Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Well, the "found cat" signs have probably been up long enough to start calling her "my cat" and deciding what to name her. (The signs blew away in the thunderstorm a couple of nights ago, but they'd been up about a week.) I did eventually realize that a large part of the reason I dragged my feet so long putting the signs up was that I was really afraid her former owner would show up. (No, no, you don't have to say it -- the myriad voices saying, "Duuuuh!" have been read into the record as if it had been spoken. You don't have to say it.) Name suggestions (some sounding like more than mere suggestions) are coming in, and I've got a couple of ideas of my own. (I'm tempted to name her "Laura" because I get mail here addressed to someone I've never met named Laura, so I figure, hey, maybe that's the cat, and she just started the mail forwarding to this address in anticipation of her getting here.)

But I've discovered she's not really a cat. She's a toon. Tonight after 3LF rehearsal, dmk, her mother, and I were standing in my kitchen when the cat squished herself flat and slid under the oven. That is not a cat-sized opening. And remember, although I've never owned (okay, been owned by) a cat before now, I've lived with cats a lot, on and off. (Wait, maybe she's a mouse in a cat disguise. Isn't that a mouse trick? Or instead of being a tiny cat, she's a very oddly shaped, large ferret. But I think she's a toon.) She sat quietly under there with just the edge of her tail showing for a while, ignoring any attempts to lure her out. Then when we were about to wander off to another part of the house, she squeezed out like toothpaste coming out of its tube, re-inflating her body cartoon style, I swear along the way. Still photos aren't going to cut it for this, if I catch her at it again; I'm gonna have to shoot video. It's an eyeball-bending thing to watch. Truly surreal.

I mean it: squish, flat cat, toothpaste, re-inflate, toon. Especially the toothpaste imagery. Freaky

I've got some photos I shot on my deck the day she and I met, but I haven't been happy with the scans I've gotten on my flatbed. Here are two of them anyhow, plus one I shot in the basement with dmk's digicam.

When I get a scan that really shows the magnificence of her coat and the markings around her eyes, I'll post a larger image. :-) Note that the milkiness of her eyes in the third image is glare from the pop-flash on the digicam -- her eyes are actually clear and healthy. She does have a little bit of brown in her coat, which is more noticeable now than it was a couple of weeks ago. It's mostly on her chest.

The other change since she arrived is that she looks like a rather small cat now, instead of looking like a nearly-grown kitten. And that's the difference of a few pounds of weight on her.

Were I not so tired, I could babble more about her (behind another cut-tag, of course), but I'm feeling headachy and dizzy, so I'll keep this short, apologize for how long it took me to get the images up (I had to convince myself it was okay to show them even though I wasn't happy with the scans -- I like the wet prints that the scans were made from), and say that yes, I will be accepting the assistance that was offered regarding paying for her upkeep.

Other than revealing her cartoon nature to us, she seems to be a basically healthy cat. I think the house is too hot for her (unsurprising -- it's really too hot for me), but she escapes to the basement to cool off. She pouts at me when I don't let her have her way (such as when I remove her from the blue bedroom (designated cat-fur-free zone) after a lighting dash between my legs, or when I dare to put on clothes and leave the house (but she's happy/relieved when I come back), or when she wants to play ultra-swat and I'm too busy, but not-getting-her-way aside, she seems a happy enough cat. Likes people in general, not just me. Affectionate. And the most bratty things she does are to try to get on the keyboards, and to try to make my hands too busy to type. She's a sweetie.

Okay, tempted to babble more after all -- deleting the paragraph I just started so I can wrap this up and crash.

Other name ideas, besides Laura:

• Belle, or Belle Chat, though that's more a description than a name
• Sihaya, from Dune
• Bibi, after a friend I've lost touch with -- that's the obvious shortening of the friend's name, but no the shortening she prefers, so if I ever manage to re-establish contact with her, it shouldn't cause confusion (Soheyla, if you're reading this, drop me a line!)
• Rachelle (or maybe Raquelle), after a friend the markings around her eyes remind me of, but who has since changed her name (so it shouldn't be confusing name-collision-wise, but it still feels a little confusing to call the cat that)
• Betty, I'm not sure why

"Life wants cheese, orange juice, onions, garlic, chocolate, and maybe paprika." -- Brent

*grumble* I was just woken up by a telephone.

In a dream.

The phone rang, I answered it, the person on the other end had trouble hearing me at first but we eventually sorted that out and started talking, then she just stopped talking.

I kept trying to figure out why she'd stopped talking. Had we gotten disconnected? Then I realized that she wasn't talking because there was in fact no phone next to my ear, and I was in a completely different house than the one in the dream, and gee, by then I was awake. Dammit.

I'd been asleep less than half an hour. Feh. Took me forever to get to sleep in the first place, what with muscle cramps in my shin and all.

I still have mice. But I'm about to have one fewer.

Kitty got game. (Pun intended.)

When she cartoon-squished herself under the stove last night I figured that probably meant I still had mice. This afternoon while I was eating breakfast (stirring chopped fresh spinach into the egg/cheese mixture before dumping it in the skillet was a win; trying to fold the result over other stuff omellette-style was not), she got really worked up over the pile of grocery bags in front of the radiator. When she started burying the front half of her body in the pile, I decided I was right about my interpretation of her interest in mouse-scent and her body language the first day she came into the house: she hunts. I just still didn't know whether she was any good at it. I also figured maybe it was time for some teamwork, since the mouse had way too much room to hide beyond paw-reach. I started moving bags-of-bags aside, the mouse ran under something else, I started pulling other stuff out of the way, and as soon as there was a cat-sized opening, she was in. A moment later she emerged with mouse in mouth and trotted down to the basement to play with it.

Okay, one question answered: she doesn't suck as a mouser. :-)

So I grabbed a camera and flash and followed. In the open areas of the basement I got to watch her in action. But she wasn't big on posing. I may have caught her with her prey clearly visible at least once... She is fast (not super-feline speed, but hey, cats are fast and she's not a slow cat). And she looked like she was having Intense Fun. Unfortunately she got cocky at one point and the mouse vanished behind something. She's down there now, pacing around the different exits from the spot where the mouse went, and sticking her head into openings. Once the mouse comes out of hiding, it's toast.

I didn't get much time to tell her what a good cat she is, or to reward her, 'cause she was in a hurry to take her catch downstairs to play with. I'll have to do that later and hope she knows what I'm fussing about.

Yaaay cat! As long as she doesn't try to kiss me with mouse breath. (I'm not worried -- she's likes hands more than faces.)

Update, about ten minutes later: Drat, she came back upstairs with that "Can you please find my toy?" look on her face and meowed at me, then started retracing the steps of the chase in the kitchen. So that mouse gets another day or two or three to poop on my counters (unless it stays in the basement). But it's just a matter of time.

Man, that is one cobwebby cat. (I had to grab her and remove a dust bunny from her whiskers 'cause I couldn't stand watching her walk around with it hanging off the side of her face.) Her fur isn't going to be so nice to touch for the next twenty minutes or so.

I need to look up how to specify an em-dash or minus sign in HTML instead of an en-dash. Looking at this entry on the Mac, the subject doesn't look right with those teeny tiny hyphens.

Argh. Next "link sausage" entry is ready to post, but 'clive' keeps segfaulting. Probably an illegal character that got pasted in that I need to find. Bleah.

• Study Says Women May Ovulate More Than Once a Month (Reuters) Important but very quick to summarize ... "scientists in Canada said on Tuesday they had found women sometimes ovulate several times a single month. Their finding, if verified, would overturn the traditional wisdom that women produce an egg cell once a month. It would also help explain why "natural" methods of birth control, based on the idea that ovulation can be predicted, often fail." Probably also useful info for designing fertility treatments for women trying to become pregnant. "'We had 63 women with normal menstrual cycles. Of those 63, only 50 had normal ovarian cycles,' Pierson said. Thirteen of the women ovulated multiple times, in various different ways. And of the other 50, 40 percent had up to three waves of activity by the follicles, any one of which could result in the production of an egg." (I got the link from angelovernh.)
• Headlines from 2011 by Mike Johnston, will be more entertaining to photographers but has plenty of gems for everyone else as well. "Work on the Iraq/Texas oil pipeline continues, despite setbacks." And "[...] The book, which is more than 1,700 pages long and expected to sell more than 80 million copies (some to children as young as 4), has prompted renewed pleas for mercy from the Governors of both Oregon and Washington State, whose forests continued to be decimated by the Potter series' voracious requirements for paper." I'm going to make y'all go read the page yourselves for the bit about the terrorists and the robot, the Seqway joke, and (best of all in my not-so-humble opinion) the "Composition Nagger" chip. (I got the link from the Pentax-Discuss Mailing List.)
• Pluto's atmosphere behaves oddly (New Scientist) -- it gets larger as Pluto moves further from the sun. Nobody knows why yet. (I got the link from Fred.)
• "Welcome to the Machine: How the GOP disciplined K Street and made Bush supreme" (Washington Monthly) describes how the GOP is making sure that trade organizations and industry lobbying groups are staffed by Republicans, and the history and ramifications associated with this plan. "The chief purpose of these gatherings is to discuss jobs--specifically, the top one or two positions at the biggest and most important industry trade associations and corporate offices centered around Washington's K Street, a canyon of nondescript office buildings a few blocks north of the White House that is to influence-peddling what Wall Street is to finance. In the past, those people were about as likely to be Democrats as Republicans, a practice that ensured K Street firms would have clout no matter which party was in power. But beginning with the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994, and accelerating in 2001, when George W. Bush became president, the GOP has made a determined effort to undermine the bipartisan complexion of K Street." The point: "[...] a Republican political machine. Like the urban Democratic machines of yore, this one is built upon patronage, contracts, and one-party rule." The message I get from this article is "everyone's dirty, but the Republicans are more dangerous." (Caveat lector: that was also my feeling before reading the article.) And continuing a theme of observations about the current regime: "Today, Daley dominates Chicago politics almost as thoroughly as did his father. Like his father, Daley has used his power, in part, to improve city services voters care about, from better schools to the flower beds lining Lake Shore Drive. By contrast, the fruits of today's Republican machine--tax cuts and deregulation--have been enjoyed mainly by corporations and upper-income voters, while federal services, from college aid to environmental protection, are getting scaled back." The author draws parallels to 1896-1932, wondering whether history will repeat itself. (I got this link from wayward_va.)
• Vroom, a silly MPEG file (caveat: it's 10MB, so if you're on dialup, as I am, it takes a while to download) showing an activity presenting some risk to one's posterior (nothing to offend sexually-uptight Americans, but you probably want to turn down the volume a few notches if you're at work just 'cause it's loud). Silly and cute. (The link was posted to Elbows.)
• An SCA 'geek code' (which showed me how much of a lightweight I am as far as my SCA participation goes -- fortunately Pennsic is long enough to count as more than one event for the code). (Not sure where I got this; I think it was from jducoeur.)
• Adorable meerkat photo -- this is a modern, tech-enabled meerkat. Okay, it's in a zoo. Still, the effect is there. (I got this link from Fred.)
• Pollution good for trees? Identical trees planted in NYC and a hundred km outside of town. The ones in the city grew taller. But wait, I'll spoil the punch line for you: it's not the pollution, it's that the particular mix of pollutants in the city is less bad for the trees than the mix in the country, because some pollutants, such as nitric oxide, "scavenge" other pollutants, such as ozone, during the night. If I'm reading this correctly, the pollution stunting the trees in the country is actually blown there from the city, so it's city pollution in both cases -- it just causes more harm away from where it's made. Whee. (I got this link from Fred.)
• Oneword is an example of what one of my high school teachers used to call a "shotgun" writing exercise. The site presents you with a word, and from that moment you have sixty seconds to write whatever bit of prose or poetry the word evokes from you at that moment. As the help page explains, "the real purpose of this exercise is to alleviate our natural tendency to edit everything. once one learns to flow freely in his/her writing, their best material will emerge." They're saying that editing should happen after the writing, not in-the-way-of the writing. (I don't think that's a hard and fast rule, but I do see merit in shotgun exercises to help sharpen the "writing reflexes".) (I don't remember where I found this; I think I got it from griffen.)
• And just to end this sausage on a song virus again, here's a song which, if you can't remember the lyrics, I'm worried. :-) (It's okay to get a few details wrong.) Blame cthulhia.