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.

Got Refinanced -- Training Going OK I Think -- Two by Two -- Mini Vacation Soon?

The value of our home has certainly taken a beating in this market, but (a) it had gotten ridiculously high during the bubble and so is now merely reasonable and (b) was enough for us to refinance and get our bills more organized and less expensive interestwise. Plus this interest is tax-deductible. So there is great rejoicing. And the place is mostly clean—wowza!

Had my first "real" training session for Kaplan yesterday, where we spent the whole time doing "teachbacks" -- we teach a section of the test and get feedback. It went so much better than I thought it would. (When I told Doug that, he just rolled his eyes. Then I said, to be funny, "I don't think I flunked," because that's what I said all the way through grad school every time I had a test . . . then got 100 percent. He doesn't understand my insecurities, which is very sweet of him—not to understand why I wouldn't feel confident about my abilities.)

I'm also working on a GRE book for Kaplan Publishing right now, so I'm getting a GRE immersion experience!

Two by two: I saw two bunnies under the birdfeeder at the same time the other evening. That means baby bunnies! Also, last summer we had a small reddish squirrel join the big gray ones we're used to seeing, and the other day, I saw two red squirrels (Tamiasciurus hudsonicus; see also the U of Mich site here) chasing each other along the fence. That means baby red squirrels! Still not seeing many birds, just the ubiquitous house sparrows, a pair of house finches, a male cardinal, and the odd robin looking for bugs.


Photos © Patriot Plaistow John
I desperately need a change of scenery, and although Doug travels for work, he'd like to get away without working for once. I think we're going to go on a little jaunt to Madison, WI, for a couple of days. Enjoy the restaurants on State Street, cruise the art galleries, walk around the lakes, visit the Oldrich Botanical Gardens . . . As long as we can work our schedules so we can both get away when the weather is good there—it all needs to come together . . .

Haven't updated about the fish for a while. Maybe it's about time for another long, geeky tropical fish update?

Some R&R (Over Now)

And I have now complained several times about how hot it’s been. Fortunately, the weather is gorgeous this week. I can stop worrying about my plants shriveling up.

Finally got my "spring break." Every year in the spring, copyediting work dries up for a while. This year, I got about two weeks off. Enough to recharge my batteries; not enough to get worried about my income. Just right.

Read a couple of really good books. One I can highly recommend is In the Woods by Tana French. It’s her first novel, and it won an Edgar Award, and it’s awesome. The characters are deeply flawed. One mystery is solved, but others remain unsolved and justice is not all that one would hope. The characters pay an enormous price for their involvement in the case. The friendship of the male and female homicide detective partners is one of the best male-female relationships I’ve seen rendered in fiction.

Watched a good bit of Wimbledon. The men’s final--Roger Federer versus Rafael Nadal--was one for the ages. Wow. I’ve been a Federer fan for years but only this year started appreciating Nadal’s game. All I wanted from their final was a five-set match of amazing tennis, and I got it. Someone had to win -- no ties in tennis. How long ‘til the U.S. Open?

Attended CONvergence. My five panels went well. Enjoyed the Art Show very much. Hung out at the Diversicon party for a while and watched The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra, a fabulous spoof of 1950s SF B movies. It takes real talent to write dialogue that bad on purpose!

Also played in the dirt with my plants.

Now I’m back to being hard at work. Just finished editing a really good book about careers in nursing -- lots more options than when my mother became a registered nurse. Now working on a couple of books for teachers working with students of diverse abilities and a book on how to bring a specialty or gourmet food to market. Since I worked for two and a half years at the Wedge Co-op, the specialty food book is pretty interesting -- talks about a lot of the products we sold from the producers’ point of view. How does that organic honey-mustard get developed and made in large batches that all turn out the same and packaged and labeled and shipped anyway?

Fun:

NYTimes columnist Gail Collins writes about vampire chick lit. The whole column is worth reading, but I particularly enjoy the quotes from a Twilight Saga book: "He lay perfectly still in the grass, his shirt open over his sculpted, incandescent chest, his scintillating arms bare ... A perfect statue, carved in some unknown stone, smooth like marble, glittering like crystal." "Incandescent chest"? Really? "Scintillating arms"?

Also in the NYTimes, an article on a rural Albanian custom whereby women become the "men" of the family. They cut off their hair, wear pants, and foreswear marriage, and in return they get treated with all the respect and honor accorded men in their society. Really interesting!

DeadProgrammer's Café explores the genesis and evolution of the Starbuck's logo. Explains how a buxom mermaid could be of more use to a sailor than just as eye candy.

Fascinating history of photo tampering from the 1860s up to, as of this writing, July 2008: http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/farid/research/digitaltampering/.

Great Moments in Procrastination offers, um, great moments in procrastination. Bored people in offices come up with fun games to avoid doing work and so forth. Lots of fun videos. Just viewed "Office Jousting," in which four office workers create a RenFest or Society for Creative Anachronism event using office supplies.

On a more serious note, David Frum offers a realistic view of our next White House in the Prospect magazine (U.K.).

And now on an outré note, here is Edward Gorey's fabulous ABCs book, showing one child after another meeting a grisly fate in a horribly hilarious way: The Gashlycrumb Tinies. And here is an Edward Gorey TrueType font available free under creative commons license.