Laurie writes a blog

A week or so ago I decided to get the H1N1 vaccine.  I have asthma and I'd been reading that of the people who wind up in ICUs with this flu, the worst hit are people with asthma.  I live alone and I don't want to be sick and miserable and alone, plus, I have a lot of travel (next weekend to see Cappy, plus US Thanksgiving and Christmas trips down there, too, plus some business travel) and I don't want to A) get sick from other people in airports and planes and large meetings, or B) be sick and potentially miss any of my Philadelphia visits.  No fucking way.  I'd rather spend a day in line than a week sick in bed, or in ICU. 

The vaccine wasn't out yet in Ontario when I decided, it's doing a very slow rollout, but they'd posted the upcoming hours of some vaccination centres and one was a couple of blocks from my office at a municipal centre call Metro Hall, starting next week.  Then, they moved up the date and planned one for yesterday at the same place.  From 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.  People in high-risk groups (including asthmatics) have been encouraged to get the vaccine, well, in fact, everyone has by the various government health bodies, but people NOT in high-risk groups have only been "encouraged" to let the high-risk people go first.  (Until a new bottleneck in production and distribution was revealed yesterday, now, as of today, vaccination clinics are only doing high-risk people.

I got to Metro Hall about 8:35 a.m.  I imagined I'd spend half the day there.  It turned out people were in line from about 5 a.m.  There were already about 650 people ahead of me.  If I'd walked over instead of taking the streetcar, there might have been 100 more in that 15 minutes I saved.  Here's what it looked like from my vantage point, the line snaking back and forth across a courtyard.

845 am

Being Canadians, the line was orderly and polite.  The luckiest people (aside from the ones inside) were the ones closest to the building.  Because it rained.  Showers on and off, and then a couple of right downpours over the morning.  At 11 a.m. Public Health officials finally came down the line handing out colored tickets for a particular time.  I got 1:00.

Purple ticket

That's the book I'm reading, Where Men Win Glory about NFLer Pat Tillman going to Iraq and the cover up over his death from friendly fire.  I didn't get a ton of it read in line, though, because in the rain, it was hard to juggle it and the umbrella in such a way that the book didn't get water dripped on it.

With the timed tickets in hand, some people left to come back.  I was among the first to get the 1:00 ticket, so I stayed in line, even though it was two hours (and likely longer) away.  I didn't want to come back and find 400 other 1:00 had come back to the line ahead of me.  What bugged me though, was that people could ask for as many tickets as they wanted (i.e. for family members at home who hadn't come to the line).  So one person who was ahead of me could get three tickets, and jump 2 additional people ahead of me, because the 1:00 people had to let anyone with a 12:00 ticket ahead of them, even if they hadn't been in line before.  That sucked.

It was about 1:00 before I got to the envied under-the-overhang spot.

Shelter

Sweet, because it poured rain again by then.  It was 1:45 before I got inside, then 2:45 by the time I got my shot.  I was owed some lieu time from work, anyway, so it didn't matter that I didn't get to work before 3:15.

My arm now feels like it's been punched, hard, but at least I got mine.  And the nurse, when I told her I wanted photos for my blog, let me hold up the process to get a good shot of the needle, and offered to take a shot of my arm after.  What a champ for a woman who'd been dealing with the flow of humanity all day, in the vaccination zone, also known as Screaming Baby Central.  These are good people working with far too few resources.

Here's a cat with a problem:

Josephine

Her name is Josephine, she's a sweet six-month old feral who was trapped for spaying and now turns out to be tame.  She loves to have her head patted and rolls around on the floor of the recovery cage in bliss when you do it.  I even had her in my lap for a few pats this morning.  Her problem?  Once again, there's no foster space and she may have to go back out on the street.  In a neighborhood where the kids are mean to the cats, and even threw glass at the cat trapper.

Here's a problem caused by a cat.

Gaaah!

Same thing different date

This carpet damage was done by Macaroon, who can shred this much in mere moments.  The top example is in front of the sliding door to my bedroom, where Sodapop was eating crunchies (Macaroon had finished hers) and she wanted in there.  The bottom damage was done outside my bathroom, where Chester stayed with me temporarily.  (Through a minor oversight, I had all but those two inches of the threshold barricaded, because I know she's capable of this.)   I live in a rental place.  These bits of damage are in opposite ends of the fully-broadloomed apartment.  Help!  Is there anyway to fix this kind of thing without me having to pay the landlord for all new carpeting when I move out?  Do any of my home-handy Vox neighbors have a suggestion?

Who me?

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A couple of hours in a coffee shop this afternoon got my mojo going on these polishes to my current novel manuscript (especially by having no free wireless internet accessible -- boy, does that help my productivity).  Here's my first FSotD I had this afternoon:

Jane being crushed low was like the felling of a great redwood.

Then there's one that's an in-joke.  I have a pitcher character (as I commented to cranky this week), and my agent wants me to put more physical descriptions of characters in the book (something I'm remiss on), so here's a line about him:

Stash was too busy checking his ego in a mirror, along with the progress of his most current misguided facial hair configuration—a straight stripe of goatee down the middle of his chin.

Yes, cranks, I decided in my mind's eye that this character, even though he's a pitcher, looks like Jayson Werth.  I was inspired after reading today that Werth has recently changed his walk-up to at-bat song from "Heavy Metal" by Sammy Hagar to "Sex on Fire" by Kings of Leon.  Very much aware of our pull with the ladeez, aren't we Jayson?  I couldn't resist, because I agree he's hot -- all except the facial hair.  All the Phillies except Chan Ho Park have very bad beardage and should shave them off now.

By the way, when I was checking the available networks on my laptop (a girl can hope), there was one labelled CrankyPants.  But it was secured, so I couldn't snoop and see who in downtown Toronto has stolen our cranky's handle.

Okay, back to it.  Gotta get more done before game time.  Go Phillies!

Team Vox just posted:

Today is Blog Action Day! Blog for Climate Change.

If it would change the weather where I am today, I'd blog till my fingers were bloody.  Oh, is that not what they meant?

Her name is Cole.  She's adolescent kitten sized, but she's 2 or 3 years old.  Look at that face!

Cole cat

She came to me (trapped by another trapper) a couple of nights ago.  She was spayed about a week ago and has turned out to be well on her way to socialization.  She lies in my lap and PURRS REAL LOUD.  She loves to be patted and squirms this way and that to enjoy it more.  She LOOOVES head rubs.  She is too sweet to be put back out to her colony, where apparently, kids in the neighborhood are mean to the cats.

When she came to me from another trapper to finish up her recovery, there was no foster space for her.  It was killing her trapper to contemplate putting her back out on the street.  Today, though, a spot has opened up.  Yay!

I just had to share her picture with you.

Usually I use Saturday for yoga and chores, and write on Sunday, but my yoga class is cancelled till we get out indoor space back again, and I'm going for a bite and a movie with Patricia tomorrow, so today's writing day by default.  I'm pleased to say I was at the computer, actually working, not surfing, by 10:07 this morning.  Go me!  And I already have a Funnest Sentence of the Day, to wit:

Valeria had been the most productive office employee on the planet till David taught her to play Solitaire on the computer and stop bringing down the world average on time-wasting.

My task today is working up more detailed backstories for the characters in the novel I recently gave my agent to read.  She likes the manuscript a ton, but wants the characters, who are mostly only seen in their shared workplace setting, to have a little more grounding, so I'm going to massage in more details from their backgrounds and home lives into the narrative.  Once I work them out.  This means I'm not racking up big word count, just conceptualizing and adding dribs and drabs here and there, like a painter adding highlights to a landscape.

I'm also trying to fight distraction, or more importantly, distracting myself from the job at hand.  Which means not baking the cupcakes I want to, not reading my new library book, not watching the TV show I recorded last night, limiting the Internet, getting off this Vox post kind of now-ish...

Chester, trapped three weeks ago, left my bathroom tonight for his feeder's house, where he'll spend the next week before he flies off to his new owner (the feeder's sister) in Nova Scotia. 

Here he was before, back in his feral colony, either stray or abandoned:

IMG_5731

Here he was, this morning, looking the epitome of the happy, placid, fond-of-human-attention housecat.  Which he totally is.

Chester 2

Good luck and happy travels, Chester! 

(The cat bed went with him, since he liked it so much.)

An excerpt from the new Winnie-the-Pooh sequel "Return to the Hundred Acre Wood" at this link.

I especially like the word "de-buttered".

I just printed out and filed into a manila folder, the latest e-mail on the "Paperless Office Project" that our IT person is trying to get going in my workplace.

I think she's got her work cut out for her.

Disclaimer:  Trust me, I'm very environmentally conscious in many other ways -- I walk everywhere, canvas bag my groceries, re-use plastic bags, recycle everything I can, use both sides of the paper (and take one-side used office paper home from work for printing there), etc.  But so many people come to me for so many things at work, this is how I need to organize to put my hands on stuff in a jiffy.  And I can't drag my computer with me to an out-of-office meeting.

But here are a few neat photos (not ooky closeups, so they're even Aubrey-safe).

There's a vast invasion of tiny little winged bugs around this city (and how much further, I don't know.  I've seen them caught in multitudes in cobwebs in every window.  This is outside my office window.

IMG_5786

One day last week, the weather was too warm NOT to open my window.  I have no screen so, this was the wall after about ten minutes:

IMG_5785

Here's a perfect dispersal of them across a spiderweb outside my bedroom window:

IMG_5791

On the weekend, a cobweb like this had been blown into a ball of spidersilk and little bugs to a dense, dark mass about thumb-sized and hung from one strand of spider silk off part of my bedroom window.  The wind kept it moving, which drew Macaroon's attention, and she tried for hours to bat it through the glass.  The wind was strong enough to even swing it all the way around a wide circle from its anchor point, and it didn't let go.  Not until rain came that night and weighted the bug ball down further did it drop off.

I don't even like bugs, but these things catch my eye.