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.