Update on a Cat

Just to let you know, Houdini - the stray cat who came into my life last weekend - has landed in a great home. He passed his vet's experience with flying colors (completely healthy as well as now no longer much of a ladies' man, so to speak) and found a doctor to live with, in what sounds like a very good match. He certainly knew how to put on the charm and didn't have to work too hard to convince them to adopt him. So now he's safe, in good hands and one hopes no more in need of showing off his escapist skills.

Now to catch the two wily street cats who've been coming to my back porch all summer, Farrell and Frieda. They've been showing up together every night for the past week or so, usually sitting there waiting for me to get home and feed them. Even though Farrell still tends to eat and run, Frieda has taken to hanging around afterwards and curling up on a shelf on the side of the porch after a good wash. Both of them have been pretty skittish, though, so I'm not sure what it will take to coax them in.

A neighbor called Sunday and left a message for me: seems she has a young female ("petite," probably not a year old yet) who's brought her two kittens on to her back porch, looking for hand-outs. Am I in the market for some new cats, by any chance? Well, uhm...

So I alerted my other neighbor who'd helped me with Houdini to get yet more wheels set in motion.

Meanwhile, between blogging about Shostakovich on his 100th Birthday Anniversary (not to mention looking into the harrowing events going on around him when he wrote the 5th Symphony) and a busy weekend with concerts to attend, I've been trying to get some more composing done: looks like I'm pretty close to being finished with the last variation, but then just as I say that, I'll look at it tomorrow and toss much of it out (this is part of the natural process we call 'decomposing'). Most of it is worked out "in prose," using descriptive text to remind me what I want to do musically. Perhaps tomorrow, I might post that just to let you know what's going on, here. But then I really need some music-writing software so I can post the final results or least scanning the original manuscript. Then you can see if the musical sketch bears any resemblance to the first ideas I'd jotted down. But that's part of the fun of composing (which makes up for much of the time when it isn't exactly fun).