Bee that way

"Did you oil that cat?" Laurie inquired from the other room. "Yes! Can't you tell? He's tearing through the house like a maniac!" I replied.  For some reason Puck gets fleas on his ears, while the other cats don't. Instead of putting flea poison on him, I've been wiping olive oil on his ears, and it seems to be working well. So between catnip and olive oil, we should be able to get Puck's ears back in shape and have a well-oiled cat.

Rosencrantz has a new scratch on one of his ears so it looks like he's been out fighting with some of the neighbors' kitties that have been hanging around in the yard. A couple of years ago he got an abscess that I had to drain a couple of times. Abscesses are nasty.

Last night's medieval lecture was about a couple of paintings on the ceiling of the Alhambra in Granada, Spain that depict conflict between knights and muslims, painted in a strikingly western manner. The paintings have a lady who the speaker believes represents a combination of Blancaflor, from Flores y Blancaflor, Isolde from Tristan and Isolde, and Layla from Majnūn Laylā, a pre-Islamic Arabic romance. The painting is interesting and the lecture was long, with a lot of detail. 

One of the points she made after the talk that was interesting, is that historians and scholars want to separate classes and enemies and act like social orders were forever separated in the middle ages. She suspects that all classes knew the popular stories, poems and songs of the time, and that in Spain the enemies were often allies, and, either way, they knew each others' cultures very well. So while we have no written explanation of the paintings, or the lady in them, Professor Robinson believes anyone who saw the paintings in the late 14th century would know the stories they told.

Even with the wind, I managed to get a couple of bee photos tonight. Stretch was in the box Guildenstern has been stuffing himself into, while Guildestern laid in the background waiting his turn.