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.

What have we here?/Strange animals cont.

I am almost finished with consolidating my files! I know. I am shocked myself. After I don’t know how many days, I can finally see the end. All I have left of consolidating is burning one batch of files onto a cd and I am through…of course, after all of this, my computer is screaming for mercy and begging me to do some maintenance on it. I bet the defrag ration is quite high right now, what with adding a lot of files, rearranging them, deleting them, etc.

One thing I did that I was horrified to find out, and almost didn’t find out in time is, sometime during this process, my external hard drive was slid toward the back of the computer and was right in front, just millimeters away from, the main vent of the computer. I had no clue. I didn’t think to look. I noticed my computer (and the external hard drive) was getting quite hot. hot to the point of almost burning. The computer was running very poorly, the fan on all the time, and it would fight me with the second monitor turning on…well, one or the other of the monitor…it was never the same one. Then I noticed, everything seemed to run slightly better after I had shut down the system and turned it back on hours later. Then it started back up again. I happened to look down the side of the computer for some reason, I don’t remember why, when I saw where the external hard drive was…Since moving it forward again, and slightly away from the computer, everything is running a lot better. The computer is literally breathing a sigh of relief LOL.

So, next in the list of my strange animals is Mishka. Mishka was given to me by one of my friends when I turned thirteen, a month after I was diagnosed with the diabetes. Mishka was a very loving kitty…to me. Since shortly after she was born, I would go to my friends house, and she would be the one I would play with. She was a Manx…she just had a short stub for a tail…a stub that was broken just below the tip when she was born. If she could not find me in the house, she would wander the house meowing for me until she found me, then she would purr so loud that you could hear it across the room. When she would meow searching for me, it sounded like she was calling “Mom”. Unfortunately, we didn’t have her very long. She had to be put down due to feline leukemia about 6 months after we got her, so we didn’t get to see a lot of her budding personality.

Then we move on to Fat Rat (Lee). Now Fat Rat was a seal-point (however that is spelled LOL) Siamese. We got Fat Rat a month or so before we had to put Mishka down, and when he first arrived, Mishka pinned him in a corner and meowed and growled at him while he cowered. It literally looked like she was laying down the law to him. Now Fat Rat didn’t have too many odd things about him…the reason for his name is he was incredibly fat, yet when we bathed him, which he really loved to do, he looked like a drowned rat. So, he became known as Fat Rat. Fat Rat and Ginger were inseparable. Fat Rat would sleep on top of Ginger. When Ginger started going down hill, so did Fat Rat. Several times, they had seizures at the same time. We eventually put them both down, but because they were inseparable, we had to do it at the same time, so we had to wait for them both to be so bad, there was nothing to be done. We knew that if we put one down, the other would die shortly after.

Was it a bear?

I thought I would regal you with a story of the one and only time I wrote in a book that was not a text book or a rare journal entry.

When I was about 3 or 4, I was reading Dr. Seuss. I loved those books. It fact, I have contemplated getting them again….just for sentimental values, not to mention it is one of the few rhyming books that I enjoyed LOL. I am not too much into Rhyme…which is part of the reason I do not write poetry.

I had one of my moods where I wanted to read and draw at the same time, and my crayons were so readily accessible. I picked up the crayons, but there was no paper, and I still wanted to draw…not that I could do much more than scribble ;-)

So, even though I knew it was the biggest no-no’s with books, I started to scribble in my Dr. Seuss book. I knew I was doing wrong, but you know how children can be. So I was scribbling away…

I didn’t get many pages done when I heard a noise outside. I knew my mom, dad and brothers were across the street at my grandparents. I heard the noise again. suddenly I was petrified. I thought it was my parents returning home early… but then…I had a horrifying thought. I thought that a bear had wandered onto our porch. It is not unusual to have bears wander around up here. So, petrified it was a bear, and scared it might be my parents…I ran into my bedroom and hid under blankets in the corner of my closet.

I felt entirely safe there. I knew that the bear couldn’t find me there, and that my parents wouldn’t think to look there. I was so warm and cozy and secure that I fell asleep.

Mom and dad returned home and they could not find me. They searched the house…no Cherry. They even looked under the beds (I had a habit of crawling under there, or the hope chest, and falling asleep)…but no Cherry. They even looked in the closet. So, panicked, they called all of the neighbors (at that time, there were few) and the police. They mounted a full scale search (or what they had back in the early 80’s) but there was no trace of me.

Mom decided to look through the house again and this time she found me under the blankets. I was sound asleep, unaware of the panic I caused. So the search was called off.

and to my embarrassment (and pain of a beating and grounding), I got into more trouble for hiding then I ever would have gotten into for drawing in the books.

But, to this day, any time I even think about making notes in books, even text books, my mind flashes back to that memory, and I hesitate (or don’t do it at all) to write in a book.

What progress? and Strange Animals

I have been so busy consolidating CDs that I have not had a chance to work on writing itself. One thing I need to finish before the first of June is creating the cover art for Mu Mysteries. But right now, I have spent the last three days just on pictures, about 8 hours a day. Which is absolutely killing my body. But it must be done. Then I can install my filters and plug-ins for Paint Shop Pro 9 so I can do the cover art. Lucky I still have just under 2 weeks, and once I am set-up, it doesn’t take me long to design stuff…course my designs are relatively simple compared to anything done professionally LOL. But, it also looks like I might be signing up for a free Greek language course. I have always wanted to learn it, but when I received my English-Greek dictionary…well, it is written in actual Greek font…and not the English-Greek that I thought it was going to be…the English words are written in English, but the Greek portion is not in English font. frustrating..though I am proud of myself, I did figure out one word from the English-Greek to the Greek, to English so I knew what it said LOL. I am pathetic ;-)

Now, on to my second topic of this blog…

I have the strangest animals. Their personality quirks are something else. I am sure there are others equally as strange, or even more strange, but what I can lay claim to, is every one of my animals (at least the indoor ones) have had very distinctively strange personality quirks…

Lets see, we can start out with Ginger, who was a Lassie want to-be. She was a collie-Golden Retriever. She had the coloring (for the most part) of a golden retriever, but the build and long hair (and the “collie bone” on top of her head. She would watch the Lassie TV show any time it was one. She also enjoyed Flipper LOL. She liked to play hide-and-seek. She liked to play police dog…we would walk toward her (or somebody else) half-crouched over, with our hands in a strangling position, and she would “attack” until we stood against the wall with our hands and feet spread. Then she would only bark. That is, unless we tried to move away from the wall, and then she would attack again. She liked to have her deflated soccer ball thrown on the roof so that she could judge where it was coming down, and she would leap into the air and catch it. She would pull us on our bikes. She would haul our sleds/toboggan for us…we would go down the hills, and then hook the sleds to her harness and she would pull them up for us. One day, Brad (the mid-kid), started a rock avalanche above Bryan (the eldest), and Ginger ran and pushed Bryan out of the way of the falling debris. She also loved to be dressed in human clothes. We would put a tee shirt on her, socks on her legs and Levi shorts (turned around with the zipper on top so we could put her tail through it), and a base-ball cap and a pair of sunglasses. If she had a headache, she liked to lay with a cold gel pack on the top of her head (or nose, if it was bothering her.) when she was a pup, she was bit by a weasel on her nose, and several years later, the gas company meter-reader broke her nose by slamming his metal clipboard on it when he had no business being in the backyard. the meter was not even close to it. One thing that was really fun to do, though kind of mean, was this: we would pretend to grab her nose off her face and tell her we had her nose. she would do everything she could to try to pry open our hands, and one day, Brad opened her mouth and pretended to shove Ginger’s nose down her throat. When we told her she ate her nose, she started to gag, and gag, and gag. We had to quickly open up her mouth and pretend to grab the nose out, and put it back on her snout. She would immediately stop gagging and would wag her tail. Ginger was poisoned a year before we put her down. We managed to save her, but it unleashed a lot of health problems.

I have many other animals to talk about, but I will do those in subsequent posts.