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Aug. 5th, 2009 @ 09:32 pm You must also hear this: CATcerto.
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Nora the Piano Cat has been playing piano for some time on youtube, apparently. Mindaugas Piecaitis saw some of her videos, and wrote a quite lovely piece around them. 


It's under 5 minutes long, and all lovers of cats and/or music deserve to take a look.  Worksafe.
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Jul. 8th, 2009 @ 09:21 am Life update
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Haven't posted in much too long; my apologies!

Had a lovely super-long holiday weekend - my department decreed that All Regular Employees Shall Take Thursday Off to help us spend down our vacations.  So I spent Thursday taking a kitty to the vet (just regular checkup, no emergencies!), having lunch and hanging out with a work buddy from the Genome Center, rummaging at the library, finishing Chapter 2 of Paper Mario 1K-year Door, and generally relaxing.  (I was sorry to miss seeing [info]nezumiko  - hopefully next time she won't have the flu!)  Friday we both had off.  Um... we went skating, and I think we just hung out.  Saturday I did a pretty thorough vacuuming of the bedroom, which badly needed it.  Privet trees/bushes, to which I'm horribly allergic, are just starting to come into bloom, so anything I can do to lower the amount of allergens around is a Good Thing.  We spent the evening indoors with the kitties with the doors and windows closed, so the noise of the fireworks wouldn't freak them out too much.  Sunday I went to church, we skated again, I cleaned the living room/dining room, and finished Phoenix Wright 2.  (If you make the last couple of in-court choices wrong, you get a surprisingly detailed 'wrong' ending; much more interesting than the usual simple slamming of the courtroom doors.  The 'right' ending is, of course, even better.) 

We also finished reading Neal Stephenson's Anathem aloud to each other.  It definitely deserves its own post, hopefully I'll get to it soon.  For now, suffice it to say that it's a book that demands your close attention on pretty much every page, but is overall worth the effort the reader puts into it. 

Finally, a marvelous video ganked from kayray - College Humor's reworking of West Side Story into Web Site Story.  It's only about 4 minutes long, and extremely well done.  (Worksafe.)

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Jun. 18th, 2009 @ 09:22 pm I'm so proud of Mouse!
Current Mood: pleased
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You may remember about a year ago, shortly after we got back from China, Mouse Cat - the shyest of our bunch of five - had a burst abscess and a puncture wound.  With some effort, we got him in the house and to the vet, and he largely stayed scared for, well, some time.

That has largely changed.

The other night, he voluntarily joined us on the couch for some serious petting.  We have photo evidence to prove it!  Here's Mouse, hanging out with yours truly:

And here's a closeup of the kitty, showing just how pleased with life he is at present:

Yay Mouse!  (Now we gotta get you okay with being picked up and held.)

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Jan. 28th, 2009 @ 05:00 pm Blergh, part 2
Current Mood: sick
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( I'm sick. Cold details.. )

Huz is coming home soon!  And he's buying me English muffins, which are (is?) one of my "I have a nasty cold" comfort foods.  He was well enough to go to work, but is leaving an hour earlier than usual, for which I do not blame him.

Meh.  I'll get better, I will.

Fluffy is also doing rather better.  He saw the vet Monday, who found he had a fever and that the upper part of his favored leg was warm - consistent with a puncture wound, but no wound found.  Wonder if he got a spider bite or something.  He's been on pain medicine since, and is starting to put some weight on that foot.  So yay Fluffy.
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Jan. 25th, 2009 @ 09:19 pm Various and sundry
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( Life update: Cats, work, health, music, movies, videogames )
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Dec. 8th, 2008 @ 09:37 pm Kitty update
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Good: Mouse is inside again!

Bad: My left palm now has a 1.5 inch long memento of the fact.  With blood.  And pain.  Ow.
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Nov. 21st, 2008 @ 11:38 pm A question
Current Mood: puzzled and irritated
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A serious question, perhaps especially for[info]jab2 :

How do you re-convince a cat that the litterbox is a wonderfully acceptable place to eliminate waste?

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Aug. 7th, 2008 @ 02:11 pm Freaked-out kitty update
Current Mood: smitten
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Mouse has been doing pretty well!  His wounds are totally healed now.  Over the last few days, just about every time the huz or I have gone into the pantry to pet him, he's come out from his corner under the stepstool to curl and rub around us.  He enjoys being petted there so much that one feels somewhat guilty when the time comes that one actually has to go off and do other things. 

He's also started sitting under the dining room table in the evenings, sometimes of his own volition.  He doesn't feel nearly so comfortable there yet, though - whenever either of us tries to pet him there, he almost always scurries away to a different part of the table.  Which is still different from running back into the pantry; pretty much the only way we can get him to go back to the pantry for the night if he's sitting under the table is for both of us to approach him at once.  That freaks him enough that he runs.  I'm rather sorry that that's what works - oh well.

There have been a few occasions when I've petted him that he's very gently gnawed on my fingers to show that he likes me.  This morning, for the first time ever, he licked my fingertips when I was petting him!

*melt*
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Jul. 21st, 2008 @ 07:15 pm Kitty update
Current Mood: hopeful
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     It turns out that Mouse Cat has not one but two injuries.  The one we could see was basically in his right armpit.  The vet says that that one actually is starting to heal up pretty nicely.  But there's another puncture wound in the same limb, close to the elbow, where the puncture penetrates muscle, that the vet's less happy about.  She wants us to watch it for a few days; she thinks it'll heal by itself and she really doesn't want to have to stitch it if she doesn't have to.  So all that is at least tentatively good.
    Another distinctly good thing is that veterinary medicine has advanced since the last time antibiotics were prescribed for any cat of ours.  The usual practice is to give the cat two doses of Clavamox (dosage adjusted for weight, which for big cats like Bernie and Fluffy can mean 1.5 large pills) daily for 10-14 days.  This was going to be oh so much fun with poor little Mouse, who is semi-feral.  To my great joy, there's now an injection that can be given!  I don't know how it works exactly, but it's effectively a 2-week dose of antibiotic.  No pilling Mouse!  Happiness!
    The vet says that Mouse has been simultaneously very brave and too terrified to move.  This is completely in keeping with what he was doing earlier when I saw him with the vet briefly.  He really is a good sweet cat.
    He's home now, back under the futon.  But he's closer to the edge of it than he was this morning, and is currently in much more of a 'cat at rest' position than a 'cat in panic mode' position.  I think he's going to be ok.  :)
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Jul. 21st, 2008 @ 09:10 am Partial success!
Current Mood: determined
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We have a freaked out, semi-feral, injured kitteh INSIDE the house!  He's hiding under the futon being real quiet, but he's inside!  (We figured that this was probably a good prelude to getting him inside the carrier so that this nasty abscess under his right forearm that I discovered - sigh - Friday morning can be looked at.)
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Feb. 12th, 2008 @ 10:49 am More various and sundry
Current Location: work
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Jan. 4th, 2008 @ 01:46 pm Mmm. Tasty.
Current Location: work
Current Mood: damp but cheerful
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We did a great dinner last night.  One of the huz's high school buddies was in town, and we had him over.  Below follows the scrumptious - and easy - pasta recipe we served.  I should note that this is about the third revision of the recipe it's seen in our family since it was originally published in Gourmet magazine around 30 years ago.


We served the pasta with a green salad and Italian bread, and finished up with some of our Meyer lemon ice cream.  Danged good dinner, if I do say so myself.  :)

I'm expecting to hear back from the vet with a time to come pick Tazz up anytime.  The bronchioscopy started a little later than planned due to the arrival of an emergency case, and I got a call around 2:15 saying that the procedure was just getting started.  From talking to the doctor yesterday, I know that the procedure itself is pretty short - 15 minutes or so - with a couple of hours of waking up and being observed after that. 

It's very very wet out here at the moment, and I just got a call from [info]nezumiko, who lives about a mile away from our house, saying that her power's out.  So our power may be out too.  Huzzah for well-charged batteries in portable game systems, say I!
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Dec. 8th, 2007 @ 11:19 am Catly pondering
Current Location: home
Current Mood: curious
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The outdoor cats have their very own water dish, out in the garage. 

Yet despite the fact that I try to keep it filled with fresh, clean water (with mixed success, due to the fact that the coons like to play in it!), we regularly observe the outdoor kitties drinking from other sources, including pools of rainwater that has collected in various places (empty flowerpots, dirty saucers under occupied flowerpots, on top of the old hot tub cover) and dew (particularly off the anodized cast-iron porch furniture and new hot tub cover).

Admittedly, because their official dish is in the garage, we can't observe whether they drink from that or not.  But given the proximity of the water dish to the other sources of water that they drink from, my conclusion is that they prefer these distinctly not-clean sources of water.  Why is this, I wonder?
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Jul. 27th, 2007 @ 08:47 am Bleh, and cuuuuuute!
Current Location: home
Current Mood: sleepy
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Bleh: Still not feeling all the way better. Getting tired of being tired! On the other hand, I was able to get to work yesterday and get stuff done (with a 35-minute lie-down when I got home) AND go for a 15-20 minute walk after dinner.  So I must be getting better, right?

Cute: So as most of you know, we've got five cats at the moment: Tazz (my usual userpic), Billie (she's chipped and inoculated and everything now!), Fluffy, and Fluffy's remaining two children, Mouse and Callie (we were able to get the other three adopted when they were kittens).  Mouse is named for his temperment; he's quite skittish, and his general inclination is to run whenever he sees a human.  He will approach if he sees there's petting or food to be had, though.  Anyway, last night I was petting Mouse, reaching under him to his belly with both hands.  After a little while, he rolled over on his back and let me pet him on his tummy!    It was soooooooo cuuuuuuute... :)
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Mar. 13th, 2007 @ 03:42 pm Assorted animals and the weekend
Current Location: work
Current Music: random Spanish pop.. not by choice, mind you
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Two on the gaming scene, and one in real life.

Gaming 1: The Game Developers' Conference (GDC) was held last week. There were a number of things that looked pretty darn cool (like Mario Galaxy, which looks like the first true 3D platformer, and LittleBigPlanet, in which players can design platformer levels for other online players to mess with - the game has been described as 'a big toybox'). But I have to say that the very neatest thing was the demo trailer on this page demonstrating one of the key concepts for the upcoming Fable 2 RPG for the (sigh) XBox 360. In this half-hour video (don't say I didn't warn you!) Peter Molyneux demonstrates the bit with the dog. The dog is a fantastic bit of AI that, well, acts very doglike. And he loves the player totally and unconditionally. It's a wonderfully cool-looking thing.

Gaming 2: In Zelda, I figured out the business of getting a fish to the cat! The solution struck me as a bit less straightforward than it really ought to have been; perhaps the game developers just really didn't want to let Link equip a fish. (Can't imagine why not. Maybe they're waiting for the Monty Python/Zelda crossover game.) Anyway, Link now has all kinds of neat toys as a result! He's got a half-full bottle of milk (the huz is jealous; in Ocarina, he's found a potion shop, but the shop will not sell stuff unless you have your very own bottle in which to store the potion), a slingshot (and *enemies* all of a sudden - convenient that none happened to be about till a weapon was acquired), a sword, and - woo woo - a lantern. Now Link can finally find out what the heck he's got in his basement. Surely the kid lost in the forest will be fine while Link goes home and finds this out, right?

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