Albert in the Sky with Diamonds

GENEVA (AP) - Albert Hofmann, the father of the mind-altering drug LSD whose medical discovery inspired - and arguably corrupted - millions in the 1960s hippie generation, has died. He was 102. Hofmann died Tuesday at his home in Burg im Leimental, said Doris Stuker, a municipal clerk in the village near Basel where Hofmann moved following his retirement in 1971.

Here was a man who managed to avoid the spotlight while doing work that altered some consciousness.

The Swiss chemist discovered lysergic acid diethylamide-25 in 1938 while studying the medicinal uses of a fungus found on wheat and other grains at the Sandoz pharmaceuticals firm in Basel. He became the first human guinea pig of the drug when a tiny amount of the substance seeped onto his finger during a laboratory experiment on April 16, 1943.

I find it encouraging that Hofmann minded his own business, did not become a rock star, and yet saw potential for broad uses of his chance discovery.

Hofmann welcomed a decision by Swiss authorities last December to allow LSD to be used in a psychotherapy research project. "For me, this is a very big wish
come true. I always wanted to see LSD get its proper place in medicine," he told Swiss TV at the time. Hofmann took the drug - purportedly on an occasional basis and out of scientific interest - for several decades. "LSD can help open your eyes," he once said. "But there are other ways - meditation, dance, music, fasting."

The next day, coincidentally, a friend sent me a video in which a neuroscientist describes her first-person experience of a stroke that temporarily disabled her right arm and left brain. It's an amazing account from the inside of a common but dramatic medical event, especially given her knowledge and background.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor compares the two hemispheres of the brain to a computer with a parallel processor (right), which engages in connections in the here and now, and a serial processor (left), which engages in discrete details in a linear past-future orientation. These are well-known differences, but it comes across strikingly in her personal account of gradually losing half her brain function while retaining - and newly appreciating - the other half.

Taylor was doing research on schizophrenia in a lab at Harvard when one of the blood vessels in her brain decided to burst, so, like Hofmann, she had an understanding of what was happening to her. If you watch the video of her account years later, you'll see that the experience also suggested some possibilities beyond the strict medical-therapeutic applications. In certain moments, her account reminds me of Aldous Huxley's famous description in The Doors of Perception.

I'm not advocating that anyone do what any of these really intelligent people have done, but I can't help but notice some striking similarities in what they came across and what conclusions they have drawn.

Hofmann retired from Sandoz in 1971 and devoted his time to travel, writing and lectures. "This is really a high point in my advanced age," Hofmann said at a ceremony in Basel honoring him on his 100th birthday. "You could say it is a
consciousness-raising experience without LSD."

greener than thou

Wanna see my new Toyota Pious? It's not just a car, it's a political statement, an expression of my cultural righteousness, a symbol of being cooler and smarter than your average prole. And everyone knows that the kind of vehicle you drive is a true measure of your value as a person.

What, you don't own a planet-saving hybrid yet? Maybe someone should explain how important it is to your self-respect and social standing that you reduce your carbon footprint in the most visible way possible: by buying a new car! And while you're at it, would you mind doing something about your potassium thumbprint? It's gross.

You know - or maybe you don't, so it's my civic duty to inform you - that it's your civic duty to be green, and not only that but it's also your duty to talk about 'being green'. Pepper your conversation with references to your 'footprint', your regenerative braking, and how you're doing your part to save the planet. Like the planet gives a shit what you drive.

It reminds me of back when everybody was "going organic" because some good-looking chick on TV washed her hair with Herbal Essence shampoo. And she looked so darn natural. On TV. So the creative minds in mass marketing found out they could sell bazillions of little foil-wrapped wads of sugar mixed attractively with whey and a long list of other substances, and call them granola bars. Many more processed and packaged food-like objects henceforth filled stores and grocery carts because they were labeled "natural" or "old-fashioned."

Organic has long since been sold to the highest bidder, and agribusiness is now in the business of dictating to actual farmers and gardeners what they can call "organic" produce. You've probably heard about the legislation making its way into law that prohibits dairy farmers from informing consumers that their milk does not come from chemically injected, hormone-fed cows. That bit of information might confuse consumers who presumably would rather not know what substances Monsanto puts into their milk.

Alright, so clearly this has quickly turned into a rant from both sides of the same fence. A rant against the ostentatiously "green" among us, as well as a rant against those who legislate the right to poison the food supply. So what's my problem?

Here's my problem. Got a runny nose? Ask your doctor - or the drug dealer behind the counter at the corner CVS - which allergy medicine is right for you. Got unexplained sensations? Buy some pills, which might make you constipated, sleepy, nauseated, or sterile, to take care of that annoyingly restless leg. Got a weight problem? Buy some specially packaged, processed, manufactured foodlike substance, or a machine that will sit in your basement and make you thin. Want to do away with all the clutter in hour home? Buy an advanced room-organizing "system" at the local big-box store. Problems solved! Whatever it is, just buy more stuff.

Got polluted air? Buy a new car. Everyone will know and admire how very green you are indeed.

sequitur

1. The Departure of the Wife as Sister
2. The Journey of the Sister in Spring
3. What Color Is Your Parachute?
4. The Return of the Sister as Wife
5. The Nephew from Hope

1. Zelda drove Gven to the airport on Thursday morning for her flight to Atlanta. Gven's sister Bug has a major birthday this week, so there was no question that big sis would be present. Everything went smoothly, except that Z and G were so involved in conversation that they missed their exit to the cleverly hidden bus station known as Dayton International Airport, so they had to backtrack on I-70, but they still had plenty of time. Then G discovered that she had left her phone charger at home, so she was incomunicado by cell for four whole days. High drama indeed.

2. When Gven arrived, her home town in was bursting with spring flowers. The city is glorious in the spring. The azaleas, dogwoods, and flowers without number were in full bloom, and I can only imagine what a sight that must have been. G got on the train at the airport, and my sister Jo Jo Golly picked her up at her neighborhood MARTA station. Another nice thing about Atlanta is the transit system, and this was a prime example of its value: no one had to drive across town to pick her up at the world's second-busiest airport. It's a good system, the likes of which we will never have in the big small town of Central Swingstate.

Jo Jo is the perfect host, so she and Gven enjoyed a relaxing evening of food and talk. The following day they went out to dinner in the newly gentrified downtown Decatur with Jo Jo's son Ben "Bubba" Badly and his girlfriend, Chrissy, whom I haven't met but reportedly is delightful. Saturday morning G took the train north as far as it goes up Georgia 400, and Bug picked her up at North Springs station, which is en route to Bug's house in Cumming, Georgia. They went out to lunch and then went shopping, which is what girls do when they have quality time together.

3. The whole gang was there for Bug's birthday party: Bug's husband Bon and son Boston - for whom it was prom night, her mother (her name was Mercedes and she called herself Layla, but everyone knew her as Nancy), both her sisters, and a few of Bug's friends. Sunday they all headed to Thomaston, near Macon, on a beautiful, clear spring day to watch her jump out of an airplane. You'd think a grown woman with two grown kids would know better, but that's what she wanted to do.

While the family sat around on blankets like they were at a picnic, several experienced jumpers went up for the opening act and jumped together in formation. Then, after some brief instruction, Bug made her jump in tandem with the cute instructor. She said it's really noisy at first, and when the chute opens it gets very quiet all of a sudden, and the long, slow descent is breathtakingly fun. They all went out to eat and made a day of it, with Bug still grinning from ear to ear.

4. Monday evening, Gven's plane was on time at the little airport, but her husband was late to pick her up. His excuse was that he thought it was only an hour away, but even seeing the exit the first time it was an hour and a half, so she waited outside the baggage claim for 45 minutes. It was a successful whirlwind trip that included lots of people she loves. We talked about her trip the whole ride home, and since most restaurants were closed, we ordered a pizza and ate with Zelda for closure.

5. The next day I got a call at work from Greg Gosh, my other sister's son, who works for the admissions office at Hope College in Michigan. He happened to be in Central Swingstate for a college fair at Capital University, and he had the evening free, so we made plans to get together for a beer.

Gven and Zelda met us at Old Bag of Nails, and we had a great time catching up over a Guinness and some fish and chips. G and his wife C have a baby boy J, so they are in the midst of many exciting new experiences, such as adjusting to the rigors of business travel as parents. I can only imagine how tickled Grandma Anna Banana Golly Gosh and Grandpa Fred Gosh must be.

It was a fun evening and a nice opportunity to bring each other up-to-date on Greg's brother Todd Gosh, who lives in California, and Zelda'a brother Jessi Golly, who lives in New York. Greg is always good company. He is that rare combination: someone who is personable, easy to hang out with, and actually has something to say. I'm looking forward to the next time.

sanding down the floor

It's just another little project grown all out of proportion. Zelda was building shelves in her room on her day off, and Gven was helping her put up the brackets. When I saw the room all cleared out, I got the bright idea to do something with the old, uneven, painted brown plank floor. They weren't opposed to it, so I jumped in.

The next day I rented a flat sander from the hardware store and began my sanding education. See, you got your belt sander, your rotary sander, your drum sander, and your flat sander. Depending on which expert is giving advice, you might want one or another. Not knowing any better, I thought I was looking for a belt sander, but the first expert convinced me that the drum sander would be better suited to the job of doing an entire floor. You stand upright and push it like a vacuum cleaner, he said, with the sanding surface turning on a roller. Sounds good.

When I went to pick it up, however, the second expert talked me out of the drum sander, so I ended up with a flat sander, which is also upright but moves from side to side, so there's less risk of gouging a furrow in the floor. Sounds even better.

I take it home, move stuff around upstairs, and the machine - a long handle attached to a hexagonal motor housing that rides on top of a plate on top of a pad on top of an 18-inch sheet of coarse sandpaper - works pretty well. At least it made a difference, while kicking up a cloud of hundred-year-old brown, probably lead, paint.

So I opened the windows and skylights, donned a handkerchief over my face so I looked like a cowboy, or a bank robber, or a Berber herdsman, and guided the sander around half of the first room, learning as I go and sweeping up a lot of fine brown dust. After sanding one room and sweeping up quantities of dust, I took a shower and called it a night.

The next day I was up bright and early around noon and got right to it - after a trip to far-off Morrow County to look at a house. Why? Because it was there, and it's available, it looked interesting, it's in great shape, it actually has enough space for us and two or three additional Gollys or Gollyfriends, and it sits on almost two wooded acres, and in short, there's no way in hell we will ever move that far out of town, but it can't hurt to look.

But I digress, which is the point of the story, and consequently I don't get back on the sander until well into the afternoon, sanding, sweeping, and moving stuff around in the second upstairs room: sand, sweep, move stuff, cough up nasty gunk. Repeat. There was, I admit, a certain sense of accomplishment. I clearly recall feeling like I was getting something worthwhile done.

There was a light rain falling outside, not enough to rain in the open windows or skylights, thank goodness, and the ventilation through the two little rooms helped a great deal. Time was passing, however, and I had rented the sander for 24 hours, much of which I had already squandered on sleep and fatuous pipedreams of a house in the country with two llamas in the yard, life used to be so hard, while I was supposed to be improving the condition of this quaint old slouching, charming, off-center house.

The phone rang, but I kept doing what I was doing, and during my next break I returned the call, and it was a friend in another state, telling me she had been admitted to the MFA program she had applied to, so we talked for a while, not a long time, but a while, about school and work and writing and making ends meet, and especially about not knowing what's going to happen or even what we want to happen. That open-endedness, which I think is what Kant called "purposiveness without a purpose," is a difficult and wonderful thing if you can get inside it.

So I'm glad I had that conversation, and still the clock is ticking, so I returned to the sander as three o'clock became five o'clock, and in spite of my six o'clock deadline I decided to press on regardless and go over both rooms one more time for good measure. Sand, sweep, move stuff around, go outside, cough, spit. Repeat.

By now I've shredded two sheets of coarse sandpaper, and I'm on the second sheet of medium, and there appears a point of diminishing returns where more flat sanding is not making as much impact, so I pack it in and return the machine to the store a little after eight o'clock. Expert number two is there again, and he doesn't charge me for the overtime. Alright.

The minimal, okay, let's be frank, the half-assed dropcloth I had draped over Z's bed and clothes didn't do much good, and despite my efforts there is dust everywhere in Zelda's room and the adjacent upstairs room. I spent the next day, Sunday, doing other things and breathing normal air downstairs, while Gven and Zelda toiled upstairs, finishing their shelving project - remember the shelving project that started this mess? - and wiping down every surface of every object in both rooms, no doubt breathing their share of fine brown lead-infused dust in the process.

When I did go upstairs, the floor looked a little better, felt a little smoother, but was not transformed and renewed as I foolishly thought it would be after a good sanding. So maybe I should have gone with the drum sander after all, risking gouges in the hundred-year-old planks in order to make more of an impact. Yes, if I had it to do over again (and I might), knowing what I know now, I would do that, but I don't know what the unintended consequences of that would be.

nonsequitur

Gven Golly was out of town this weekend, helping her sister celebrate her birthday in Georgia, so I had all this undisturbed time to get all these things done, which I won't enumerate, except to say that I didn't get most of them done, which I will blame in part on the rain that fell most of Saturday, beginning during my bike ride to the bank, post office, and watch repair shop, and preventing me from doing any meaningful gardening, of which there is a lot to do, even the minimal cleanup of last week's chores, let alone the extensive planting and soil prep I had in mind.

So instead I made a big pot of bean soup (white kidneys with onions, garlic, celery, cayenne and habanero peppers fried in butter), froze about 12 quarts of cranberries (harvested on Cape Cod by Jessi Golly in November and stored in our garage all winter), cleaned up the kitchen (a mountain of dishes stacked artfully and soaking in the sink), did a load of laundry, and listened to a Lou Reed CD (New York) over and over and over. "It takes a busload of faith to get by."

In the evening I drank a glass of Ohio wine with a bowl of bean soup and some guacamole, talked to Zelda Golly, read a couple of stories from The Paris Review Book of Heartbreak, Madness, Sex, Love, Betrayal, Outsiders, Intoxication, War, Whimsy, Horrors, God, Death, Dinner, Baseball, Travels, The Art of Writing, and Everything Else in the World Since 1953. That's the title. Then I went out to a movie called "Smart People" at the nearby mall multiplex by myself. It was pretty good for a predictable Hollywood treatment of family troubles among the irritable and mean-spirited intelligentsia, who it turns out are just hurting and lonely, which well-earned condition is instantly cured by the birth of a baby.

Sunday was a little more productive. Rev. Susan addressed the Passover holiday by talking about the importance of knowing who your tribe is, and what an unlikely or unpredictable or inexplicable tribe a congregation of Unitarian Universalists can be. It was New Member Sunday, and I talked to an interesting woman who brought a painting instead of reciting her autobiography. I stopped at the office on the way home to finish off a piece of work leftover from Friday. Although it's a shame to waste good weekend weather, it felt good to get that chapter off my desk.

I couldn't squander any more of a perfect spring day, so I ate breakfast on the patio while reading the Dispatch in the sunshine. My sister Jo Jo Golly had sent me a bunch of vegetable seeds for my birthday in January - six varieties of peppers - and I don't usually start plants from seed, but here's my chance to learn how, so this will be an experimental venture. I lined six plastic flats with newspaper and half-filled each with a loose mix of soil from the garden. Each flat has space for about 50 seeds, poked into the soil an inch or two apart in rows that are then labeled on one end with the seed packet.

This is way more organized than I have ever been this early in the season, but the sun feels good on my shoulders, and it's a golden opportunity to get into the garden on the ground floor. It also forces me to be much more systematic than usual so I can keep track of which varieties of vegetables and herbs are planted where - not that I have any confidence that these tiny seeds will actually grow, mind you. Handling them individually - smoothing out little rows in a series of one-by-two-foot microgardens - forces you to pay close attention to each one and give it a chance to live, just in case of good luck and good drainage, the right temperature, the right amount of moisture, and more variables than I can count.

So much is left to chance, especially for a beginner, but what else is there to do? According to the directions that came with the seeds, the flats should be watered from below by placing them in a pan of water. I don't have a pan that big, so I commandeered the bathtub of the back (utility) bathroom, laid all six flats sideways in it, and filled the tub with about four inches of water - just enough to soak through the bottom of the flats and saturate the soil - then drained the tub.

There they sit, six flats of pepper, sage, basil, chamomile, and something called malva, either germinating and sprouting little roots, or not. We shall see. If nothing else, I'm getting a whole new appreciation for this very erotic phase of the garden process. It's no wonder old people love to grow things.

I did get distracted once or twice by other tasks I had to get done, planting three bleeding heart roots in a bare spot in the front yard and ten tiny Montbretia bulbs, which I have never heard of so I'm not sure why I bought them, in a swath across the salvia bed in the back yard. Then I started a batch of bread and took off for an hour-long bike ride just in time before the sun set.

leaf springs

Spring has sprung
the grass is griz
I wonder where
the flowers is

A verse from my oh-so-literary childhood that you won't find in Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Poetry, but growing up in the middle of the middle class in the middle of suburbs in the middle of the midwest in the middle of the twentieth century, that was a poem. Not exactly Leaves of Grass either, but who knew about Whitman then?

It's another kind of spring and another kind of leaf that's on my mind today. Hank the ten-year-old truck has developed a shake in the right-front wheel and a rattle in the rear end that concerns me while I roll down the road. The technician at Goodyear informed me this morning that the vibration is worn ball joints in the front end, and the clanking noise is a broken leaf spring bracket in the back.

Needless to say, this was not the news I was hoping to hear, but what are you gonna do? I want this truck to last awhile longer, and if you drive a used vehicle, that's what you get. So I told him to fix just the leaf springs for now. For five hundred bucks I'll have four wheels on the road again by the end of the day. When I picked up the truck, the new brackets looked just fine and the rattle was gone, but parts and labor sure add up.

Today happens to be tax day in Amerika. Maybe it should be a national holiday, as election day should be, to give people some time and incentive to do their civic duty, but then the banks and post offices would have to close, and that part of the process would shut down, so never mind. Because Gven and I - mostly Gven - made more money from self-employment this year, instead of getting a refund we owe Uncle Sam, uh, five hundred bucks.

Slate noted this morning:

In the NYT op-ed page, Richard Conniff says that the word tax has become one of the most reviled words in the English language and needs a change. Instead of calling them 'taxes', we should call them 'dues'. The word tax has "punitive overtones … as if wage-earners have done something wrong by their labors." But dues "is rooted in social obligation and duty."

Mr. Coniff has a point there. We're just paying our dues every April 15, for the privilege of membership in this big - very big - nonvoluntary, institutional, coercive social club qua military nation-state, doing our part to support the good work done on our behalf. Paying dues means we belong, we've done our part, we've earned something, and we have a stake in the union. Gosh, I feel so much better now.

It's not really our money anyway, regardless of what the tax revolt crowd says. I don't hear Grover Norquist clamoring to "starve the beast" when the beast is spending our dues starting and fighting perpetual wars for profit. It's not my money, I just get to look at it for a minute, if at all.

The U.S. Treasury prints the money and lets us use some of it. The Federal Reserve rations it out to the big city banks, which allow you and me to deposit our hard-earned wages from our benevolent employers, who send a check from their bank to our bank, from which we electronically transfer it to other banks to pay our bills.

Today also happens to be the end of the first pay period of the new annual pay scale, when this year's so-called merit increase goes into effect, so the net amount at the bottom of the electronic check is a little more than it was last year - hoo-rah! This is a freaking harmonic convergence of leafy green growth. The invisible hand of the marketplace just tightened its stranglehold.

Let me be clear about this: I am glad the net amount on my paycheck is larger. I have plans, ideas, and designs on what to do with that additional pocket change, just as I have plans, ideas, and designs on the so-called stimulus package that I'm told will arrive some time soon. Maybe Gven and I will use our stimulus package to pay the IRS what we owe for making too much self-employed money last year. Then we'll just have to make a little more next year to buy Hank some new ball joints. Isn't this exciting?

Speaking of language, doesn't stimulus package sound just a little pornographic? I bet if I googled "stimulus package" my benevolent company computer would block the search, thereby protecting my tender eyes from whatever dangerous and harmful content might come forth from an innocent inquiry, thus preventing me from finding out how to increase the size of my stimulus package.

buds and branches

Buds are everywhere. Leaf buds, flower buds, new growth on old stems, new growth from dormant roots, bulbs, corms, tubers.

As anyone with one or two functioning sense organs can tell, the weather has turned a corner, and the flora and fauna are responding as if they knew something we don't know. In my microcosm on Summit Street, the iris, daylilies, daffodils, hosta, and tulips are appearing. Lamium, lambs ear, and yarrow are sprouting. Honeysuckle, apple, pear, maple, and forsythia are poking out, as well as a lot of things I can't name. It's all good.

Yet soon it's going to be out of control. (Shadow-Sven responds: MUST CONTROL!) The cleanup tasks that have been waiting for the weather to break can't wait any longer. The garden will either evolve with the gardener's firm direction or devolve randomly into some entropic mess. (Shadow-Sven answers: MUST CONTROL!)

So I took the window of opportunity last weekend - 60 degrees, clear sky, minimal wind - to cut down half of a big diseased maple tree in the back yard - the one beside the patio, close to the side gate, the one with several dead or broken limbs, the one that's just a matter of time before the whole thing is a goner.

It was a bit of a challenge, and it took all afternoon, but it worked out well. After multiple turns with the chainsaw - cut, take a look, cut some more, take a look, remove the wedge, cut in from the opposite side, take a look, etc. - I heard a faint cracking sound, got down off the step ladder, waited a couple of minutes, heard another louder crack, and that sucker came down by itself right where I wanted it.

Laugh out loud. It was definitely worth all the deliberating. Cut up the trunk into pieces I can carry, and there's a start on next winter's firewood.

multifocal

I picked up my new glasses Tuesday on my way to a meeting after work, and it's taking me a little while to adjust. I think they will be an improvement over the old ones. The main difference is not having lines between different levels of magnification. In other words, I've gone from no glasses to bifocals to trifocals to multifocals with gradations of different refraction rather than bands from bottom to top.

In the beginning, people's eyes adjusted to see objects at varying distances. Some eyes adjusted more easily than others, and most eyes adjusted less as they aged. Anton von Leuwenhoek invented lenses that would magnify objects so people could see them better. Our relation to reality hasn't been the same since. We can look through lenses and see things far away as if they were close and see small things as if they were big. Increasing the power to observe the world has been nothing short of revolutionary. Inductive inquiry took on greater importance as people could see more things in greater detail for longer periods, especially older people who knew what to look for.

I don't think getting lineless "progressive" glasses will revolutionize my mind and attitude toward reality, but one can only hope. So far the biggest effect is the waves moving across the page, desktop, or whatever erstwhile flat surface is in front of me as I look from side to side. Whoa! The up-and-down movements are now incremental, rather than the abrupt changes with bifocals or trifocals.

[Jayhawks rule the roost]

It's over at last.

Did the tournament seem interminable this year, or is it just that my picks faded into obscurity, so it only seemed to go on forever? Even though Wisconsin and Michigan State got schooled and shown the door, and even though the anticipated showdown between the white knights Tyler Tarheel Hansborough and Kevin Bruin Love didn't happen, the final game was a gem.

The play's the thing.

Forget the ostentatious homage to tradition, the UNC/UCLA royalty, the self-serving TV spectacle, the pompous circumstance and grotesque display of the media event as historic moment in the annals of self-promotion, the know-it-all commentators, the egotistical coaches, the increasing resemblance of the whole event to the World Wrestling Federation. That's a lot of forget. What's left?

The game, as played by the players, with a ball, on the court. Big guys, little guys, young guys, older guys, fast guys, faster guys, running up and down the court, jumping through the roof, tossing the ball around, putting it in the hoop.

Even though Kansas and Memphis were not two teams I had paid much attention to during the season, they are probably the best in the country and deserved to be there at the end. Their head-to-head confrontation was a demonstration of high-level roundball, and it was fun to watch. Defense in particular was so intense that nobody got away with any lapses.

The announcing, well, the less said the better.

Oh, by the way, this is about basketball.

Happy Birthday Isabel

Our cat Isabel has a birthday this week, her seventeenth. We don't know for sure on what date she was born in 1991, but it was right around the first of April. Isabel and her brother Gus came to us as six-week-old kittens from our friends the MacKenzie family, whose momcat had just had a litter, on Zelda's seventh birthday.

Gus and Isabel were the cutest little furballs. They moved to Alabama with us, then they moved back to Ohio with us and presided in the old house and its acre on High Street for ten years. They slept together, bathed each other, played and fought as cats play and fight.

Gus died two years ago, and Isabel has declined a little since she lost her brother. She is an old cat. And the sweetest cat in the world. I know everyone says their cat is the coolest, nicest, prettiest, whatever superlative applies. But they don't know Izzy.

She has always been affectionate, that is, when she feels like it. My favorite thing is to lie down on the floor to stretch my back, and no matter where Isabel happens to be in the house, she will come and plant herself in the middle of my chest and settle in for a while.

Lately she has taken to long naps on top of Gven's printer. I think she likes the slight vibration of the new machine. And she spends a lot of time upstairs in Zelda's room, where Gus used to hang out a lot.

Now she moves pretty slowly and has trouble leaping up on the counter to her food bowl, so we help her up. She can still do it on her own, but it takes a lot of effort. She whines and complains for a while every morning and whenever someone comes home, and she requires a lot of attention. Usually she calms down if you feed her or spend some quality time stroking her back or rubbing her ears. She likes that.

Happy birthday, Isabel. You're the best cat ever.