Wow. Writing a story every day for Idol—and then TWO stories a day—chewed up so much time and energy that I haven't had a chance to make a regular post for weeks. Or do much of anything except stress, write, and eat too much. /o\

I made it into the Final 2, though, so soon it will be up to the Jury to decide. No idea how that will go. Apparently, someone has been spreading false rumors about me, which is sad and disappointing. I don't know who it is, or why, or whether they even know the rumors are untrue. I thought people knew me well enough to have a clear sense of what kind of person I am, but maybe not. As I said, it's sad and hurtful and strange. I'm grateful for the friends I have though, including the one who made me aware that this was happening in the background. ♥

So, what else has been happening over the last almost 3 weeks now? Well... WAY too much work. We had a deadline that was supposed to finish tomorrow and realistically should be about 2 weeks from now, so I've been flailing away at that. I went to bed at 2:30 last night, but it was for work reasons instead of Idol reasons. It's actually 2:30 again right now. :O I also haven't done our taxes yet. The whole month of April caught me by surprise, just like every OTHER month since the pandemic started. BUT, HalfshellHusband is now fully vaccinated against COVID, and I have my first shot scheduled in 2 weeks. So that's good news.

The Sunday before last, HalfshellHusband stumbled and fell inside the house (that happens). It hurt so much, he wound up going to the ER to make sure it wasn't broken, and luckily it was not. But he came back with the news that, because they'd done a CT scan as well as x-rays, they'd discovered he broke his right hip at some point. He wondered when that might have been, and I think it was when he fell off his bike (blacked out, really) a couple of years ago and broke his wrist. He fell right on that hip, and it hurt like crazy. He kept telling the doctors that, but none of the x-rays they did showed anything:

HSH: My hip really, really hurts.
Doctors: It's a groin injury. There's nothing wrong with your hip.
... time passes...
HSH: My hip still really hurts. It's been two months now!
Doctors: It's a really BAD groin injury. \o?

BTW, that is the hip that, about 6 months later, went from moderately arthritic to OMG, you need a replacement now! So yeah, I'm thinking that's when he broke it.

Fortunately, nothing was broken this time around. He was told it was deep muscle bruise, and by the next day, it felt a whole lot better. He was able to go biking that Thursday, and everything feels fine now. With his history of injuries, it feels like a lucky escape.

In other news, one of the Idol stories I wrote recently was about HSH icing his knees after bike rides and playing with the cat while he did that. And the fact that the cat now keeps running off with his toy and yowling. Well, this last weekend, the cat did that yowling at the front door, which is new for him. I opened it, and there was a creature on the doormat (yikes), and the cat came in all proud of himself for being such a mighty hunter. I called our son down to witness the lizard/snake thing Kashka had caught, and then while our son was petting Kashka inside the house, I went out to rescue his "kill."

It WAS a lizard—no idea where it came from, I've never seen one in our yard or anyone else's, and it wasn't the kind you find on the bike path. I picked it up to move it someplace safe, and it thwapped a foot down on me that was—eww—sticky. So I gently lifted up the foot, and a second later he thwapped it back down again. Ick. But also interesting. The whole thing reminded me of some drunk codger in a Western saloon, slapping the person next to him on the leg and saying, "Well, podner!" Anyway, I moved the lizard to the brick ridge that goes around the house, and when I went to check on him later, he was slowing crawling away farther along, and all four limbs seemed to be working fine. Thank goodness.

And the other minor surprise, apart from that, is that when I went looking for the cat before going to bed last night, I discovered that he was already curled up and snoozing in the laundry room. He had put himself to bed! We have had this cat almost two years, and in all that time he has NEVER put himself to bed. He sometimes maurauds around and howls (instant bedtime), or goes off and hides in a dark room, or hangs out with me on the sofa (usually that). But heaven forbid he should sacrifice being draped over my shoulder and snuggled all the way to bed every night. It was such a shock. Every other cat we've had has put itself to bed at night when it's tired. Though of course, the cat is right here on the sofa next to me right now, waiting to be carried off to bed as usual. ;)

All right, now it's finally bedtime for ME! But I at least I finally managed an update. Toodles!

Mouse Tales
idol survivor | daily-fic challenge, day 9, | 1470 words

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About a year and a half ago, HalfshellHusband (HSH) was diagnosed with arthritis in his knees. That, by the way, is the kind of crap your body pulls as you get older and it starts thinking about breaking up with you. It doesn't want the drama of a big, ugly discussion, so it goes the passive-aggressive route instead of talking things over like a grown-up.

The treatment for HSH's knees is to ice them for about 20 minutes after exercising. Since that left him stuck in the kitchen listening to music that whole time, I suggested he "mouse" the cat then too, since Kasha loves having someone work the catnip mouse for him and he never gets enough playtime.

(That last part isn't because we don't play with the cat, it's because he's never ready to be finished playing.)

The arrangement seemed to go pretty well for the two of them, although I found the mouse and its stick in the diet-soda cupboard in the pantry one day, and had to ask what that was about. HSH said the cat loved the mouse too much, so he hid it between play sessions to keep the cat from destroying it.

Meanwhile, the cat had gotten smarter about how the whole routine worked. When HSH returned from a bike ride, Kashka sometimes hopped up on the counter under the toy mouse's cupboard, just to make sure playtime would not be forgotten. After a couple of weeks, he skipped that part and just waited by the table for HSH to sit down. Soon after, he was able to wait without howling at HSH over and over to start playtime now. \o?

That was what I saw on the weekends, anyway. Then, the COVID pandemic started.

Suddenly, I was at home during playtime every day, getting a much closer look at some of the weirdness that had been going on when I wasn't around.

I would overhear snatches of conversation from the kitchen, things like, "Come on… No, you're not even trying. Do I have to take it away?"

If I went into the kitchen, HSH would complain that the cat was "hardly working the mouse at all." Sometimes, he would attach different toys to the elastic on the end of the stick, but then complain that the cat was mostly ignoring them because they weren't the mouse. Which I could understand, since the mouse was Kashka's favorite—obsessively so.

Between all that and keeping the mouse hidden in the cupboard, it started to seem as if HSH was involved in some kind of weird power struggle with the cat over that toy. Good grief!

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The Boy King
idol survivor | daily-fic challenge, day 3 | ~2135 words

^.^(__)~~ ^.^(__)~~ ^.^(__)~~

There is a cat-whisperer in our house, and I used to think it was me.

We are a family that really likes cats, and for years, that family was just HalfshellHusband and me. I move slowly and quietly around cats, and speak to them softly. If they seem shy, I'll let them sniff my hand before trying to pet them. From a cat perspective, this is the equivalent of being "wooed"!

I pet their heads gently, stroke their bodies firmly, and I understand the importance of rubbing the sides of their jaws until their eyes roll back in their heads. Yesssssss…

If I pick them up, I'll set them all the way down instead of tossing them, and I do not, for example, pat or whomp them as if they were dogs. Ahem. So, while all of our cats have loved HalfshellHusband, I was always the preferred human. This went on for more than twenty years!

But then, the dynamics began to change.

Our son was always an energetic child. When he was little, we'd drive North to visit my parents, and my Dad's idea of entertaining family usually involved chatting while he sat in his recliner all day. He was very sedentary, and even the adults found that limiting. So, there was usually a point each day when we gathered the kids up and went looking for a playground or a McDonald's Playland. Every time, my Dad would wonder where we were going.

"Out," we would say.

He was always surprised. "But why?"

We would point at our son. "To run the 'puppy.'"

This was a boy who was very much like a puppy. He was talkative, loud, busy, and on the move, and he needed and wanted a large amount of interaction. How could anyone with such a dog-like personality not be a dog person?

But somehow he was not, and he still isn't. He is most definitely a cat person.

All of that racket and restlessness fade away when he's near a cat. Suddenly, he's on their wave-length—quiet tone, gentle interest without being pushy, and the kind of soft, slow petting that most cats love. He "gets" them, and they know it. And they "get" him in return.

Here he is at age 12, with our little rescue cat Tigger. I was always Tigger's main person, but he was a close second. Tigger was very much a lap cat, but liked to sit sideways. That worked out well for our son—he was very accommodating. He would often sit on the sofa with his computer parked on a tall footstool and just lean forward across her to play his video games. The light squooshing probably felt like extra snuggling to her.



And here's a sick day in 2013, just a few months before we lost her. She was 18, and our son was devastated.



We didn't go looking for another cat until 6 months later. That trip to the animal shelter was where the game changed.

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--/--

We had an impressive storm here this afternoon—thunder, lightning, rain, and a lot of hail. Big-ass hail!

I've heard people talk about huge hailstones, but in all the places I've lived, the size only ranges from "rock salt" to "pea." Today was the largest I've ever seen—it was marble-sized!

The cat was unsettled by all of that racket, and decided to run around and howl (because that's fun for everyone), and then watch the storm through a window for awhile. I miss the house in Portland where I lived as a kid. It had two stories, and on the top story, there was an enormous half-circle window in the eating area next to the kitchen. That was the perfect place for watching storms, up above the forest level and with all of this big, open sky stretching out on both sides and running all the way to Vancouver. \o/

A couple of hours after the storm peaked, there was still some rain and hail going for awhile. My home office is in a corner room, and it's on the other side of a wall from a drainpipe. That gets noisy during storms, but today it was all,

BUM-BADA-BUM-bum-BUM-bum-BUM-bum! BUM-bada-bada-bada-BUM-bum-BUM-bum!

I felt like I was back at Disneyland, on my way to the Jungle Cruise or Tarzan's Treehouse or the Indiana Jones ride, just strolling through Adventureland and enjoying the escapism. That's certainly where I would rather have been, especially when yesterday marked the one-year anniversary of being sent home to work remotely. Boy, it's sure been a long year... :O

...because the wind is behaving itself for a change. It hasn't been a great week, let me tell you!

Friday would have been nice, but I spent all my daylight working on my Idol entry (which is here—please take a look and vote, if you can!) Yesterday was major wind again, so I continued my battle against entropy in the form of the gazillions of weeds in the garden. Not sure what's in store this coming week. I see warm temperatures again, like last week, but those may also come with obnoxious wind speeds because BOTH are signs of Spring being on its way. We don't get a lot of wind when Summer transitions into Fall, but entering Spring is always like this. It's annoying.

Saw this on Quora yesterday, and it cracked me up. I think it can best be summarized as ( Clickety!Collapse )


After I get back from riding today, I REALLY need to square away some of the half-finished projects in various parts of the house. Enough is enough.

And also find the next book to download on my Kindle, because the end of Deacon King Kong is looming, and it's time to go back to my library Wish List and see what's available and what to put a new hold on. \o?

...to stop putting so much ice in my water bottle when I go out biking. It's winter for crying out loud. At these temps, that bottle is self-refrigerating. *brutal brain freeze* :O

On Sunday's ride, my stomach started feeling a little upset, and that lasted clear through last night. I was pretty tired yesterday and this morning too, but better by later this afternoon. For the last couple of weeks, I've felt off and on like I've been fighting off an impending cold, but taking bunches of "magic green pills" (ecchinacea/goldenseal combo) has beaten it back. I think? I had trouble over the weekend with being too cold to sleep, which might have been a fever. \o?

I'm hoping it's all over and done with for good now. :O

I ran errands yesterday afternoon, and while I didn't find any good Xmas lights on sale, I did get half-price chocolate oranges (HSH and The Boy love them as much as I do). Most importantly, I went to Big 5 and got replacement tennis shoes! I was about to do that in March, but then everything shut down. It's always an ordeal, mainly because the store's shoe area is understaffed, so I never go on weekends or after working hours. I missed my chance right before Thanksgiving, but finally remembered this week. I don't love these new shoes, but the previous pair was coming apart, so I guess I can live with them...

Today, I got out the new cat-toy-on-a-stick I bought at Rite-Aid last week. Our little beast has been destroying its predecessor for months now--it's his favorite toy, to the point where we have to hide it in the cupboard between play sessions. He still knows where it is, though, and sometimes tries to sneak it out of there. But he finally ripped it to shreds and killed it, so we needed a replacement while I tried to fix the original.

I got the first twist-tie off of the new toy and was starting on the second when the cat zoomed over from across the house. It was like he knew. Boy, was he glad to see that thing. He is obsessive about playtime, and before HalfshellHusband broke his leg he would "mouse" the cat in the kitchen after bike rides while he iced his knees. He had the cat trained to wait until the ice packs were on, and to know that once the 20-minute timer went off, playtime was over. Because otherwise, this cat is NEVER DONE.

It'd been three months since there was major "mousing," so after I started using the new toy today, I realized about 15 minutes later that I would also have to set a timer, or the cat would never be ready to quit. Gah. While I set the timer, and then paused later to untangle the toy, the cat howled like there might never be playtime again! Good grief. And after the timer went off, he howled some more and tried to get on the table to look for the toy. Clearly, retraining is in order. :O

Meanwhile, tonight's project: the destroyed mouse was covered in a loose, coarse fabric the cat really liked (for the optimal fanging experience, I guess), and we didn't have anything like that around the house I could use for repairs. BUT... I remembered that we had some sort of Christmas gift-card holder in burlap I'd saved from a few years before, and that would probably work:

Gift-card bag          Dead toy mouse                     Deadest part of dead toy mouse. :O
     

So I tied the existing fabric over the exposed stuffing as best I could, and then used half of the little gift bag to patch the mouse. It won't last forever, but I'm hoping it will hold for awhile:



Yeah. Tada? \o?

ETA: Ooh, it looks like the repaired toy meets with Kashka's approval, so I call it a win!

Ouch the first: I was eliminated from Idol on Tuesday, and I'm still reeling from it. Such a shock—I'd hoped to make it at least another week or two, and I wasn't quite prepared. I was confirmed as going out at #10, but that's also the earliest I've ever been eliminated—including the first season I played! Still, the competition has been pretty fierce these last few weeks because there are a LOT of super-talented writers this time around. Plus, I found this season really hard, for some reason. I think the earliest I ever posted an entry was about an hour before the deadline, and most went up with only 1-10 minutes to spare. o_O

It was a great ride overall, though, and I think I got quite a few really good stories out of it.

Meanwhile, HalfshellHusband (aka rayaso) is still playing. He feels even worse about my going out than I do, but it's nice that he'll have the chance to keep shining. He always underestimates the quality of his work (though he's gotten better the last couple of years), so maybe this will help hammer the truth home?

Ouch the second: I found out yesterday that the original Banana Boat Baby 50 SPF Sunscreen has been discontinued, which is super-worrisome. It wasn't something I ever used on our kids when they were young (and probably wouldn't use on an actual baby), but it was my go-to sunscreen for my arms, neck, chest, and other areas that get relentless exposure while swimming or bicycling. The thick, tarry texture (it's almost like diaper cream) is annoying but is also what forms a really good barrier against the sun, and it holds up better against water and sweat than any other sunscreen. I sent our son to water polo practice with this stuff in high school, and his friends teased him about it at first but eventually started borrowing it, because it worked better than anything they had.

I have tried a LOT of other sunscreens (including other Banana Boat products), and none of them offer the heavy-duty protection I need for those more damage-prone areas. And this is SUCH a challenge in Sacramento, because it's so freakin' hot. Longer sleeves/etc. are not really a feasible solution (apart from the swim shirt I bought), because I just overheat. I grew up in Oregon, and my people are from Wales, so this is not the climate for me. I'm in better shape than my mother (who thinks 80^o is hot), but after almost 33 years here, this might be the best it gets.

So, now I have to start researching other sunblocks and asking other Palest of the Pale People what holds up against a UV Index of 10 or 11 for them. /o\

Ouch the third: I caved last night and Googled "How to get your cat to stop meowing." :( Our kitty spoke very little when we adopted him about a year ago (at age 2 or 3), but now there is epic talking and it is super-annoying. The Whale was like this too, but he was half-Siamese, so there wasn't much hope. Kashka, OTOH, has evolved his way into this behavior. He yells while making his way from one room to the next, or even while he's sitting right by you—including when you're already looking at him. A few months ago, the main annoyance was late at night, when I'd be half-asleep on the couch and he'd hop up next to me and moan in my ear. Piercingly. Now, it's all the time!

It's gotten much worse over the time our son has been home, and a lot of it involves the cat's pursuit of Boy Botheration. He's almost as obsessed with our son as Jinx was. :O

It turns out that the best way to reduce this behavior is to treat the cat like a toddler, and either ignore his vocalizing OR put him in another room and shut the door for a while (like a time out). But this also means retraining our son, who tends to respond this way because he thinks it's funny (which it is):

Cat: Mowr!
Son: Hi!
Cat: Mowr!
Son: Hi!

Our son is pretty good at applying his proto-parenting skills to the cat, but I think this will be a challenge for us all... :O

When you need to move your kitty, and it's all curled up into a nice circle of softness, do you

1) Nudge it awake and off of wherever it is?
2) Pick it up under the armpits or belly and lift it off the surface?

Or do you sometimes

3) Pick it up and move it in its circular form, like a fuzzy little dinner plate? \o?

Ours may be the only family that refers to that shape as a 'dinner plate,' but I'm betting we're not the only ones who sometimes opt to move the kitty "as is."

I may actually get a real update out later, but I wanted to spread the word about LJ Idol. there's a poll going on for which of a subgroup of Main-competition and Second-Chance players should move forward into the Main comptition. Voting is pretty close for some of them, so we could really use more readers and voters to help decide the outcome! The poll is here, and there are only 8 stories to read and choose from by 9pm EST tonight! Please help if you can!

Okay, off to get more caffeine. First workday after "Spring Forward" is always a challengggezzzzz...

This cat.

On Saturday, I was in the kitchen when someone came up the walkway and rang the doorbell. The cat popped right up on his hind legs in front of the picture window to see who was out there. Then he trotted to the door with me, assessed the visitors when I opened the door, and then went flailing all "Whoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hooooo!" past them out into the front yard like a lunatic. \o?

Then Sunday, a new low in cat ownership. Not as in, "This is the worst cat-related thing that's ever happened to me," but as in, "This is a new bleah I really could have done without."

He came to see me and paraded around for pets. Then he sat his rump down and I noticed a dead, half-shriveled worm stuck to his belly fur. EWWWWwwwww! I had to pry that off him with a Kleenex and flush everything down the toilet. And you know he must have just flopped down on that thing without even noticing it. Yark.

Monday, I nearly hit one of those Canadian geese I wrote about for LJ Idol last week. I was driving through the parking lot, singing along with the MP3 player, and I noticed something entering down into my field of vision. It was a fat goose belly with dangling legs and flapping wings. No idea why it suddenly decided to fly in front of my SUV, but I slowed down so it could get away. \o?

Speaking of Idol, sign-ups are open now for Second Chance Idol! If you've thought about playing but missed the first sign-up window in Septeber, or you byed-out or were voted-out too soon, now's your chance to get in the game! I hope to see some of you come back, and I would love to see some NEW people give it a shot. You can do it! People write fiction, non-fiction, poetry, all sorts of things. We have some amazing writers for whom English is not even their first language. That could be you! *tempts* *tempts*

And speaking of languages, courtesy of the New York Times Crossword (where I get all sorts of random facts), it appears that The Daily Show's Trevor Noah is fluent in eight languages. EIGHT! I'm sure some of those were learned in childhood, which is the best and easiest way, but still. I learned just two other languages from my teens onward, and I struggle a little with "cross-pollination" of vocabulary not just between those two but also from a bunch of other languages. Thanks to working in radio as a Classical music announcer for 10 years, I picked up a lot of random French and Italian words and a little Latin. The occasional Russian/Swedish/Norwegian/Czech/Hungarian stuff is less of a problem, but the others cause enough trouble on their own.

Instead of the parallel "word in language X" for something, I often get the "top-of-mind non-English word" instead. So, if I were working in German, for "left" and "right," I might come up with gauche and droite instead of "Links" and "Rechts." The German is still there, but the French jumps the line. Thank you, Satie, whose violin piece I practiced in college! \o?

I salute those of you who are truly multilingual and whose words obey you. :D

Howdy!
idol season 11 | week 7 | 1100 words
Feckless

x-x-x-x-x

Hi, I'm Kashka the cat, and I am super-cute. Look at my flippy ears and my silly little nose-dot! Is that thing adorable, or what?




I'm 3 ½ or 4 ½ years old now—nobody knows for sure. I was adopted from the animal shelter five months ago, and brought home to live with HalfshellVenus and her husband. My pre-shelter past is a mystery and I have the energy of a young teenager, so while I'm definitely not a kitten, I don't really act like an adult.

Did you know that all you need for a "cat stampede" is the sound of the thundering hooves paws of a single cat rocketing around the house like a maniac? No really, it's true. I do it every day!




I like my new home. It's warm and comfortable, and there are lots of toys for me to play with. There's no real pressure, either, because I really only have two jobs:

1) Be loving and cuddly and sit on laps
2) Police the property, and keep the squirrels and rodents away.

So far, I'm totally killing it on the first job, because I love people! Any people!

Alllll the people.

Halloween was great—every time the doorbell rang, I ran to the front door to see who was there! I love visitors. Visitors are my future friends! I like following the cleaning lady around when she's here, too. She's my buddy, even when she's pushing that noisy machine around the room.

I wasn't allowed to go outside for a long time after I moved here. I'd clearly been an indoor/outdoor cat at my old house (wherever that was), but my reintroduction to the outdoors was slow. The first few times I went out, I was on a leash. What a pain. Then I got to have a little supervised free time in the back yard for a couple of weeks, which was nice but much too short.

Finally, I was allowed to stay outside for hours one day while my people worked around the yard. It was amazing! I wandered around smelling everything and looking at all the plants. I chased bugs and played with leaves. Then I climbed a tree and got up on the roof, where I could see everything! I spent hours up there, and actually… could not figure out how to get down again. I had to be rescued. But I'm sure I'm not the first cat to make that mistake—or to get stuck in a tree over at a neighbor's house. Everyone does that, right? Of course they do!

Now, I've heard my people making these noises about the outdoors from time-to-time, things that sound like "rats and squirrels" and "crawl-space" and "attic" and "five-thousand dollars," or something like that. LOL, whut? Hey, whatevs, people!

As far as I'm concerned, the outdoors is for making new friends. I like to walk along the back-fence kitty highway to other people's yards, and see who's around. Sometimes, I'll go around to the front and look up and down the street. If I don't see anyone, I might wait outside a garage door or sit on a front porch to see if anyone comes out.

I have collar tags with my name and family phone number on them, so people can call HalfshellVenus or her husband to come and get me if I'm lost. Or if they think I'm lost, anyway, which is ridiculous. The first time, it was a nice lady about six houses away who was working in her garage. I hung out with her for a while, and then I followed her into her house, because why wouldn't I?

The second time was a man two houses away, who petted me and then carried me back to my front door and rang the bell (because my address is on the tag, too). I liked him so much, I went back to see him a few more times, and it was his tree I got stuck in. My family had to bring over a really tall ladder to get me down. HalfshellHusband was so embarrassed, he baked chocolate banana-bread the next day and took it over as an apology.

Just this last Friday, I explored the street around the other corner of the block. I met a nice man over there who called my family, and HalfshellHusband had to wake up HalfshellVenus so he could ask where the street was, because he's not very good with geography. I don't know whether I am or not.

I've gotten to know several of the neighbors, and now my family has, too. I get called back inside regularly to make sure I haven't wandered too far, but finding new people is one of my favorite things in the whole world. If I'm feeling really determined, I'll start looking right away. I am the Ambassador of Me!

I mean yes, I have a family who loves me and feeds me, and who would pet the socks off of me if I let them. I also have a huge yard to play in, with all kinds of interesting plants and places to hide, and I've even noticed a couple of other animals there, too. But why would I stay in my own yard and laze in the sun or keep intruders away? Who does that?

Boring cats who don't want to meet the entire planet, that's who. And I can't be responsible for the dumb choices of other cats!

I can't even remember the last time I was up on the roof. Once I learned how to get on and off by myself, I sort of lost interest. It's a madhouse up there now, with all sorts of critters racing around, but… meh. Why should I care? It has nothing to do with me.

I found a new neighbor yesterday, who became the fifth person to call my family to make sure I wasn't lost. Everything was great—I was sitting on my new friend's lap, enjoying myself and getting all sorts of pets. But then HalfshellVenus showed up to take me home, and I started growling. Not again!

Now I'm hearing new noises around the house, things like "busted" and "failure" and "indoor-only cat." I have no idea what they mean.

Meanwhile, it's a beautiful, sunny day outside. I'm looking out the window, watching the leaves shimmer and tumble as they fall from the trees. I can even see a fluffy little animal in one of those trees, chittering away and flicking its tail at me.

Ooh! I'll bet it wants to be my friend!

^.^(  )~~~

No voting link this week-- it's a contestant-only round.