Tag: cats

Driveby cute, and reasons.

White-and-grey cat in a green-and-black hat. This is a hat that I knit

  • partly to stashbust,
  • partly to try out a pattern from Doomsday Knits, and
  • partly because a friend of mine collects hats for the kids at the school where she works. So.

The project is called “Rewoven Threads”

  • because Threads is really a pretty classic post-apocalyptic movie (and an incredibly bleak one, I will add),
  • because knitting a hat to give away to someone who needs it seems specifically to address some small reweaving of the broken threads of the aforementioned movie, and
  • because I needed to weave in fourteen ends.

The cat is in the picture because

  • I apparently have no sense of self-preservation.

(He is plotting my demise. Oh yes. Do not be fooled by the sad kitty-eyes.)

Adjustment period.

The cats went to the vet recently. They’re fine, but one of them especially has started gaining too much weight (a pound a year is fine for an adult human. For an adult cat, it’s something you want to nip in the bud), so there’s no more leaving food out for them to graze. They each get a measured amount.

In practical terms, this means that they don’t eat together anymore, and that the food dish for one is taken away and the food dish for the other is brought out.

In other words, there is food right there and yet one or the other of the poor poor things is not allowed to eat. Is restrained from eating. Is, as it were, brutally starved by a cold and unfeeling human who has clearly put food out for the express purpose of torturing them.

It is amazing how piteously hungry a thirteen-pound cat can sound as he looks soulfully up at you and quavers out a question mew. (His sister is more practical, and has taken the “If the humans wake up, I am fed. If I push things off the dresser, the humans wake up. Ergo…” approach. At two in the morning. Darling  little fluffbucket.)

On a lighter note, I feel I have survived the worst of the holiday crunch, so there’s that. Now if I can just get a few more hours sleep…

Of cats and wires

The rewards of bravery are scant and cruel.

The technician who came to fix our internet connection seems competent and pleasant, but I don’t think the salesperson he was talking to quite followed what needs to be done differently for installation sales orders.

Hoping all issues are resolved so everyone gets internet access and gets paid.

Angus very bravely came out to watch the new human, at which point Piper sat on him. (Angus, not the technician.) The rewards of bravery are scant and cruel.

Right now the cats are patiently studying the high winds outside, and I am mourning the lovely weather we were having. Nice while it lasted.

Update:

Well, the internet problem is not actually fixed, which is really annoying. Hoping it gets sorted tomorrow morning. I mean, for the moment, we at least have flaky internet access, but we had that before so it isn’t really an improvement. And the afternoon was a whole lot of fussing back and forth that just enabled us to stay in one place.

Eh.

On the plus side, the weather hasn’t gotten quite as unpleasantly chillier as I was worried it would, and we are getting some lovely windy bluster and occasional spates of rain. Combined with a warm house and extensive amounts of tea, this actually makes for a pretty pleasant afternoon.

Regrouping.

I haven’t written anything–well, outside of online communications and work-related email, which I generally don’t count–in a day and a half, which is annoying because I was on a six-day streak before that.  I know why, and it’s understandable, but that doesn’t make it any less annoying.

It will not happen today. There. I have said it, so now I have to make it true.

In other news… well, there is a nineteen-and-change year-old-cat sitting on my arms while I type, gently pulsing and purring and being old and delicate and imperious.  Doesn’t interfere with the typing, at least, although I do need to crane a bit to see over her to look at all of my screen. And I’ve just been reminded that vacation pay is issued upon request, which means that it’s been quietly accruing for the last few weeks.

Am finding that Night Vale Community Radio is actually very pleasant to listen to, being something between “background noise” and “actually requiring full attention”.  It’s funny in a highly bizarre way, and while I can think of a few descriptors, they are a bit obscure, so I will just go with the slug that “It’s as if Stephen King and Neil Gaiman created a SimCity and let it run on its own for forty years.”  The more I look at fiction, the more I find there’s a dearth of the unapologetically weird stuff.  (There’s some – and there is obviously going to be a bit of disagreement over what’s “unapologetically weird in the service of the story’s mood” and what’s “bad worldbuilding” – but it’s rare.  Suggestions welcome!)

Sore and tired, but trucking on.

Viciously sore throat today, and not much sleep.  Plus one of the cats threw up first thing in the morning.  I think it’s going to be a long day; may try for a midday nap.

On the plus side, there is a lovely softly-grey sky outside, shading from dove to slate, and the rain and thunder are at least making indoors seem cosier.

Pets are exhausting to take care of sometimes, but I will grant that they give you a sense of purpose.

Blinking at the calendar

Wow, it’s been a long time.

Most of February was taken up with some acute household health stuff (everyone’s fine, life carries on, thank god the crying jags were mostly staggered in timing because I think that if we’d had them all happening at the same time it would have been harder to get through).  March was tied up a lot with some temporary work.  And I can’t believe it’s halfway through April, good grief, where does the time go?

I spent a chunk of last night trying to update my CV to reflect something that I’m good at but that I’m not usually hired to do, and it’s a little scary.  Besides that, there’s not much really going on.  I’m tired and I realized today that I’ve dropped the ball on something, and I’m trying to get it back together rather than bolting in the opposite direction throwing excuses behind me.  Should be manageable, really.

Piper’s having trouble walking, so I’m sitting with her in the living room and going to get through as much as I can today without leaving her alone for too long.  I foresee a lot of laundry in my future today.  It won’t be so bad, if I can get to the doing rather than the talking about.

Quite tired.

The job hunt continues, and I think that’s enough said about that.

I’ve been tidying the house a fair bit, and while it was never horrible, it looks a lot less cluttered now. (I got rid of fifteen litres of yarn on Thursday, actually, and am rather ridiculously happy about that. Am currently trying to figure out how best to rehome comics and graphic novels.)

I lost two hours in the middle of the day, today, and while I don’t think it was a bad loss I wish I’d been a bit more productive.

And I’ve joined A Month of Letters because really, I have all these bits of stationery around and after a while an unused stack of paper can start to seem as sad as an unread book.

(I’m still working on books, too.)

One of our pets probably needs elbow surgery, and we’re still waiting to hear back from the surgeon (we, at this point, means both us and the vet we took her to see). I am trying very hard not to get frustrated at the delay, I understand that there are probably not a lot of veterinary surgeons in town, but I really want to know what can be done for her. She’s not okay, right now.

I’m trying not to get ground down. It’s mostly working.

Still life, with cats.

Not much to say tonight, but I’m awake and can’t get back to sleep and am trying very hard not to pick up the latest Laundry novel because if I do I’m going to finish it rather than go back to sleep.

I went downstairs for a warm drink, and was cornered in the kitchen by three sadly hungry cats.  “Feed us,” their eyes said. “You weren’t doing anything important, so feed us–and then hang around and adjudicate to make sure Newcat doesn’t steal all the food in Mediumcat’s dish, and Oldcat gets hers allllll to herself. You didn’t want to try going back to sleep, did you? Look, we’re cute. Feed us.”

(Given that it’s actually kind of important that we find out ASAP if Oldcat goes off her food again, I actually do need to keep an eye on her when she’s eating to see if she’s eating her food, or if the amount’s just decreasing because one of the other cats dove in when she wandered away for a bit.  And given that she’s really too skinny, whenever she indicates that she wants food we give her food, because then she will have more food and hopefully put on some weight.  And what this all boils down to is that I spent twenty minutes in the kitchen watching her mumble away at her wet cat food when I would much rather have spent five minutes in the kitchen making myself a hot drink and then ten minutes upstairs poking at the computer before going back to bed.)

(But she’s eating, so I don’t really mind.)

Lucifer Tailypo.

From Nolan, via Stephen King:

Nothing is so frightening as what’s behind the closed door, Nolan[1] said. You approach the door in the old, deserted house, and you hear something scratching at it. The audience holds its breath along with the protagonist as she/he (more often she) approaches that door. The protagonist throws it open, and there is a ten-foot-tall bug. The audience screams, but this particular scream has an oddly relieved sound to it. “A bug ten feet tall is pretty horrible,” the audience thinks, “but I can deal with a ten-foot-tall bug. I was afraid it might be a hundred feet tall.”

Every time I see this picture of Lucy–

lucy-100feettall

–yeah, that one. 🙂 Every time I see that picture of her, in my mind, I imagine a gleeful scratchy voice, specifically Isme’s voice from The Emperor’s New Groove, cackling out “–and behind the door was a bug A HUNDRED FEET TALL!”

That’s a clever girl, Lucifer. You’ll upgrade to a thousand feet any day now.

Also, I figured out what I really wanted her middle name to be yesterday, when we were bringing her back from the vet’s. It’s Tailypo.

So she is Lucifer Tailypo, and she is settling in beautifully.
—
[1] William F. Nolan, at the 1979 World Fantasy Convention.

Observations.

Yesterday, the cat had beef and beef-liver stew, in bouillon, with “a medley” of vegetables, parsley, and oregano.  Seriously, looking at the ingredient list on that can, I would have sworn it was human food.

Yesterday I had hot dogs.

I mean, don’t get me wrong, I think I had the better deal (if nothing else, dinner was made, which was a really nice feeling right about last night).  I’m just amused by the fact that I think my pets eat more healthily than I do.  It comes from not having thumbs or wallets, I think.

In possibly thematically related news, I have figured out why I hate going to the gym when the gym employees are around.  It’s like clothes shopping.  Except the clerks really are looking at you and thinking about what needs to get fixed about your body, and you knew that going in, and you (quite likely) paid money to go there and… agh.  Body image issues, how unsurprising to see you.

(Going when staff is not around is much easier.  I do not think it is ultimately as productive, though.)

Not much more to say, really.  I’m making a concerted effort to work through my reading list.  (That goodreads widget down there?  That is not a complete list of what I have on the go.)