Lone Wolf. The Party Starts October 9.

Stef asked me today to strongly consider keeping Cabot at home while I'm away next month.

You may recall that originally my brother was going to babysit with a view to keeping Cabot for good. But then he went and got a different cat.

Then, briefly, I'd hoped to give a friend a little vacation whilst, in reality, fulfilling my own selfish needs by having him come to stay with Cabot. Not to be.

The next and probably final option was to send him up to maJen's to start getting used to living with her and her dog, Max(i-pad), as that will more than likely be where he ends up when I leave indefinately.

It wasn't an option for me to even consider asking Stef to add to her farm day by having to feed Cabot twice a day and spend some time with him. He doesn't have the ability to stop eating and therefore cannot be just given a bowl of food and checked on every once in a while, in addition to being quite social and loving. He needs the contact with others and you know, 25 days seems an awfully long time to leave him alone with only the short daily visits.

Stef thinks that leaving him somewhere for a month and then bringing him back will destroy a lot of the ground he's gained this past year and a half and cause him some serious self-confidence issues. She thinks that from his point of view it would be preferable for him to be able to stay 'home'. He'll be in familiar surroundings and as she put it, "If his home is this area he's comfortable with and defends than it's less about his home being YOU and more about his home being THIS."

I can't disagree with her at all and I guess if she's offering, well then, Cabot stays home. Alone.

They'll be enclosing the fifth wheel to aid in heat retention for the winter anyways so at the same time she's said they'll build Cabot a doorway through the bedroom with ample space for his litter box to be moved outside. That way, I get the litter box outta the house and he can spend time, just as he does now but within his own control, outside on his own porch as the life of the farm goes on around him. He can interact just as much as he does now with the things he's become familiar with.

Behold, in one fell swoop, my 'home' has just become the largest cat cage in history. Complete with all the modern amenities.

I guess it's too much to hope that he'll be paying the rent while I'm gone.

Suddenly, I Have A Quantifiable Past I'd Forgotten All About ..... This Day Last Year. And the Year Before.

I'll be cutting and pasting these since the first bit of the blog was hand-coded and on my ISP server and the second bit was on blogger (in RG, of which we no longer speak due to my shhhh.... stalkers)... but can I just say? .... I really miss it's clean lines, among other things.

This first one, September 9, 2003 was actually only about 3 weeks after I began blogging (August 17, 2003 is my first entry)...

Tuesday, September 9, 2003

having a life (but just for a moment)
I am currently out (or in) doing one (or all) of the following:

-getting a "shit, we need to fix this" haircut.
-visiting my friend 'When Diesel'.
-sitting in the wonderful enclosed smoking section of Bad Ass trying to surreptitiously suck in as much cigarette smoke as I can while dodging the counter people who keep asking why I haven't bought a coffee.
-desperately seeking Susan and feeling very 80's.
-taking an 'arthritic dog massage' class.
-singing and dancing in the rain.
-working on an autumny background as the more I look at it, the more I hate that picture up there.
-flitting silently about the alleys searching for a cat to cook as we've run out of food for the dog. And she's been eyeing my leg every time I stop moving.

And maybe, just maybe, when I got home I - tweaked the munchkin's pics/made external links open in a new window/fixed copyright notations/fixed links and myriad other teeny things. I'm getting quicker at this! See you tomorrow!

September 9, 2004. A year later, I had a lot more to say ...

Miracle? Or Sign of Armageddon? You decide.

(just so you know, those horoscopes are creepin' me out. I may have to take them down. ahhh, wait.... 48 hours? It'll all be over tomorrow. Well, that's alright then.)

Did I mention that my carpet shampooer isn't working since someone borrowed it from me? Cause isn't that just always the way?

Which has actually been upsetting me, especially since the "V-8 Incident". Cause the carpet is still orange.

I'd checked my receipt and my manual (packrat!) and for the life of me could not find how long my freaking warranty was. So, I gave up.

Tonight, in the midst of 800 other things, I thought I would check the website one more time.

It's under full warranty until 10/11/2004.

Well, fuck me. Something actually broke down BEFORE the warranty ended?

Now I just have call and find a service place and get it to said servicey place. Without a car. Which is probably in another city. Which will probably cost more than I paid for it. And it will probably be the $2.50 belt that's broken.

But, still.....

lyric at post:
...they're shaking with the rhythm
making with the rhyme
jumping like they
just won the 6/49..

best quote of the day

he: So, is your throat feeling better?
me: Yes, yes it is.
he: Do ya think it could be just the cold that the rest of us have been fighting for weeks?
me: Why, then, would I have had it for three months? And why would allergy medication make me feel better?
he: Hey, I'm just trying to give you hope. You're obviously screwed.

mind-numbing

Can you take this 80 page faxed document, hand-written (not printed but full-on tiny writing on lined paper) in FRENCH and just type it verbatim into Word? So we can send it to the French client?

Sure, but you do realize I don't know French, quit French in high-school and in fact, don't much like the French** and that it's going to be a complete piece of incorrect trash, right? Which will probably end up saying something like... well, like... horrible due to me having no idea what I am typing as I cannot decipher nor guess at word patterns in a foreign language and this shitty writing?

(I couldn't think of anything suitably horrifying - my brain is numb, you see - abject apologies)

Right?

...made worse by the fact that you framed it as "this is a project that I'm sure will interest you" as opposed to (as Dooce might say) "here's something that will cause you to jab the hot forks of discontent repeatedly into your own eyes!".

Trend of the day in the paper: Life Caching. Apparantly, what we bloggers DO.

And because I am really unable to come up with anything else, hopefully I can appease and amuse you by sharing three of my horoscopes for the day.

---

You might feel cornered into doing something you just don't want to do today. If you're not comfortable following through, communicate that. Your ability to express yourself and to be understood is enhanced with this day's energy and rescheduling may be far better than potential resentment.

these following two are sun sign and rising sign. and I think they may be contradictory but I'm not really sure. I'm all confused.

Cancer: Everyone takes a wrong turning now and again - it is nothing to be ashamed of. The important thing is that you know you have strayed from the path you should be taking and what happens over the next 48 hours will leave you in no doubt at all that it is time for a change.

Leo: There is an element of risk in most things in life and you are well aware that what you are planning could go badly wrong. You are also aware that if you don't go ahead with it you will hate yourself for being so timid, so prepare as well as you can then jump right in and pray that it all goes according to plan.

---

It would save them a lot of space if they just said.... "Damned if you do, damned if you don't. You're fucked. Have a nice day."

On the up side, my throat doesn't hurt as much. Although, that is not an up side for Cabot the polydactl cat.

**disclaimer - a) Canadian French. and b) that is by no means meant to reflect a blanket statement about the French but rather a great big wooly, arrogant and man, the air is stagnant under here blanket of the French that I have KNOWN. Thank you.


Is life-caching it, do you think? Since 90% of the bloggers get only 10% of the traffic? Is it a bunch of us looking for immortality?

hmm, if it's immortality, then all of you with children you get the hell off my web since, classic immortality, you've already got.

(not that there's anything wrong with that....dude)

...but, those (chosen and not) who are childless and alone? we need our own immortality.

give me passion give me feeling
give me something to believe in
give me passion over feeling
give me reasons to keep breathing

The Yeti Files. Part 1.

As you may (or may not) remember, Yeti (Jeff) is one of Matt's best mates and was out to visit just before my accident and the last week before he went home to Aus.

Rather than retype or cut and paste the backgrounder post, it'll be here.

The background for THIS post I will cut and paste....

...Walking around Matheson Lake last night I had to stop and wait while Yeti crawled around on the ground taking a picture of the biggest black slug he'd ever seen, exclaiming excitedly the whole time. It was about 5 cm long and 1 cm 'wide'. Which is nothing really, not when you've grown up in the rainforest.

I was explaining about elementary school field trips when every autumn we all trooped out to Goldstream Park to watch the salmon spawn and die and lick a banana slug. I don't think Yeti believed me. Banana slugs are the second largest slugs in the world - up to 24 or 25 cm. and their slime is anaesthetic as protection against predators.

Tomorrow, we're leaving to head up island to Cathedral Grove and then on to Tofino and Pacific Rim National Park and as soon as Yeti said - "You've done this? Licked a slug? I'm pretty hard to gross out, Jen, but I think you've just managed to do it." then *suddenly* everything became clear to me.

Cathedral grove is the perfect habitat for banana slugs.

I'll give you only one guess as to what my goal in life this weekend is.

(That whole post is here.)

Then...

...because, YES, there was slug licking.

Even after Yeti was witness to the following conversation....

me: "C'mon, Les, *everyone* licked a slug when they took us down to the Park every year. You just won't admit it."

Les: "Uh, no, Jen. No one licked any slugs. I don't even know wtf you're talking about. "

Yeti and I both did it though. And, once he actually downloads and sends me the pictures, eons from now, I'll prove it to you. Well, that *he* did, anyways. There's no photographic evidence of me licking no slugs.

Hey, I may be crazy but I'm not stupid.

(that whole post is here.)


*click to embiggen*
When I spoke to Tim a few weeks ago about the trip, I was shocked to hear that Yeti hadn't told him the story of the slug! (hee hee)

Tim's comment to my telling of it was, "Well, Jen, you know that out of the three of us, he's probably the only one you could have talked into that."

Whether he meant Yeti is more adventurous or less bright, I'll leave you to decide.

inaudible melodies
serve narrational strategies
unobtrusive tones
help to notice nothing but the zone
of visual relevancy

A Tiny ?Explanation?

I've noticed that since I closed v.1 I've been less that what I imagine you're used to and I thought I should explain that a little.

One, with the trip journal preparing to come to the fore, the address of the site has gone out to more people who know me, in different capacities than the friends who come here. So, there's that consideration - as Sipes put it (another one who calls me Jenny), "Jenny blogs about everything. Sometimes things you don't even want to know about her." So, I'm trying a little to limit that. Even though you may say that it's a journal and it's my place to work through things - I have also made the choice to expand it's purpose and I have to figure out what that will mean to the content.

Two, I've always written to myself (and you) as an ongoing story. You understand what I'm saying when I talk about Matt because you've watched me work through it (which he was aware of, whether he read it or not) and you understand precisely what I feel for him. You understand about the Munchkin, as well. It's been more a serial than a stand alone and I'm trying to get away from that as well.

Three, I've made certain promises to myself and to a couple of people in regards to what I'll say and won't say and I intend to honor those promises.

Being fair to that / them comes first.

(and you may have noticed I just took this bit out)

I know only that the truly real things, they stay. And stay.

And when they go, they stay.

As grief.

On The Serrated Edge

Remember when I said a while back about what I considered to be the final 'piece' of Matt? That part that for whatever reason, inside of me, could only be erased by someone else's body?

Well.

It's a double edged knife, isn't it?

Uneasy Bedfellows

First, I have a techie / hardware question.

Now you could say I shouldn't have assumed that my Mobilepro's PC Card Slot would allow a USB adapter when I went ahead and bought that Lexar LDP-600, which can only be recharged by USB connection. You could say it's my own fault. You could say I should just slow down and think things out. You could say that I should wait until I have ALL the information before I jump in.

You could.

I wouldn't, obviously, like you anymore. But, that's your choice.

I'm keeping the Mobilepro so just drop that suggestion.

Now, I could test my theory by making that nice young man at the computer store open a new box of something I'm not going to buy (it must be the phone voice), or I could assume (yet again) that I'm right and open the Lexar (thereby rendering it to a lower resale value) and buy a gadget that may not be useable in the context I need it to be OR you could just save my ass by telling me you have the ability to TEST my theory or that you have seen it in action.

Pwease.

OKAY, here it is. I need to buy a memory card reader because my Mobilepro uses CF for storage, the camera has it's little funky cards and I can also use the card slot for another kind of storage as well so it only makes sense to be able to read/write and swap info about on the cards, yes? So, THEN does it follow that a card reader that *includes* a USB hub could theoretically be used to recharge my Lexar if it came WITH an adapter that supplied extra power.

What I'm saying here, is that even if I couldn't plug the USB hub INTO a USB port at the time, isn't it still feasible that it would supply power enough through the USB connections to recharge my Lexar if it were just plugged into a power source?

Did anyone get that? Am I making sense? Or am I just so desperate that I've taken the 'think outside the box' thing a little too far out da box?

---

Second. A little John Keats for this fine fall evening.


sonnet: "When I Have Fears. . . "

When I have fears that I may cease to be
   Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,
Before high piled books, in charactry,
   Hold like rich garners the full-ripen'd grain;
When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face,
   Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
   Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!
   That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
   Of unreflecting love; -then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.


1817

Dry Your Eyes, Princess, They're Fascinating Animals

Tonight, I shall be watching this, a loving and heartbreakingly poignant story of the life cycle of Australia's tarantulas.

I'm hoping it may make me less likely to have an embarrassing accident in the event I have the ?pleasure? of meeting big spiders next month.

I doubt it, though.

Although, spiders, per se aren't the issue - it's the sheer size! I can't kill them anyways but seriously, killing a big one like that must be like stepping on a newborn. Can you imagine? ick.

We all know, don't we, deep in our hearts, that the girl who rescues worms after the rain (as well as a slug the other day) really does contort herself around the 8 million webs on her front porch on a daily basis. I just can't bear to destroy that amazing web they've built nor one of their few chances at survival. Sometimes I even feed them.

But, the big ones, who's eyes you can look into? And fangs you can see? *shiver*