Bathtub Gin, Now with Added Tonic

Mission accomplished!

 Yes, they're looking very, very happy...

Now there are two feral cats in the bathroom. The new kitten, whose name is Tonic, has not yet learned to be stealthy. (I assume he's a boy, but I don't really know yet because I can't get within 5 feet of him.) When I walk in the room, he runs straight at me and then turns sharply to go into the cardboard box, instead of just staying hidden where he was.

Meanwhile, his mother Gin has been growling less lately. All I have to do is figure out how to get her into the cat carrier on Monday so she can go get spayed.

A Little Bathtub Gin

Periodically new cats show up outside my house. Most of the time they're owned and taken care of (which, in my definition, includes feeding, vaccinating, and spaying/neutering as a bare minimum) but they like to hang out in my yard. But every once in a while, new cats show up that aren't being taken care of.

So... yeah, I saw a kitten last week that looked old enough to manage on its own even though I saw it nurse a bit. I had thought the mother cat was fixed because the people at the end of the street have been feeding her, but apparently not.

Out came the trap. First I trapped a larger orange cat. There's a 75% chance that an orange cat is male, and he didn't look pregnant, so I let him go.

Next I caught the mama cat, who is probably not more than six months old. I thought she wasn't really feral because she hangs out five feet away from me when I'm gardening, so I dumped her in my (empty) bathtub to wait for her spay appointment.

 (Before she trashed the tub)

That assumption about her not being feral might not have been a good one.

Her new name is Bathtub Gin (or Ginnie, for short) and I have until Monday morning to figure out how I'm going to get her into a carrier for the ride to the vet.

 (Yep, she's super happy about this whole situation.)

Then I set the trap out to catch her kitten. I got the larger orange cat again. I let him out in the morning, then set the trap up again in the evening. Come morning I found the damn orange cat again. He was clearly irritated that it took me so long to let him out. Next day, same result, although this time the little kitten (whose name obviously needs to be Tonic, right?) was hanging out nearby and ran off when I approached to let the big idiot out of the trap.

Anyhow, I'm not really sure what I did wrong in my life, but I'm 50 years old and have a bathtub full of Gin...

If It Hasn't Happened After 50 Years...

I've given up on memorizing this, so I just painted it on the wall in my office.

Maybe this will cut down on the number of notes littered throughout my manuscripts that say things like "why don't you know the past tense of lie yet?", but probably not.

The Professional Home Office

We're all about rolling with the punches and making things work here at the House of Nebulopathy.

So what do you do when Effing Scooter expands his oeuvre to encompass not only paper and plastic but also computer cables? You roll with it and use an empty box to protect the work computer when you're not using it.
(Related: I'm pretty sure someone with naughty cats invented the rolltop desk.)

But if you just put a box over the important computer bits, there's a good chance E.S. will let loose in the box itself (ask me how I know!), so you have to tape it shut.

Problem solved... except then Ripley, the cat who likes to eat tape and cardboard, enters the picture.

Duct tape doesn't really hold up to this sort of thing.

Mmm, fiber...

Overall working from home is a huge improvement over going in to the office, but it has its challenges.

The Mad Scrumble

Yesterday I met up with K-Poo and her husband (who shares a name with the big dog -- sure, they spell it differently, but maybe the big dog just doesn't spell very well). Anyhow, she claims she misses the blog entries, so here we go.

The latest news at work is that management has decided we're going to use "Scrum". If you've never heard of Scrum, lucky you! It's a management system for agile development. It's also a cult. Generally it's used for software development -- it's supposed to keep people focused on small tasks so new software can be released rapidly.

That's the theory. In practice I've noticed it seems to encourage crappy prototypes that are released to the users as finished products, causing a massive load of technical debt that will eventually cause the project to fail because nobody can change anything without breaking something else. That sounds bad, but honestly I've seen enough projects that went slowly and were over-planned and never got released because nobody could change anything without breaking something else, so... I guess what I'm saying is that this management fad probably isn't much worse than any other management fad.

Anyhow, proponents of the Cult of Scrum will talk about all the official principles and the Holy Scrum Master and how you are supposed to have Self-Organizing Teams and quick Daily Stand-Up Meetings to keep everyone informed and identify problems early on.

That's all well and good, but in a big company, by the time something like this gets shoved onto the lower ranks -- especially groups like mine where software isn't our main product -- some of the subtleties are lost. In fact, pretty much the entire spirit and 90% of the letter of the law as well.

What's left?

Yes, you guessed it. We're having daily meetings.

So far my efforts to self-organize my way off the team entirely have failed.

But here, have a picture of Guido enjoying his summer. His lymphoma is still in remission so not everything is terrible.

I'm Sure They're Talking on Nextdoor

So it's summer again, or technically spring, I guess, but I prefer to simplify things and go with:

• cold = winter
• wet/green = spring
• hot = summer
• omg it's still hot just kill me now and also everything is dead = fall

Obviously there's a little room for overlap, and sometimes spring and winter flop back and forth, but my system makes a whole lot more sense than looking at the damn calendar and claiming that it's spring when it's supposed to be 100 F this week.

Wait, I was going somewhere with the spring/summer thing... Oh yeah. Anyhow, now that everything is growing, I feel the need to plant things around my property. Most of my garden is stuff that grows with little-to-no intervention and is either perennial or reseeds itself. Artichokes, chard, mint, blackberries... that's all stuff that takes care of itself. Some years I get tomatoes and for a while I had tomatillos that came up every year, but I think I smothered them the last time I mulched. But I like to try new things, especially in my ongoing war against the front lawn-weeds. Yet plants are expensive.

You know what's not expensive? Cuttings from other people's plants. (Obviously, this is only true if you don't get fined or shot or whatever. Your mileage may vary.) So my daily walks around the neighborhood have turned into long strolls wherein I size up everyone's landscaping and try to decide if that interesting plant a) is drought resistant, and b) will root from a cutting. Extra points if I can break off a piece from the sidewalk. My kitchen window houses a row of Ball jars with cuttings in water.

So yeah, that's what I've been doing lately. Now I just need to get a pair of scissors that will fit in my pocket and I can go cut a few twigs from a plant a few streets over...

The Only Middle Grade Fiction I'll Ever Write

A while back I purged a bunch of stuff, including some bags of papers. Later I realized I couldn't find the book I'd written in 7th grade English, and I just assumed it had been in one of those bags and was lost forever.

But then today I was doing a clean in preparation for letting my petsitter into my place, and tada!

As covers go, it's a bit... terrible, yes, I know, but in my defense this was done in an era before personal computers. And Photoshop hadn't yet been invented. Also, I'm not sure I had a choice about the orange paper. Of course, I'm not sure my efforts today would be much better.

Anyhow, it's 50 pages of hand-typed amazingness. First off, it definitely starts out in media res. In fact, it's so much in the middle of things that I had absolutely no idea what was going on for two pages as I read it. But hey, I managed to get two characters, the setting, and the hook all in the first page.

The tall green grass felt cool under Mirny's feet as she and Myda, her twin sister, wandered off the trail to explore. As she looked around her, she was surprised at the beauty of the tiny valley they had found. Tall leafy trees towered above her head and provided relief from the hot summer sun.

"I wonder who owns this place," she said aloud, before she realized that they did not have to hide their talent with no one around. She knew Myda could hear her thoughts just as well as when she spoke.

The telepathic twin girls are chasing their dog and fall through a hole into another time. The last 500 years have not been good ones (due to a nuclear war with the Soviet Union -- yeah, this was written in 1980 - 1981), and they immediately run into another telepathic girl (Vena, the third of the titular trio) who has escaped from a mental hospital because she doesn't think like everyone else.

The whole "hey, we just ended up 500 years in the future" thing is covered entirely in two paragraphs.

In many ways this book is way ahead of its time. It's a post-apocalyptic tale with some kick-ass female protagonists who solve their own problems. There's a dog (their German Shepherd "Kenya").

The only men in the story are evil (so... the most lifelike part of the entire story, ha ha!). I give you this snippet, which is the introduction of the antagonist:

Just looking at him gave Myda chills up and down her spine. His black hair was cut short and he did not have a mustache, but one look at his eyes and they knew he was not as soft as his appearance would have them believe. His eyes were black and he had a piercing gaze that reminded Mirny of an eagle before diving for its prey. After a long moment he finally spoke. "My name is Dr. Myze and I'm your new psychiatrist. Even though my colleagues tell me that you," he stared directly at Vena, "are hopelessly insane, I will still try to cure you of your disease. As for your acquaintances, I have no record of them on our files, but I'm sure they're as crazy as you if they were Beyond, in the forest."

I mean sure, there are a few (hundred) cliches crammed into that paragraph, but there's no question about who the bad guy is.

The girls get captured and sent to a mental hospital where they are found to be resistant to the machine that would change their thoughts. They then communicate telepathically with their dog (who, sadly, wasn't enough of a character to make it into the book title) and bust out, destroying the evil machine and freeing everyone in the process.

There's some excellent world building along the way, like this section, during the escape:

The indignant guard started yelling for help.

"Isn't there some way to shut him up? Somebody is sure to hear him and then we're in big trouble." Mirny was glancing around nervously as she said this.

"Oh yea, I forgot." Vena gave a short laugh. She depressed another switch and the noise was instantly silenced although they could still see him yelling. "It's possible to soundproof the door, but I forgot all about it until now."

 Then they get to the evil laboratory, find the unknown-before-this-point button that makes the machine unfold into a computer, and the twins suddenly remember they took a computer course the summer before and decide to reprogram it.

For the next two hours the twins set out on the monumental task. Many times they stopped to try and figure out something that was new and strange, but they finally finished.

That's probably the most unrealistic part of the whole book because I've been programming for nearly thirty years now and in two hours I would probably still be dinking around trying to figure out why the damn button that doesn't do anything yet is showing up twenty pixels away from where it was supposed to... but whatever. Maybe they've given up on web-based GUIs in the intervening 500 years.

Anyhow, they all run off to "Beyond, in the forest" and the three girls (and the dog that saved their asses!) fall back through the OSHA-approved hole in the ground and end up back in the original time and everyone is happy.

Sure there's the odd plot hole and point of view shift along the way, but I've read worse things that were traditionally published.

If only I'd had access to photo editing software back then... I could have made a book cover like this and this thing could have been a best seller!

(Original kitten photo from The House of Floof / Jennifer and/or Richard Crawford)