Other cat-like beings

 

I'm so tired I'm doing things like just stopping myself in time from putting the peppermint tea in the kettle instead of the . . . the . . . and standing there with a heaped-up teaspoon of loose peppermint tea* and trying to think what to do with it, while a few peppermint leaf fragments drift gently down to the counter.  —Teapot.  I knew it would come to me eventually.*

            Various Things are making me crazy**, I've still got this mutant virus sticking up progress, and today I took Peter and me to Tabitha for our monthly onslaught of Bowen massage.  When it was my turn and she asked me how I was I said MAKE THIS MUTANT VIRUS GO AWAY.  Bowen always tires me out, it's just worth it when you wake up the next day feeling better than you have since . . . well, probably since the day after your last treatment.  But if there's something really to be grappled with, like a mutant virus . . . well.  I feel like a petri dish and the fungus is winning.

            So, since by the time I got back from the last hellhound hurtle of the day the prospect of words in complete sentences was alarming, I got out the doodle paper instead.***  There are quite a few people soliciting Narknon and someone tweeted in response to last night's blog that her idea of McKinley felines are all tiger sized.   Okay.

Narknon.

Smug Narknon

Tiger

* I drink black tea all day long and then I shift to peppermint after dinner.  It's all loose.  Teabags are an abomination.  There's a Graham Greene quote that I've just wasted about ten minutes trying to find on Google, which I'm pretty sure is from TRAVELS WITH MY AUNT.  The narrator, sitting in a café, is watching someone at the next table remove the teabag from his/her cup 'like a small drowned animal on a string' or words to that effect.  As I recall the someone is American.  Thanks a lot, Graham old buddy.  At most restaurants it's not like you have a choice . . . and his narrator is at the next table, isn't he?  This is on my mind because I seem to have been in and out of Mauncester rather too often the last few days and have twice wanted a cup of tea and a sit down . . . but try finding somewhere in this medieval English town in the heart of Tory Hampshire that will make you a decent cup of tea.  It's stiff with cafés . . . all of which throw a tea bag in a pot and seem to think they're a hot number when they offer you Earl Grey or Assam.  Grrrrrrr.  Floor sweepings are floor sweepings and they don't warm the pot first either.  Monday I had a cup of tea at a Very Lofty Tea Shop with Pretensions—and a national reputation.  Teabag.  In a pot.  Weak and bitter.  And the chocolate croissant was ordinary.^^

 'In the early 1960s, tea bags made up less than 3 per cent of the British market, but this has been growing steadily ever since. By 2007 tea bags made up a phenomenal 96 per cent of the British market.'  http://www.tea.co.uk/the-history-of-the-tea-bag  How the mighty are fallen.  How glad Mr Greene is to have died twenty years ago.  I hope there is tea in Paradise.^ 

It's not like my country of origin is getting it right either however.  'Approximately 85% of the tea drunk in the USA is iced.'  http://www.teausa.org/general/pdf/FACTSHEET.pdf  What?  I'm with Katharine Hepburn in THE AFRICAN QUEEN on this one:  a nice cup of hot tea on a sweltering day is refreshing.  And I fear a lot of that iced tea is that ghastly powder stuff out of a jar or a packet. 

^ Or wherever I go to wait between incarnations. 

^^ The problem with taking your own flask is that I have yet to find a flask that doesn't have a plastic stopper and the taste poisons the contents.  You make a thermos of your very own perfectly brewed tea and . . . BLEEEAUGH.  Yes.  I'm fussy.  It's a curse. 

** Yes, this would include the sale/auction.  But it's not the doodling, it's the practicalities of the back end.  I WAS NOT MADE TO BE PRACTICAL.  I was made to sit in a small room . . . all right, a large room . . . with a piano, a computer, a lot of paper of various types, several handsful of pens and pencils, hellhounds, an electric kettle, a teapot^ . . .  and told to get on with it.  I don't want to know about the rest of reality!  Tell it to go away!  I have plenty to do in here! 

^ And may I please have some overachieving geraniums in the windows? 

*** I've been trying to convince myself to doodle on proper drawing paper but that's so . . . serious.  I suppose I'll have to when I run out of second sheets^. 

^ using the second sides of paper that has story drafts on the other side.

Friendly medium-large squid. I admit he's not giant, but he's still bigger than I want to meet if he's not friendly.