Our baby is 10 (months old)!

Tristana is now more or less a fully grown kitty and probably won't get any bigger (she is still pretty small), but she is nonetheless full of youthful vim & vigor. She's a bit like a child being raised by three grandparents - me, Wax, and Snookums - preferably three grandparents tucked up in bed in a row, like the ones in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. However, she seems to thrive on all the attention and be very good at entertaining herself. And in spite of her youthful zooms and her hours-long sessions of playing with pretty much anything, she's still detectably grownupper than before.

She has successfully made friends with both bunnies pretty much, and both bunnies have been known to play with her, or at least like... try to play with her, and kind of play parallel to her while she is also playing but without really understanding what the other is doing. She's also revitalized Snookums, who is pretty frequently tempted into playing with her. Today we saw both of them playing and Inspector Japp even briefly (sort of) joining in, and not for the first time!

Her newest toy is a piece of cardboard torn off the box of fountain pen ink I opened on Thursday, and her newest hobby is sitting on top of the upside-down armchair that's stacked on top of its rightside-up twin waiting for the rain to stop so we can carry them down to store in the garage. Tristana is pretty sure they're a new cat jungle gym. And they kind of are, just one that's not technically completely structurally sound. Yesterday we had to arrest a cat when they were play-fighting on top of them twice during Dune.



She is tiny enough to frequently squeeze her entire body under Snookums's chin and wrap around his neck like a foxskin stole but backwards, because that way as much of her body is in front of his face to demand kisses/grooming as possible (and it is a fairly effective strategem).

Her newest problematic habit is sneaking up on the kitchen counter and licking things. Which is fine, but Wax tends to leave the butter knife on the edge of the sink after she makes toast or a sandwich and then use the same one again later... but that's not gonna work any more.

Today I learned what makes midcentury Murano lights so incredibly biteable

The name for the material that makes mid-20th-c. Murano glass lights/lamps look so incredibly biteable and candylike is cased glass.

1. Modern midcentury-style Italian mouthblown pendant lamp by the Murano masters at Millefiori
2. A vintage Yugoslavian blown glass pendant lamp
3. Vintage Italian pendant lamps by Venini

All the images were posted recently at my decorative arts Tumblr designobjectory under the tag lighting.

The effect is caused by a colored layer of glass fused over an opaline/milk glass white layer; cased glass is any combination of two or more differently-colored layers, often with the opaque white on the outside or all the layers colored, and often with the outer layer etched or cut away to create a design. Cutaway and etched cased glass effects apparently go back to ancient times. The most familiar examples to many, however, will be 19th century antiques, particularly the then-wildly-popular Bohemian art glass (often further embellished with gold leaf and other painted-on designs), as seen in the ornate red and white objects in the top rows of images here and our heirloom Bohemian cranberry glass candy bowl here:



I haven't found a specific term for the color-over-milk cased glass that produces this luscious candy effect, but it was a very popular technique in the midcentury, not only in Murano glass, obviously. You can see a lot of Empoli (art glass center near Florence) cased glass from the period in luscious rows here.