Training Buster

I thought of training Miss Margot

to be a circus cat but she wasn’t really ept enough. Buster,

however, has the combination of smarts, suckiness and athleticism which makes for a perfect circus cat. His contemplation time is 5-10 seconds, as opposed to the 18-20 seconds it took Margot to work anything out. (All cats have a response time to inputs, unless you’re dropping something on them or they’re actively in danger. It’s not the only thing I gauge intelligence on but it’s quite indicative.)

This morning, he announced (body language, he’s a quiet critter normally) that he wanted to train. He flopped on the rug (which our mOm made….) and I bounced a couple of treats over to him. It seems weird to start training by offering treats for no harder a task than showing up in the kitchen, but Buster wants to know if I’m going to keep loving him even if he’s feeling lazy, so I bounced the treats. Then he got up and wound himself around my ankles making very quiet mews, so I asked him to jump for treats. And he did, twice. Then he jumped onto the tuffet and stared meaningfully at me. When he sits nicely on the tuffet he gets a reward. I gave him a treat and he dropped it from his paw onto the floor. He just stared at it and I picked it up and put it back in front of him.

He mewed after he finished eating it, and then I put the next treat in the air above the chair next to the tuffet. I said jump, and HE DID, HE JUMPED OVER TO THE OTHER CHAIR, and then jumped up for his treat. Then we did the ‘cool down’ which is him running after treats along the kitchen floor, which can be marvellously entertaining, and then I gave him a pat, told him he was a good boy, and gave him the sign language for ‘all done’, so he knows it’s over (I’m trying to do that all the time now when I’m done with whatever activity, cleaning him or treats or grooming.)

It’s May and it’s just so frikking cold all the time. It’s not my imagination I just checked the data for May 2019. If this is another ‘no sun summer’ I’ma gonna be choked. I think we had the aircon on this time last year at least once.

My current fave pic of Katie

My current fave pic of Keith:

My fave pic of Paul, or among them anyway.

batman go slap

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I literally slept all day yesterday, and then slept the usual amount at night. I’ve either got trypanosomiasis or I’m sickening with something or I’m depressed, and how would I know. I do know that I sleep to get away from my allergies, and the pollen count right now is higher than Cheech and Chong.

 

One of my fave Gorillaz song with a marble machine mashup.

current mood GARBAGE TRUCK BREAKS HYDRAULIC LINE kabooom

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google earth image of Mongolian rivers

still giggling

so…. Dave and I were missing each other on Skype and finally we connected. I spent… it feels like I spent the first ten minutes of the call going On and fucking On, as one does, about how intelligent Buster is.

Mookie, Dave’s cat, promptly got up on the back of his chair, put two paws up on the bookshelf, and then, delicate, delicate, delicately extended one claw AND YOINKED DAVE’S WATER GLASS OVER. It didn’t break but Dave had to get up and get a towel. I got to watch the whole thing and instead of doing anything useful like warning Dave I screamed with laughter because I am, not to put too fine a point on it, a total weeb.

Then he jammed his hairy little face into the camera and for one brief second I thought I was disappearing into a tiger’s maw.

There are no eggs in Toronto, at least not for delivery.

 

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lovely walk with Peggy

I took my picker upper that Renée gave me (she turned 80 on Earth Day, god love her) when I broke my shoulder in 2013, and picked up all the plastic trash blown into the yard. Then I picked up trash in the Hilda Avenue (not street ha ha) park while walking slowly around and around the park. Much dog shit, but without PPE and a paycheque ain’t picking that up, sorry. Returned to my place with half a bag of trash and the warm tummy feeling of a conversation with a friend.

Mental health, it’s tough. But it’s easier with Peggy around. I wore my white cloth mask, she wore her N95 respirator mask that Tom had lying around.

IRL

I follow so many people on twitter – approximately 500 – that it’s always wild when I know one in really-for-truly real life.

This is Benjamin Luk: a hard working and thrifty bon vivant who has several income streams but is also a wedding photographer, when the social climate permits.

He posted this.

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I’ve met him twice IRL, and he’s utterly charming.

Impossible pie

I have here, in Sue Gillespie’s handwriting, a receipt for Impossible Pie.

4 eggs
1/4 cup margarine
1/4 cup white sugar
1/2 cup flour
1/4 tsp salt
2 cups milk
1 cup feather strip coconut
1 tsp vanilla

blend ingredients in blender
pour into 10 inch greased deep pie dish
sprinkle with coarsely chopped pecans
bake at 350F for an hour

Only someone who’s a destiel / SPN fan will get this

found this on the bpdfamily dot com website and I AM HOWLING

 

IT’S LIKE ALL MY FANFIC CAME TO LIFE. All my fanfic is about hot guys navigating their way toward sex while negotiating life partnership agreements BECAUSE THE REUNIFICATION OF THE COUPLE AFTER DUMBASSERY dadgum HAPPENED AGAIN, did you miss it, sorry, (furtive sounds that might be regret) anyway it’s all a bog standard thing, but I’ve been hit by that lightning a few times and it isn’t difficult for me to recreate the hopeful, lustful feeling of anticipation tinged with panic that is the beginning of a returned interest.

anyway, it’s a stupid subset of a ludicrous fandom, and be happy I’m not more locavore about it, I could have been haunting locations all this time, as if my feet would let me. Although I suppose in those hiking boots I bought for Iceland… why do I go there.

You see how lonely people can get to thinking sour thoughts with all the angry voices boinging around with them in their cells, and slowly start to go off the rails.

I’m not lonely, I talked to Mike and Tammy today.

You gotta hustle when your friends live in different time zones. Tammy lives in Toronto, Mike has this timezone called ‘work’ and it is filed under my ‘amorphous blob of time zones’ theory.

I am supposed to make more masks.