A little bit this, a little bit that and Strange animals, cont.

I am up early. didn’t mean to be, but I am. I have been up for a couple of hours already…any work done? nope. Dad was up, but mom wasn’t, and since I usually don’t get to see dad very much during the day, I decided to spend the morning with him until he went to grandma’s. Now, I am on here…the house is quiet for approximately an hour. I am going to start retyping one of my old stories, so that it is in a format that I can work with, and also to see if it is worth trying to continue, or not. Later on in the morning, I am going to be cleaning house, and in the afternoon I will be making homemade chicken stew. In between all of that, I am going to work on the cover art for Mu Mysteries and, depending on the time that the art takes, I will try working on either Underhill, Grakas, or The Prank…depends on which one tickles my fancy most. Also depends on how I feel later on…I have a lovely throat infection and ear infection to contend with right now…the treatment of one interferes with the treatment of the other, but we are trying to treat them both at the same time. And the ear is deciding to be particularly vicious this morning. Probably didn’t help that I have been sleeping with my fan on all night and the past few days have been chilly LOL.

Watching the Early Show this morning with dad. they did a segment called “Why am I still single?” things like that annoy me. Especially when they said how depressing is it when someone is still single. I don’t find it depressing at all. But I get weird looks when I tell people that I have no desire whatsoever to find a mate. I don’t need one. and honestly, I don’t particularly want one. But they always try to find out what is wrong with [me]” that I don’t want a mate. I don’t mind people who do look for mates, I find it a little annoying that some people seem to think they cannot exist, or are “faulty” if they don’t have a mate, but there is honestly nothing wrong with being single…and others shouldn’t try to put down, or think less of someone because they are single.

Anyway…LOL

I do know one thing, I am going to sign up for the free online Greek language course…it looks good, and it will give me something else to do…I just need to check into it a little more…I need to see if they have to have voice communication…if so, I need to hook a few things up onto my computer LOL. But I do need a little bit more intensive information to go along with my Greek dictionary. I think I will also look for a Irish course too. ;-) This should be interesting…I completely failed any language course I took in school…I tried French, German and Spanish…and failed them all…of course, I did try to take them while I was in and out of school, more days out then in, so I think that had a major play in it, so hopefully I can learn languages now. I was joking with my adelfi the other day, that I think it would be hilarious for me to learn Swedish or Dutch, because my voice tends to automatically go into the lilt of those languages, and lets face it, I have a heavy Dutch background in my lineage LOL. Then I can fulfill mine and adelfi’s craving to hear barbeque said with an Swedish accent (Thanks for that mental/audio craving Sherrilyn Kenyon! LOL.) it was sparked by her Dark-Hunter series, most particularly Wulf’s book, Kiss of the Night.

ok, one more quick thing, then I am off to work on a story…

For the next animal(s), it is impossible to talk about one without the other, so…

we went a short while without animals. then I adopted Orion, and a few weeks later, we adopted Clarence. Orion was a Russian-Blue/Persian. Beautiful cat. and Clarence is a Lynx-point Siamese (I think that is the one LOL). Orion and Clarence have always been inseparable, until the day Orion died when his liver disappeared on him. Orion has always been a hoot. He was strictly my cat, much like Mishka was, except he would tolerate my mom. He absolutely hated Brad, because when he was a kitten, Brad put Orion’s head in his mouth. If it was anybody but me, and sometimes my mom, Orion would growl and his and literally chase everybody out of my room, hitting their heels as they went (he had a very powerful hit). For quite a while, my nieces were scared of him as he did that to them. It was not uncommon for him to leave a bruise when he hit. Clarence and Orion would literally fight to see who got to sleep up by my head with me each night. It was so funny how everybody would ask why he was so loving to me and hated everybody else. I could not work on the computer without him laying in front of my monitor. I eventually had to put my monitor on a riser so I could see to work. He liked to bury his head in the toes of Brad’s shoes, all the way to the toes, and he would fall asleep like that. He also liked to roll, sometimes hours at a time, in Brad’s dirty clothes. There is more, but I am having a hard time writing about him. He was a piece of my soul, much more than any other animal we had, and even though he passed away in November of 2007, I still have a hard time talking, or thinking about him.

So we will move on to Clarence. Clarence is the most loving cat we have ever had. Orion was the most loving to me, but Clarence has not met a person, or animal, he has not licked…I mean, like. He ahs a licking fetish. He will lick anything if it stands still long enough. We have caught him licking bleach bottles before. We have tried putting cayenne pepper on things…and he likes that. So we always have to watch to make sure he is not licking things. He will lick your hair to the point that you realize…he is eating your hair. And he doesn’t just lick, he double licks. His touch will slap you going one way, and then he will lick you with the underside of his tongue. He and Orion, at one time, got really really sick when they were kittens. We couldn’t figure it out. We thought maybe they were eating our philodendrons, but there were no teeth marks. The vet couldn’t figure it out either. So, one day we happened to see what they were getting in to, and it was the philodendrons…but they weren’t eating them…they were licking them. I have caught Clarence licking the most disgusting things. When they were kittens, Orion taught Clarence how to groom himself…then as soon as Clarence picked up the knack of it, he taught Clarence how to groom him and since that day, Orion never groomed himself ever again, He let Clarence do it for him. And it was from that time on, that Clarence would lick everything. He has a very odd allergy…he is allergic to all fish and shell-fish, so we have to be very careful that the food we buy doesn’t have any fish or fish by-products in it. He is a tough little bugger though. He keeps getting sick, sick enough that we think we have to put him down, and then he will make a recovery. I think he is past his nine-lives, I think he owes some now. LOL. Oh, and when he and Orion were kittens, At that time, we lived in a split-level house, and the landing, kitchen, and all of the downstairs in the hall, bathroom and the laundry room, was ceramic tile. Well, one day Orion threw Clarence from the upper floor (there was only a wrought iron railing, like a fence, to stop anyone from falling…which my nephew got his head stuck in one day LOL), but Orion threw Clarence from upstairs above the landing down to the landing, and so Clarence busted his leg. Clarence is very loving and sweet, until you say his “other” name. He is usually called Clarence (or some form of that) the Lion Cub. He is named after the movie Clarence: The Cross-Eyed Lion, because he is cross-eyed. But when you call him “Ferocious Mountain Lion Cub”, he will start biting and kicking you, grabbing your hand so you literally have to pry it out of his grip. LOL.