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ShinyHappy - Thoughts for August 3rd - 15th
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08/15/05 News flash! Mongkut is still bad!
Most often when I'm confronted with a news page that requires registration I don't do it. Not because I'm terribly worried about anyone out there having my information, but because I'm a lazy person who doesn't want to have to type all those things in with my delicate fingers. So, I go back to the Google News from whence I came (who gleefully feeds my browser cookies) and simply click on the next link regarding the same thing. It's usually non-subscription and I get my news. Today I stumbled upon BugMeNot.com and was for a moment thrilled. Until I realized that you have to feed it a URL, then copy and paste the info it gives you into the registration site. That's just as much effort! Argh!
Obviously it wasn't designed for those like me, the indolent and lazy, it was designed for those who are concerned about their personal information getting out there into the wrong hands. Since I am not a felon, I don't care as much, I guess. And sometimes spam almost feels like real email.
I'm kidding about the spam. Seriously.
Today I had a lovely afternoon visit with Jen at Bridgehead, where we drank fruity tea slushies and talked about life, the universe and everything. Almost. The slushies are basically the same thing as the Tiamos that The Second Cup serves, but I assume the Bridgehead versions are made with organic ingredients, which makes them more enjoyable in their cold, yummy fruitiness. I managed to give myself a severe brainfreeze with mine, though. Anyhow, Jen and I started our visit inside the coffee shop, but since the air conditioning was making Jen freeze down to her marrow we moved outside where we sat in the shade for a long time and yakked. It was lovely. I'm loving the not-quite-as-stupidly-hot weather we're having. It's now the normal-for-the-time-of-year weather and I likey.
Mong likes it too. He was extra bad today. While I was out with Jen Mong taught himself to open another of the kitchen cupboards, making the aquisition of child-proof latches even more necessary. For a while now we've had the wooden stepstool sitting in front of the cupboard he'd originally been opening, but he figured out today that he can move the stool by himself. So his horizons are expanding, unfortunately. While I was watching CSI tonight he kept stalking me on the sofa, too. I'd see him peeking at me around the end of the sofa, then a minute or two later he'd suddenly lunge up and bite my legs or arms or whatever was closest. I've learned that my best defense is to grab a sofa pillow and beat him with it, but he always comes back. He's not so bright.
Here he is after he'd sated himself on my flesh:
I think his eye infection is coming back in his left eye. It's a good thing we still have lots of eye-drops left from the last time.
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08/14/05 I forgot to ask if she put a steak on it.
Tonight I was talking to Jerome on the phone when I got a long distance call-waiting beep. It turned out to be Alannah, who had called to tell me something exciting. She'd gone four-wheeling this weekend! And that wasn't the exciting part! The exciting part came when she bounced her face off a tree branch or something (while four-wheeling) and gave herself a black eye!
I was already laughing when she told me she'd been four-wheeling, since I honestly can't imagine La four-wheeling any more than I can imagine her voluntarily babysitting a hyperactive border collie for a fortnight and that's something that's about as unlikely as a total eclipse of the sun and moon at the same time. I had to move on to laughing even harder when the part about her face and a tree branch was revealed, although I swear I asked her if she was O.K. through my giggles. I really do care, you know! Poor La. She said that she even laughed at the time despite her ouchies. Now it's turning into a real shiner and she was wondering if it was better to try covering it with makeup or just going to work with it hanging out for everyone to see. I said that covering it wouldn't work all that well and people would ask about it anyhow, so why not just go disfigured and deal with it?
I never claimed to have a great bedside manner.
This weekend I decided that I wanted pancakes, so I went on a hunt for a good pancake recipe that doesn't use eggs. Now, our superfantastic good-cooking friend Dan makes awesome egg-free pancakes, but I felt the need to develop my own personal recipe instead of just sensibly asking him for his delicious recipe. It's a matter of pride in being able to cook for my egg-allergic fiance or some such silliness. Anyhow, yesterday I hunted down a site with a million pancake recipes and settled on one that looked pretty good. It was for griddle-cakes of some kind, and you can't go wrong with something that sounds so griddled and cakey, can you? I mixed it up, using some yogurt and a wee bit of extra butter in place of the egg. I thought that the batter seemed pretty thick, but it made good-looking pancakes. Really tall ones that didn't want to cook in the middle so much. Sigh. We ate them anyhow and I determined to try a different recipe that was just called something sedate like 'basic pancakes'. Which I did. Today.
Thankfully, this one turned out way, waaaaay better! I tweaked it so that it was the consistency of what I think pancake batter should be and I decided to mush a banana into it to take the place of the egg. It worked fabulously and I think that now we are sick of pancakes for a bit. Or at least I am. This recipe made a lot of batter and so when we were full I decided to make the rest of it into pancakes to heat up later on rather than go through all the cooking again. I got so sick of pancake making, though, that finally I just poured the rest of the batter in the frying pan and made a gigantic pancake. Like, a huge one. It took up an entire plate. It turned out great, though. I think it was perfect for Marcus. You hear that, Marcus? Next time you come here I'm making you eat giant pancakes.
If you read this far, thanks for reading about something as boring as me making pancakes. You must really love me!
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08/12/05 He is a purebred, after all.
I, like many people, am fascinated by egg-shaped things. I like them. They have a particular aesthetic appeal with their neat shape and simplicity. Art that uses egg shapes appeals to me; hence the polymer clay eggs that I enjoy making. Whenever I read about egg art or stumble across it online I tend to study it and try to glean ideas of my own from it. Today, however, I discovered a style of egg art that I intend to leave alone.
I'm sure that the artist finds her creations incredibly satisfying to produce. Judging by the number that are 'adopted' or sold, many others find them just as appealing. I ... don't. See, eggs are appealing. Newborn babies? SO appealing. Putting them together to create Egg Babies just crosses some kind of line for me. The artist is obviously a genius at sculpting the human form and captures that tiny, curled-up, brand-new quality of a newborn absolutely perfectly. Looking at them you'd expect to see them sigh or grimace or twitch. The size of them, however, and especially the picture of one held in the palm of a normal-sized hand just screams PREEMIE to me and I can't help but picture them in incubators. Not good! She also makes Shell Babies, some of which have pearls in their belly buttons which is WRONG. I will admit that on the Shell Baby page there is a particular baby named Pia that is stretching and yawning and it made me issue forth an involuntary 'awww' noise, but I still wouldn't buy it. Nuh uh.
Anyhow, I am very interested in exploring other types of egg art, like eggshell carving. The problem is that this could be very, very bad for Andrew. I think that breathing in eggshell dust would be a lot worse for him than it would be for me, and eggshell dust is something that even non-allergic people aren't supposed to get in their lungs, especially when carved with a dremel. If just handling eggshells gives him a rash I'd hate to see how his lungs and esophagus react! To do that having a private studio would be a necessity, not just a luxury. I'll have to see what else I can do that's eggy that won't send Andrew to the emergency room.
I decided that Mong was missing out on having his Harry Potter personality test done, so I asnwered the questions based on his particular personality (which is entirely id driven). His results:
You scored as Draco Malfoy. Spoilt and proud, you place high value on the purity of wizard blood and look set to follow in your father's somewhat shady footsteps.
Draco Malfoy
90% Sirius Black
80% Albus Dumbledore
75% Harry Potter
75% Lord Voldemort
70% Ginny Weasley
65% Severus Snape
60% Ron Weasley
50% Remus Lupin
50% Hermione Granger
40%
Your Harry Potter Alter Ego Is...?
created with QuizFarm.comI'm not surprised at all. Although I'm somewhat disheartened to see that he scored next highest as Sirius Black. Hrm.
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08/11/05 You, too, can get syphilis! For only $6.25!
I did a quiz today to see which Harry Potter personality I am. I'm not entirely displeased with the results, overall:
You scored as Sirius Black. You are a gifted wizard and very loyal to your allegiance. Whilst you have a big heart and care very much about those around you, you can be a little arrogant and reckless at times.
Sirius Black
70% Ron Weasley
65% Remus Lupin
60% Albus Dumbledore
60% Harry Potter
55% Hermione Granger
50% Severus Snape
50% Ginny Weasley
50% Draco Malfoy
45% Lord Voldemort
20%
Your Harry Potter Alter Ego Is...?
created with QuizFarm.comI feel good about all the evil and possibly evil being far down the list, although being Snape wouldn't have bothered me too much. I'd be very interested to know how my friends do on this quiz. (hint hint, nudge nudge, DO IT NOW! [Um, please?]) As for the arrogance thing ... well ... I do always claim that I'm right. Andrew also claims that he knows everything so at least we're on equal footing.
I haven't pointed out yet that I have a tiny index page that links all three of my sites. I decided the other day to get my desktop tiles page working again since all the image files were on Andrew's G4 and he's not using it so much these days. I'd figured out that it would be very easy for me to do it this time since my image browser program generates html pages for groups of images in a very handy way. And I have a cool search and replace program that did all the hard work of changing the source address of the images for me. It took just a couple of hours to do what used to take me at least a day. Nice! I used to tout the graphics more as website backgrounds than desktop tiles, but it seems that nowadays people aren't using background images so much any more. Plus, tons of these are really too busy to use on sites unless you're using coloured tables and whatnot. Anyhow, I'm still all puffed up and proud of these because I made them all myself from scratch using Paint Shop Pro and nothing else. They're seamless so they work nicely as desktop tiles.
Someone tipped me off about this awesome site today! I was so excited to see it. It's educational and fun! For those too lame to click, it's a site that sells stuffed plush toys of various microbes. The best ones include; ebola, the common cold, bad breath and (my favourite) the dust mite. The dust mite is so adorable! I want a dust mite! Other than the ones I already own since they're too small to play with. I also think that Mong would thoroughly enjoy the ulcer with its delightful strands of ... whatever they're strands of.
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I called Jerome on the phone tonight and said 'car'. He was thoroughly unimpressed, seeing as how my pronunciation is more 'kär' than 'cahhh-rrrrrr'. I said some other stuff with 'ar' at the end to make sure that it wasn't a fluke, and it seems I'm not a mispronouncing freak of nature. HAH!
Or maybe Jerome pronounces it the same way I do, which possibility I suppose I am also open to. We'll have to get him to say it for May and if she mocks him pitilessly we will know for sure. I don't think that Jerome gives Smooches Of Punishment, but he might have his own system.
It was dumb stupid hot today. I was going downtown and rather than walk in the hotness I took a bus, and in the end I think I'd rather have walked than experience what I did. Firstly I had to wait a while for the bus, so I stood and baked for a while, feeling the sweat running down me in a most icky way. I tried to stand in the shade of the streetlight pole at the bus stop but it didn't help much, I admit. When the bus came I was glad as I figured it would be air conditioned. I was wrong. It was not air conditioned and there were so many people on board that we stood crammed against each other like sardines. The windows were open, but it didn't feel like they were. I thought I would faint before I got to my stop. Thankfully I did not, but I was imagining that nobody would know if I had, it was so packed. The bus I took back home wasn't anywhere near as crowded, thankfully, and was much more comfortable. I really, really wish the O-Train ran all over town.
We've been discussing the possibility that Mong is beginning to get a bit more mellow as he ages. The other possibility is that we're indulging in wishful thinking. Lately, though, he hasn't been trying to get out of the apartment door quite as much. And today he chose to snuggle on my belly for almost five whole minutes, which is unheard of in Mongland. For the rest of the day he tried to put the lie to our suspicions by being rambunctious, even in this heat. He attacked me numerous times and went on a bit of a play rampage a little while ago. He was being pretty amusing so I took a couple of pictures.
First we have him in the process of divebombing poor octopus. Octopus had no idea what was coming:
And then the kill. This one is also for Colin to puzzle out where Mong's head is in relation to his butt:
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08/08/05 Beware the wrath of Keltie!
Well, fateback.com suddenly got on my nerves with its ugly old banner ad, so I shopped around for something else that's cheap as free without the intrusive advertising. So far, so good. We shall see if it works out. If not, I can go back to my old digs at fateback, since other than the banner ad they've been rockstars of free webhosting. In the end all I can say is thank heavens for search and replace programs! And WS_FTP!
Let's see ... today was another hot one out there. Andrew and I do try to only run the air conditioner when it's stupidly stupid out, and today was one of those days. So we hung out in the bedroom when we could to take advantage of the cooler air in there. Doing this inevitably means that Mongkut will make his way in there and start playing. Playing with us, with Andrew's work papers, with the monsters under the bed ... with pretty much anything and everything. It's cute, but at the same time annoying, especially when he's doing something noisy. At one point he was killing an envelope under the bed, and that kind of thing is noisier than you might think. Anyhow, the time also inevitably comes when one of us will get totally sick of Mong's brattiness and give him trouble for it. For Andrew, this means grabbing one of his slippers and waving it at Mong. Mong will scoot away temporarily, then return and resume his antics.
I have one tactic that I don't employ every single time. If I did I'd have a lot more Mong-related scars than I do. I can only use this particular form of discouragement when Mong is rowdy but not spazzing out totally. What I do is grab him, hold him in my lap, pin his front paws and give him the Smooches Of Punishment. Mostly the Smooches are for the top of his little head, which makes his ears flatten down in a pleasing manner and he looks totally pathetic. Today was perhaps the first time that Andrew witnessed me giving Mong the Smooches Of Punishment, though, and he was absolutely horrified. I have seen this man chase Mong out of a room while wildly flailing a ratty sheepskin slipper over his head. I have seen him hold the cat upside down while laughing maniacally at him as he waits to see what happens next. I've seen him shut him in drawers, close him in cupboards, wrap him in blankets and tie tin cans to his tail. I have witnessed all these things (well ... not the tin cans; they were just a joke), and yet somehow the sight of me giving the cat kisses on his head seemed the most horrible punishment conceivable. He said, "Stop doing that to the poor cat!" I don't know if I've ever heard him speak with such intensity of emotion since the day he proposed.
So I stopped. But I will do it again. And now it seems I might have a new punishment for Andrew, too! Ha ha ha!
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08/07/05 It seems we're making the most of summer.
It's been a pretty nice weekend here in the Glebe. Yesterday Andrew and I went to his grandparents' place to visit with them, his parents and two of his great-aunts that were visiting from England. It was a lovely, sunny day so we sat out in the backyard, drank lemonade, watched Andrew and his dad swim and chatted. I wore my straw hat, furthering my efforts to become more hat-friendly.
I expected that we'd spend the remainder of the day quietly at home trying to stay cool, but was pleasantly surprised by an invitation from Colin and Jen to go to the cottage with them for an evening swim and barbeque. I'd been saying to Andrew earlier in the day that I could hardly wait to get back out there and, lo! There I went! It was awesome to get back into the lake and cool off, and even more awesome to hang out with Colin and Jen, eating fantastic food and drinking delicious drinks. Good times! There were a few moments of anxiety when we could not find the entire bottle of vodka that Andrew and I had accidentally left there after the long weekend (laying the blame for its disappearance entirely at Colin's brother's feet), but it was eventually discovered and I was able to enjoy a nice vodka and Sprite. Aaaah.
We got home late enough that I was too bagged to do any weblog-writing, but it's been amusing to me to watch the gradual separation of the bubble tea drinkers and the bubble tea haters in the comments from my last entry. Jerome went and did some personal research on bubble tea and provided me with a few education links for those interested. This first one gives The History of Bubble Tea (which nicely explains the tapioca pearls), this second one gives an alternate explanation for the bubbles. The last one is a FAQ that I like because it also explains about coconut jelly, an alternative to tapioca pearls. Thank you, Jerome, for your hard work!
I admit I was a little taken aback at my first reading of the description of coconut jelly, which reads: "Coconut jelly is another texture component and is made from coconut juice and meat." I was all, "Whaaaa? That's gross!" And then I was like, "Ooooooh. Coconut meat. Right." I am not a total dummy.
Today was a hot one, but Andrew really wanted us to go for a walk and enjoy the sun and fresh air so we went for a beautiful stroll along Patterson's creek and along the canal to Somerset street. It was totally worth it to go out and brave the possible resulting future malignant melanoma, and I even tried wearing my hat again, although the wind was a bit too strong and kept lifting it off my head. I eventually gave up and just carried it. I tried! We stopped at Hartmans to do a little grocery shopping and buy a bottle of water to cool down with, then came home. Before we left for our walk a woman in our building caught us at our door and made a huge fuss over Mong, telling us that she always talks to him under the door and has been wanting to meet him. No wonder he spends so much time screaming at people in the foyer. Some of them talk back!
It's very rare that I get pictures of Mong where his blue, blue eyes show up at all. Our apartment is kind of dim no matter what, so I have to use the flash on the camera. That means that all of his pictures do this:
I caught him snuggling Andrew's iBook on the bed the other day, though, and managed to get a few pictures of him with mostly non-demonic eyes:
He's so handsome and techno-savvy!
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08/04/05 My brain is host to a parasite colony, it seems.
I got a phone call this evening from my lovely sister Alannah. La was calling to inform me that while she was in Toronto for the last few days she decided to go to Greg's Ice Cream to see if they had any licorice flavour. They did not, so she left but noticed that there was a bubble tea place next door. Now, Andrew and I have visited that bubble tea place and I think it serves sub-par bubble tea. Alannah, not knowing this, decided that since I've gone on and on and on about my love for bubble tea she would try it for the first time and see what all the fuss was about.
Her report is that she took one sip, spit it out and threw the rest away. She thought it was that gross. I do not understand how the goodness of bubble tea (even sub-par bubble tea) can be so gross to someone else that they literally spew it out of their mouth as soon as it touches their tongue, but this appears to have been the case with La. She also expressed concern about the colour of the tapioca bubbles. It disturbed her that they were brownish-black and not a light colour like you find in everyday tapioca pudding. I don't know why this is, but it reminded me of a conversation that Andrew and I had almost exactly a year ago on August 8th concerning bubble tea bubbles and their similarity to bunny poop. Check it out and see.
I saw this old but bizarre article online today. It's about cats and toxoplasmosis. It's a parasite that cats carry and it appears that it causes changes to the human brain that actually alter personalities, contribute to mental illnesses and delay affected people's reaction times, making them more susceptible to car crashes.
Wow.
I'm pretty much screwed by this point if it's all true, so I just won't think about it. It doesn't hurt at all, I swear! Well, it doesn't cause actual pain to the brain, anyhow. Having a cat can be very painful at times. The tracework of scratches and slices all over me and Andrew bear testament to that.
We now have Mongkut more into decaffeinated Coca Cola than the caffeinated kind. See:
He doesn't seem to be any less freaky as a result, unfortunately. Even in the punishing heat we're experiencing he still musters up the energy to dash around as much as he can, attacking ankles, leaping at flies, falling in his water dish after leaping at flies and just generally being an exuberant, life-loving kitty. His entertainment value is high.
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08/03/05 Mong is odd and unholy.
We got back on Monday from our lovely, lovely weekend away at the cottage. It really was fantastic. Spending time with many of our fabulous friends in an idyllic setting is a pretty awesome way to relax, I must say.
Hisani and Wade spent Friday night with us. They arrived at close to 1:00 a.m. and when they got here it turned out that Wade is allergic to cats. Which meant, of course, that Mong looooooved Wade and wanted to be his friend. Hisani loooooooved Mong, though, so he got lots of attention from her. Mong also loooooooved Wade's packpack which wasn't very endearing since the last thing Wade wanted was lots of bratty cat dander all over his stuff. We had to lock Mong out of the living room where they were sleeping which offended him a bit, but worked quite well in the end.
The next morning was great for Mong, though, since Hisani and Wade vacated the futon mattress they'd slept on and Mong got to take it over, which he did pretty much immediately. He thought it was really there for him, I guess. He and his octopus had some quality time on the futon:
So Saturday we (all twelve of us that went) made our way to the cottage where we spent our time eating wonderful food, having wonderful conversations, soaking up the sun, swimming in the lake, watching fireworks, participating in the talent show and generally enjoying ourselves almost to death. Many were still reading the most recent Harry Potter book so there was lots of discussion of that, and a really cool point where Hilary and I geeked out like crazy over Star Trek: The Next Generation. I won't go into details of the total obsession we both have a similar shared history of, but I think I might have trumped her at one point. I used to own an insignia. Really. And if you don't know what that means, you're not a Trekkie.
Now, I was stressed out about what my talent would be this year. I realize I have talents, but none that translate well to talent shows. Making hairsticks and masks and weaving things on a bead loom are not talents with a lot of potential for spectator amusement. I worried that this might be the year that I got tossed in the lake. I recalled at the last minute, however, that last year someone brought apple pie as their talent so I figured that I could do something similar. I decided to make fudge. I used to have a recipe for easy fudge that always turned out perfectly so I hunted it down on the internet (I love the internet) and doubled the recipe I found. The next morning I went to cut the fudge up and found that what I had wasn't exactly fudge-like. It was more taffy-like. I wasn't sure what had gone wrong, but I made up my mind that I'd be damned if I didn't bring that fudge with me. So I more or less forced it into serving-sized pieces, wrapped them individually in saran wrap and brought those puppies along.
The comments about my talentless fudge looking like servings of poop didn't exactly hurt my feelings, but I did feel better when Colin insisted that we find a pleasing name for my recipe. I think that the closest we came to a name for it was something like Molten Fudge or Fudge Plasma. Something like that. Thanks, Colin! In the end, though, I managed to contribute a bit more to the talent show than I'd expected. I'd given Hilary and Jen F. pairs of hairsticks and they modeled them for everyone while Colin played 'I'm Too Sexy'. I told the story of my four hundred hairstick blanks to pad things out a bit, so I was not thrown in the lake. Phew!
Andrew's talent this year was quite amusing. He put on a puppet production of Top Gun and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Three of my socks were sacrificed for the cause (because they were odd and holey) and Andrew actually went to the trouble to create a wig for the female character. Wow. He managed to condense the movie down quite well, and the extra sex scene (that was not in the movie) was tastefully done. Or not.
We had to come home on Monday, like it or not, but we got to get together with Shannon and her husband for dinner on Tuesday night. We went to The Works where I once again went with the boring Ho Hum #2 (cheddar cheese and bacon) but jazzed it up with some added roasted red peppers. Yum. Then we went to Bridgehead for coffee-like drinks after discovering that Sugar Mountain was closed, and came back to the apartment for some relaxing chatting. Shannon had thoughtfully brought me a Cocoa Camino Bar and I made sure that she left with a pair of hairsticks that she might even wear in her hair someday! Mong was thrilled to see company again, the little social butterfly that he is, and showed off a bit for everyone. We've had some flies in the apartment since the air conditioner fitting has some spaces in it, so Mong spends a lot of time trying to catch them. At one point in his fly-catching efforts he launched himself off of a windowsill and used poor Shannon as a springboard, which I was horrified by. Luckily she wasn't injured and laughed it off, but if it had been someone who doesn't love every single cat they see it could have been a different story altogether!
In other news, Mong and his octopus might get married:
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