Laurie writes a blog

It's a long weekend here in Canada, and I took this afternoon off to add to it.  I'm catching the train to Belleville later this afternoon t go and join my friends D & R at their cottage for the long weekend.  Real downtime!

This is the view from their back deck, where I sit and watch bunnies and birdies and chipmunks and rest my urban eyes on refreshing fractal images instead of rectilinear ones for a few days.

It may look grayer and damper than this, since it's not predicted to be a sunny weekend, but it's still time away, with D feeding me fine stuff (she's chef-trained) and both of them thinking I'm a great guest because I don't expect them to entertain me. 

Speaking of decks, my kid sister provided me with these at the Mother's Day get-together.

Yes, the next seven books in the seafaring Aubrey/Maturin series, of which I've already plowed through one and a half since Sunday. I'm tempted to bring several and do nothing but read all weekend, but I'm also mindful of the great expanse of writing time the cottage offers, so I'll be working on the new novel, too.  And rewarding myself with virtual turns upon the quarterdeck with Jack and Stephen. 

We have all the conveniences up there except internet, so I won't see you peeps on Vox till sometime Monday.  Take care!

What is your deepest, darkest fear?
Submitted by [Susan].

What?  Last week my greatest sensitivity and now my deepest, darkest fear?  What exactly are you planning, Vox?

What are you most sensitive about? 

Oh, I don't know, Vox, how about intrusive questions trying to expose my sensitivies?

Tom's QotD:
Name three words or phrases you wish you'd coined:

1.  Fictioneer.  -- It's my word for myself as a writer.  I cribbed it from the Tommy Lee Jones movie, Nate and Hayes, where he plays a pirate.  I may have been the only person who saw this movie, so people do think I came up with the word myself.

2.  Cubic assload.  -- Gotta ditto Lauri on this one. TM Bobavey. An incredibly useful term for "humungous amounts".

3.  Batshit crazy.  -- Don't know the genesis, just know it works.

I have had some comfort food, a comfort movie and am feeling more human again.  So here are the photos from this morning, when I got to see Honey and her kittens at the vet where I brought the black feral cat this morning.  When I got there, this sign was on the door:

This isn't for Honey's kittens who were only born April 22, and are still in the nest. There were six five- or six-week old kittens running around the waiting area, four black, two gray tabby. Honey was also in reception, having a break from the kittens, so I got to pat and scritch her.  Then the staff let me go to the back and see the kittens in their cage/nest, and Honey went back in at the same time. 

She has two orange tabbies and two brown tabbies.  I tried to use my macro setting to get pics of all four, but the one brown tabby at the back stayed turned away, and the other photos weren't so great, but here they are anyway.

 

So I lug the black cat to the vet to be neutered this a.m.  Because he's a male, he got out the same day.  I cut short my lunch so I could leave early (on a hectic day where I'm still doing two jobs because the person whose been off for eight weeks, and told me she'd be back today, decided to take just one more day off).  I get to the animal hospital, lug the cat home (15-minute walk, heavy male cat), walk in the door to the phone ringing.  It's the animal hospital.  They forgot to give him his vaccines, can I bring him back.  Fuck!  Idiots!

Almost all the lift is out of my arms now, so I turn around and head for the streetcar.  And for the first time, ever, a driver hassles me because there's some rule no driver I've encountered has ever enforced about not taking animals on the streetcar during rush hour.  And I tell him that no other driver has ever been uptight about it.  He hassles me after I pay my fare, so I took the ride anyway (only four stops), with him berating me half the way for trying to tell him how to do his job.  Yeah, and thank YOU for the transit strike a week ago, dickweed.

So to go home, I was so upset and frustrated that I didn't even try to get on the streetcar going the other way.  If that guy had hassled me, too, I would have totally lost it.

I have kitten pictures from this morning when I dropped him off, because I saw Honey's kittens, but I'm so not in the mood right now.  My cats are pestering me to feed them and I've just about had it with cats right now.

Tonight we trapped the new cat, Lincoln, that showed up at the boxcar colony about two weeks ago!  Our strategy was perfection.  I last fed there yesterday so they'd all be good and hungry today.  My fellow feeders weren't sure he was still around, because no one had seen him since I saw him Tuesday a.m.  I thought he probably wasn't showing up because he didn't need to all week, because food was very plentiful, so he could eat when we weren't there.  So we tried anyway.  When we got there, the five familiar cats were all out front waiting to be fed, so Joyce, my trapping partner and the cat whisperer, went around the south side to a different feeding area to feed them wet food.  They will all eat with her a foot away, so we knew Lincoln wouldn't go there.  She fed them up so they wouldn't go into the trap after food and muck up the plan, and while I waited for her on the north side, the main feeding area, I saw Lincoln show up.  So I set the trap up with tuna for bait, Joyce came back to sit on the far stairs and wait with me, and he started sniffing around the wrong end of the trap.  Then he cruised over to where he could watch us from about ten feet away and see what we were up to for a few minutes.  We didn't move a muscle.  The he ambled about the whole north feeding area again, and by this time, some of the other cats were drifting over from the south side.  We were really anxious for none of them to start going for the trap, but luckily, what Joyce had fed them was enough for the moment.  Lincoln finally went to the business end of the trap, and we had him.  Total time from when I placed the trap to when we had him -- maybe ten minutes.  We are so good at strategizing this colony.

This is Lincoln about a week ago:

This is him looking for a way out of the trap.  Tomorrow he'll be neutered (I assume he's a he.  He has those big unneutered male cheeks.)

So with this trapping, once again, all the cats at the boxcars will be spayed and neutered!

This is rom the edits I was making today on the novel that's coming out in the fall, not the usual one I've been working on.  But I figure, hey, I spent time writing, I still get to post an FSotD:

“It’s kind of an urban legend thing.  You can’t Mapquest an urban legend.”

That is all.  I'm off to see Iron Man.

Further to my post Friday night about book news, I realized that if my book is now in the publisher's catalogue, it must have an ISBN number now.  Sure enough, it's right there, only I was so caught up in the other info that I missed it first time around.

So my official number ISBN 978-1-894917-66-7.  It doesn't bring up anything yet, if you google it or plunk it into an ISBN search function on a book site on the web, because they haven't pre-sold it yet (my understanding is the sales reps just recently got the info on it, and apparently are quite keen on the book).

I started saying last year that the only tattoo I would be likely to get, if I was so inclined, would be my ISBN number of this, and possibly future books.  It's a number that will always truly be associated with me..  Like how parents tattoo their children's names onto themselves, or Angelina Jolie tattoos the latitude and longitudes of the places her kids were born onto her arm.

Which reminds me -- another book I'm sure I'll never have enough time to write is sort of an Illustrated Man kind of collection of short stories about the stories behind some really out there tattoos that people all get from this one tattoo artist. 

Gotta go start my Sunday chores.  There's cats to be trapped.

My weekend to-do list is too heavy.  It's impossible to squeeze in a few chores, a little down time, and a bit of a social life.  It's also what I get for being in movie and Patrick O'Brian book withdrawal:

UPDATE: - I did pretty good.  All but the cheeseballs.

- yoga class

- grocery shopping

- phone and extend warranty on my laptop (tried, can't do till Monday, department not open on weekends) - DONE at lunchtime today

- unload dishwasher

- watch Master and Commander again

- read Saturday paper

- pick up mail and delivery notices at apartment of friend who's out of town (this just came up)

- go to movies with friend tonight (oh, great, it's raining torrentially out there)

- read Sunday paper

- cat trap at colony #2 Sunday a.m. for the last spayed female - unsuccessful.  She came out and ate a bit of tuna in the mouth of the trap, but didn't go in.

- try to fix up beginning of novel about to be published for per agent's comments (publisher hasn't provided any rewrite instructions yet) - made one of her changes, the only one I agreed with.

- try making the cheese ball recipe I dreamed about weeks ago, that then showed up in newspaper 

- Iron Man matinee with other friends Sunday 4 p.m.

- if unsuccessful on earlier cat trapping, cat trap at colony #1 Sunday evening for unneutered male, so spay/neuter appointment Monday a.m. doesn't go to waste - YESSSS!  VICTORY IS OURS!