Lap Top Cat

Little Mad is still exploring her new environment and this has caused me to abandon a long extablished pattern. I have been forced to turn on my heating because I cannot stand the cold drafts caused by her rigid ever-open door policy. Until now I have been in habit of avoiding the act of flicking that little switch from HW to CH/HW until the glorious sixth day of November ....

(OK Parenthetical paragraph to explain Nov 6. The fifth, of course, is Bonfire Night and for some longish spell of years during the '70's and '80's a certain school's annual bonfire, pig-roast and firework display marked the last day of the year when it was possible to stand outdoors, drinking alcohol and eating chunks of dead animal, without either becoming a victim of hypothermia or else sinking into a muddy quagmire ... although the latter calamity was always the more likely. As the years turned into decades I grew more and more cantakerously miserly in my determination that no heating was required until the bonfires' flames had died.)

So ... Mirelly was born in a barn, a true wild thing (but with a soppy fondness for having her belly fur ruffled so long as the ruffler is prepared to accept the occasional need for reconstructive surgery of the lower arm). Mirelly hates to be on the wrong side of a closed door. In case I need to make matters clear, any side of a door is the wrong side if a cat decides there is an urgent need to be on the other side. Anyway. She is still exploring and finding her way around. With the heating on, there are now more doors left ajar and so there are more places for her to explore in search of that feline grail: the Ideal Snoozing Spot.

So far, today, she has utterly ignored her previously established ISS (an old banket on an Ikea special) because she can now wander around without me leaping up to push the door as close to the frame as I dare behind her in the vain hope of keeping out the autumn chill. No. Today she has sought to leap onto my lap the moment I sit down. Being a lazy cow I tend to do a lot of sitting down but having Mirelly on my lap is not just uncommon it almost amounts to a cause for concern. Almost but not quite; sometimes she can be quite affectionate for a cat. Then, when my back was turned, she found a new fun place to sit. Notebook computers get quite warm and the keyboard turns out to be a nicely sprung platform for a fussy felix to use as a bum-warmer while shaking out the chaff and trail dust preparatory to searching out an ISS.

Little Mad has had no IT training whatsoever and yet I found her washing a paw languidly whilst my laptop obligingly went about the unexpected chore of upgrading Window's Media Player. Hey! It wasn't me who did it! I'm just a big pink thing who keeps the food coming.

Three Cubed Answers

I saw this meme on Heather's blog and I thought I should try it. The results have been interesting ... even to me and I thought I knew who I was. Go figure.

1. Do you try to look hot when you go to the grocery store just in case someone recognizes you from your blog? Oh yeah, like that is gonna happen. The question is silly, surely. Anyway you can be sure that if I could still look "hot" I would go out at least once with the intention being attraction solely so I could fight off the attention with a big stick ....
2. Are the photos you post Photoshopped or otherwise altered? Bearing in mind my answer, above, and the admitted fact of my own idleness I am torn between two camps. The first being that no improvement is too slight bother with, the other is "why bother". The plain answer is that photography requires actual effort without a digital camera and mine is broke.
3. Do you like it when creeps or dorks email you? I am so sad that I like any email. Hate mail is the sincerest form of flattery. But creeps and dorks ... those are ... ahem ... hapless suitors? I should be so lucky.
4. Do you lie in your blog? No. Though I might succomb to a little literary license occasionally to embroider around the edges.
5. Are you passive-aggressive in your blog? I don't like psycho-babble so I'll ignore that one on the spurious grounds of incomprehension.
6. Do you ever threaten to quit writing so people will tell you not to stop? That would be silly.
7. Are you in therapy? If not, should you be? If so, is it helping? No. Probably ought to be but have had "help" in the past and look where that got me?
8. Do you delete mean comments? Do you fake nice ones? Both would be silly. All comments are valuable. Faking praise is even less admirable than hiding £500 notes under the board when playing Monopoly.
9. Have you ever rubbed one out while reading a blog? How about after? Is that a question about masturbation? OK, I'm old enough to be honest. I might if I read that sort of blog. Mostly though that sort of blog just makes me jealous and that's kinda counter-productive I find. That's as much as I wanna say right now, 'k?
10. If your readers knew you in person, would they like you more or like you less? I am not very reliable in estimating others' opinions of me. Frankly I find it faintly ridiculous that anyone would like me in person ... I am as selfishly lazy as a very fat and lazy cat and as selfishly self-important as a poorly house-trained adolescent puppy.
11. Do you have a job? No. My self-indulgence takes up far too much of my time to leave room for anything so dull and mundane as a job.
12. If someone offered you a decent salary to blog full-time without restrictions, would you do it? That would be a job, wouldn't it? Sheesh! When even the memes are trying to outwit us maybe it's time to wave the chequered flag on the human race!
13. Which blogger do you want to meet in real life? Most of them but I can spot a singular when I see one and I won't shy away from this one. But allow me to take a turn around the block. I'd love to meet up with Dave Rupert because I have been reading his blog for a dog's age and I've never commented because I fear to start after all this time. I would also like an opportunity to share a pot of coffee with Sharon whose writings over the last year have given me such insight into her mileu that I am happy to count her as a friend. But if I were to be pressed I would leap on a Eurostar and travel to Waffle Central for a chinwag with Chameleon.
14. Do you usually act like you have more money or less money than you really have? I am not conscious of acting but I suspect that I behave as though I have more money than I have.
15. Does your family read your blog? No.
16. How old is your blog? Rather older than the paucity of posts might suggest.
17. Do you get more than 1000 page views per day? Do you care? No. No.
18. Do you have another secret blog in which you write about being depressed, slutty, or a liar? I don't have a secret blog. I write about being a depressed, slovenly (aka slutty), liar right here in public. Now ain't that a shame?
19. Have you ever given another blogger money for his/her writing? And I would want to do this, because ...?
20. Do you report the money you earn from your blog on your taxes? I do not earn money from my blog ... but if I did I would be sure not to report the fact to anyone.
21. Is blogging narcissistic? It ought not to be but for some I think think that it may be ... oh was I expected to answer for myself? No ... yes ... er can I think about it?
22. Do you feel guilty when you don't post for a long time? Laughed my arse off at that one!
23. Do you like John Mayer? Hang on ... (google google) No. (Terrible control freakery of a website!)
24. Do you have enemies? That would imply that I have allies, wouldn't it.
25. Are you lonely? Everyone is lonely. I like my own company better than most folks. On the other hand, most days I miss having someone to talk to. Is that loneliness? It's not a big deal. I talk to my cat and I talk to myself and I shout rude comments at the TV and I laugh when I see or hear something funny. Is that lonely? I don't think so. My therapists and social workers think I should get out more and meet people but most people are arseholes.
26. Why bother? Exactly!
27. Who am I gonna tag? Nobody.

Ramble In Rows

Good lord! How did it get to be October already? So much of my life is racing by me unregarded, like the star field that whizzes by the starship Enterprise. Things happen and I think how cool it would be to waffle to my blog about the significance of them and then .... What? Well tempus ceases its fugitive property and simply frangits [Sic] with the result that I find myself passing on to the next fascinating tableau and contemplating the griste worthiness of that instead. And oh! Lordy, Lordy! Lookit me making unconscious associations: tableaux versus the tabular (in the keyboard sense) nature of my sense of time's careless passage.

Last night, for no good reason other than because it was on the TV schedule, I decided to watch The Shawshank Redemption. I have loved this film since I first saw it and found to my delight that it had captured every drop of the essence of Stephen King's orignal novella. It is a delightfully brooding and horrifying plot full of shockingly naive little deux ex machina that somehow seem plausible anyway and the film extends the liberties taken with our credibility exactly far enough to add the seasoning that a movie demands; the richer meat of words on paper needs no such condiment of course.

It's funny in a screwy kinda way. King's novella, Rita Hayworth and The Shawshank Redemption was published in a collection of four such stories that had outgrown short but had somehow miscarried in the gestation period leading up to full-blown novel. Three of the stories were simple tales of human-scale experience but the fourth, to be oxymoronic about it, was so larded with salt it was neither believable as real horror nor especially horrific in any gothic sense. Or maybe I am just cynical .... Maybe I just think that King had three good stories and a notion of attaching a seasonal theme to them: Hope Springs Eternal, Summer of Corruption and Fall From Innocence. The first and last of these — the Shawshank story tied, seemingly with irony, to spring and hope, and The Body (which was made into another great film: Stand By Me) which was a fabulous metaphor for the loss of the innocence of childhood ... and its lasting effects — qualify as great fiction. (The middle one, Apt Pupil, was, well ... ok but a little ditsy). It was a shame that the fourth and last story was so unsatisfactory. Winter of Discontent: The Breathing Method was risibly out of place and skulking around at the back of the book practically screaming, "I don't belong here!" (like the new fish at the start of the first story in the volume) ... perhaps that's the point.

Hmmm.

I shall adjourn to the kitchen to contemplate while concocting a bacon sandwich and to fret over my unweeded garden and the horrors that will be revealed when the volunteer flora dies back for winter .... Uh oh! Maybe I ought first to worry about the quantity of leafage to be harvested from two rather large sycamores; leaf mould is an excellent compost but where to build a heap? Decisions, decisions. Why could I not have been born royal and pampered? I am sure I was never meant to fret so over such mundane things. Surely I was meant to concentrate more about the artistry of pruning roses than with what to do with the prunings ....

And now I am suddenly thinking about the imitation Lalique specimen vases that I saw in the window display of a local hospice's charity shop all reasonably priced in the one or two pound bracket. But why break with habit? The triptych of peach coloured blooms on my windowsill looks just as good in their sherry schooner.