End of an Era

The last of my vet school bottle babies is gone now. Guido had a good 20 year run, so I can't complain, but I'll miss him. (The dog will probably not miss him as much — Guido would wake up, seek out the 65# dog, and then yell at him until the dog fled the room.)

Some things Guido will be remembered for:

• He was named Guido because he resembled the mafia enforcer characters in the old movies. As a small kitten, he was enrolled in a behavior study along with his littermates. Every day I had to mark down how roughly the kittens played with each other and with people, and every day all his littermates were in the 1-2 range and Guido was up in the 7-8 range. He was a bit of a legend in the behavior department.
  
  
• Guido got into everything. He saw people as convenient stepping stones so he could jump to a place he couldn't normally reach. He had to help plumbers and electricians do their jobs. Mostly, they thought this was funny.
  
  
• I had to change all the interior doorknobs because he could open anything with a lever. During the house remodel, the contractor went to great lengths to keep him out of the demolished area and it took Guido less than two minutes to get inside.
  
  
• He was the only cat to make it out of the cat porch, and he did it at least three times. Each time he would wander around on the roof, just out of reach as I clung to a ladder trying to make him come down. Before I finally fixed it so he couldn't get up there anymore, I spent 30 minutes trying to coax him to the edge while he rolled around just out of reach, and when I paused to feed the other cats dinner, he strolled in like nothing had ever happened.
  
  
• During his annual exams, he would climb all over Keith (his vet), walking across his shoulders as he contemplated getting into the ceiling tiles, and generally being a complete nuisance while we laughed about it.

Anyhow, he was a great cat and a great pain in the ass and I'll miss him.

Not a Place to Live

Given the number of people traveling to meet at my mom's house for the holidays, I've opted to stay at a hotel nearby. I think there will be at least ten people staying at the house plus another eight staying at my brother's house and I need my own space to survive that.

So the hotel is about 1.5 miles away, which would be the perfect distance to walk off a few extra cookies, but... This is southern California. Great weather for walking, but cities built to require cars and discourage people from getting out of them.

The direct route from the hotel would require me to dash across a two-lane freeway on-ramp where people are already going forty-five mph and then a freeway off-ramp where everyone is looking the other direction to see if they can merge into traffic. Even Google Maps doesn't suggest that route for a pedestrian.

The other way to get there requires walking half a mile in the wrong direction to get over the freeway without dying, so it goes from a 30-minute walk to a 50-minute walk. For me, that crosses the barrier between "good walk" to "pain in the butt". I'll probably walk it at least once, but...

This is one of the reasons I would never consider living in that area. I don't even like to visit.

Obligatory Photo

I bathed the foster kittens in lime sulfur again this morning before dropping them off at the shelter. An hour later, the coordinator emailed to let me know their second culture came back negative, so they're cleared for spay/adoption. Here's to Margo & Tina as they head off to their new lives!

Being Social

Now that Twitter has been purchased by a billionaire so he can throw tantrums as people make fun of him, I've been exploring Mastodon.

(Or, I guess, technically the Fediverse. Basically, I'm too old to give a crap about the difference between them, but I think Mastodon is a part of the Fediverse. If you feel the need to explain the difference in the comments, I swear I will drive to your house and burn it down. But I'm a good person, so I'll evacuate the pets first.)

Anyhow, Mastodon is like Twitter in many ways — you can post short things and follow people. But it's unlike Twitter in that it's made up of a zillion independently owned and operated servers that talk to each other. So instead of just going to Twitter and creating an account, you find a Mastodon server that seems like a good fit and request an account on that server.

Servers are often geared toward specific interests — writers, gamers, lawyers, journalists, etc. Since you can follow anyone on any server, as far as I can tell the server you choose only matters in two cases:

1. You can view a feed of all the posts on your local server, so you might want a server that caters to your specific interests so you can easily meet other people who are into that thing. 
   
   
2. Servers can get blocked by other servers. This is the equivalent of shunning someone until they get their act together.

And if you decide you joined the wrong server, you can migrate to a different one.

In addition to following specific people, you can also follow hashtags. For example, #DuvetKnowItsChristmas is a collection of pictures from people forced to stay in odd places while visiting for the holidays. Stuck in your childhood racing car bed as a thirty-year-old? Post a picture with #DuvetKnowItsChristmas in the text and everyone following the tag will see it. Apparently this hashtag has existed on Twitter for years, but I never saw it, so let's all pretend this is a new thing, 'kay?

Obligatory Photo

We don't really get snow here, but we do get a nice mixture of browns in our foliage.

(This picture would look better if I had a macro lens, or even some way to affect the focus on my phone. Didn't that used to be a thing?)

The Last Write-in

Yesterday I went to my last write-in of the year. My current schedule has a Wednesday morning write-in in the restaurant specializing in crepes and a Saturday afternoon write-in at the local coffee shop. Both those venues were chosen because they have outdoor seating and don't mind people taking up space for a couple hours. I tip heavily to encourage that behavior.

Luckily, I live in a climate that makes that mostly possible, even in winter. Layers are my friend, as are my scarf and fingerless gloves.

I miss sitting in a warm room when it's cold outside, but it's just not worth it at this point. The only people I know who haven't had COVID/RSV/flu in the past month are the people who don't spend time in crowded indoor locations. Please note that I'm not saying anyone who spends time indoors deserves to get sick — nobody deserves to be sick, no matter what they do. But I can rearrange my life to minimize my risks, and it seems stupid not to.

Having said that, I'm about to visit with a bunch of people who will be flying and visiting other groups of people right before we meet up, so... Fingers crossed the test kits are accurate!

Obligatory Photo

The view from the coffee shop patio. It really is a great place.

Another Three Minutes

Speaking of three minute tasks that I've been avoiding... There were a bunch of dead bugs in the light fixture in the kitchen and I thought the cover was going to be glass and heavy, so I've avoided touching it for twenty years.

Turns out the cover is light plastic and I was able to take it down, clean it, and put it back up in just a few minutes. The change isn't quite as impactful as I thought it would be because it's not dust that's blocking the light but the fact that two of the four fluorescent bulbs aren't working. I guess I should probably replace those, but that requires a trip to the hardware store, so...

Anyhow, I hope my pet sitter enjoys the bug free dim kitchen experience.

Obligatory Photo

I'm not sure how much longer this dude will be around, but 20 years is a good run.

Schrödinger's Novel

Today was once again "bathe the kittens and bleach the bathroom" day, so at least I got one thing done.

I also wrote up some notes on what I need to fix in the cozy mystery. Overall, I like how it turned out, but I need to make the first chapter stronger and fix some inconsistencies.

One thing I still need to do is write up a family tree for both sides of the wedding party. I got partway through drafting the novel when I realized I'd accidentally made the victim related to one of the suspects, which was bad because he shows up to start an affair with her. That absolutely was not where I wanted to go with that. So there's a note in the original draft that says "Make Ashley one of Brian's relatives." I have to go back through and change earlier references.

I also realized that I named a new character "Brian" and then brought in a recurring character, also named Brian. All the names in the world, and I have two people with the same name in this novel. Clearly new-Brian needs a different name, but I can't just do a search/replace on all instances of Brian without screwing up the places talking about old-Brian. Ugh.

My margin notes always make me laugh, because they range from the obvious ("Fix this sentence.") to the irritated ("Be consistent with the periods and then document it somewhere dammit."). Sometimes I can't describe what needs to be fixed, so it gets a "Meh".

Anyhow, it's mostly good and I think I know what I need to do to improve the beginning. After I write a story and before I read over the first draft, it's Schrödinger's novel — it might be good or it might be terrible. This time the novel gets to live.

Obligatory Photo

Let's hear it for this brave sunflower which has made it through multiple nights below freezing and is hanging on until the winter solstice. We salute you, messed up flower!

Garrigue

I was watching a new show today ("Perfect Murders", aka "Crimes Parfaits") with subtitles because I only have three words of French.

The description of this show is "Quirky investigators team up to solve impossible crimes in this fun French mystery series." Every episode starts out with an extended scene (~5 minutes) of someone getting murdered. I'm not sure they really nailed the vibe of the show in that description.

Anyhow, at the end of one episode, the word "garrigue" showed up in the subtitles and I wondered why they had left that one word in French. But then I looked it up and found out we have conscripted it for use in English. Collins defines it as "open shrubby vegetation of dry Mediterranean regions, consisting of spiny or aromatic dwarf shrubs interspersed with colourful ephemeral species". Apparently, it's a thing that comes up a lot when people talk about wine.

Wine Enthusiast says "Garrigue is a classic example of terroir, the notion that aromas and flavors in wine are influenced by the environment in which wine is produced."

I know almost nothing about wine, and it's always interesting to run into stuff like this — one new word leads to a glimpse into a subculture that opens up into a whole new vista. My #4 Learner is all about this sort of thing. Maybe I'll figure out a way to put this in a book so I have an excuse to learn more about it.

Obligatory Photo

Look at the bark on this tree I found today while walking the dog. How wild is that?