carving cats in a blizzard

I'm making a custom cat portrait for a customer in Japan. She runs a cat rescue with her husband, because Yokohama doesn't have shelters for strays. This is the lovely Papico, her permanent pet, rather than one of the cats for whom they hope to find new homes.

Meanwhile here in Toronto, we're in the midst of the largest snowfall in five years. The media are having a field day with it, of course, riffing on the fact that this is the meeting of two 'cowboy' weather systems, from Alberta and Texas respectively. Though, really, this is Canada in February and supposed to happen; it's been the lack of snow in recent years which is the real anomaly. It started last night. I shovelled at 6 pm. RJH shoveled at 8 pm. Then this morning, RJH shovelled at 7:30 and by 7:35, I could see a centimeter already on the recently cleared steps. I went out there this afternoon and shovelled again. I'm sure it will need more shovelling by the time he gets home. It is very quiet, despite being a busy street. There are more entrepid pedestrians out there than cars.

I need to make Papico into a pillow, but I am out of stuffing. I've decided that it is entirely reasonable not to try to get a 25 pound bag of stuffing on a day like today. It's an unwieldy sort of item to wrangle on public transit on the best of days.