Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

I'm all over the place topicwise in my brain today.

Dinner. I didn't eat breakfast today 'cause I was trying to get stuff moved before the painters showed up, then I was distracted so lunch was, in addition to being late, something innocuous from the freezer. So partway through an episode of ... one of the Law And Order francise ... that I'd already seen, I decided I wanted to cook. But I couldn't decide what.

There's this large wok-ish thing hanging in my kitchen, left by somebody before me, and I figurd it was time to try my hand at the stir-fry thing, which I've never ever done before. And, being me, I didn't Google for tips and techniques; I just looked at the shape of the wokthing, dredged up vague memories of other people using real woks, and winged it. (That sounds like it ought to be "wung it", exceept that sounds even "wronger" (couldn't resist).) The result: something edible and satisfying, but decisions that:

• Stir fry goes on the list of "things I should have no trouble at all learning, but that I haven't learned yet"
• Daikon is okay, I guess, but I don't think I'll be buying it again unless I'm cooking for someone who especially likes it, or it turns out to really be that much cheaper than turnips and potatoes
• SSC-time: I'm still not very consistent at preparing rice.

Hey, I feel more alert now that I've eaten a big bowl of hot food and my tongue is tingly.

Less-significant notes: This is the third thing I've made with daikon since I bought one piece of it, and I still have about a fourth of it left. I have a disgustingly cute cat, but I did have to explain to Perrine at one point that if I wanted a kitty-nose in my food, I would've stir-fried said nose. (One convenient thing about being a vegetarian -- it cuts down on the number of dishes the cat will try to eat. But she does want to sniff it just in case, as is the way of many cats.)

Perrine's latest cute thing to do when the camera is out of reach, is to pick up water in/on her paw and drink it that way. I first saw her do this when I left a faucet running for her to play with, but tonight I watched her dip into a container of standing water then drink from her paw. (After three or four repetitions, she put her head down to drink normally.)

And several times in the past few days, I've seen her clench her jaw and chatter her teeth to make a loud-ish K-K-K-K-K-K-K sound. I've always associated that behaviour with birds on the other side of a pane of glass, but following her gaze when she does that, I can find no birds. I haven't figured out what else she might be K-K-K-K-K-ing at, either.

She's gotten seriously into rope games -- tug-o-war and chase-the-end. (Sometimes I guess wrong as to which of those she wants to play.) Twice now she has dragged pieces of rope to me in bed to ask me to play. (Once while I was sleeping, so I found it when I woke up. I think that time was hoping I'd play, but I'm pretty darned sure from her body language that the time she did it while I was awake was exactly that.) But sometimes, just as with the laser pointer, she just wants to watch it. Goodness, she is cute shen she catches the rope and walks away holding it.

It turns out that luring her with the rope is the most reliable way to get Perrine to use her scratching post -- I drag the rope across the scratching post, and she uses the traction she can get on the post to persue the rope that much more aggressively. (The other way is to get her to chase my fingers, but feline enthusiasm makes that risky unless I'm fully awake.) Watching her turn herself nearly upside down while crawling around the circumference of the scratching post made me think she'd really enjoy one of those larger, uh, cat-trees? Kitty jungle gyms? Climbing posts? Whatever they're called. I'm filing that as a long term project for when I get a tuit of circular or spherical morphology.

The rest of the time, she really prefers to scratch my mattress (slapping the edge of the mattress -- my instinctive response when she wakes me up doing that -- doesn't dissuade her, and grabbing her front paws or hissing at her just means she'll try again in twenty seconds or less, but leaning over the edge of the bed and putting my face Right Looming Big In Front Of Her Nose seems to stop her), the wooden step-stool in the bathroom that I use as a place to store shampoo and conditioner (I let her claw that, because it's unfinished and raw-looking, so I figure a few claw-marks won't matter much), or a couple of chairs that I try to discourage her from using. She acts as though the scratching post feels really good to use when she uses it, but she never uses it without being convinced somehow.

And I've noticed that one of the nifty side effects of posting cute-cat stuff is that I can pretty much count on someone else (usually donnad) to respond with related cool/cute stuff about their own cat, so I get a bonus vicarious dose of cutey-cat on top of the pleasure of writing about Perrine.