The Thessaliad Redux

Rob T Furball (cat) is being a yowly attention-sucking pest. mitchy has been offering him the requested space on the sofa, but he has been ignoring it and pestering me.

Me: I am trying to write! I am just going to ignore you!
mitchy: ...Did you say you were writing?
Me: Yes.
mitchy: (to cat, very loud) OFF!
Cat: *scarpers at speed*

In short, even if you are too cute to be turned into furry slippers, do not get between a mitchy and the object of her fan-squee.

Kitty's on crack. Kitty's currently having a 'time out' in the box the food processor came in.

We're off to dinner at Mum and Stepdad's place in a couple of hours. Oh, yay. I mean, it shouldn't be so bad really, but I didn't sleep all that well and don't feel particularly fantastic. Still, I suppose it won't be a whole lot of effort on my part, except for the travelling and such - we're going to sit and have a drink or two and open presents, and then there will be dinner and coffee, and then we go home. Somewhere in there will be Mum showing off her new kitchen and us sitting down and getting me registered for Phoenix Rising. 'Cos, of course, I'm not missing this one.

Speaking of getting things organised, I also made some agency calls to remind them that I exist and would like work. Why is it that they only call when I'm either working or swamped with hospital appointments? Anyway, they said I'd hear from them, so here's hoping that I hear a) soon and b) about a really good long-term temp job, or a good series of short-term temp jobs.

It occurs to me that it would be nice if life were more like FFXI. Stuck for money? Go out and kill monsters! Or go fishing or grow things in your garden or something. ( Cut for FFXI news. )

And now I need to consider what I'm going to wear and then go get some cash so I can top up my Oyster card and get smokes. Really all I want to do is crawl back into bed, though...

A slow and boring day. I let Yuki go for a wander for awhile because she was driving me buggy, and one of the neighbours saw her loitering around outside the back door and knocked to ask if she was all right. I said she was fine - she obviously knows her way home. Also, she knows to come in when I open the door and call. Well, it worked this time, at any rate. Unfortunately, she managed to knock part of the huge stack of DVDs we keep next to the TV onto the floor behind the makeshift home entertainment centre (TV, DVD player, PS2 and Xbox) and reclaiming them is going to be difficult. However, it will also be necessary, because the top of the pile contains the favourites - the ones that get watched the most often. So ... yay.

I've been basically fart-arsing about with FFXI this morning. My deathgnome has been pottering around West Sarutabaruta in a bid to find a stone monument for some stupid quest or other. Still, it's all good gil, so I shouldn't complain overmuch, and I'm going to need a map of Crawler's Nest one of these days. There are a whole bunch of Selbina / Mhaura quests that I can probably do now that I can ride a chocobo through the nastier bits or just warp out if I need to. So I'm going to think on a game plan for that one because I could use the gil. Still, probably best if I just do the easier stuff first so I'm not spending quite so much on chocobo rental.

And now I'm going to leave the kitten dozing on the wardrobe and go find something to have for lunch, which I will eat while sitting in front of something televisual (probably while reading a book as well - yay multitasking). It's a long slow kind of day, but at least I've got things to keep me occupied.

Yuki is currently going through a phase of wanting to be allowed outside. Of course, this has to happen when it's too cold to keep the windows open all the time, but the cold does not seem to be a hinderance to our fluffy little crackhead. No, she'll happily roam around the house and yowl. And yowl. And yowl. Generally while sitting in front of windows and looking out longingly.

The other day, I accidentally left the kitchen window open after I was done cooking. (Odd thing about our flat - the smoke alarms are sensitive enough that even cooking food sets them off, though oddly cigarette smoke does nothing. We'd just take out the batteries while we cook but the damn things are tapped into the mains, so there's nothing we can do but keep the kitchen door closed, the extractor fan on and the window open, and even then sometimes the smoke alarm goes off for no reason. It happens in the other flats, too.) Anyway, we found this out because Yuki had gone off for a little jaunt through it, which we only realised when we heard scrabbling at the window and saw her clambering back in without a care in the world. Seems kitty at least has enough sense to come back to where the food is.

Anyway, so every now and then we open the window and let the cat out. Today, it took me opening the back door and calling her before she'd come back, but if we don't let her have her jaunts, she's never going to give us any peace. So what we're going to do is put a collar and tag on her and, when we're home and can call her back, we're going to let her roam and hope she doesn't get run over by anything. This seems like a good compromise.

Thing is, while I was in Waitrose this evening, looking for cat treats for the kitty, I spotted some flea collars and realised something. Outdoor cats get fleas. Yuki with fleas would be bad. Humans with fleas would be worse. Therefore, a flea collar would be a good idea. So I bought a couple of flea collars (they come in packs of two, and aren't too costly) and brought them home. They are pretty things - purple velvetish material, with a little bell on them. And Yuki didn't object too badly to having it put on. Now all we have to do is get a tag, write our phone number and her name on it and attach it to the flea collar. Except for one minor issue, all is well.

The 'one minor issue' is this: Yuki's a little bit spastic at times, and likes playing with things that make noise. The fact that I left the bell on the collar means she jingles when she moves. Ever seen a cat try to play with her own neck?

The cat eats dried mango.

On purpose.

That is all.

( Quiz )

Yuki has not taken well to the return to the status quo, work-wise. She's acting up for the attention (no Yukis on the desks!) and only stops yowling when cuddled. Poor needy kitten. Cats are supposed to be independant, not co-dependant. She'll get used to it again, I'm sure. Not that she ever liked it much in the first place...

At least it's Wednesday. I keep forgetting that and then keep reminding myself that Lost is on tonight, which means it's Wednesday, which means that after today's over, it's only two more days until the weekend. Yay! One day back in the workplace and I'm already looking forward to weekends. Not to mention looking forward to my next holiday already. I've only taken about seven of my twenty-five days of holiday (three days off to do some Affils work, one day off to wait for a delivery and the Christmas break, which I'm not even sure counts), so I have about three work weeks left of holiday left until September, when it all starts up again. We were thinking about Edinburgh end of March (some convention or other, plus I've always wanted to go), I generally take a week off in February to celebrate my birthday and then there's Battlemasters in Leicester at the end of April. If I only take off a couple of days either side of the cons, I should still have enough time off left over for a nice week off in July or something. That might be nice. In any case, I can't take my actual birthday off because Angela's still going to be in South Africa, so it's still over a month before my next holiday. *whimper*

Ten minutes left to pet the cat before I have to start getting ready to go. She's already trying to eat my hand so she's going to be a handful when I'm on my way out. Eesh.

...Sarah. There's another one I don't bloody believe I forgot. Feh.

( Since I got the promised bits done, more Legacies )

Yuki goes to great lengths to get me to cuddle and pet her. Essentially she climbs up on the bed in the study (which is technically the second bedroom, but there's noplace else to put the bed), sits on the corner nearest where I sit and then puts her forepaws on my shoulders and tries to climb on. Suffice it to say, this is distracting. She's only done that to dodgyhoodoo the once, but she does it to me all the damn time. Cute, but seriously, I thought cats were supposed to be independent. Then again, it beats "I'll get up on The Man's desk because I know someone'll pick me up to get me off of it!" as an attention-seeking strategy.

Right. Time for shower and bed. Work tomorrow. And I'm typing this one-handed because I have an armful of cat.

So they've announced the dates for Dragonmeet. (3rd December, 2005 -- yay! More time than I thought I had to prepare Affils! Woo-hoo!) Well, at least, I think they have. It shows up on Google okay, but when I go to the Dragonmeet home page, all it says is "spykids ownz you". View-Source also reveals nothing but "spykids ownz you", so I suspect a hack-job. People are totally fucktarded. Plus the Kensington Conference Centre doesn't say anything about it, but it only seems to list events a month or so in advance. Feh.

Well, extra month notwithstanding, I keep a-working on Affils. Well, actually, I currently keep running around after the kitten, who's taken dodgyhoodoo's absence to mean that she can get away with damn near anything on the grounds of "The Man's not here! Waaaaaaaaaah!" (He's gone to visit his mother and I declined on the grounds of needing some head-space.) I've had to put his graphics tablet pen in one of my desk drawers because Yuki keeps using it and its base as a cat toy, and now she's taken to depriving Cthulu of his sacrificial jelly beans.

...sentences I never thought I'd say, but anyway...

I know she misses him, but that's no reason to be on crack. I miss him already and I'm not on crack. In fact, I've had the best night's sleep I've had in days, and if it hadn't been for Yuki pawing at the door and whingeing at half-ten this morning, I'd have slept in a lot later. Still totally knackered and want to go back to bed, but kitten will either whinge or pee on the bed. She wants to have me within sight at all times, apparently. I'm sure this will be better when she knows The Man is home.

I seem to have kicked something somewhere along the line. My left foot is bruised, swollen and hurts like unholy fuck. Now that the pain in my left shoulder has subsided, I feel it rather more acutely. Still can't remember where I got the injury, though. That really annoys me. That isn't just me, is it, who sometimes gets some sort of bruising injury and can't remember how?

Yuki is trying to eat the radiator. Yuki is daft. She has also demonstrated the "Pet-me Roadblock" manoeuvre, whereby she walks up to her target (in this case, dodgyhoodoo) as the target passes and drops herself right on the target's feet. But we love the little furry miscreant and she has stopped yowling for attention at three in the morning, so that's okay.

Watched Ginger Snaps and Hellboy this evening. Well, I fell asleep towards the end of Hellboy, but I caught the "You should be running" line, so that's cool. And Ginger Snaps is all kinds of fun. Must watch the borrowed subtitley things at some point in the near future. Well, it's not like I'm going anywhere tomorrow, what with the foot and everything.

Now I'm going to have a brief music listen and a poke-around online, and then I'm going to bed.

I still cannot sleep. I think it's the heat. I managed a couple of hours' worth of nap this afternoon, during which time dodgyhoodoo did about a thousand words of something sci-fi that he seems to think is crap just because he hasn't necessarily seen plot yet. Silly man. I think it's brilliant.

Did some writing myself. That can be seen on non_plot. My next step is to actually do something coherent, but at least with the community challenges, I keep myself in trim. I'll probably also try some of the challenges in the 'workshop' segments of the BBC Get Writing site because hell, if I'm going to ride people about actually writing, I'd be hypocrite of the century if I didn't do it myself.

I need to try to get some sleep. I don't know if I'll be able to function tomorrow if I don't. I tried the aromatherapy bath thing but only wound up feeling marginally less like someone replaced my vitreous humour with napalm.

Yuki peed on the bed. She's definitely home. She's now also being a total attention-whore with both of us, up to and including crawling into my arms because, after all, if I'm typing, I'm not petting her, and we can't have that.

Argh. I will try lying down and getting some sleep now. I don't think it'll work, though -- I seem to be too tired to even think about sleeping. Argh. Argh!