Still Life, With Cats

A couple years ago we ripped out the front yard and replaced it all with drought tolerant plants and a couple citrus trees, and a whole lot of mulch. And by ‘we’, I mean we hired someone to come in and design it and then do all the work, because as I have noted previously, yardwork is not our thing.

I freely admit that one of the primary reasons for doing this was sheer laziness. A grass-free front yard requires far less maintenance, and no more lawn meant we didn’t have to keep remembering to drag out the stupid sprinkler and keep the grass (or rather, the weeds) green primarily so the neighbors wouldn’t hate us for having a crappy yard. Now, with the blissful lack of lawn, and the drip system installed, mostly all the plants just sit there and do their thing and sometimes if we’re lucky we get some fruit out of the deal (although I suspect it will be a few more years before the citrus trees really start to produce). But the other reason we did it is because drought-tolerant yards require far less water and it has been clear for years now that water is one of those things we really needed to find ways to conserve.

Should you not already be aware, California is currently in a serious drought. The annual rainfall has been dwindling for years, the reservoirs are scarily low, and whoever thought it was a good idea to encourage everyone to have water-greedy lawns in the middle of a desert climate was an idiot in the first place. So it has been encouraging to see that slowly, more and more people are ripping out their front lawns and replacing them with far more drought tolerant landscaping. It is nice to see, as I travel around my city doing errands or heading to work, that new little patches of native plants are starting to spring up.

I know we have a long way to go, yet. There are far too many people who cling stubbornly to their lush green lawns (because denial is a powerful, powerful thing, unfortunately). But it is happening. And it is nice to see that more and more people are finally catching on that xeriscaping can be a beautiful, wonderful thing, and that water is not an infinite resource.

The letter X is brought to you by the Blogging from A to Z Challenge.

First, I will state the obvious. I am a fan of zombies. I like (mostly) the entire genre. And it is really not a huge surprise that they’ve become so popular. Zombies cross every boundary – they can be any race, any religion, any gender, any species. Anything that can die can become a zombie.

There are, of course, a lot of different interpretations of zombies – from the mind-controlled not-really-dead ilk, to the rage-virus type (which technically isn’t a zombie, since those infected weren’t actually dead, but eh, I’ll let it slide) to the most common iteration of ‘dead person reanimates due to and wants to eat your brains’. It doesn’t really matter *how* the zombies came about; what is most important is that underlying commonality. They were dead. Now they are ‘alive’, in some form or another, and without proper control, they are very, very dangerous.

There have been a few recent shows on TV whose premise relies on zombies. Let’s start with Walking Dead.

We started watching it, when it first came out, and I admit, the first season was terrific – the story arc following this desperate band of survivors trying to figure out what to do with themselves, now that the world as they knew it is over. The zombies themselves primarily serve as background material throughout the show. The rag tag band of plucky survivors could just as easily have to battle giant mutant killer bunnies, or oncoming swarms of rabid hamsters. It’s just in this case, it’s zombies, and so they have to work around that.

The problem I have with the show, and the reason why eventually I stopped watching it, is because after a while it stopped being a show about people working to survive a desperate situation, and instead morphed into just another a show about people being horrible to each other, with the occasional zombie thrown in for dramatic tension. We stuck it out through the second season, but by about midway through the third, we were done. Even zombies couldn’t make it appealing anymore.

In contrast, and at the urging of a friend, we watched something from across the pond called In the Flesh, which takes place after a zombie apocalypse has happened, and after a cure (of sorts) has been discovered. In this case, the viewer is experiencing the plot from the point of view as the former zombies. As is often the case in shows from the BBC, the characters, and the plot, were allowed to develop slowly. If people were being horrible to each other it is because there were good, understandable reasons (unlike in Walking Dead), based on what had happened during the early days of the zombie uprising. The show allows the characters to work through all the emotions of having to now reconcile and reintegrate with people they had once been fighting, such that even when horrible things happen, you as a viewer can still sympathize with the people doing those acts. The last episode of the first season was done so beautifully that I was crying by the end. Naturally this show has not lasted nearly as long as Walking Dead, because alas, people being horrible to each other for no apparent reason always manages to be more popular (see also pretty much every ‘reality’ show on TV).

And finally, I want to mention a brand new show that is currently in its first season – iZombie. Technically it’s based on a graphic novel series, although having read the first book in that series, I will state for the record that the TV show is a bazillion times better. It’s made by the same people who did Veronica Mars, so if you liked that show (we did, a lot), you’ll likely love iZombie. The basic premise is that a young woman has been turned into a zombie, so she ends up working in a morgue (to gain access to her primary food source, of course), and also helps solve crime. Since she works in a morgue, and because she is not the only zombie, there are occasionally people being horrible to people (because that is usually how someone ends up murdered), but that is only a minor backdrop to the rest of the plot.

The letter Z is brought to you by the Blogging from A to Z Challenge.

One of the awesome things about the internet (all hail the internet) is that it opens up all sorts of opportunities to take classes online. Occasionally I sign up for something that would be useful for work, or because it seems like something I *ought* to learn how to do to enhance my existing skills, but lately I’ve been signing up for MOOCs, purely for the fun of it. The best part about them is that you can take the tests, or not, based on how you feel. You can cram all the coursework into one week if you don’t have time to do it spread out. Your level of involvement in the discussions is entirely up to you (and if you don’t post a single response, no one will care). And if life gets in the way (like with the Mobile Game Programming course I had to sadly let slide a couple months ago), eh, you just stop logging in.

In January I went through a really interesting course called Introduction to Forensic Science, which was offered by the University of Strythclyde via FutureLearn. Over the course of six weeks the instructors posted lectures (via video) and links to articles and other related reading material, and hosted lively discussions. Each week they provided a high level overview of some segment of forensic science (which is, of course, far more time consuming, and far less accurate than CSI and all of those other crime-of-the-week shows would have you believe), and throughout the course, we were also considering one particular murder case, and using what we learned to assess what we could now know about the evidence collected. As I’ve got a science background (as rusty as it is), most of what was covered wasn’t difficult for me (although I admit to being surprised by how many people seemed to struggle with DNA – didn’t everyone learn about Mendel and his peas back in grade school?). And what I appreciated most about the course is that the case study they used did *not* have a clear cut verdict. Our class poll was pretty evenly split; at the end, the ‘guilty’ votes only won out by a percentage point or two over the ‘not guilty’ votes.

Currently I am taking two separate ethics classes via EdX (a rather amusing coincidence, as I signed up for them at two completely separate times). The first is The Ethics of Eating (put on by a couple of philosophy professors via Cornell University), and if the first week is any indication, it’s going to be an interesting class, since we’ve already tackled Food, Inc. (hint – the film has a NOT REMOTELY SUBTLE agenda), and read an article that, if I hadn’t already been extremely uncomfortable with how they were prepared in the first place, would have been more than enough to convince me to never eat a lobster again. The second course is an Introduction to Bioethics, put on by the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown, and it also looks like it’s going to be really interesting. As of the first week we’ve discussed bodily autonomy; the slippery slope ethical discussions around patients making decisions to refuse treatment without which they will die, and the issue of doctors who do (or do not) honor those requests, and from the syllabus, it looks like we’ll be tackling some even more contentious issues later on.

The letter U is brought to you by the Blogging from A to Z Challenge.

I picked up my new glasses last Tuesday.

Normally when I get new glasses there’s a brief moment when my eyes try to work out that something is new, and then it’s all good. These, however, are bifocals. So the transition has been a lot more rough. Do I look straight ahead? Do I look down through the lower half that is meant to be used for close-up work? Which one should I be using for when I’m on the computer. How about for when I’m knitting. Or trying to read music.

I was really, really aware of the bifocals the first couple days (driving after switching to bifocals is certainly an interesting experience). At this point, however, most of the time I don’t even think about them anymore. But every once in a while, like during tonight’s rehearsal, boy am I reminded that I have to look at things in a new way.

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Mom and kittens are settling in just fine, by the way. It’s clear Ruby isn’t going to transition to lap fungus right away, but she leans into our hands for head rubs and neck scritches and she deliberately shifts her body so she can get closer to the front of her box for more attention. So it’s really only a matter of time.

I set up a Facebook page for them, so you can keep up with how they’re doing here.

The letter F is brought to you by the Blogging from A to Z Challenge.

I still miss the pull-out keyboard of my old Droid phone. I miss it a LOT; it’s so much harder to type on a screen.

But there are bonuses about my new phone (Droid Turbo, since I know someone is going to ask) that make up for it. And one of the primary bonuses is the camera.

I love the camera on this phone so much. I have a little point-and-shoot-dummy camera as well, but these days I rarely use it, because my phone does just as good a job, if not better.

I know there are likely special apps I can download, but why bother when the default app lets me get pictures like this.

Or this

Or this.

The letter P is brought to you by Blogging from A to Z Challenge.

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I’ve done a couple 5ks over the past few years, and have gone through the Couch to 5k program (via the awesome Zombies Run! training app) more than once. But running isn’t ever going to be my thing. For one thing, I have pretty much zero speed. More importantly, running seems to be the key trigger for the exercise-induced asthma. The last few times I’ve tried to run, I just end up wheezing and gasping for breath. Kind of takes all the fun out of it (assuming there was any fun to begin with, which, hint, there wasn’t).

This, however, did not stop me from hovering over the refresh key anxiously at 9am this morning, waiting to register for this. I’ve been wanting to do that event since The Oatmeal announced the first one last year, and when I found out it was going to be in my area this year, I got super excited.

The plan, however, to circumvent the frustrating asthma issue, is to speed walk the 10k, not to run it. I was a short kid growing up and I had a lot of really tall friends. So I learned at an early age to walk really fast (and my default walking speed is *still* usually faster than most of the people around me). There’s seven months between now and the date of the event. Plenty of time for me to train myself to walk even faster, and to be able to keep up a really good speed for 6 miles, without any pesky asthma flare-ups.

Fingers crossed.

The letter Q is brought to you by the Blogging from A to Z Challenge.