Still Life, With Cats

Last night all the weather reports were full of excitement about the current cold snap we’re experiencing here in the Sacramento Valley. On Facebook, people were posting pictures and reports of snow in places like Redding, Grass Valley, and so on. The forecast for Sacramento itself suggested that there was the teensiest possibility we might actually see snow. And it *did* start raining yesterday evening.

Alas, if it snowed, however, it didn’t stick around long enough for me to see it. Oh sure, they’ve got snow up in Roseville, but none made it to Sacramento. Sigh. I admit I was really, really hoping.

Ah well. Not that we would have been able to do much about it one way or the other, as today was the TGIO party for Nanowrimo, which meant that we spent most  of the morning scurrying around the house cleaning and getting things ready, and doing hasty runs to the grocery store because we were out of eggs, and gah, how can I bake anything without eggs, except that then I found this recipe that I’d bookmarked ages ago, and hey, as it so happens, I made a whole bunch of apple butter just recently, so I whipped up a batch of those . By the time people arrived, we’d cleared away most of the cat toys and paraphernalia, and lured five of the six cats downstairs with plates of wet food, and the house smelled like cinnamon and baking, and we were all set.

It was a fun group of people. Mostly the party consisted of everyone standing around in the kitchen and eating (Nanowrimo parties are always potluck) yummy things. A few people were brave enough to read snippets from their Nanowrimo novels, and Nutmeg (who has neither any interest in people food, or in trying to run out the door, occasionally wandered through and ignored every single person who tried their best to get her to come over for a pet.

It is funny how every year we all get together and do this crazy thing, and for a whole month we all look forward to seeing each other at bakeries and coffee shops, or virtually over IRC, and we cheer each other on, and catch up on each other’s lives, and then the month ends, and we all wave our goodbyes and most of us won’t actually see each other again until the next November, where we will do it all over again.

* * * * *

On a completely unrelated note, here is a picture of Rupert and Sherman at the top of the cat tree in the office, being, well, very much Rupert and Sherman.

‘Tis the season for Holidailies.

Today I:

• Worked from home because of the coughing. I am sure all my nearby cubemates were grateful not to have to hear it.
• Successfully tracked down people to handle some complex stuff, of the sort that would have been a whole lot easier if I’d been physically in the office, but hey, see previous bullet.
• Finished and submitted my final for the Business Analysis class I’m taking (and the beauty of doing it all online is that I then immediately got my grade back for the final – a nice, solid A. Go me!).
• Did a bunch of knitting of the type that I am not allowed to talk about, because this is December, and the majority of my knitting is either going to be for people for whom I would like to maintain *some* element of surprise, or the sort where, contractually, I really am not allowed to say much about it. So. Just imagine random knitting (any size needles, any color / type of yarn), and yeah, that’s what I was doing. Mm hmm. Yup.
• Tormented Sherman horribly – at least, according to Sherman. He has become, lately, an escape artist, and we are bound and determined that he remain an indoor-only cat. So any time someone comes to the door (such as the mail carrier), or one of us goes outside (such as when Richard left for work, or when I went outside to drag in the trash bin and throw out some garbage), Sherman immediately dashes for the door. It makes getting in and out of the house a more complicated process than it should be, and if we are doing something like carrying in groceries, the first step is to open the door, hands completely unencumbered, catch Sherman, shut him into a room, and only once that is done, can we then go back outside and resume carrying stuff in or out. If someone is coming to the house, one of us has to first catch Sherman and keep a tight hold him before the door is allowed to be open (luckily most of the people who come to our house already know this and the first words out of many a visitor’s mouth has been ‘Do you have him? Is it safe?’). Once thwarted, however, Sherman will express his dismay loudly, but either pawing at the door, or (to our amusement) by flopping on the floor in front of it, all the while singing his woe to the world. Mowowowow! Woe is he!  Ah, fun times. Lucky for him he’s pretty darn cute. And also easily distracted.

‘Tis the season for Holidailies.

We live in a neighborhood full of old houses (50 – 100 years old) and huge old trees that tower over everything. It is the sort of neighborhood where every house is different (no cookie-cutter development tract homes here) and every house has character and charm.

Someone recently bought a house on a nice big corner lot in the area, and tore it down. The yard was full of giant trees and they chopped those all down. Every. Single. One. They built a new house right next to the old house’s foundation, and put it up for sale. Eventually (from what we gathered today) there are plans to put up a second house directly next door, on the space where the old house once stood, basically splitting the old lot into two significantly smaller ones.

From the outside the new house looks okay. The style does fit the neighborhood, and even though they took out all the trees in the yard, there are still enough ‘city’ trees (the ones between the sidewalk and the street) to provide a good amount of shade. But the inside….wow. Just…no. Color me underwhelmed, with an emphasis on the ‘under’.

There was an open house today, and because I love peeking into other houses – especially in neighborhoods where every house is unique – we stopped to take a peek. This is not the first time we’ve done this and sometimes we wander around raising an eyebrow at the previous owner’s decorating choices, or wonder quietly to ourselves what someone was thinking with some particularly strange sort of add-on, but most of the time, the houses are cute, and full of character and charm, because that is what you get when you get old houses, and that is the thing I love the most about them.

But this house has very little charm. The cabinets and finishes all looked cheap, and the bedrooms were like tiny shoeboxes. It reminded me of something I’d see in one of those cookie cutter tract homes – not the model homes where they pull out all the stops with all the best finishes, but one where the buyers went with the lowest priced, lowest quality options throughout.

But what’s worse than the uninspiring interior (because some of it could be fixed if the buyer had the inclination is that there is no yard. Literally. They have paved pretty much every single bit of it. If the people who buy it have kids, there is literally NOWHERE for the kids to go outside and play (unless they want to romp around on concrete). Nowhere for the new owners to plant a vegetable garden. Just…concrete, and a tiny strip of landscaping that separates the new house from the street and it’s soon-to-be neighbor.

I look at our own house, which is roughly 100 years old and which (like any old house) will always have a huge project that needs doing. Our yard is a mess of lawn and raised beds and who knows how many desiccated drip hoses buried in the dirt. Our back deck has so much dryrot the stairs (it’s a 2nd story deck) have completely collapsed. The floor downstairs isn’t level, and don’t even get me started on the walls.  But I would take our house, any day, over the thing we just toured. Our house has character. It has charm. Heck, it has a yard (no matter how much of a mess it might be), and not just a bunch of ugly concrete.

We wandered the house beside another couple who’d also stopped by to check it out, and they were muttering the same thing under their breath as we were. Why? What were they thinking? Who would *do* this? For the price they’re asking, the house ought to be gorgeous. It ought to be the kind of place that impresses you the minute you walk in. But it’s not. And it makes me sad, to see a little piece of the beautiful neighborhood in which we live be transformed into *that*.

Things I have learned:

• The buttons in the elevator in the office are always on the side away from the main door.
• Some things are worth spending a lot of time on.
• Exercise is more interesting when there are zombies involved.
• The right pair of shoes can make all the difference.

Things I wished I hadn’t learned:

• Science Diet  is awful and I will never attempt to feed it to a cat again. Ever.
• Apples do not belong in chili. No matter how intriguing the recipe sounds.
• There is no way in the world that eggplant will ever be made edible.
• Slamming your foot into the corner of the dishwasher door really hurts.
• Exercise-induced asthma is really, really, really annoying. And frustrating. And did I mention annoying?

Things I wish other people would learn:

• There is no such thing as a ‘miracle’ food.
• There is no one diet that will work for everyone.
• There is no one exercise that will work for everyone.
• None of the rest of us care what you had to eat, or more importantly, how many calories were in it.
• The number on a scale is not, and has never been, the One True Definition of your health, despite what the media wants you to believe.
• Just because someone enjoys different things from you doesn’t mean that there is something wrong with them.
• Claiming that you are joking does not make it any less insulting. In fact it makes it worse.

An electronic version of the book we did for Richard’s birthday is now available for purchase through Amazon. Getting this thing edited and formatted and printed and published has been quite the learning experience for me – ISBN numbers, and what should or shouldn’t be on a title page, and the limited number of contributors one is allowed to have on any given publishing software / site, and how no matter how many times I check and double-check, and triple-check the text and the images, I will ALWAYS miss something and have to go through the whole process at least one or two times more, and on and on. But I at least managed to get the eBook version up and available, and I’ll fight more with how to get the print version available later this month. And even though the process has sometimes been extremely frustrating, it still really strikes me, how absolutely amazing it is that a bunch of people can write a book and stick it out on the interwebs for everyone else to read and other people can download it instantly and never in a million years would I have thought, lo those many years ago when I was a painfully awkward kid in junior high school, always scribbling stories in notebooks, that this sort of technology would exist.

There are so very many things in our lives that are evidence of how we live in the future – computers so tiny they can live in our pocket, yet so powerful we have a world’s worth of information always at our fingertips, for example. One of those ‘future’ things I admit I usually don’t give much thought is the International Space Station, which has been floating around up there above our planet, with continuous human occupation, for more than 12 years. It’s kind of amazing, if you think about it, which I suspect most of you don’t, because hey, like that amazing device you have in your pocket, it’s just….there. It was mind-blowing when it first went up, and if you think hard about it, it is still a little bit mind-blowing that it’s still up there and that people are living on it, year round, but most of the time it’s just not something that most of us dwell on at all anymore.

But there’s this one astronaut – Commander Chris Hadfield – who has been tweeting the most amazing pictures, from the ISS, of that funny little blue marble on which we all live (if you are on twitter you really ought to be following him – his handle is @Cmdr_Hadfield). He has a wonderful sense of humor (as evidenced by this series of tweets shared with actors from Star Trek), and as it turns out, is quite musically talented too. He and Ed Robertson (from the Barenaked Ladies, who happen to be one our favorite musical groups) collaborated on a song and then the two of them, plus a local college choir and the rest of the Barenaked Ladies, all sang it together – Commander Hadfield from space, and the rest of them from, well, not space. You can see / hear it here.

And over the past few months, looking at the pictures Commander Hadfield has been posting, and then this morning, watching that video, it just struck me, how amazing it is to live in the future. Maybe by the time my niece and nephews are my age, this sort of thing will all be old hat and people will be zipping up to the moon for quick jaunts and the idea of a musical collaboration between earth and space will be nothing more unusual than a bunch of friends getting together to write a book for someone they know, but right now, this moment, the future we are living in is pretty damn awesome.