Sparky! And a hawk!

It is my great pleasure (and surprise!) to announce the addition of Sparky to our family. I really have no idea how we went from me looking at cute pictures of kitties at Petfinder.com to filling out an adoption form at the Animal Humane Society. It just happened (like some pregnancies -- LOL!) Doug and the 9-month-old Sparky took to each other right away, and I thought he was a nice kitty, so home he came. Sparky's been living mostly in my office until Bootsie gets used to the idea, and I adore him. Starting about Day 3, couldn't imagine life without him. Today is Day 8. He loves to sleep on my book or keyboard with his head on my hand. Or slung over my shoulder with my hand supporting his bottom. How can I possibly push him aside to work? Cuddling him is a much higher calling.

Need to give equal visibility to Bootsie. Here's a picture Doug shot a couple of years ago, I think. She loves the back windows in summer when the ivy grows over them, giving her a "jungle screen" to lurk behind as she watches the birds and furry critters that visit our backyard. She is sort of OK with Sparky as long as he doesn't try to play with her or enter her domain upstairs. Unfortunately, he wants to do both those things very much. So they're going to be separate for a while.



AJ is very interested in the new cat, and Cubby Bear is absolutely over the moon at having another kitty friend. Sparky was wary at first, but now he has discovered that Cubby's huge brush of a tail makes a great toy.

This summer, we were visited for about a week by a juvenile Cooper's hawk. He perched right outside my office window for hours! I've always joked that my utter lack of care of the backyard and its subsequent run to weeds was an effort to create an ecosystem. Well, I guess it worked! The hawk eventually caught a baby rabbit! Then s/he took off. They like to nest in Douglas firs, apparently, and our next-door neighbor has a beautiful one, so fingers crossed that s/he remembers that tasty bunny and the nice tree and maybe comes back someday to raise baby hawks. Photo below by Gerry Dewaghe.



Otherwise, life has been about working . . . and working . . . and working . . . and . . . Did I mention I've been working a lot? I'm guessing about 70-80 hours/week. So much housework and yardwork isn't getting done, it's not funny. But with the economy the way it is, and the way it's likely to be for a while, I'm not complaining. One of my clients sent me a chilled box of See's Candy for working on a series of challenging projects -- how sweet! Do you know that See's Candy comes with a nutritional leaflet? That's just wrong! It went into recycling unread.

Wrapped up my GRE class for Kaplan Test Prep. Enjoyed teaching very, very much. It definitely got me the interpersonal contact I needed and used the presentation skills that would otherwise atrophy. Plus I met remarkable people and got to know their dreams and goals and maybe help them a little toward them. I hope they all do great on the test!!! Now I am tutoring a wonderful guy, also on the GRE. I hope to teach a class again in November, but that will depend on enrollment. I'm looking forward to fine-tuning my teaching and continuing to improve in my next class.

It hasn't all been work. At the end of August, we did go on a sort of vacation to Kansas City, where we met Doug's parents for a couple of days. Visited some museums, ate some barbeque. I alternately worked and crashed, worked and crashed. Afraid I wasn't exactly the life of the party. I'd lost 5 pounds since May, but I gained 3 of it back over that vacation -- bleh. How discouraging.

Also carved out some time to watch the U.S. Open. Men's champion Juan del Potro seems like a really nice guy with a great game, so glad he won. And Kim Clijsters -- good grief, just her third tournament back from "maternity leave," and she wins a Grand Slam! I remember her as being mentally fragile, but she was incredibly focused here. And now Justine Henin is planning a return. Hurray for women's tennis!

Garden update: Bunny ate most of what would have been a great crop of broccoli, but tomatoes are producing like crazy, despite the drought. (We've had only 0.01 inch of rain so far in September!) Without time to cook, I've been just slicing them up on a plate and sprinkling salt over them.

She's Trouble with a Capital "C"!!!

Cat Bootsie, that is. I'm getting ready to stuff her in a box and ship her off somewhere. Kidding, of course. I adore her. But she's a total pain in the ass. I've been working mostly on hard copy for the last couple of weeks, including two massive test-prep books for the GMAT (business school exam), and she seems to view manuscripts as her natural prey. She's relentless too. No matter how many times I pick her up and put her on the floor, where she has a fleecy thing to lie on and a heating vent she likes, she jumps right back up and insists on being front and center. She attacks the manuscripts, my pen, and my arms. Then when she senses my frustration, she starts purring and rolls over to show me her tummy. I have to shut her out of my office, but then she claws at the door. So I have to shut her out of that section of the house, putting two doors between us, to have peace. And then I feel guilty for being so mean to the adorable kitty.

I was searching on Petfinder.com to find her a little kitty friend to play with, but I think she needs to remain an only kitty. We just can't risk the litter box politics that plagued us with our previous two cats. Also, Bootsie's so intense, I'm afraid a lot of other cats would be intimidated by her. Plus, if they ganged up on me, I'd be totally out-kittied!

I haven't blogged for a while because life has been mostly quiet. I've been working up a storm, despite having a cold that lingered for weeks. Bleh. (Like the last cold, which I got after Christmas, this one was a result of close proximity to little bundles of germs joy.)

I also had a scare when I went for a routine eye exam to get my prescription updated (close-up, detail vision is pretty blurry) and couldn't focus my right eye. Then the doctor found some odd pigmentation on my right macula. I followed up by going to a retina specialist who diagnosed me with pigment dystrophy, which means I have funny macular pigment. He said some doctors would diagnose me as having macular degeneration and prescribe vitamins, but I was too young to be worried about that yet. From all this, I gather I have the very beginnings of macular degeneration but won't need to worry about my functional eyesight for a long time. By then, I hope they'll have a cure more definitive than "large amounts of antioxidents might have a preventive effect in some people."

Bunny (or maybe more than one bunny) continues to visit nightly for the smattering of birdseed I toss under the feeder. A few weeks ago, the snow cover had retreated quite a bit due to sublimation (it was bitter cold, but the snow evaporated because the air was just so dry), and I saw another bunny a few blocks from home who had come out to try to find something to eat. That bunny was skinny and scruffy. The bunny(ies) in my yard is fat and sleek. When Bunny strips the leaves from my Asiatic lilies in the spring, I know I will not find Bunny so cute.

I'm getting impatient with all the talking heads in the media claiming that the Obama presidency is hosed. The guy's been in office two months. He's got four years. No, he hasn't turned around the recession yet; no matter what anyone does, the economy will start perking up next year. No, he hasn't brought bipartisanship to Washington yet; you don't change a deeply entrenched culture by flipping a switch. It's taking longer than anyone would like to fill positions; it always does. (Though I don't understand (a) why these people don't pay their freakin' taxes and (b) why it's vetting for a government position, not an IRS audit, that catches them.) Yes, he's talking about health care and global warming and Afghanistan in addition to the economy; yes, he can multitask, even if the media has trouble doing so. Everybody: Lighten up!

Fun:

• Histiophryne psychedelica is a recently discovered tropical fish that uses legs to "hop" around coral reefs, a behavior never previously seen in any other fish with legs. Check out the University of Washington article here, which includes video. Photo below ©David Hall/seaphotos.com.
  
  
  
  
• In a study in contrasts, here's another recently discovered fish, this one from a depth of 2.8 miles near Anarctica.
• According to a supercomputer named ThamesBlue, the oldest words in the English language may be I and who. The word dirty may die out fairly soon.
  

Merry [Holiday of Your Choice]! Five Rooms Clean!

We're utterly secular people, but we celebrate Christmas, a holiday celebrating family ties; generosity; and warmth, light, and love at the frigid yin of the year.

My Christmas present to myself: cleaning the bedroom. So we have the following clean rooms (and, yes, I have kept the others clean -- it's much easier, I've discovered, to clean a room when you last cleaned it a few weeks ago rather than a year ago):

1. Main floor bathroom
2. Kitchen
3. Dining room
4. Paula's office
5. Bedroom

That's five -- count 'em 5! -- rooms! I think that's a record since moving into this house ~16 years ago. Next up: the living room. It's the largest and hardest room to do, but then the whole main floor will be clean -- I may faint!

The bedroom doesn't actually have a bed in it. Around the time we got our current two dogs, who are bigger than any previous dogs, our mattress was also giving out. So we got a king-size bed to accommodate everyone. Then we got the main floor of the house remodeled, including having the hardwood floors refinished, and moved all the furniture downstairs to accommodate the work. Moving the king-size mattress down the stairs wasn't terribly hard. (You know what's coming.) Moving it back up? Haven't yet found a way to do it. We've have a bunch of friends over to apply brute force, but I'm afraid someone would throw out their back or slip on the basement steps. The mattress is not only large and heavy but also floppy, and the stairs are steep and narrow and have a low ceiling. So the box springs are stacked against one wall of the "bedroom," where they serve admirably as a shelf, and the mattress lies on the lower-level floor in front of the TV, where it's actually quite comfortable to sleep, especially in the summer when it stays nice and cool downstairs. Someday we'll buy a new mattress and have it delivered to the bedroom, from where we will never move it.

Bootsie the cat loves to "help" with all the cleaning. I swear she engages in parallel play. Whatever I'm doing, she likes to be right next to me doing something similar. When I was sorting clothes onto a shelf, for example, she sharpened her claws on the shelves and then jumped up, kneaded the clothes in a pile, and jumped down, echoing my motions. When I was picking up bits of paper and tissue from the floor, that's when she ran around batting at bits of paper. She also loves to plunge into small dark spaces, and dresser drawers are no exception. Leap! Dig-dig-dig through the clothes! Up over the back of the drawer! Into the great dark unknown of the dresser innards! Finally emerge with a wild look in one's eyes!

Fun:

• A Very Scary Solstice "finally merges the wonderful tradition of merry holiday carolling with the cosmic horror of the Cthulhu Mythos. The result is a CD and sing-along songbook that features twenty[-]five holiday favorites infused with a liberal dose of madness, horror and otherworldly blasphemies." Three free MP3s are available. The juxtaposition of the tra-la-la melodies and Halloween lyrics works . . . unspeakably.
• I haven't yet checked out Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog myself, but it's by Joss Whedon (Buffy, Angel, Firefly) and it made the top-ten TV show list (despite not being on TV) of some critic or other who was on NPR and sounded like he had good taste.
• Finally, here's a posting at MightyGodKing's blog titled "MGK Versus His Adolescent Reading Habits." Check out the hilarious Photoshopped covers of fat-fantasy-novel classics (anticlassics). The comments by readers are interesting, too. (Thanks to Barbara Davies, who in turn got it from Ursula K. Le Guin's site).

I cleaned the kitchen!

What did you think this post was going to be about? Last week, I cleaned the bathroom. Next up was the kitchen. This week, I cleaned the kitchen. Since the kitchen also functions as a mudroom for the dogs when they come in the the backyard, this is actually pretty exciting news. Especially having a clean floor. And clean walls next to the door, where they shake their jowls after eating grass and rooting around in the mud. Amazing what I scraped off those walls!

Next up: The dining room. This is the room where the mail piles up. We get an amazing amount of mail.

Bootsie: I'm happy to report that Bootsie the Cat enjoys figure skating. She especially likes it when the skaters spin. They must look like fluttering moths. I watch skating on my computer (though Ice Network), and Bootsie sits beside and behind the monitor and cranes her neck and watches the skaters for minutes at a time. She also likes the cursor, though, so I can't say her interest is really in either sport or in culture.

Work: I've had over a week now with nothing to work on, and I'm going crazy. Yes, I realize that normal people take a week's vacation now and then. In the last year, I've had two long weekends and a few days off here and there. Otherwise, it's been seven-days-a-week busy. But I don't have a job from which I need a vacation! I love my work! Still, judging from how much I slept last week, I guess I did need some downtime. Doug keeps telling me, "It's okay, honey. It's okay." He's a sweetie.

My e-mail's been down all morning. Maybe some authors have returned files to me, or maybe I've got some new projects. Not having e-mail makes me a little crazy. I just invoked my ISP's online chat helpline, and they know about the problem and have no idea when it will be resolved. Bleh!

Fun:

• The U.S. Senate race in Minnesota was so close -- only a couple hundred votes out of 3 million separated the two candidates -- that a manual recount was invoked automatically by law. So folks are counting ballots, and some are interesting. Apparently, filling in an oval next to a name is challenging for some folks. And then there's the Lizard People . . . See challenged ballots at the Minnesota Public Radio site, make your own decision, and see what other people think.
• This is interesting: Nanowrimo. National Novel Writing Month is what I've always known as a "novel dare," in which a group of writers challenge each other to crank out a novel in a compressed time frame. They often blog about their daily word counts and blockages and e-mail each other to show support. Nanowrimo is like that but with global participation. The year 2007 saw 100,000 participants with 15,000 crossing the finish line with a 50k novel. Participants can write by themselves or find others in their local area to meet up with physically. There are forums and other ways to bond (and procrastinate). The point is quantity rather than quality, to break through any blockages and just write-write-write. Since November has been a slow freelancing month for me for the last couple of years, perhaps I should plan to do this in 2009?