C.E. Murphy's Blog, page 39

one more garden cat!

This afternoon Duchess, the mama cat, was meowling around the trap, either looking for her kittens or food. I wasn’t about to give her the kittens, but on the off chance she might go in and eat, I put food in the trap and set it.

Half an hour later there was a VERY UPSET Duchess in the trap.

I texted the rescue people and they called and said bring her down to the rescue centre, there’s someone there, so we transferred her to the cat carrier (which was easy but impressed the rescue ladies th...

capturing the garden kittens

We got a capture cage and a regular cage from the animal rescue place & to rehabilitate the kittens in. (Habilitate, I guess; they were never habilitated to begin with, so I guess they can’t be REhabilitated….)

The animal rescue people are SWAMPED and they have no easily found place to give the kittens to someone else to teach to be pets. The lady there said every female cat they’ve had brought in in the past 2 months has been heavily pregnant and that she doesn’t remember a year this crazy.

...

to the dentist I went!

So I’ve had this vague awareness of a sensitive place in one of my teeth for a while, and in the past week it’s gotten quite sharp when something cold encounters it, so, grimly irritated about the prospect of a cavity (not so much the dentist; I don’t mind dentists, but I only have 2 cavities and that’s from drinking too much soda 25 years ago and I’m still pissed off about it), I called a local dentist and made an appointment. The sharpness of the pain seemed to fade a bit in the past couple...

my captain’s keyboard has stopped working :(

My captain’s keyboard has stopped working. :}

I’m almost positive I know what the problem is. There are about 8 keys that don’t work, and there’s a pin in the PS/2 connector that got bent a while ago. I was able to nudge it back into place, but it got yanked and bent again and although I’ve nudged it back into place again, I think the base of the pin is no longer connecting.

I’m also almost positive this could be fixed by splicing a new PS/2 connector into place.

The PROBLEM is that the OTHER...

separate hobbies

I saw a thing yesterday that said “Buying fabric and sewing fabric are TWO SEPARATE HOBBIES.”

I actually feel that I understand so much more about the world now.

I’m now up to 6 artist’s figurines (I need to write more reviews) and I was unable (or unwilling) to resist a set of 14 archival color pens, plus all the stuff I already own, but do I actually draw? No, hardly ever. (That said, I’ve done more this year than in many years.)

Anyway, point is I’m back to that “I want to draw some silly...

Recent Reads: A WRINKLE IN TIME

Having cried all over the WRINKLE IN TIME trailer, I thought I’d better re-read the book immediately to get a proper feeling for it again. It’d been at least twenty, possibly thirty, years since I’d read it, and…

…it’s kind of equally weirder and more mundane than I remember it.

I was prepared for, although somewhat exasperated by regardless, the Christian allusions; whenever I last re-read L’Engle, I was adult enough to notice her books are really laced with Christianity, so I knew that was...

The 13th Doctor: It shouldn’t matter, but it does.

Carrie Fisher. Robin Wright. Gal Gadot. Daisy Ridley. Melissa McCarthy & Leslie Jones & Kate McKinnon & Kristen Wigg.

Jodie Whittaker.

It shouldn’t matter. It shouldn’t matter, but it goddamn well does.

You know why I chose the women I did, up above? You know why I didn’t include Weaver & Hamilton & Theron on that list?

Because Ripley and Connor and Furiosa were given to us. They were put on the table by filmmakers who said either “it doesn’t matter if this character’s a woman or a man,” or...

still toxic

I’m somewhat better than I’ve been, but I’ve still got a cough and snotty nose. No, I haven’t gone to a doctor, but only because it turns out there’s a shortage of doctors in this town and nobody is taking new patients. We got signed up with a clinic in theory but we still haven’t gotten notification that we’re actually in their system, so…yeah. Anyway. At this point I think I’m going to have healed up before I’m in the system. Whee.

That said, all I want to do today is lie in a lump on the c...

my head is a toxic waste dump

Actually, I think–I hope–my head is coming through the other side of being a toxic waste dump, but jeez o flip. I’ve had two back to back colds. I don’t think I was sick when I went to Liverpool, so I guess I’ve been sick since about the Sunday after, which is three weeks today. It feels like longer. Both colds have been entirely in my head with a massive fucking cough that ejects gobs of snot that the constant nose-blowing assaults on my sinuses have not been able to remove preemptively.

I’v...

extreme sport sleeping

Last week I apparently participated in some extreme sport sleeping. I can tell because I woke up with a knot the size of Kansas in my neck and shoulder, and then the next day the middle of my back went out.

Young Indiana, employing new techniques learned from his aunt, gave me a genuinely terrific massage that dealt with the middle back problems, but my neck was really a mess. I went to my PT, who said, “Wow, that’s a big knot!” and worked on it thoroughly and it’s loosening up. Slowly.

Rea...