A day just full of events

Today is Mardi Gras so I thought I'd post something about my turn of the century fan from Switzerland. It's made of a lot of different crepe papers, some plain, and some with painted/printed designs (back then, it was not unusual to have gold ink printed on the crepe paper too).

The little figure has a die-cut scrap face glued to a cardboard body. She is dressed in more crepe paper and she is holding a pitchfork made of gold metallic paper glued onto cardboard. There are lots of pretty little gold decals floating on her costume and in the background. I think she looks like a little butterfly among the stars. 

But when you turn it over, you see a mirror (reflecting whoever is looking at it) and gold cut-out paper letters that spell out the word "hell" in french.

Well, and oh my. Not sure what to make of that. I'm assuming this was made for a Mardi Gras type holiday in Switzerland. Just another curious thing in my ephemera collection that I hope to find more about in the future. :-)

And today is also the day I got to see Rane again and to meet his friend Carse. I had NO problem recognizing Rane. And he had no problem recognizing me because apparently I have the same walk. :-/ That's what he said. I picked them up at Union Station and we went off to eat breakfast at Succotash and one of us (not me) had pear and pecan pancakes because today is also International Pancake Day. 

And while I was writing this I heard a racket on the deck and when I just checked to see what was going on, look who showed up after being gone for nearly two months...

Oh that Freddie. I opened the backdoor carefully to give him his plate of cat food but he managed to grab my leg. That surprised me so I dropped the plate and quickly got behind the screen door and Freddie got surprised himself and jumped backward. Gawd. That little raccoon was starving. Look how thin he is...

Freddie was a little put out because as we all know, he does not like to eat off of floors. He likes plates. But I was not going to take the time to carefully place another plate in front of him if he was going to grab and jump on me. So Freddie had to roll his food back onto the plate that was out there. Freddie's hunger eventually got the best of him and within a minute or two of impatient cat food rolling, he just started chomping on anything he could find.

Then it was time for a clean up and a short rest on the glider while that awful cat that smells like cigarettes made sure Freddie behaved.

I don't think he appreciated the feline supervision.

So off he went and we could tell where he was going by the dog barking we could hear as he travelled through each yard. Must be hard to be a raccoon in a dog and cat and possum world.