Kiki Caturday ~ the kiss

Bookfool has Fiona Friday pictures, so I decided to post about Kiki on Cat-urdays (I mean, of course, Saturday is the cat's day).  So here's a photo I don't think I've posted before.  It's Kiki "kissing" me by licking just above my chin.




Above is "the kiss" by Kiki.  Here's "The Kiss" by Gustav Klimt.








And here's a story from maybe 2002, give or take a year, that I shared in a comment a couple of years ago:

I had been out of town for 3 or 4 days. I had left plenty of food and water, which works for a cat, who eats what she needs and saves the rest. When I got home and opened the door to the kitchen, Kiki ran past me like crazy through the garage to the driveway, happy to be outside again. But she stopped suddenly, turned around, ran back and "kissed" me by licking my chin. Then she felt free to run out into the glorious sunshine.  You may laugh about cats ignoring you, but Kiki loves me and remembered to welcome me home with a kiss before she went outside to smell the fresh air and play. As I've said before, she is the most loving cat I've ever had. I feel blessed to be loved by Kiki.

~~~ Kiki's best friend, Bonnie

Will it be like homecoming ... or a funeral?

Under METHODIST, UNITED in the list of sermon topics in today's Chattanooga Times Free Press (on page E6) is this announcement about tomorrow morning:

East Lake, 2903 E. 37th St., "Passed Away," 9:30 a.m., the Rev. Bonnie Setliffe Jacobs, guest speaker as the church holds its final service and celebrates its 102-year history.

Church family and friends will gather one last time (at least in this building) for a time of closure and fond memories.  We have folks planning to "come home" from all over, including some from Nashville, Lenoir City, and Knoxville, as well as from churches all over the Chattanooga area.  The Chattanooga District Superintendent will be there, along with several other pastors, active and retired.  It will be like homecoming!  Or a funeral.  But this isn't really the end of the story.  Come tomorrow morning to hear what I think comes next.

Where's your nose?

After sitting for hours like a good girl during her mother's graduation  at the Tivoli this evening, Raegan had fun showing me she could find my nose and my glasses.  Then we went to eat Japanese food and she enjoyed the fried rice with the bits of carrots, but not the green peas!  More pictures tomorrow.

Attitude is everything!

A woman who woke up one morning, looked in the mirror,
and noticed she had only three hairs on her head.
'Well,' she said, 'I think I'll braid my hair today.'
So she did and she had a wonderful day.

The next day she woke up, looked in the mirror
and saw that she had only two hairs on her head.
'Hmmm,' she said, 'I think I'll part my hair down the middle today.'
So she did and she had a grand day.

The next day she woke up, looked in the mirror and noticed
that she had only one hair on her head.
'Well,' she said, 'today I'm going to wear my hair in a pony tail.'
So she did, and she had a fun, fun day.

The next day she woke up, looked in the mirror and
noticed that there wasn't a single hair on her head.
'YAY!' she exclaimed. 'I don't have to fix my hair today!'

-------------------------

NOTE: I don't know who wrote this, but thanks to Karen who emailed it to me.

Teaser ~ from the book cover itself

Before you read any further, look back at the cover illustration showing a boy wearing blue and a girl wearing pink.  Say the title out loud, and then come back here.  (I'll wait.)

Okay, someone was having fun when they designed the front cover!  I almost wrote "Blue" as the first word of the title -- because "Pink Brain" is shown in a blue font, and "Blue Brain" uses a pink font.

That was the first "teaser" but I'll give you another one to enjoy, this time from the dust jacket of Pink Brain, Blue Brain: How Small Differences Grow into Troublesome Gaps--and What We Can Do about It by Lise Eliot, 2010.

"By appreciating how sex differences emerge -- rather than assuming them to be fixed biological facts -- we can help all children reach their fullest potential, close the troubling gaps between boys and girls, and ultimately end the gender wars that currently divide us."

It's an allusion!

Resolve the paradox of this poem by identifying the allusion.

IN THE GARDEN
by Anonymous

In the garden there strayed
A beautiful maid
As fair as the flowers of the morn;
The first hour of her life
She was made a man's wife,
And was buried before she was born.

Do you recognize the allusion?  Oh, you want me to define allusion?  Okay, an allusion is a reference to a literary work, person, place, or event.  Allusion is a means of suggesting far more than it actually says.  This picture is a visual allusion to another part of the same story.

I ran across my old copy of Sound and Sense: An Introduction to Poetry, Second Edition, by Laurence Perrine, 1963.  My notes in the book show that we discussed this poem in my college English class on March 28, 1966.

What's new on my bookshelves

The complete title of this book is rather long, when I include the subtitle:  The Gnostic Gospels of Jesus: The Definitive Collection of Mystical Gospels and Secret Books about Jesus of Nazareth ~ by Marvin Meyer, 2005.  Meyer offers fresh translations of a dozen books, most of which were found at Nag Hammadi in the Egyptian desert in 1945.

My interest in this area started when I read the then-newly published The Gnostic Gospels, a scholarly book by Elaine Pagels (1979) which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award and was chosen by the Modern Library as one of the hundred best books of the twentieth century.  Many years later, I also read her bestseller, Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas (2003), in which she says the Gospel of Thomas reveals, along with other apocryphal teachings, that Jesus was not God but rather a teacher who sought to uncover the divine light in all human beings.  She argues that the Gospel of John was written as a reaction and rebuttal to the Gospel of Thomas.

This sort of thing fascinates me, so I developed a class about "Six Gospels," using the four gospels that made it into the Christian Bible (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) along with two of the gospels found at Nag Hammadi:  The Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Mary (Magdalene).  For later classes, I decided to include a gospel by James, the brother of Jesus.  James was the leader of the church in Jerusalem, which was decidedly on the side of Christians conforming to Jewish customs, like circumcision.  Now I want to read Meyer's new translation and see what I notice this time around.  If you are interested in attending the class when I teach it again, let me know.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Remember when you were a kid and getting new crayons was a big deal?  Getting new books holds the same kind of magic for some of us big kids.  Susan at Color Online came up with the idea of New Crayons as a metaphor for the new books that have arrived at your house.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------