my cat

Why not complete the immediate family with a little rant about my kitty. I am fighting becoming a total cat lady, but what can I say, I have wanted my own kitten for ages! This summer I was alone in my apartment, and realized I had been there two whole years, and had a job longer than one, and that meant that it might finally be time. Within a week, I was at a party at my sister's boyfriend's family's house, out in the burbs, and I hear the neighbor kid say, "Does anyone want a kitten?" Doth my ears deceive me, I thought! They did not! "My cat had kittens yesterday, want to see?" um, YES! They were awesome, four little black sausages. I said I would think about it and in a couple of days I said yes, put my name on one of them!

So in August my friend and I got a zipcar and a cardboard box and headed back out to Grafton. There was one of the four left, a little girl, and she was scared to death of me. But I finally caught her, stuffed her in the box, and brought her to Cambridge.

Eventually, after a day or two, she came out of hiding and has since become very friendly and curious!

Salisbury Paradise Johnson is now 7 months old. This pic is from when I took her home for Christmas and my parents' cat kept her mostly corralled in my room. It was like passive aggressive Animal Planet all week.

mi familia

I'll start in order of distance, and see how far we get. Just a few blocks to the southeast we have my lovely sister, Emily! Emily has two jobs and is therefore more interesting to talk about than myself. First of all, she works for Spare Change News. If you know what that is, BUY IT! If not, then you soon will. Spare Change is a "street paper", put out by a non-profit organization. It addresses issues related to homelessness, and a lot of the content is by homeless and low income authors. Vendors buy the paper at the headquarters in Harvard Square for 25 cents, then sell it on the street for a dollar.

She also works at Sofra, a delicious new bakery in North Cambridge. Delicious.



My parents. I am from Maine, they live there. My mom is a nurse, she works overnights and has for many years. My dad builds boats! We actually live in Maine because my parents met working at a restaurant in Burlington, Vermont, where they went to UVM. That restaurant, Carbur's, opened a Portland branch and sent my dad out here to work it. They never left! Eventually my dad got tired of restaurant work though and went to the Landing Boat School in Kennebunk.

This pic is them in Puget Sound, I believe, where they vacationed this fall with their friends Peter and Debbie, who merit their own entry altogether. I stole it from my mom's very new facebook page. That kind of gives me the creeps but I am getting used to it.

OK Since I mentioned the Landing School, I'll tell you about how we got interested in it: my grandmother married the resident naval architect and scholar. This was about 1992. Here she is looking over the table at Thanksgiving (she's smiling, I swear!). My mom's mother, she lives a town over from my parents. Although a lot of my family is there now, they weren't originally from Maine. My mom and dad came for the Carbur's gig in the late 70s, and after we were born my grandmother and two aunts followed. I can't blame them, they were from New Jersey.

There are more.. New Hampshire, Minnesota, California, Italy, Colombia, Peru..