The Sun Sets On An Old Pile Of Dishes

I've been living with Selina for most of the last 14 years. She and Goose each have/had their bad habits but they never understood counters/tables or eating food that wasn't in the bowl. I couldn't train them with treats because they would only ever eat the treats when it was placed in their bowls.

Polly gives no shits about counters or tables. If she can stand on it, she's going to jump on it and see what's there. We tinfoiled the entire kitchen counter for a week and a half before I saw that she was still jumping up on the counters, just not when we were in the kitchen watching her, so I removed the tinfoil.

But now that Selina has seen Polly on the tables, she has started hopping up on tables. And she has seen Polly investigating plates and bowls so now she does it. (She still HATES Polly but she's learning from her.)

Friday night/Saturday morning, Comrade and I woke up to a crash. Comrade wandered around and came back with the report that Selina had knocked a spoon off the living room table.

This was not the case.

She had, in fact, hopped on to the living room table and pushed off a bowl that had been in the center of the table.

Who cares?

I grew up with ugly blue 1970s Greek inspired (but definitely not actually Greek) plate and bowls. They were grey with cauliflower inked plants. Plates aren't a big deal to me. I'll eat off napkins, paper towels, paper plates, plastic plates, and ugly blue 1970s Greek inspired plates. It doesn't matter.

At some point in the 90s, my family upgraded to modern white plates and bowls with a dark blue rim.

I don't remember any plates from when I moved off the Cape in 1999 and when I moved to Cambridge in 2011. And I only remember the dishes from The Crooked Treehouse because they were the aforementioned 90s dishes gifted to me by my father.

When I got back from Bad Times In Florida, 2019, many of my belongings had been put in storage, but the plates didn't make it. It's no big loss. All of the actually important things were rescued, and I could have totally gone back to that house until July 0f 2021 when they finally started taking the house apart (nobody went into that top apartment for over two years, my roommate's old AC hung out the window the entire time, and I could see my old bookshelves still standing in there from across the street) to get them if they mattered.
When I finally got that crappy little apartment in JP, I had no furniture, and I didn't yet know that The Crooked Treehouse had been preserved while the family fought over which piece of shit owned it. You, my very cool friends, helped me raise enough money to afford/donated things like a bed, pots and pans, towels, and other things that hadn't made it out of The Crooked Treehouse, and that I couldn't really afford to buy myself (since my employer at the time stole thousands of dollars from me in wage theft, which he has decided he doesn't need to ever repay, but you know, he's a "nice guy").

My coworker, who is less a "nice guy" and more of a Good Person, was helping another friend empty their parents' apartment out after one of them died. She arranged and moved four dining room table chairs, a couple of end tables, two standing lamps, and a very comfy living room chair to my new place, which I've moved twice since then (and she helped me move both times). I also went through that apartment's cabinets and took flatware, glasses, and a set of 1970s yellow and white dishes called the Sundance pattern, which was in circulation for two years before being discontinued. I don't know why I like them. I'm not super into yellow, but I do like plates that feature geometry as opposed to flowers.

They have also come with me through the last two moves. During our first few months together, Comrade broke one of the four bowls, and we both scoured The Internet looking for a replacement, which is when I learned they were discontinued almost half a century ago, and weren't around for very long. C'est la vie.

Friday night, Selina broke one of the other bowls, which means there are only two left. (I think we have eight small plates, and six large plates with the same pattern.)

Comrade has saved the pieces, but there's a dozen pieces, not just 2 - 5 so I don't see it being worth reconstruction.

But I did go back online and saw that there were two auctions, each for a set of 4 dinner plates, 4 salad plates, and 4 bowls last year. One went for $500. One for over $1000.
I'm not alone in liking that stupid pattern.

(Don't worry, this doesn't end in me asking for donations to buy a fucking salad bowl. That's not where I'm at in my life.)

While searching, I found THE LAST SUNDANCE SALAD BOWL ON THE INTERNET. (It didn't say that, but I looked. It's the only one I could find. And I couldn't find any in 2021.) $20 on Etsy. I bought it.

But for $80, I could get a whole nice set of new dishes/bowls from the same company that made the Sundance set. They have three or four more modern designs that I could probably care about, given time. So why the Sundance nostalgia? A couply thing since I met Comrade fairly soon after getting them, and we've used them ever since? Something to focus on as a post-coma new life thing? I appreciate and like the chairs and tables, but wouldn't be at all sad to replace them.

I don't know.

I just know all this introspection is Polly's fault for teaching Selina new, awful habits. Selina is already a scratcher, but I try and catnip the scratching pads every week or so, which tends to get her to focus her sharpening there, and it's always worked.

Polly rolls around in the catnip, and then goes to scratch the couch. I put scratching pads in front of the couch legs, and she pushes them out of the way to scratch the actual couch.
Last night, I dreamed that we clipped her nails.

What a waste of a dream.