Pointless photo of the day:

That's it. Other stuff to do now...

I got rhythm...

... I got music. I got...

nothing for a blog post...

Yep. I can already tell that I'm just not in the mood today. No reason for it; I've just got that feeling that there's no point in forcing anything because it'll end up totally lame.

Hey, at least I'm honest.

Enjoy the weird picture, then. See you tomorrow.

Or whenever.

Pointless photo of the day:

Fresh laundry. Now with extra cat.

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I suppose it's not a terrible surprise that I ended up with a degree in zoology, considering that I grew up with animals. We always had pets. Furry pets. Cats, dogs, gerbils (way too many gerbils. Nasty cannibalistic things, gerbils, when there gets to be a few too many of them), guinea pigs, monkeys...

Yeah, we had monkeys when I was very little. I remember a bit about them, like the bamboo cage in the kitchen, and having one on a leash in the back yard. I also remember an old film reel my dad took of one of them that would wait on top of a dining room chair for the chihuahua to pass underneath so that he could leap onto the dog, grab his collar, and ride him around the house. That particular monkey's name was Charlie Brown. The dog? Snoopy, of course.

Poor dog had such a monkey on his back.

You'll notice above that I said furry pets. We never had anything that wasn't furry as a pet here. No birds at all (I'm not sure, but I think that might have been because my grandmother always had birds. Maybe it turned my father off a little). No reptiles either, although having reptiles as pets wasn't very common around here when I was a kid so it probably would have seemed pretty weird anyway.

I didn't find out that I liked snakes until I started working at the nature centre, actually. I remember being asked in the interview if I had experience with snakes, and having only just finished university the previous spring I had to be honest and say only dead ones.

Good ol' zoology degrees. You get to know a lot of dead everything.





Um, yeah. Live snakes turned out to be pretty cool, though. More personality than I would have thought they had. I'm not sure if I'd want the bother (and dead-mouse-defrosting) of having one as a pet, though.

I don't technically have any pets at all at the moment, although I do think of the cats as mine as well as Dad's (and, more importantly as all cat owners know, the cats obviously think of me as theirs). I live in a pet-free apartment building (supposedly pet-free. There seems to be an awful lot of "pretend" dogs about for pet-free) and my apartment's pretty small, so it would be a bit difficult to have a pet even if I wanted to.

Do I want to? Well like I said before, I grew up with animals. Sometimes I think it would be nice to have something around if I could.

So what would it be, then?

I dunno.

Probably not a dog. Don't get me wrong -- I like dogs. What I don't like is needy, and dogs have that in spades. Sure, it might be rewarding to come home after work and have some dog wagging at the door waiting for me, but there comes a point with dogs where I always feel like saying CAN'T YOU FIND SOMETHING ELSE TO DO???. Maybe it's just that our last dog was neurotic, I don't know, but if you look back through the archives at any time I house-sat for Dad while she was still around, you'll find me just about going bats by the end of the week. All that constant what are we going to do now and what are we going to do now and what are we going to do now...

Yep. There's more than one reason that I don't have kids.

I don't think I'd have a salamander or a frog as a pet either, even though they're about fifty billion times less needy than dogs. Why not, then? Simple. Crickets. I hate crickets, and I deal with them enough at work. They stink. And as careful as you are with them, there's always going to be one or two that manage to escape. And then? Singing. Gah. Look, I know that there are plenty of people out there who really like the sound of crickets singing, and if crickets are singing outside that's just ducky. When they're insistently singing from a random corner of a room and you can't find them? Not exactly soothing.

Let's face it -- anyone who knows me knows that I would end up with cats. Nothing wrong with that; I'm good with cats. I like to think that I get cats, and cats generally get the fact that it's ok to have attention for a little while and then go do something else. I know that dog people don't care much for the independent streak in cats, but that's all right for me. I like my alone time, as any one of the people I dated seriously back in the day can tell you (oh, but that's really another story for another time. Really really for another time). Cats are like boyfriends who work on the oil patch. Just when you're getting sick of them they go away for a while.

Ok, I'm laughing at myself for that last one. Sounds like I need to rent a pet rather than own one, doesn't it?

The big problem with cats (besides litter boxes, I suppose) is that I'm allergic to them. Might be an issue, yes? Oh, not so much. Like I said, I grew up with cats. I also tend to acclimatise to cats that I'm around regularly. Allergies wouldn't stop me from getting a cat.

If I were going to get a cat.

Which I'm not, in the foreseeable future.




Guess I'll have to keep borrowing Dad's cats, then. Oh, and for anyone concerned about my allergies after seeing the shot of Penny on the laundry, don't worry.

It was Dad's laundry.

Home work

If any of my two fans missed me yesterday, I was working at home. Well, even if any of my two fans didn't miss me I was still working at home, so there you go. I stayed home to try to give myself a boot to the youknow in regards to a project that's been waiting to be finished since last spring. Not terribly time-sensitive, I guess you could say, but it still needed to be done.

Today's pointless photo shows what working at home looks like, or at least what it looked like yesterday. Yep, I was sprawled out on my cheap, needs-to-be-replaced comforter (the white stains? Gesso. Let's just say that art happens on the bed a bit too frequently) pretending that I can draw ground squirrels. I might put the scans on the other blog after I'm done here since I've been a little lazy about posting there this past while, but if I do and you decide to go check them out just keep in mind that things were supposed to be on the kid-friendly, slightly cartoonish but still recognisable side.

And also remember that I suck at ground squirrels. Plants are much more fun.

Anyway. For the art supply nerds amongst you, you're seeing Koh-i-noor Hardtmuth woodless graphite pencils, which it's completely ridiculous for someone of my level to use but I love the feel of; Pigma Microns (in sepia), still very much my pen of choice even though I've tried plenty of others by now; and... yeah, good old-fashioned Laurentiens. I've thought about getting some better quality pencil crayons, yes, but the fact is that I do so little with crayons that it doesn't seem right to spend the money, somehow. Not that similar logic stopped me from buying the woodless graphite pencils, you'll notice. Maybe I should rethink it the next time I'm in the mood for a new toy? We'll see.

Oh, and if anyone was wondering about the rest of the pencil crayons that should have been in the empty box you see in the picture, they were on the floor. Some of them are getting a little short to be able to find in the easel set-up, so I usually just dump them out when I use them. Can you tell that I live alone, folks?

You should be able to tell that I was working instead of just doodling because you can see my phone in the middle of the mess. I needed to stay in touch while I was working. Working, yes. Not texting the Ontario office about the fact that I suck at ground squirrels.

Ok, well, maybe a little of that.

Ah well. There you have it. I don't always do the art thing on the bed, by the way. It was just easier to have my resources close at hand this time around. And it was closer to the television. And I didn't have to bother with cleaning the mess off of my table...



Hey. All these things are important considerations when you're spending the day sucking at ground squirrels, you know.

Things I didn't plan to be doing today

Or, more accurately, thing I didn't plan to be doing today. And that thing is?

Cleaning out my fridge.

Yep.

Didn't feel like getting groceries yesterday, so I just picked up something for supper. Well, I must have had a moment of prescience or something, because when I got home my fridge was cool rather than cold, and the freezer? Dripping.

Sigh.

Good thing I was fairly bare-cupboard, I guess, but it was still rather depressing to have to throw out a grocery bag's worth of limp, thawed stuff this morning.

The good news? I'm a renter, so it's the landlord's problem to fix this.

The bad news? This is the same landlord that took three months -- THREE MONTHS -- to bring in an electrician to replace the broken light switch in my bathroom. I don't hold out a lot of hope, which is why I haven't quite got around to calling the office yet. I'll do it after I type this, of course, but in the meantime?

Well, does anyone out there have any suggestions or living in the nineteenth century?

Did I sigh already?



Yeah, I did.

Ah well, this deserves another one.





Sigh.

Lack of Christmas Carols

But first... OCD much, Dee?

These peels aren't posed. I peeled them that way and put them down without thinking. It was only after I looked at the pile (and these were the teeny tiny mandarins, if you're wondering why there's four peels. I love mandarins, but four regular-sized ones at once is a lot even for me) that I realised that the world deserved a photo of just how habit-bound I am even when it comes to oranges. I always peel them the same way, I get a little miffed if the peel doesn't come off in one go, and obviously I'm a trifle... decorative when I stack the peels.

Sad, really.

Anyway.

My two fans will be shocked to hear that there are no Christmas carols at my house so far this year. No CDs out, no books out, and as far as possible no carols in my head, either.

If you're new to the program, you'll have no idea how shocking this really is. You see, I love Christmas carols. I collect Christmas carols. I have scads of unusual or hard-to-find carols, both to play and to listen to, and I generally have to force myself to wait until December first before I start singing Christmas carols. I figure it's only fair, the December thing. If I didn't have it in place, I'd be driving everyone around me nuts with off-season Christmas carols. I'm usually scalp-deep in carols by now, if you hadn't quite picked up on that.

Not this year.

I'm doing everything I can to avoid it.

And why?





I STILL HAVE NO VOICE.

That's right, still. Well, there's a squeaky little pathetic excuse for a voice that I can almost use to communicate with, yes, but for the most part there's not a voice. And definitely no voice to sing with.

I can't even begin express to you how frustrating that is.

At this point it's fatigue from all the coughing that's been happening these past couple of weeks and I know that all I need to do is rest things to make sure that I don't cause myself permanent damage, but really? No voice at the one time of year when it's permissible to sing along with the vapid tunes in the department stores? No voice when I could be blasting away through my New Oxford Book of Carols at some hoary old thing or other than 99% of North America has never even heard of (I, um, have a bit of a thing for early carols)? No voice when it's Christmas carol season?

Is not fair.

Not fair at all.

And it's equally not fair that I have to work so hard at keeping the tunes out of my head, since I have such a habit of singing along to my internal voices.

It's pretty hard to make it a truly silent night in my brain, boys and girls.

Silent night.

Stille nacht


heilige nacht
Alles schlaft; einsam wacht...



Bugger. This ain't gonna be easy...

Quick pointless photo:

Mostly just by way of letting my two fans know that I'm still around. This blasted cold (which, hello? Still no voice. That's nearly two weeks with no proper voice) migrated to my sinuses and caused me a couple of days of not being able to leave the bed much. Needless to say, I missed a bit of work.

Also needless to say, I need to get back to work now.

I'll try for something more tomorrow, assuming that I can make it into work two days in a row.