Mom's (Almost) Naked Cat Parade!

Mom's Stuffed Cats!

Okay, so Mojo is going to try to make this brief since it'll be the last Craptacular auction until she gets back from vacation. So if this is somewhat slap-dash, it's because Mojo doesn't really care. Mentally she is already swinging in a hammock somewhere. Of course there are those who argue that mentally she is always somewhere else anyway, somewhere that doesn't require intellect beyond tying one's shoes (and even then it's the cheater's way that Mojo learned, by making two loops and tying them together instead of making the one loop and wrapping things around somehow. Mojo never learned how to do it THAT way).

Anyway, what we have here is a collection of Mojo's Favorite Mother's Stuffed Cats. I believe Mom made them all, but I will only vouch for the two biggest ones. The naked ones. Yes, I've said it. They're naked. You see, in her never-ending quest to expand her world and learn new things and change with the times Mojo's Mom likes to take "classes" about things. It doesn't really matter what. Her fabric room, when she and my Favorite Older Sister cleaned it out, was filled with dozens of quilt tops and squares and whatnot that she did for classes and never bothered to back or bind or quilt them. Of course some of these were demos for classes that Mom herself was teaching, but she was not above taking classes just for taking classes and spending the weekend with her friends on what they called "quilting retreats". And judging from some of my Mom's friends I'm guessing there was not much retreating going on at these functions, but rather things involving lots of giggling and misbehaving and the occasional ingestion of alcoholic beverages. Mom of course always comes home all "my, that was a lovely retreat" when Mojo privately suspects the hotel manager was called in once or twice by the harried staff who had never dealt with a group of quilters before, and envisions the hotel lit up at three in the morning by the silent red and blue flashes of the local law enforcement. You'd never know it as Mom comes home all innocent and "tra-la-la, let's have pork chops for dinner" while behind her smokes the trashed ruins of what was once a fine upstanding establishment.

Cats. Apparently part of a class teaching one how to make very tall thin stuffed fabric cats. Mom never bothered to make clothes for either one of them. They have blotches of sponged paint on them in an effort to make them calicoes, but I think at least the one the effect only gives him a dirty face. Oh, and get this--one has a tail, the other doesn't. Why? I don't know. Maybe my mother knows, but do you really think I'm going to call her on the eve of my vacation to ask her if she remembers why one cat has a tail and the other doesn't? Answer: no. I'm not going to call her. Besides, she will probably come up with some lame way of blaming my older sister for it, which is what she did when she was caught red-handed palming off a lovely heart-felt gift *I* gave her as a child.

In addition to the two naked tall thin cats, I will throw in yet another anomaly, what appears to be a large Christmas tree type decoration of a smaller cat who DOES wear clothes. At first I thought it was a girl cat by virtue of its apparent calico dress, but now that I have actually looked at it I'm not sure if that's a dress or meant to be some sort of angel robes, since the cat is either sporting a pair of wings OR the poor thing is lugging around some sort of heart-shaped possibly cancerous growth on its back. Either way it doesn't look too good for poor little kitty, does it? Then again, what do I know? When we first moved here we had a female deer frequent the yard with a horrifying tumor hanging from her underside (when I first saw her I said to my husband, "Gee, I've never seen a deer with an udder like a cow before") and a nasty limp besides. The instant I first saw this deer I was like, man, that poor thing is a goner, but she proved me wrong. Every year she had at least one or two little ones join her in the back yard, and she stayed out of trouble until this summer, years later, when I have not seen her and suppose she's finally off to the Big Deer Herd in the Sky.

But that's neither here nor there, huh. I only mean to say that I assumed Gimpy, which is what I ended up calling this deer, was a goner from the get-go but contrary to my opinion she seemed to get along just fine. Many's the summer morning we'd just sort of hang out together, with me and the dog puttering around the garden by the house while Gimpy and the kids lay down under the trees and just sorta watched us. Sometimes when the fawns were really little spotted guys, if I completely ignored them and seemed really interested in something they couldn't contain their curiosity and start creeping toward me with their big ears all spread. I could see them peripherally--if you stare directly at them they run off, because a direct stare is predatorial. But whenever they got too close to me Gimpy would put back her ears and snort and stamp and make them come back. Leave it to a Mom to spoil all the fun.

But wait. This isn't about deer, but cats. Stuffed fabric cats. If you want 'em, take 'em. They come with the Certificate of Craptacularity, of course, which is the very cynosure of taste and good breeding among Those In The Know. I don't know what you would do with large stuffed cats--they're over two feet long--but that's not really my balliwick, huh. I'm sure I will come up with all sorts of uses as I lie in a hammock doing nothing for a while....