Category: Nature

Companions

Lady Miss Banjola’s kitty Toby has crossed the rainbow bridge, and I really feel for her and the Beanpie.  They live with us every day, with their moods, and their fur and their appetites, and their surprises, and then the only surprise is how fast they exit, and how our grief pangs us.  I only met him a couple of times.  He was a fine companion, and he will be missed.

In about an hour I’m going to do something I rarely do.  I’m going to get off my duff and go protest something.  More after I get back.

1.8 hours last night.  I cleaned the hose (I almost wish somebody had recorded my death struggle with the damned thing, it was probably amusing to watch) and although my face didn’t hurt, I forgot to put it back on when I took it off in the middle of the night.  I’m usually good for one sleep cycle and then RRRRIP.  Must remember to apply eye goop.  I couldn’t get my eyes open for about ten minutes this morning.

 

Buster’s continuing antics

Buster came into my room while I was wearing my cpap mask.  He very slowly inched toward me, eyes narrowed, and gave a very soft and disturbed mew of “Why do you have an octopus on your face?” His eyes traveled along the length of the hose and back up to my face.  He left, slowly and perplexedly.  Yesterday he tied a knot in something, always an interesting feat when you don’t have thumbs.

Later he tried to come back into my room, but Margot was guarding my door so she hissed at him and he backed off.

2.2 hours last night. Sue’s coming to get me at 10 and bringing me straight home, she has a rehearsal.  Then a nice long chat on the phone with a former coworker, and getting my interview clothes together.

Diddy-wah GRR

Buster, you are a CRAZY MAKING CAT.

He came in, feet wet and filthy with more than the normal grime, and I decided to clean off his paws before he tracked the schmutz ev’y’where.  Without biting or scratching – a masterful demonstration of tension and torsion – he resisted so hard I pulled something and it feels like the last time I had costochondritis.  I grabbed the scruff of his neck and said, quietly, “You will do as you are told.”  He promptly lay on the floor and let me minister to him, and wipe his feet dry, with no further resistance.  Now I feel like I went nine rounds with a baby goat and all of its pointy little hooves, at 4 am, hallelujah.

On his account we bought toddler proofing for the cupboards…

Only half an hour last night.  Not sure what happened there.  I don’t remember taking the mask off.

400 words yesterday.

I have an interview Monday.

 

Not much to report

Went for a short walk and fed Paul lunch yesterday.  Paul’s in good shape and told me a couple of hilarious (non-safety related) stories about his work.  I used to post them, but now I know that lawyers lurk everywhere.

I have a project to complete for church today and then hopefully I can head off to Victoria with a clear conscience and the ability to actually walk through the terminals.  Going up stairs for some reason is easier than coming down.

Unless of course Jeff wants to go first, in which case I’ll stay back and monitor cats.  I’ve already let Buster out, he was wild to leave the house.  He caught a mousie yesterday, which is now living in Jeff’s room in a box (Buster is generally kept out of our rooms as we’re not entirely sure he’s gotten out of the habit of pissing on things he wants to mark.  I can no longer put laundry in the bathroom as he soddenated one of my favourite dresses.)llllllllllllllllllL0 ,555555555555555555555555555555555

\’]2333ll  <—————Buster jumping up to greet me and mashing my keyboard.

Miss Margot is still good for a handful of fur every single day, and she’s getting increasingly cheesed with me and if I make eye contact with her for more than half a second she lollops off under the dining room table and hides.  However she cannot resist the table top as a sleeping / puking spot (dollar sized circles of grit, no hair), so I pick her up while she’s unconscious and for the first thirty seconds she’s too sleepy to put up much of a fight.  Don’t worry, those velvety paws turn into razor shanks when she’s so inclined.  Jeff pointed out that she’s sharpened her claws up and down the eastern side of his bed frame, heavy sigh.  Buster, if allowed in to his room, tips stuff off his desk and takes over his chair.

Why won’t you die? (It’s a song, don’t worry)

Here it is…

Also, I thought I’d lost a different SG1 song, and it turns out I haven’t.  I’ll have to construct a new tune for the verse, but the chorus (the most important part of the song) is still firmly lodged.

Yesterday was an editing as opposed to writing day, but I still ploughed through some stuff on section 2, mostly in the “minions find the hologrammic skeleton” section.  I also did laundry, cleaned up cat puke and cat litter, baked a banana cake, ran the dishwasher, talked to a bunch of my friends on the phone and drank far too much coffee.

I think it’s possible I had the CPAP on for as much as four hours last night.  I get very dry eyes and it’s hard to swallow.

Buster is just as affectionate as ever.  Apparently he enjoys my skritches.  He has learned how to scoot his ass across the floor to scratch his bum where the surgery was, since it probably still itches like fury, and whenever he does it I burst out laughing, for never did I see a cat so locomote.  He can get up quite a turn of speed.  When he still had the cone on he was dreaming about cleaning himself in his sleep.  (Paw twitching, tongue coming dreamily out in licking motions).  He has finally policed himse’f up to the point he no longer smells, which is probably a relief to everyone.  He’s still pestering Margot, and yet they sleep in the same room, every day.

I will be getting chicken and chili ingredaments today for my various activities today – Jeff got home from various work related stuff so late I didn’t feel like going out.  Kids are going to Victoria, yay!  My mOm is kvelling herself into a little groove there, I’m quite sure.

The hypochondriac in me

I fucking hate it when somebody on facebook says “I meet most of the diagnostic criteria for X HORRIBLE INCURABLE UNTREATABLE DISEASE”.  Because, lalala, I run off to the dreaded Differential Diagnosis Machine that is Google and go “ARGH MY GOD I HAVE THIS DREADED DISEASE and it isn’t fatal  BUT GOD HOW INCONVENIENT.”

No, I don’t have this dreaded disease.  I am just complaining about how the ‘monkey see monkey do’ part of my brain seems to be hyperactive.

Keith and Paul, bless ’em, have gotten me out of the house for walks over the last couple of days.  Oakalla was gorgeous, as always, full of lovely dogs.  Whom I respected from a respectful distance, but Paul never saw a Samoyed he didn’t want to manhandle.

Inherent Vice is a sterling example of how you CAN film a Pynchon novel.  Joachim Phoenix is remarkable, as is the rest of the extremely well chosen cast.  Josh Brolin is a standout.

I have met Keith’s girlfriend!  She exists.  L. is a charming young woman with a most infectious laugh. I gave her a lift home the other night and so had a chance to interact with her.

Buster is remarkably blithe for someone who’s been castrated. He leaped up onto the pinball machine less than 24 hours after the operation.  If he keeps this up he’ll rip out his stitches.  Remarkable feline. Hopefully his remarkable aim, persistence and bladder capacity will be put to more pious uses in future.

Today’s walkies will include tomaters.  Jeff needs tomatoes for BLTs.  Also, I must cook bacon.

Everybody have a lovely day now!!

 

A brief exchange of food

Paul dropped by yesterday morning on the way to work to drop off a cheque for his half of the baby carriage (which it turns out Alex loathes unless it’s moving). He brought fresh bread (cousin Jim’s recipe) and I had a container of home made rice pudding (strangely, IN a commercial rice pudding container).  He couldn’t stay so we chucked food at each other and he left.

Buster got out the door.  He paused (like a moran) on the deck to inhale the sweet air of freedom – and I chucked him back in the house.  He doesn’t hate me but he was not amused.

He gets snipped on Tuesday.  The whole house smells like pee, sigh, but we have a plan to deal with that as Buster recuperates.  I will be ever so glad when he can FINALLY get off the cone of shame.

I’ve put some items on craigslist for sale. No responses yet.

At last a deadline

I am going to try to complete a couple of songs in Songwriter so I can export them as PDFs and get them into the Conflikt song book.

Much as it pains me to say it, I can’t afford to make trips to the US and otherwise spend the income I have, so I am going to go to $15 worth of church event as opposed to the $500 con.  Yes – I could spend less but I don’t like going to a convention if I have to bunk in with anyone else for the usual reasons, like my privacy requirements now I’m no longer a live in parent are rather absurdly high.

So I’ll be sending the songs along instead.  I’ll send Gateway and Dishing with Joyce, since Fred Pohl’s stuff is going to be commercialized over the next couple of years (I believe it’s going to be a tv show, which would likely work fine, helmed correctly) and Buffy never stops being popular with certain crowds and the Scoobie gang have dozens of songs and Joyce not so much. I find it amusing that I have repurposed a song with was a song about a crush on a coworker into a filk, but one of the great appeals of filk is how it mashes things together into a great media pulp.

Saw Mike yesterday, and he popped by later, after he fed me a light supper at the Oliver Twist, and I will be seeing Sue for brekkie this morning to feast her for her birthday.  She is so wonderful, I am sure we will have a lovely earflapping. For she is the Great She-Elephant, and I am her dear chum.

Okay, enough demonstrating that I left the house yesterday (I did twice, and with all the cat commotion with Buster and his collar Jeff did three times) and I have friends, I gots work to do, coffee to make and songs about Giant Squids (words) (music) to listen to for its inspirational effect on my opus.

Buster report

Buster is rapidly turning into one of my favourite cats.  He is affectionate, vocal without being a pain, coexisting well with Margot (she’s still not a big fan, but has started rimming him while he eats, so that’s something), athletic, a good sport about being stuck in the house while his most recent set of contusions heals, a non finicky eater and A LAP CAT.  He helped me with my most recent homily, huzzah.

 

All is merry and bright

  1. Paul gave me and Jeff motion detector lights; the upgetting to pee is now a lot easier.  Paul’s approach to Christmas gifts is to buy a bag of useful objects and let you pick which one you like – this year the theme was light, so it was headlamp, motion detector light or keychain flashlight.
  2. I was really resentful about ‘having’ to do Christmas dinner, and then I asked myself what it would take to be less resentful.  I immediately thought “If I don’t have to buy the turkey and lug it home!”  To which Paul happily agreed, and Keith lugged it over here.  Resentment vanished, I went to Granville Island with Tammy for the rest of the veg and happily lugged that home.
  3. I made vegan squash soup – there wasn’t enough for everybody and it was damned good.
  4. so much good beer – pumpkin ale, winter ale, shipwreck IPA! Tammy brought some nice wine.
  5. The turkey was good – the meat delicious, the skin like an advertisement – but what was really amazing was the gravy. I ended up eating it cold as a side for leftover pie, and it was SO GOOD.  It was pan dripping gravy.  I stuck the pan drippings in a blender, added a tablespoon of cake flour and about half a cup of milk, blended the shit out of it and then nuked it for a minute.  From such pedestrian beginnings came a voluptuously smooth gravy with a meaty and almost nutty flavour.
  6. Mike and Tammy and Paul and Katie and Keith and I sang and played afterwards, and Alex grooved along.  He really really likes music, and he is most fabulously strong.  He apparently likes his Christmas present, which was a stuffed T Rex. Paul introduced Tammy to Never Set the Cat on Fire, which was wonderful.
  7. Wine was spilled on Granny’s linen tablecloth… horrors! and it came out again the next morning with some Amaze.  Tablecloth is clean, folded and ready for use.
  8. Earlier this week I got the lobster dinner I have been drooling for, except it was lunch, and it was with Tammy, so it was pretty much perfect.
  9. Although the kitchen is once again the habitation of orcs this morning, I HAD cleaned up and ran a dishwasher and got rid of the empties and straightened out the living room the next morning and returned some sanity to the proceedings.
  10. Today I hope to get cat litter.  With two cats, more shit.  It is the law.
  11. Autumn is a boy.  He is now Buster.  Jeff and I are fine with this, but not fine with not noticing earlier.  He will be snipped in a week or so.
  12. He has been to the vet for suturing because he’s already gotten in fights. Margot was disturbed by him before, but with a cone on his head she is Miss Hissy each time he approaches.
  13. I am really enjoying everybody’s pics of how happy their Christmas has been.  The various traditions from around the world and around the various ethnicities of my friends and flist make me happy in their variety and conviviality.
  14. I am sad to have missed Christmas Eve service because it was the last time a certain church member will ever provide music for us, because he is awesome, but also sick.  As sad as I am about this, I made happy memories in my own home with my loves and kin.
  15. Keith was sober, and he was Mom’s taxi.  He: ferried Tammy to and from Edmonds, drove his sister home, drove Rob to Church and drove Mike and his Dad home.  As happy as I was to see Alex, Keith did a lot to make the evening perfect, and I am now considering (which I can do here, since he never reads my blog, haw haw) how I shall appropriately reward him for his service.
  16. A car was stolen from in front of our house at 3:30 am Christmas morning.  I spoke to a Burnaby RCMP officer about it… Jeff and I were asleep at the time, or in no position to see what was happening.  I thanked her for working Christmas Day and wished for her to stay safe out there.
  17. I made chocolate cake.  I am thinking perhaps cinnamon rolls later. The turkey soup is made and in the freezer.

This concludes my report….

Autumn emerges

I’m on the john talking to my mother on the phone and THAT’S when Autumn comes up and starts loving on me so hard that it’s embarrassing.  Darn you critter!  I was ALREADY multitasking and you just made my life harder.  I almost wish somebody had been filming my attempt to manipulate toilet paper while fending off a most importunate feline.  No I don’t but it would have been funny.

I then hucked Margot off her (Margot is spherical with fluffy rage and making strangling noises with occasional hisses for contrast and after my third attempt to make her back off took refuge in Jeff’s room) and played with her for about half an hour until I was exhausted (and I was pretty tired from standing and baking).  There is biscotti.

I got pictures.  She is SO PRETTY.  And soft.  Softer by far than any cat since Kira, and I think even softer than her.

THERE WERE SO MANY COOKIES.  I only took a few; I left a tray of biscotti.

I was expecting to be asleep two hours ago and now I’m so tired I am glad i am in bed as I think I could just clunk.