yonmei

11:44 am: I love pure black cats

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PS But Bob left the house at the same time as me today and sat on the top step looking up at me with enchanting wide eyes and I petted her and wished I could sit on the top step with her drinking tea. Me, not her. Bob does not drink tea.

Tags: bob, wolf

11:23 am: Bob's story
Consider this a literary exercise, and don't be too judgy. (A bit judgy is OK, it is awfully sweet.) This site was inviting interesting cat stories, so I wrote down Bob's for them, and I did it in the format of Cute Sad Cat Story With Happy Ending, Told From Cat's Actual Point Of View.

(In point of fact, I remain firmly convinced, the idea that cats have a point of view falls squarely into the realm of Fantasy Cat, though see item 15 on the list.)

( Bob's story )


Tags: bob, cats, writing

05:13 pm: Am HOME!
Priority Actions:
1. Hug Bob, because she's acting awfully unloved.
2. Open windows! 'cause the place smells awfully stuffy
3. Feed cats.
4. Pet Wolf's nose, because it's the longest I've ever been away in his LIFE and he had his 2nd birthday while I was gone and he's acting like he's not sure who I am any more
5. Change litter in litter trays, light incense and oilburner in bathroom
6. ...check e-mail! E-mail solo to tell her I'd love to go bungee jumping with her and another slash fan in a couple of weeks.
7. Also, need to e-mail catsitter to tell her I'm home and catsitter's employer to ask her to bill me.
8. While hoping it will stop raining before I walk over to Tattie Shaw's, get involved with the retweet game on #welovetheNHS.
9. Realise it is Scotland, after all, and the rain is not going to stop, so go out anyway to buy fresh fruit and milk

Tags: bob, everybody lies, evil american politics, evil americans advertising against nhs, health, lists, weather, wolf

12:42 pm: Bob is too thin.
She's 3.1 kilos. The thinnest she's been before, last September, was 3.2 kilos. She went up to 3.4 kilos last time she saw the vet.

She had an appointment to be seen by the vet this morning, and the vet went over her thoroughly - no lump in her thyroid, no sign of tumours elsewhere. No reason she should have lost weight, except she has and is: she's eating but not enough. She's lively as usual, and affectionate at me and growly at Wolf. But too thin.

She feels far too light when I pick her up.

I couldn't even make this post last night, I was too worried. I feel better that the vet's checked her over - I was thinking (among other horrid prospects) that how Cally went was a tumour in her stomach that stopped her from eating.

Wolf is ginormous. I'm going to have to buy a bigger cage to take him to the vet next month for his booster shots: he'll never fit into the one I use for Bob.

Tags: bob, cats, wolf

04:17 pm: Of strawberries, carpets, cats, and kittens
I am in my bedroom, and Bob is sitting beside me, looking very wary and disconcerted. A bloke called Alan, who looks far too young to have a regular job (yes, yes, I am getting old) is cleaning my hall and stair carpet, for £45. The company what is doing it is H2O. He is using some kind of powdery green chemical which - I was checking out the label on the giant carton - is remarkably short on specifics: it's Heavy Duty Detergent, made by Prochem, 30% phosphates, do not get on bare skin, keep away from small children. Contains ionic and anionic cleaners, FWIW.

Anyway. The point of paying someone else to clean the hall carpet is to find out if this improves my nose. My allergy, rather, but we'll call it my nose. Properly, my guess is, I would need to have someone else clean every carpet in the house, but as I am achieving this by stacking the various things that normally live in the hall in my bedroom or the sitting-room, I'll stick with the carpet which I definitely notice as incredibly dusty a lot of the time. (It gets vacuumed more, but needs it more.)

Alan rang this morning to find out if he could come round earlier than 4pm (the original appointment had been made for arrival any time between 4 and 5:30) but I said no, as I had my usual Saturday stuff to do.

Walked over to the pet shop (the nearest one to me that sells Hills Science Diet: I also bought a bag of Burns biscuit to see if Bob could also be tempted with that, and a wee bag of cod liver capsules, which I intend handfeeding to Bob on a daily basis (because it will make me feel better about her being so skinny, since you ask, not because the vet is specially recommending this). And as I was packing all this into my backpack, the assistant tells me they have a new litter of kittens in.

Cally's mother Amber came from this shop, back in 1988 - back then, before the SSPCA had got going on "Please sterilise your cat unless you intend to be a breeder", the "new litter of kittens" happened quite a lot. Less frequent now. Much less frequent now. The pet shop always used to accept a healthy litter, at least six weeks old and weaned, and offer them for sale for £5 each plus. (The plus would be where they made their profit: when Ajay bought Amber and Witch, she got a stack of stuff with them - the kitten food, litter tray, handbook, plus a load of free advice.)

Anyway, so, I went to look and stayed to squee. I feel slightly guilty because of the health risk (to the kittens: while my cats are vaccinated, no one asked me if I was safe), but I even picked two of the kittens up: a tiny little fluffy grey thing with four white paws who looked at me with amiable bewilderment, and a slightly larger fluffy grey thing with a ginger mask, who was practically dropping asleep from over-excitement (I put her back in the cage after a minute, and she went from bounce to nap before she could yawn). I was tempted - I really was - but Bob was not happy about Wolf, and though the pair of them are getting on much better now (I distinctly saw Bob sniffing/licking Wolf over last night) I don't think she'd be happy to be presented with Brand New Kitten. Though Wolf would probably think it was cute. But no. One should never impulse-buy kittens. Though I saw a couple of girls who were squeeing before I left who very evidently wanted their mum to impulse-buy kittens for them. There was also a very bouncy long-haired tabby, who if I'd been seriously on the look-out for a kitten, would probably have been my serious considered choice: awesomely pretty when she grows up, plus clearly extremely healthy, active, and definitely weaned. (The smaller kittens, I suspect, were still doing a "where's mum??" a bit.)

And then I walked down to Tattie Shaws and bought pears from Belgium and apples from France, and four satsumas, and ... my first strawberries this year. I've been resisting the berries flown in from Spain or elsewhere, because really, I know they won't taste of anything much: but Scottish strawberries, misshapen and slightly pale though they are, perfume the air: I bought a whole punnet, and ate half within minutes as soon as I got home. Yum. (The other half I kept for breakfast tomorrow.) You can get "fresh strawberries" that have been airlifted in so easily that it's way too easy to forget what strawberries really taste like - the scented, indescribably sweet, fruity flavour of a berry that was sun-ripened and attached to a bush only 24 hours ago.

The Alan finished, and my carpet is now way cleaner than it was. (He poured the water from downstairs down my kitchen sink, which I am none too happy with: I need to go buy sink unblocker now.)



Tags: berries, bob, carpet cleaning, cats, kittenlove!, nose of a nose, wolf

06:10 pm: Just My Life Really
On Tuesday evening, which is cheap night at Vue, I went to see Star Trek. It wasn't good. It was the sort of kind of film where, having taken care to check how long it lasts, I keep glancing at the clock on my phone to establish how much plot there must be left.

There were three women in the film who had names and lines, and a fourth who I think wasn't named: an Orien green cadet who has sex with Jim Kirk and a few lines of dialogue and let Kirk see Uhura in her underwear. One of the women existed to give birth to Jim Kirk, and is thereafter never seen or heard again (she wasn't even allowed to be the voice on the product-placement phone telling Kirk not to steal the car and drive it to Arizona). One gives birth to Spock, and is thereafter used to make Spock go apeshit: she gets pushed into a metaphorical refrigerator fairly early on. One is supposed to be Nyota Uhura, and exists to be appallingly, skeletally skinny, be hit on by Kirk, prove that in the modern Starfleet men don't obey women officers (in that bar fight? If the real Uhura had yelled at them to stop the redshirts beating up Kirk, they'd have stopped), and to hit on Spock, thus (the director and scriptwriter and stockholders presumably hope) forestalling the slash fans taking hold and writing the K/S for this universe. Because these are het guys. Straight, straight, straight. Hell if it'll work: I say Uhura and Spock are totally cousins. The young Bones was OK even if the old joke got taken away from him and replaced by a new and much stupider joke referring to one of the few other women in this AU; Baby Sulu and Baby Chekov and Baby Scott were ... okay, I supppose: Janice Rand and Christine Chapel and Number One, the first First Officer of the USS Enterprise, were... absent. (See also: feministsf and jekesta being brilliant.)

Afterwards I wandered home and Bob was missing and it turned out a neighbour had accidentally shut her into his bike shed, because late at night when the street was quiet I went out again and heard her yell and it was too late to wake up my neighbours, so I left notes in their door and on their fence, and went to bed and slept badly. My Twitters are full of me Not Panicking. She got let out first thing the next morning, and is fine, though very clingy: but the part where it turned out I have the nicest neighbours in the world?

The neighbour who had shut her in the shed (by accident! I know he wouldn't have done it on purpose!) came round on Wednesday evening with a card and a bottle of white wine to apologize. Which I found myself without a polite way of refusing, though the bottle of white wine is still lying on the couch where I put it (the card is on the mantelpiece) and fills me with helpless rueful giggles whenever I think of drinking it. Because, after we were dialoguing on the step and he was saying how sorry he was and I was saying "Thank you for letting her out!" (it was actually his partner who had slipped down first thing and let Bob out, as soon as she saw the note) and then Bob wandered out. And I picked her up (she feels terribly light and thin these days, which I'm worried about, because this reminds me of Cally, but she's still eating....) because I did not want to let her go wandering again... and my neighbour started chucking her under the chin and apologising to Bob. So I accepted the card and the wine, and still think I have the nicest neighbours in the world.

Thursday I had a meeting in Glasgow, and after the meeting I went to the SH[OUT] exhibition in GOMA, which was absolutely fantastic and I want to go again. Maybe I can persuade Ajay to come with - it had several things I thought she might like, especially a picture of a Thai man, a prostitute, standing on a stage, not quite looking at his audience - but the whole picture was so richly painted, and the frame was ornamented, and it looked as if he/his image was a gift to us. The other I remember vividly was a picture of two older women, who had been burlesque artists in their youth, painted as they lay holding each other on their bed. It was the kind of oil painting that looks more real, has more depth, than any photograph could. But, speaking of photographs: the Mapplethorpe photo. I'm told there was some dispute about including it, and its inclusion was probably the main reason the exhibition has been banned to children under 12. But I am so glad to have seen it. I had read about it - it's a famous photograph, politically as well as artistically, the depiction of a standing man pissing into the mouth of a kneeling man, which a court case formally established as having artistic merit and therefore (in the US) protected under the First Amendment. But words and reproductions do not do the photo itself justice: it is an extraordinary work of light and shade, balanced images: it is simultaneously a depiction of a sexual act in pornographic detail and it is a work of art. In many ways the exhibition felt like a series of windows into other exhibitions, that I wanted very much to see as well - if there had been money to produce a catalogue, I would have bought it.

After I had looked round the exhibition, I wanted to see if I could get my T-Mobile dongle to work, and after trying unsuccessfully and calling the helpline, it appeared that the problem was I'd put the wee card in the wrong way round - and it was fairly jammed. So I asked the helpline to find me the nearest two T-Mobile shops in Glasgow, and set out to find the one in Buchanan Street. (On the basis, as I told them frankly, that if someone were going to break the card getting it out, I had rather it was someone working for T-Mobile than me.)

The T-Mobile shop was in the Buchanan Street Galleries, which are just above the Buchanan Street Tearoom, where one can get a very nice cream tea for £2.50. So, after I'd got my dongle working (oo-er) I went there and had tea and a scone with cream and two sorts of jam, and it was very nice. (They supplied me with butter as well as jam: I ask you, what kind of person puts butter and cream on a scone?

Then I walked round the GOMA exhibition again, to fill my eye with it a second time, and caught the 4:15 train back to Edinburgh (safely in the cheap zone) and surfed the net and wrote a bit on the way home. I was due to meet my parents and the young man who is helping them clear out their flat (a bit) at the Ann Purna that evening.

We had a nice meal: my mum told me about seeing a sign in Bakewell, where they'd gone for their holiday, about marriage between a man and a woman being the law of the land, and she said she'd wanted to add a sign about civil partnership but hadn't had paper/tape to do it. Still. It was nice of her to want to.

Friday has been a fairly ghastly muddle, in which I got not enough done and that too late. But I am drinking wine and eating nice food, and TGIF: it's the weekend now.



Tags: bob, glasgow, i want a cup of tea and a tonne of sympa, just my life really, scones, star trek, yarg

12:32 am: *yawn*


I think you should all know, I have incredibly nice neighbours. Also, Bob is sitting near my feet, looking contented.

Tags: bob

12:58 am: Bob went slightly missing
This caused me to Not Panic for some time after I got back from the Star Trek movie (which I may post more about when I'm less tired). You know the Not Panic thing where you are officially Not Panicking because that would be silly, but inside where no one can see you're panicking away like crazy? (And, just then, because the universe hates me, IJ went down.)

But I went out again when the street was totally quiet (late) and called Bob's name: and found her by her wailing, shut inside a neighbour's garden shed. This is the second time this has happened to her. Silly cat wanders in, thinks Nice Sheltered Spot, settles down for a nap... and doesn't notice she's been locked in.

So. I left notes up on the fence by the shed and through their front door, and will try to catch them before they go out, and I left Bob shut in the shed wailing a bit, because she could hear me outside and wanted OUT, now, dammit... and Wolf prowling around outside, looking at me in befuzzlement because I didn't do the human-magic thing of getting the door open.



Tags: bob, cats

07:01 pm: Pineapple sorbet, Sun King, and yew trees
I spent most of the morning waiting for the man to test the boiler, and trying to do some work for work, neither of which is a good state to be in.

But, then the man confirmed my boiler is in good health, and I did the work I'd planned to do, and I bought fruit (and sweet potatoes) at the community centre co-op, and at last I could fulfil my long-held plans (at least since Sunday, when eileenlufkin suggested it) to visit Luca's, the one in Morningside as nearer, and buy a flavour of ice-cream I had not tasted before.

Luca's in Musselburgh has a whole array of ice-creams and sorbets, and a full-scale cafe: the one in Morningside has only six, and while it does have a cafe, it is upstairs, from which alarming noises were coming like a large number of children being tortured being fed lots of sugary treats to make them hyper.

So I stayed downstairs, and made a choice between Idgie-Widgie Toffee Fudge, Pineapple Sorbet, and Irn-Bru Sorbet.

I didn't think I could say the first without giggling, and I didn't think I could eat sorbet made in Scotland from girders without throwing up, so that really left only the pineapple, which, while nice enough (I had a single scoop and a cup of coffee, since I'd nearly fallen asleep on the bus) was nothing to write home about. Maybe I will have to go out to Musselburgh, after all. Unless there's not much of a queue and some unusual flavours at the Ben'n'Jerry's in the cinema this evening?

Afterwards I browsed through the charity shops of Morningside looking for pint glasses (having broken my last one Sunday) and a lidded pan for rice etc (which I did not find) and finding a marvellous copy of Nancy Mitford's life of The Sun King, hardback, with lots of colour plates, priced at 69 shillings, for sale in the charity shop at £3. How could I resist? I didn't. I read a large part of the building of Versailles and the ditching of La Valliere, while eating a very nice late lunch at the Yellow Cafe. (A grilled wholemeal baguette, with roasted vegetables and hummus, plus chips with brown sauce, plus a reasonably nice salad, all for £5.) Afterwards, I got my new library card - I'd lost my old one, ages ago, but kept forgetting to bring a recent bill with my name and address on it out with me when I knew I'd be passing an open library. Morningside Library used to be my idea of what libraries were, though it's changed substantially since I used to go there from Bruntsfield Place with my three library tickets, and my brother's and my sister's. Nowadays instead of three small cardboard tickets apiece, each one good for one book, so that even borrowing my sister's and brother's I could only get 9, one small plastic card does for 12. But the building is still the same.

And then I walked to the Commonwealth Pool, and went swimming. On the way there, I passed by where I used to live between 1981 and 1986 - my parents sold it some time in 1987 - and stopped to take photos of the house and the yew trees. It's been 22 years, probably, since I stood underneath the arch the yew trees make to either side of the gate, but they seemed just the same. Yew trees can live to be 5000 years old, though these are just babies - they can't be much more than 120 years old, because that street isn't much older than 1890. Anyway. I don't think yew trees really notice anything that lasts less than a decade, but I said hello.

Now I hope to get to the cinema to see Wolverine, but Bob is sitting on my lap being all purry at me.





Tags: bob, ice-cream, just my life really, swimming

02:46 pm: My hatchling is going to die soon.
It's kind of sad in an online way.

I got to the gym this morning and was unpacking when I realised I had forgotten my swimsuit, so I did not do "gym and swim": I only did gym. I also forgot my hairbrush, which was slightly ghastly and made me think all over again that I want a haircut like I used to have where brushes were things you really didn't need.

There are tiny little green sprouts growing in the interstices of my lawn. I contemplated cutting it. It's quite windy. Mostly I just want to lie out on it in the sun, but it's just windy enough not to be really comfortable doing that.

Bob is asleep on the windowsill. She looks quite impossibly comfortable, even though she really doesn't fit it.

Tags: bob, dragon eggs need clicky, garden record

09:51 am: Weird
That wasn't even a peculiar one-day bleed. That was more like a blurt. Singular.



Also, clocks went forward, it's an hour later.

(And I just saw Bob poise herself to jump to the windowsill, make several half-starts, and decide not to: I seldom notice her missing her tail any more, but that was a clear instance of it.)

Tags: bloody bloody bloody, bob

08:32 am: Coffee, cats, and dragons
When I looked at the clock this morning, I thought it was 8:30, and in a fogged kind of way, knew I had to get washed get dressed put Bob into carry cage get to vets for 9am.

Then when I was up, dressed, and ready to go, apart from not having had coffee, I saw that it was 6 minutes to 8am.... I was out by a good hour.

So I brewed coffee, and gave Bob her steroid pill - and let both her and Wolf out, since Bob will certainly want to come back soon. I need to leave the house in ten minutes, and I already hear her mrwaring outside the door.

*goes to door and lets Bob in*

Bob is looking pretty good, after a couple of weeks on steroids. Of course she can't compete in the Olympics any more, but sport isn't everything. Best of all, the pattern of fleabites on her back have dried up and gone away. Will report on her weight, later.




---
Update: 3.4 kilos, as last time.

Tags: bob, dragon eggs need clicky, worrying about my cats

11:50 pm: Home safe, cats are fine, tired out
Wolf and Bob are both very obviously Not Talking To Me.

Also: this little dragon has 22 hours to live:


This little dragon has a couple of days to go:


This little egg was snagged as my home-from-Redemption dragon gift:


Tags: bob, dragon eggs need clicky, redemption, wolf

12:38 pm: So, I took Bob to the vet this morning
...and the scale wobbled back and forth between 3.3 and 3.4 kilos (same as last time) but the vet identified the worrying rash/scabs on her back as a standard reaction to fleabites. Even though I hadn't spotted any flea dirt, on Bob or on Wolf, and the vet couldn't find any either, he still thought the pattern was unmistakable, so I got a round of steroids for Bob to help with the swelling (and pick up her appetite) and fleakiller for both cats (and will go past Dofos and pick up herbal flea collars for them both). And made an appointment for two weeks time.

Tags: bob, cats, wolf

10:15 pm: The 2008 meme
( it was 365 days )

Tags: 3 are bastards, bloody job, bob, cats, evil british politics, meme meme meme, working at the forest, worrying about my cats

10:41 pm: Cat politics, etc
Picture this:

Bob is scratching the side of her head. Scritch-scritch-scritch.

Wolf is sitting beside her, watching her quite intently.

Bob stops scritching, sees Wolf watching her, hisses and whacks him.

Wolf snarls and leaps, knocking Bob over (he's a lot bigger than her these days, have I mentioned this?) and they spend about a minute with Wolf's paws and jaws locked in Bob and Bob snarling and kicking at Wolf.

Bob escapes from Wolf's necklock, snarls at Wolf, and heads for the door, Wolf following close behind.

No blood drawn: still just cat politics.

Tags: bob, cat politics, wolf

07:48 pm: FWIW - and not because I think you're at all interested
I find that a 2-kilo bag of Hill's Science Diet catfood lasts my two cats just under 4 weeks. I guess that means they're eating it at about 35g a day. They also get wet food, daily. Bob is looking very well on it: Wolf is blooming.

Tags: bob, wolf

10:31 am: Polar bears and Bob
I had a vivid dream last night that I had released a polar bear on to my bed (a small cat-sized polar bear, but an adult) and was feeling quite pleased with myself for having offered support to an endangered species, when Bob jumped up on to my bed and the polar bear went for her. I stood there unable to move, suddenly realising that however small the bear was, it was an actual polar bear - the most dangerous ursine species - and that it was going to kill Bob before I could get to my bed and stop it happening.

Then I woke up. And had tangled thoughts, climbing out of the dream, that I should also have released penguins on to my bed to give the polar bear something to hunt.

Awake, I would not have considered this solution: penguin guano all over the sheets?

Evidently it was really cold last night. My bed does not otherwise resemble a glacier.

Tags: bears, bob, dreams, penguins

09:36 am: Hurrah for Bob!
Last time I took Bob to the vet (16th September) she'd lost weight even since that operation. Today the vet weighed her and she'd gained half a pound - she's 3.4 kilos, back to where she was at the time of the operation. So I bought some more Hill's Science Diet kitten food, and took her home and gave her some more of it, and she ate it.

She is in wonderful condition. So is Wolf. I think he's still growing. He's enormous. If I could locate my camera I would do another comparison photoshot, because I think he would now overtop the cat toy I bought for him back when he was a wee thing.

Tags: bob, worrying about my cats

04:50 pm: Coffee and tiny doughnut
I have just had a mug of coffee and a tiny sugary ring doughnut.

The coffee was excellent: the doughnut mediocre: but the combination was lovely.

I am due to go to the gym tonight. I packed a Stoats bar to snack on to avoid hunger.

Now why shouldn't the healthy snack of a Stoats porridge bar just kind of cancel out the unhealthy irresistibleness of, um... doughnut? (I'd had another earlier with my lunch, so I already knew they were slightly mediocre. I have high standards about doughnuts, on the, I feel, perfectly rational grounds that anything that bad for you really ought to be delicious. I feel the same way about mince pies.)

I had to go home again right after lunch to pick up a file I needed I thought I had emailed to myself, and as it looked to be set dry for the afternoon, and both Bob and Wolf wanted to go out, I left them both sitting on the steps, looking a bit surprised... they haven't both been outdoors at once in ages, it seems.

I have updates about Bob, but they can wait till post-gym.

Tags: bob, cat politics, coffee, food politics, gym membership, wolf