Cats

Cats are weird.

And if you think that you may vaguely remember this photo, that's possible. I might have used it before. I was too lazy to get out the camera just now (when I decided to blather about the cats) to take a new one, so I'm recycling.

That's Max on the left and Penny on the right. Or, Smack on the left and Lumpy on the right. They answer to either. Or at least I call them either. They don't seem to mind.

Because they're cats, some of you are saying. Don't let that fool you. Cats know their names; sometimes they just don't care that you're calling them, that's all.

Technically these are my father's cats because I can't have pets in my apartment, but since I'm here pretty much every weekend I'm considered part of the service crew as well. If Lumpy demands a shoulder ride around the house or Smack wants his belly rubbed at too freaking early in the morning, I'm the one on call.

It's funny how cats decide that different people are good for different things. Penny knows that I'm the one to go to for shoulder rides, and if she wants to sit with someone she'll sit beside my father but on me. She's only a part-time lap cat, I guess. And as far as Max goes, my father's the nighttime person and I'm the morning person. Max has his set rounds. He also knows that I can be suckered into filling his treat ball in the morning if it's empty, while the father figure generally can't be.

Hmmm. Let's sidetrack for a moment from the cats' general weirdness and talk about the treat ball (which, before anyone says anything about the use of too many treats, I should tell you that we fill with regular cat food. It's just a different cat food from what's in their dishes, so the cats think it's treats. Works for all of us). I said it was his treat ball because it originally was, but I suppose it's their ball now. You see, when we got the ball years ago Max figured it out pretty quickly. Bat the ball with your paw; food comes out. Penny, on the other hand... well, Penny's a bit... shall we say floaty? That'll work. Penny knew that there was food in the ball, she'd watch Max get it out, she'd snap up any of the leftovers on the floor... but she never really got the concept of the ball itself. "Come on, Penny. Hit the ball. Food will come out. You can do it." Her answer? Usually a blank stare and a meep. Well, later a maow. It took a while for her full voice to develop.

Anyway.

One day (years later. Literally years) Penny nudged the ball a tiny bit with her nose. She may have been trying to lick it or something, I don't know. Whatever she was aiming for, the ball moved and food came out.

It was Penny's eureka moment.

Now poor Max has to share his secret food stash. He still uses his paw and Penny still uses her nose, but they're both equally capable of getting food out of a plastic ball. A useful skill to have, don't you think?

I suppose I should take a pointless photo of Max and his ball, because he really does have finesse with the thing. And then you'd be able to see (getting back to weirdness) that he currently has no eyebrows.

I have no idea why. Something must have irritated his eyes and he overgroomed, maybe. All I know is that when I came here last weekend the cat had no hair above his eyes. None on the lids, either. It's starting to grow back now, but he looks pretty freaky.

Appropriate for the day, I suppose.

Happy Halloween, everyone. Stay away from weird cats.




Which, I suppose, would be all of them...

Out, damned song

What? It's Shakespeare.

Well, almost Shakespeare.

Oh, if you honestly don't know just google Macbeth Act V Scene I. And the only reason she wasn't damning a song is that she was too worried about murder to care about earworms.

And before I go any further, the photo is COMPLETELY pointless. Don't wear yourself out looking for hidden meanings.

I need to keep this short(ish) today because my wrist brace is completely buggering up my typing and I don't need to give the backspace key THAT much exercise. And why a wrist brace, Dee? Old injury that hurts sometimes, that's all. Compression helps, but it also means my wrist/hand balance is totally off at the moment. And, apparently, the heel of my hand keeps hitting that Windows button on the keyboard (does anyone ever really use that thing?) without my feeling it. I've found myself in places today that I never even knew existed, computerily speaking.

Anyway.

I'm a bad one for earworms because I have a combination of a pretty good musical memory and an irritatingly olf mind. Once my brain latches on to a tune it's really, really, really hard to get that tune to take a break. There are a couple of tricks that work a bit (Monty Python's Traffic Lights song being one of them, unfortunately. I'm not entirely sure why. Maybe because the musical brain can't tolerate it for too long?), but for the most part I tend to hang on to a song until something even more insistent (or is that persistent?) comes along.

Right now? Well, I'd be happy to get rid of the Souling Song any time soon. Seems an odd choice, I know... to anyone who doesn't watch Letterman. You see, Sting performed his version of the song the other night (which was probably completely boggling to his North American audience -- most of whom would have never heard of soul cakes -- even though the song itself is very appropriate for this time of year), and while it was very pleasant and well put together it does NOT NEED TO STILL BE IN MY HEAD.

Just saying.

Geez, there have been a lot of parentheses in this post.





I need to sing about traffic lights for a while now, ok?

Ok.

Now the funny thing is...

... that when I haven't really had the chance to blog for a while I sort of forget that I have a blog.

This ought to be good, then. What to talk about?

Well, I suppose I could mention that since I haven't taken too many depressing autumn photos (or even non-depressing autumn photos) you're going to have to put up with some of the stuff that's been sitting on my nerdstick for a while. I thought today's web might be at least a little Halloween appropriate, though. Or at least that's going to be my excuse.

Hmmm. Kind of slow so far, don't you think? What else, then?

I could, I guess, tell you that the crud has attacked the office to the point where the first words I heard when I came in this morning were "don't touch anything! We just disinfected your desk". That sounds promising, yes? Yep, a good part of the staff is off being generally infectious. And when I protested that I'd already had the crud (for a whole fricking month, if you remember), Wheat gave his opinion that this particular crud is a different crud.

Great. Just great. It doesn't help that I spent yesterday morning doing programs at a school, aka The Home of All Things Viral. Well, maybe not videos. But you see where I'm going here. Send a person who seems to catch every damned thing going around to a school -- where EVERYTHING goes around -- and it's not too hard to predict the results.

Sigh.

I felt like I should be bathing in hand sanitizer by the time I got back.

Speaking of which (hand sanitizer, not bathing in hand sanitizer), it's definitely proliferating around here. Part of that's a general OH&S flu season precaution, but part of it is, I'm sure, the general media fascination with OMG WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE IF WE COUGH/SNEEZE/TOUCH ANYONE/TOUCH OUR MOUTHS/TOUCH ANYTHING stories. Not that I'm against precautions. I think you'll find that I mentioned just above that I seem to have caught pretty much everything going around this year, and I'd be very happy to have that stop. It's just... there comes a point, doesn't there? There comes a point where you just have to trust that your immune system will do it's best to keep you going.

And also, more worryingly, there comes a point where fatigue sets in and people stop listening to warnings and then stop taking precautions altogether.

There's only so many times a person can cry wolf, you know.

And do I think we're hearing too much wolf right now? Oh, I don't know. I'd make a joke about it just being coyotes or foxes, but coyotes definitely don't work in that particular punchline at the moment.

And how freaky was that? Poor girl.

Anyway, back to work now.




And, hopefully, back to more regular posting.

Be vewy vewy quiet...

Yep. The blog IS being vewy quiet. And will probably continue to be for another day or so. Try not to miss me too much.

Ah, headache

The pointless photo is of the trees outside my apartment at night.

Oh yeah, and the moon's in there somewhere too.

----------

There are many things that my mother left me, some good and some bad.

In the bad file would be her neck.

Well, not literally her neck, of course. That'd be weird. She did, however, leave me the genetic capability of carrying on the family bad neck, and I can't say that I'm especially grateful for it.

I had a bit of an off-night overall, and unfortunately that off-night must have led to sleeping in a bad position. The result, as was obvious as soon as I tried to get up, is that I'm not turning terribly well to one side at the moment.

Yay, stupid neck.

It's annoying not being able to move your head properly, of course, but that's not the worst part about the neck thing. The problem is that over the course of the day gravity starts to get a hand in and compresses things in the wrong position, and that leads to headaches.

Like I need more headaches in my life.

Anyway, I guess this all decides what I'll be doing for the rest of the day. The drive back home will be uncomfortable but manageable, and then I'll just sprawl out on the bed and try not to move in the wrong fashion. Oh, and hope that when I go to sleep tonight things decide to shift in a good direction rather than a worse direction.

It's always a bit of a crap shoot when the neck's not happy.

There must be something out there in silly video land to make me a little more happy, right? Let's see what I can come up with...

Ok, how about this? You have to follow it with this, though, or it won't make as much sense.

Going now.

WHAT POST???

And how pointless is this photo?

Yeah, I know. It's been a pretty inconsistent week for the blather. I've got a feeling that this post will continue the trend.

It's not that I don't have thoughts, you know. I do. They're just on the weird side today, that's all.

For example?

Well, how about "American" cheese? I honestly felt like I could write an entire post about processed cheese and how boggling it is to me that a country which is capable of making some decent cheeses chooses to name FAKE cheese after itself. Not that I'm a total snob about processed cheese -- it definitely has its place in my life -- but if the best you can do is name pseudocheese after your country I do have some questions.

Like... why do Americans insist on calling back bacon Canadian bacon when we Canadians don't?

Yep, this line of thought could have easily become a whole post. Could have, except that I've already posted it.

See? Even my pointless thoughts go around in circles.

So what does that leave me? Not a helluva lot, to be honest. And my usual pointless game site was down this morning so I ended up playing Plants vs Zombies instead (no, I'm not going to link to it. You're all just as handy with the google thing as I am, I'd imagine) and... I think I may have game brain now.

And I need to think of something to doodle that fits the word fast, apparently. Seeing as there's nothing fast about me and my doodles, this may be more of a challenge than someone with game brain can handle.

Ah well.

I need to go put stuff in the dryer now. Catch you later.

[/lame nonsense]

But I don't like it...

This is the time of year where normally I'd be posting photos of autumn colour (you know, leaves. And other stuff that perhaps isn't leaves. No, most likely leaves) in a futile attempt to prove that looking forward to winter isn't depressing me. HOWEVER. This year's early freeze caught most of the plants by surprise, and as a result most of the leaves that are still on the trees are nothing but brown.

I refuse to post a bunch of photos of brown leaves.

She says, after posting a photo of brown leaves. That's different, though. They were from last year, if I remember right.

No, really. That does too make it different.

----------

Yesterday found me manning a booth for the Centre a couple of hours. Normally I don't mind that too much, but there were two problems I had to deal with this time around. The first was that I'd had very little sleep (explains yesterday's non-post, don't you think?) which made it hard to look terribly enthusiastic about the place I was supposed to be representing. Although I did try. The second? Was the clowns.

I hate clowns.

Ok, I don't actually hate clowns, but I really don't like them much. And when I'm tired I tend to get a bit whiny about the things that I don't like. I'm reasonably sure that these particular clowns sensed that in me, because they pretty much left me alone. I hear from my coworkers who also did shifts at the booth that they were pestered by the clowns, but the clowns hardly even tried with me.

Smart move, clowns. I don't like clowns.

There are other things I don't like, of course.

Things like the banging and thumping that the apartment's heating system makes when they turn the radiators back on for the season. That's great.

I also don't like Twitter much. I think it's kind of annoying and trivial. Not that I'm not annoying and trivial too, but at least I know that the vast majority of my annoying and trivial isn't at all interesting to the public at large so I keep it to myself. I figure that my two fans get plenty of annoying and trivial right here on the blog.

Let's see... what else?

Well, I don't like green peppers. Or politics. Or pigeons. And if you're thinking that one of these things is not like the other things, then you're right. The green peppers really didn't belong with the pigeons or politics.

This is all kind of negative today, don't you think? I should probably do something about that. On the old blog I once posted a list of... I guess it was about fifty or so things that I liked. No theme to them or anything; it was just things that I liked. Don't bother looking for it, by the way. I deleted it when I changed the old blog into Doodle Central.

I should probably do another one of those lists.

But not right now.






I like this, though.

And I like that this became an actual post when I wasn't really intending it to...