Plants, Cats of a Certain Age, and Movies

And here I thought that everyone was just being quiet.

I did some planting over the weekend. Cilantro (a gift from a colleague), parsley, chives and catnip all hit the soil on Sunday. Since I lost my garden haven from last year, I’m doing planters this year. The ones I’m using are double-tiered wrought iron, about 25 inches long, and more than sufficient to do herbs and some flowers in. I grossly underestimated the amount of soil necessary for this endeavor though, and about half the tiers remain empty at the moment. Those are the ones I’ll be devoting to flowers instead of herbs, though, and I may want to wait another week or so until the summer plants start going on sale. I may even cheat, and leave the flowers in the pots they’re sold in, rather than repot them in the window-box type planters. Doing this will be cheap (I won’t have to purchase more potting soil) and easy (just plop them in place and go), so this approach appeals to me on several fronts.

I also planted Mammoth sunflowers. They are supposed to get between 8 and 12 feet tall, and are drought resistant. I planted them in the gravel that the edges the base of my paved patio area (aka the ex-walled garden). I noticed that soil is seeping up through the gravel, as though my old garden were trying to rise from its pavement grave. There is enough sandy soil there now to support plants that can manage dry conditions and it occurred to me that the sunflowers might make an interesting change from last year’s morning glories. If the sunflowers need stabilization, I can always use the fence behind them as stakes for support. These are supposed to be drought resistant, so should tolerate this well-drained area very well.

Now all I need are two largish potted plants of an as-of-yet unknown type of plant. I would like something that flowers, but my only true specification is that the pots be large enough to plug up the two largest gaps in the fencing that could potentially allow one of our three idiot cats to squeeze through. Once I have the potential escape routes plugged up, I can allow all three to wander about the patio at will.

Right now the only one of the three I trust out there is Warrior Princess, who seems content to check out the area and then settle down under one of the white PVC tables for a siesta. Clueless Wonder is especially persistent in his attempts to get past Checkpoint Salamander and liberate himself to the Great Outdoors. I suspect he remembers his days as an indoor/outdoor cat, and wouldn’t mind reliving past glories. I’ve attempted to reason with him, pointing out that Fluff Butt and Taco (our next door neighbors’ cats) would have his sizable guts for violin strings given half a chance, but Clueless is the trusting type and doesn’t quite believe me.

According to a popular conversion system, cats age about 10 years in the first six months of their life. They age five years more in the next half a year, so the total number of “cat years” in their first year of life is fifteen. After that cats age four years for every year of their life. That makes Warrior Princess and Clueless each about fifty-one years old, and The Grey Menace about 23. It fits. At fifty-one, women are more settled, sensible and dignified than their male counterparts. Clueless is your typical fifty-one year old man, hitting male menopause with a vengeance. He thinks he can recapture lost youth by trying to carouse around town. Heck, given half a chance, he’d probably buy himself a sporty car, dress it up with mag wheels and a sub-woofer, and go cruising around with the volume up to 10, just like the kids do. No wonder he and The Grey Menace get along so famously.

Poor W.P. simply watches it all from slitted, unblinking eyes and waits for the both of them to grow up.

The Socialist and I took in two movies this weekend, both playing at my favorite little arts theater not far from us. We saw “Good-bye Lenin” and “The Reckoning”, two very different movies that were both excellent. “Good-bye Lenin” was German, with English subtitles, and dealt with the truths we hide from each other, and the delusions we operate under because of this. The basic premise is that a son and daughter hide the truth about the fall of the Berlin wall from their mother, who is recently out of a coma and could potentially be killed by the shock of this knowledge. But the mother has truths of her own she is hiding from her children, and the intersection of these two cause the movie to end with no one knowing the full truth about each other. On the surface a light movie, it stayed with me the rest of the weekend, and would bear a second viewing if I ever get a chance.

“The Reckoning” reminded me of a more coherent “Name of the Rose” (if anyone out there still remembers that dark and incoherent movie based on Umberto Eco’s number one book of the same name from a decade or so ago). It’s essentially a murder mystery set against the Dark Ages, but the story could, with little adaptation, could have come from today’s headlines just as easily. While the plot revolves around the suspicious death of a young teenaged boy, the crux of the story is really about the redemption of a good man running from an evil deed. The movie suffered from some heavy-handed editing that forced a couple of very abrupt plot advances, but if you ignore that, it was an otherwise superior film. (William Defoe had an absolutely marvelous role in this movie, by the way.) Definitely NOT a flick to take children to, though.