This blog is not about cats. I tend to write about law, politics, and philosophy. Occasionally, I write about other subjects which are on my mind. This entry, however, is somewhat about cats, about calico cats and the goals of this blog.
The first cat I brought into my home was a calico cat, who I named Finnegan. I chose her from the shelter because she was a calico. I loved that she had three colors, and I loved the biological explanation for why she had three colors. When my partner and I decided to add another cat to the household, we sought another calico. We found a lovely calico kitten whose coat had an added wrinkle. She looked like she was dipped in milk. That’s because Brannegan, as we named her, was a dilute calico. With Brannegan’s addition to our household, it seemed obvious that our home would be known as Calico Manor.
We are a two-person home, and this has meant that we are a two-cat home, because I respect the following rule. To avoid eccentricity, there must never be more cats than people in a home.
After Finnegan died and time passed, my partner and I decided to adopt another kitten. We planned on finding another calico. But when we went to the shelter, we couldn’t resist asking to spend time with a particular kitten, though he was all gray. We were allowed to take him into a small room with us, where we put him on the floor while we sat on a bench across from him. He immediately picked up his head, jutted out his chin, and tottered over to us on still-unsteady kitten legs. Clearly, he was destined for Calico Manor. We dubbed him a mutant calico, named him Tappington, and brought him home.
Eventually Brannegan aged and died and Tappington was an only cat for a while. This state of affairs ended when we adopted a quirky tortoiseshell kitten. Her genetics are slightly different than a calico cat’s but her coat and personality suit her to the Calico Manor vibe, where we aim for our cats – and ourselves – to have a good backstory, as well as the ability to be interesting at first glance.
That’s my goal for what I write in this blog: I hope each entry is at least somewhat interesting on its own and that behind each entry there’s a good backstory. By this, I mean a line of thought, a web of ideas. I am going to try to indicate the lines of thought, the web of ideas with hyperlinks and with tags. I’m going to treat Notes from Calico Manor something like a digital garden, permitting myself to revisit posts and revise them when and how that makes sense or to create and publish updated versions of posts and link them back to earlier versions.
At least for now, I’m using Notes from Calico Manor for thinking out loud, sometimes at length. If you prefer to hear from me in pithier form, you can find me on the fediverse at @heidilifeldman@mastodon.social. If you are looking for publications by me, popular or academic, see my website.