In the first place Monsieur Tibault is not a bozo

And today derspatchel and I have been married for eight months. Today is also my brother's birthday observed, so I believe the plan to involve celebrating with him and his family in Lexington and then peeling off to watch Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) by ourselves.

Yesterday my father came over and brought light. Over our dining room table now hangs a seventy-year-old Tiffany lamp. It's not the kind with wisteria and dragonflies; it's a hexagonal shade of heavy streaked sand-colored glass in twelve panes, one of them supplemented by an electric bill where it broke in transit from upstate New York. It belonged originally to my god-aunt's mother; she and her husband brought it down on Sunday as a present for my mother before realizing there was nowhere in my parents' house it would actually go, whereupon it was regifted to Rob and me. My father spent most of the afternoon wrestling with the clashing combinations of fixtures and wiring in both our dining room and our bedroom upstairs, which now has a very bright ceiling lamp instead of an unwieldy combination of freestanding table and floor lamps. We need to get the Tiffany the right kind of bulb—currently it's kind of cold and white, which shines uneasily through the colored glass—but it's a lovely, slightly massive old object and it means we can actually see what we're doing over dinner. The broken pane will need replacing, but I'm sure there are glass companies which deal with exactly this kind of demand.

(While repairing the lamp-chain, my father was trying to remember the author of a story about a cat in human form who conducts orchestras with his tail and steals away with the equally feline love interest of the bewildered young human protagonist. I had it mentally associated with Saki, but it turned out to be Stephen Vincent Benét's "The King of the Cats" (1929). Hence this post's title. Hestia slept on my windowsill most of the time, half-wrapped in the periwinkle-colored curtain; Autolycus followed my father around the house and watched him at work, occasionally voicing a plaintive command to redirect attention to the cat. Then he pounced all over the TIE fighter toy deployed by my mother until he passed out on top of a plastic bin full of sheet music. Have I mentioned lately how much I like these cats?)

sairaali just linked me to the Cambridge Digital Library (springboard: Siegfried Sassoon) and now I am trying not to lose all my free time.