Category Archives: Pets –

Day 25 / November, 2014 – Pets in Mourning too:

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Tuesday, November 25th, 2014 -( 13°C / 55°F – Cloudy & very wet out there @ 10:45 am in Atlantic Canada )-

Boof

Jassper le Boof on February 28, 2009 – He didn’t like being behind a barricade, but he was trying to be Cute & Lovable.

Cathi realized that all the pets have been effected by Max’s kicking off his earthly shell and charging off into the next world. Late last evening Jassper went looking for his usual number of stainless steel bowls to play hockey with on the living room floor and drive ‘mommy’ nuts with – barking, jumping around and making lots of noise as he narrates his mock games with the Boof equivalent of “Boof Boof Scores!” — But there was one bowl missing.

Cats

Moe and Domino on the window seat enjoying the sleeping bag Domino decided was his, back in Arnprior. – Photo borrowed back from MySpace –

This morning Moe l’Orange didn’t have much of an appetite for his wet food. So I brought his leftovers down to Domino, didn’t even realize Boof had followed me, and I put the bowl on top of the dresser that Jassper might be able to reach, if he really stretches- but what shocked me, is when Domino went to sniff the wet food in the bowl, Jassper growled, like he was telling him that that was Max’s, leave it alone. I turned and yelled at Jassper to cool it, “Chill!”

& I could almost go into shock when I realize how deeply I’ve been effected by this. I mean, when a human dies, even someone very close, we seem to go into a cloud of ‘shock’, disbelief and un-reality.

Last Saturday, the 22nd, the day before Max left us, I just happened to tune in to my old radio station, WPKN.org  / wpkn.fm and listened to Annette Sz- read from one of her favourite books written by a Buddhist nun. Annette read a passage in which the nun described the shock she and her friends went through when their ‘Guru’ and inspiration died suddenly. She said that being as spiritual as they were, someone was shocked at how deeply their suffering was as they mourned. Someone else came up with the explanation that as they opened their heart centres through their daily attempts to practice deep meditation, they also tore away the protection that ‘normal people’ had and opened themselves to deep and powerful emotional responses in the moment. – Wow – So, Annette and the Universe got that right. Funny how we rarely have anything give us support and glimpses of what might be coming our way ahead of time. Thank you, Annette- Thank you, ‘Universe’ –

Moe

“Keeping Humans on track is such exhausting business-“

 

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From the Archives : Aerendel News & Reviews:

Screenshot of earlier blog.

{ The first several attempts at using a theme I could live with failed – And then I found this “Lord Of The Rings” Theme – & that worked. }

Yay-

—–Jim

=====

———jda——

Day 24 / November, 2014 – We lost a cat last night.

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Monday, November 24, 2014.  -( +2°C / +36°F – cloudy & grey @ 8:00 am )-

Cats

Moe hoping Max leaves him some of his treat after Max gobbled up most of his own and then jumped in front of Moe to gobble up his too-

A comparatively small grey fussbudget of a cat gave up his body and strutted proudly off into the clouds, ectoplasmic tail in the air, ready to bat at anything and any body who got in his way or came between him and his food – early this morning. We think Max was a British Gray Shorthair.

My stepdaughter first saw him in a cage in a Kanata pet store where the local shelter in Ottawa had cats on display with their stories, and when she read that he was older and realized that nobody might want him because of that, her heart was touched and she had to have him.

He was not the easiest cat to get along with. He would often try to ambush anybody coming up the stairs in our just-west-of-the-Ottawa-city-limits home in Ontario. Even when he was on his best behavior, he might let you pet him for a while and then decide he’d had enough of you and take a swipe at you with his sharp little claws, acting like he meant to slash and draw blood.

A few things changed when we moved to New Brunswick. Instead of Max hiding from Domino, our alpha Bengal Cat- Domino ended up hiding from Max. Max continued to strut around and tried to invade Domino’s territory several times. We broke up minor cat fights every now and then.

About six months ago, Max had a scratch on one paw that became infected and we got him antibiotics and ‘stuff’ to paint his paw with until it healed. The first round of ‘stuff’ didn’t quite do the trick so we tried a second kind of ‘stuff’ and that did work. But the antibiotics had a side effect and Max began leaving puddles of diarrhea here and there, in ‘interesting’ places, like covering electrical cords behind the credenza that houses our stereo stuff, on the cord to the modem we depend on for our fibre optic internet and ‘cable teevee’ connection. He lost some weight. He became more voraciously hungry than before, less patient while waiting for us mere humans to get his food out of the can and into his bowl. He would often abandon his bowl, jump down, run to the porch, jump up and push Moe, -the sweetheart of an orange tabby ‘cat and a half’ 24 pounder- away from Moe’s bowl of food, gobble up all of Moe’s food and run back to his and gobble that as quickly as possible. He spent a lot of the last few months with bits cat food all over his face and head until we could get him to allow us to clean that up.

And he continued to lose weight. He was little more than skin and bones last night, lying on his side, struggling in vein to get up and get out of the box we gave him to lie comfortably in. His eyes had already glazed over.

My stepdaughter was here for a visit yesterday, Cathi said it seemed to her like Max just hung on long enough to say goodbye to her and then rapidly went downhill. Cathi saw and recognized the symptoms of a cat preparing to jump into his next life and pronounced that before I saw it coming. But when it was obvious to me, I lost it. After my step daugter had gone home, I all but fell onto Cathi’s shoulder and cried like a baby.

Several strange messages came through. As Max was lying on his side, expiring, and I was in the bathroom, just sitting there, I received this image of Max lying on his side with a golden stream of smoke rising up from his heart as a thin vertical line and then blossoming into spirit cat-ness above him. AS I cried my eyes out and asked his guardian angel if there was anything we can do to make it easier and let him know he’s been loved, no matter how mean and feisty he ever got, I felt the message, “You taught me kindness.” and yeah, now that I thought about it, in the last few months he was a whole lot less ready to tear a strip off anybody within reach, he actually purred when I pet him, and right away, didn’t wait a couple long moments and then begin to purr in spite of himself. I went out and pet him lightly where he was lying in his box, staring at nothing, and got the same kind of message, “Soon I will see my mother again.”

I’m a basket case. I can’t see through the tears. I don’t know whether I should carry Domino up to where Max’s empty shell lies and let Domino say goodbye or what.

And I better end this here before I can’t see what I’m typing.

———jda——

Day 21 / Friday

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Friday, November 21st.  -( -3°C / +27°F  @ almost 4:30 pm )-

"Boof!"

Jassper blocking the way into the living room, piano on the left, fire behind the puppy-horse. Note, I didn’t correct the flashburn in his eyes. He does not have Orphan-Annie eyes.

I’m listening to “Sixty Years On” by Elton John, from his first album? Reliving a lot of the turmoil from the late sixties, early seventies.

My NaNo Novel has gone over 98, 000 words, is dealing with the early sixties and pouring salt in old wounds.

Somebody once told me that he’d heard that the measure of a writer is what he or she does when there is “Nothing to write”.

Sometimes I think I will never know what that feels like. I have so much to finish writing. Other times I think about writing and my head fills with pins and needles and I can’t imagine sitting down to start.

Yeah, it gets weird. But

What doesn’t?

—sigh–,

Orange Cat on a piece of paper on a couch.

Moe, aka le bete orange, happily enjoying the torn bit of packing paper, which, he is sure – I put there just for him.

The orange cat scattered packing papers all around the living room again. When I tore one in half to roll it up and use it as the kindling and put the second half on the couch, Moe, the orange cat, jumped up on the couch, smiled at me for being so thoughtful and perched himself on that piece of paper. Yup things are back to normal around here. —WordPress’s special characters don’t like being placed in a ‘caption’.— & I’m not sure whether all beasts in French are supposed to be feminine or not. — But Moe’s a neutered male so he probably doesn’t care. And human languages are all inferior to meows in cat’s minds anyway — so would he be ‘Monsieur, la bête orange’?  —

The grey visiting cat jumped down from the table this afternoon and did not go down on his face, and hurried and jumped up onto the cat perch on the porch without favoring his wounded shoulder.

Fire In The Woodstove.

Oh, the fire – for which I didn’t need Moe’s little bit of heaven to fuel it’s beginnings.

—double sigh–,

———jda——

20 November, 2014 – Snowy Morning?

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Thursday, November 20th, 2014  -( -3˚C / +27˚F @ 9:45 am in Atlantic Canada. & We had snow over night. )-

snowy look toward Canada Street.

This is the view from what Cathi calls our back door. It looks more like a front porch entry from outside, except for the complete lack of sidewalk. One of the first things Cathi had done after we moved in was have a fence put up to give Jassper a nice area to run around in without needing to be chained up all the time. This was taken a little after 8 am on 20 November, 2014.

Moe Morning Yum

Moe, the Orange ‘Cat and a Half’ – enjoying a morning treat with this morning’s snow in the background.

Just before I woke up I dreamed I was telling somebody there was something wrong with my shoulder. I woke up and my right arm was numb. I moved and my shoulder snapped into place. I thought that was a bit strange, but it worked. Whether this is some mild flu or a left over from a slightly stronger one that plagued us both last week, I have been waking up with stinging muscles and while I haven’t been feeling really bad, I haven’t quite been my normal self either.

Yesterday, worrying about the grey ‘visitor’ cat, it took me more than twice as long as usual to get anything accomplished- but went over 90,000 words in My NaNo Novel. There are a couple things I think I want to pull out before I have it officially registered as a winner. At least two scenes I believe are so special I don’t want them out there, released where anybody can steal them from me. This is the first time I’ve felt like that about anything I’ve written, and I’ve been writing for quite a while. -Just, maybe, haven’t felt like I’ve been this close to having a commercial success in my ‘hot little hands’.

—Yay?–,

~~~~~  ———jda——

Wednesday, 19 November, 2014 – Weird Feeling & Cat Fights

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Wednesday, November 19th, 2014 -( -6°C / +21°F @ 5:40 am )-

It is now 8:30 am

I woke up around 5 am, had a feeling that something was ‘wrong’ with the world, like something major had happened.

I didn’t wake Cathi, her sleep is precious and if a three hundred foot Tsunami was coming, Yes I would wake her and get us somewhere above that height, but short of that, she needs to have her head on her shoulders and in close to full functioning mode for work.

I wanted to check our friendly news services, but the computer was weird. It wasn’t quite frozen, but it wouldn’t load, or refresh, graphics. Trying to refresh a different page in firefox, it got hung up trying to connect to ‘ad.[something].ru’ and I wondered if something had happened between here and Russia, like maybe somebody pulled the plug on international connections via the internet. I tried loading a wordpress page – and that page got hung up trying to load an ‘iSomething.1wp.something-else’

So I told the computer to restart.

It did. It can’t find the system fan so I had to tell it to go ahead and start up anyway, I’ve got the case open and a small external fan is blowing on the cranky system fan that starts up, yawns, sometimes plays happily for hours, sometimes says, ‘oh the hell with this’ makes too much grinding type noises and shuts itself off. The external fan does the job better than the system fan did anyway. [ mumble mumble schnarr schnarr planned fuppin obsolescence schnarr schnarr schnarr- ]

Okay, spiffy decent windows 7 computer gets back up, and the blinkin’ graphics still didn’t want to load. But when I broadcast images of computers sinking under multiple fathoms of sea water from my imagination into the cpu, it said, okay, you mean business, I’ll be good, please don’t drown me-

And- so far anyway, there’s no freaking huge headlines about nuclear bombs hitting anybody’s infrastructure with emp’s or anything.

Cathi got up at her usual time, was getting ready for work I was staying out of her way, and when I got a chance, I told her about my weird feeling that something was wrong, and her jaw dropped.

She had awakened about half an hour before I did with that, “Something awful is happening somewhere-” creepy feeling that my sister might have called the ‘heeby jeebies’.

And the dog was his usual pain in the bum self, wanting to be right in the middle of anywhere anybody wanted to go, staring at the refrigerator and looking at us, looking at the refrigerator, and back at us, until we either give up and get him something, or chance major injuries trying to push him out of the way, or sit down and try to explain to her boss that she can’t come to work because this hundred and twenty five pound dog won’t let her get back to her bedroom to finish getting dressed and ready for work.

Sigh.

Well, Cathi drove out of our driveway. I let the dog out and I thought I’d blog about my weird apprehensive feeling and climbed into the office – I have a piece of 12 inch wide shelf wood blocking the door from animals who might be too lazy to jump over that- It actually keeps the dog at bay, and he could easily step over it.

I almost sat down at the computer when we had hissing and loud meowing and scrambling noises and I turned around and made it back to the door to see one cat with his teeth clamped on the other one’s shoulder, and Moe, the orange trouble maker, looking like he was really worried about this. So I screamed and Domino let go and turned and ran back into his sanctuary and Max, who most likely had started it, got up and scurried into the kitchen, the other way.

I checked on Domino, who was up on top of one of his perches, looking worried that Max might attack again. I went into the kitchen, no Max. I looked under the kitchen table and then around the corner through the open door, onto the porch- there was Max, sitting on the floor, thinking about things. I glanced and saw that the dry food bowl was empty, went back to the bag, got a handful of dry food and some cat treats, gave Domino a little of each, and went back to the porch.

I put the handful of dry food in the empty bowl and deposited half a handful of treats near it and the rest on the floor in front of Max. — The dog was still outside and didn’t look like he wanted to come in yet, which is odd, but I walked back toward the porch off the kitchen, and there was a puddle of blood under Max. I grabbed a paper towel and dabbed at it, saw a slight trail of blood coming from his shoulder, bright red blood, and thought, oh no, did Domino bite into an artery? And dabbed at it. -Max, who was eating his treats, did not seem to mind being dabbed at. He looked stunned, but didn’t look like he was in any pain. I stayed there long enough to see that no blood was squirting out of his shoulder, so I hoped that meant that no arteries had been sliced. I waited a couple minutes, Max did not keel over dead and no more blood oozed or squirted from his shoulder wound, so I decided to get the cats’ morning wet food into their bowls and put Max’s bowl into the crate that Moe likes to go into whenever he wants to feel safe or whatever. I did that, Max didn’t want to go all the way into the crate, but I managed to get him in and close the door. Then I got him some water, and another half a hand full of dry food. He looked at the closed crate door and wondered why he was in a crate, but didn’t start complaining and went back to greedily chomping on wet and dry food. I went back to soak up the blood on the floor and saw another small puddle where Max had landed when he jumped up on top of the cat-friendly claw cleaning post that used to be a guitar amplifier’s extension speaker.

I called Cathi’s work number, left a message, checked on the dog, he was happily sitting out front, surveying his domain, I finished fixing his morning crunch crunch and broken up piece of bread, which I figured would keep him busy for ten seconds or so when he did finally decided to come back in, checked on the cats, made sure Domino was okay, had more than enough dry food, a few extra grains of cat treat and available water and all that, went and sat down at the computer and Cathi called.

We talked for ten minutes. Max was still alive inside the crate, had food to look at and water to look at and a closed crate gate to look at and, strangely enough, wasn’t complaining.

The dog started barking at somebody who was heading for the nearest bus stop and didn’t want to come in, but finally did.

And here we are.

— I blew it for NaBloPoMo month yesterday when I got distracted by an orange cat who wanted me to know that he could cause a lot of pain with his claws and my leg if I didn’t drop everything and cater to his whims right then and there, I forgot to come back to finish that up and forgot to post it before midnight. & apparently, when you manually save a draft early on, like right after you write out the date, the time and the temperature on the top line, um, after you do a manual ‘save draft’ the auto save drafts function doesn’t feel like it has to pay attention to anything and goes to sleep. And if weird graphics freezes happen and you think you’ve got everything saved and tell the computer to restart, well, you lose the stuff you forgot about, that should have been auto-saved, but didn’t think it should bother and, can I scream now? —why bother?

—Okay, it’s after 9:30 am now. We have a big black dog blocking my side of the bedroom, a large orange cat happily occupying Cathi’s spot. Domino is curled up on one of his safe perches, sleeping peacefully and Max is still alive staring at the closed door and not complaining about being in the crate. I can’t say things are normal, because things are never normal with our pets, but this is close.

—Weird moning news, signing off—,

~~~~~ ———jda———

le 17 novembre, 2014

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Monday, 17 November, 2014. -( 0°C / 32°F and not snowing at the moment in our neck of the woods. @ 4:15 pm )-

NaNoWriMo? I went over 80,000 words in 17 days @ 10:38 this morning, according to the word count function in my copy of open office – I hate microsoft products, they built holes in their security so US Government agencies could hack into your computer any time they felt like it and wouldn’t plug those leaky security holes. They will probably suffer in their next lives. It’s not my job to pass judgment. I’m thinkin with my luck, I will be in love with somebody who was a microsoft programmer in their previous life [ this current one, here ] and suffer along with them when the fit hits the shan in their next life (or lives?).

It was snowing earlier, around 2:30 I tried to get some photos.

Boof!

“Boof!” -the wanna-be 500 pound puppy wants in. He thinks he deserves a treat for chasing snowflakes and barking at anything that moves.

Outdoor 'Zen Corner' in the snow.

Cathi’s outdoor ‘zen corner’ it’s hard to photograph this spot and get the perspective right. I might have to move the swing out of the picture to do that. But this isn’t bad.

Feng Shui?

This almost looks like a Feng Shui shot, a doorway to something mystical? -Shrug, I took several shots, higher, lower, a bit to the left, a bit to the right. This one looks the best.

Domino Plus An Orb

One minute earlier, all you could see of the cat was his head, everything else was under the blanket. I grabbed the camera and he decided he didn’t want to be just another meowing head? Orb to the right-

— um, Through many lives do you suppose any one pet would want to reincarnate with the same humans? Do you really believe that any one of them would be able to stand us for that long?

— & Um–, Time to push the publish button.

———jda——

Day 8 / Saturday

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Saturday, November 8th, 2014  -( +2°C / 36° F @ 3:15 pm – The sun is shining and there are a large low clouds in odd roundish shapes, connected around corners et cetera, with interesting shades of dar to light grey and a bit of white. I took a couple photos, we’ll get one up here, sooner or later, the weather app says, ‘scattered clouds’ but these don’t look scattered to me. )- It’s my friend since High School’s birthday, Walter C.

clouds

I wouldn’t call these clouds, “Scattered”.

Moe

“Moe” enjoying a box, sitting on Halloween candy. Couple days ago.

Sleep: Duh- I fell asleep watching House Hunters international or something like that and might have slept fifteen minutes to half an hour. This was before ten thirty pm yesterday. They it must have been seven am when I rolled into bed this morning, I got up and fed the animals around eleven and went back to bed, and slipped in and out of dreamland until 3 pm. Cathi went to bed after I did and got up before me. I thought I heard her calling me and rose from a dream I was having to find that she had gone somewhere and taken the van.

Dreams: Yup- Many- All I remember at this point is that I was talking and/or interacting with several people, maybe several groups of people. And I felt like I was learning something.

Health: I have a head ache, back ache, body aches. I have that, “I need coffee” sense that caffeine may make it a little better.

Nano: Went over 32,000 words last night.

NaBlo: Here we are, Day 8. I could see where today could have been a day where a change in momentum might not have good for ‘discipline’ here.

Astrology: The month began in the midst of a Mercury Retrograde Cycle. Many writers who don’t sneer at astrology completely will recognize this as not a good time to start anything. When Mercury goes direct Anything you started while it was retro is very likely to stop. I tried to outsmart that probability by not beginning a brand new venture, a whole brand new blog, but picked up and continued one that had already been started earlier this year, thinking it would be a little bit easier to continue on with that. The same with the NaNoWriMo story. It’s a prequel to something else, I’m trying to make it stand alone, but I also started this prequel a month before Mercury went retro and began the NaNo drive fresh, with fifty thousand plus words that followed plot lines before the NaNo on hold, waiting to be edited and merged into the NaNo stuff after the NaNo stuff is finished. I never dove into NaNoWriMo and produced this much so quickly before.

Reality?: Yeah, I have a few worries about financial things and the way things are going.

On The News Front: I think I fully expect somebody to try to bring down the economy of the Western World. I think I believe the Rothschild Banks are behind this, or rather somebody behind the Rothschilds banking system is behind the plot to impoverish the USA and all her allies. Shrug. I think there may be more news on this front before December. I will be surprised if the economies of the US and Canada are doing well before and after New Years. I’ve been pleasantly surprised before, let’s hope that happens again.

—–sigh,

 

———jda——

Day 7 / Friday

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Friday, November 7th, 2014  -( +6°C / 43°F @ 10:00 am – & We’re having a rain event. most of the snow from last week is gone. We might get more snow later today & this evening, it’s hard to tell and the weather network has gone graphically wonky so their information is useless. )-

Dreams: Of Course, Most memorable right now? (1)  There was a guy whose body was becoming very strange. His back, arms, neck and head had become almost entirely atrophied, but were minimally working and somehow he had walked out of the fatty substance, so he had a very thin body from the base of his spine up and a blob of formless fat, which sort of tried to regain the form of his former body- following him around, more or less hovering in the air behind him. I only saw this guy from behind and he was verbally describing his condition to me. (2) (?) Indoors somewhere, I was visiting or checking out this couple who had built a meditation dome, and wanted to give or sell me a booklet on how they had built and finished their dome and what they were all about. They had deflated something, put it inside their dome and re-inflated it. I couldn’t quite reach the booklet and wanted to read it, but for some reason I couldn’t. (3) I realized there were several people at this meditation meeting. I thought the original couple who had built the dome were gone. They had left their manifesto behind, and left. I think I was worried that people coming to them for wisdom and guidance wouldn’t get any. I started talking to somebody and asked him if he knew my yogi friend, the guy said he had heard of him, I said that my yogi friend had seen this meditation group as a good thing if you came here to meditate as a group and then went home or went someplace quiet to let the meditaion session sink in, energy take route or whatever, but don’t believe anybody human is going to sit down and solve all your problems in 25 words or less. (4) I think there was a fourth dream in which somebody was telling me he was going blind. This may be connected to a news story from last night’s television news. Somebody had shot a sea otter with a shotgun and left it to die. Rescue people from an aquarium had come along and tried to save the sea otter. they had to operate on a flipper that had been partially shot away, had to operate several times on shattered bones, and discovered that the concussion had left the otter permanently blind. This had been about a year ago, and the otter is doing a lot better now, but is still blind. The aquarium has since rescued a female sea otter and she’s okay, but not okay enough to release back into the wild. Because male sea otters can be aggressive, they introduced the two slowly, showed video footage of the female swimming around near where the male was out of the water, sniffing and looking around, but unable to see her. They said that the aquarium staff is still cautiously optimistic and were very happy to see the two sleeping together, one of them had its arm out and had spent their sleep time touching the other one and nobody had gotten crazy and tried to slash or harm the other, so they thought the two had become friends. So that might be why I dreamed somebody told me he was going blind. (?)

Health: Right now I can barely see what I’m typing because I have one of those visual migraine patterns going through the entire left half of my visual field with a small ‘tail’ just to the right of center. The whole left half of what I can see was vibrating, with crystal, opague and bright colourful stuff moving around. I’ve had these things for most of my adult life, I remember thinking the first time I saw one that it might be a sign that I would soon have a religious experience. I remember feeling strange when I had one of my early experiences, seeing this stuff while talking to a salesman in and electronics store. Can’t remember right now whether it was a radio shack or a place that sold primarily stereo components in the seventies. I’m thinking lately that I’m barely functional, operating at flat out the best I can do and worried that Cathi doesn’t believe my best is good enough. I think maybe she thinks I should be trying harder on several fronts. I have also been suffering through headaches when I first get out of bed in the morning. These headaches last between fifteen minutes and an hour, with rare headaches lasting longer, On a couple of days I’ve had to go back to bed, arrange the ramp of pillows just right and try to ignore the pain until I can use yoga techniques to relax completely, and this usually works. Sometimes takes me an hour or longer, and sometimes takes me several passes of relaxing various body parts’ muscles in a specific order, and finding the first few muscles have tensed slightly again after I’ve worked my way almost to the end of each cycle. After several cycles the first muscles I relax become more and more relaxed, and I know I’m getting somewhere when the first muscles do remain relaxed until I get all the way through the cycle and can then feel like I’m letting go of all my tension, floating down or up out of my pain- Often, I fall asleep at this point, and if it worked, I wake up, soon or sometimes after a couple hours, feeling relaxed and headache pain free.

Pets: The animals are their usual needy selves. Grey guy driving me nuts from the second I’m up and out of bed until he’s been fed and eaten all of his food and gobbled up everybody else’s that he can get to. I’ve had to put the dog’s food up on top of the refrigerator to keep the cat from eating it before the dog comes back inside from his morning pee and poop session outside.  Moe gets to follow me out onto the porch while grey guy is greedily gobbling up his bigger portion of ‘wet food’ on the kitchen table. I toss the rinsed tuna-can-sized tin that the wet food comes in- into the recycling box, set the porcelain bowl of Moe food in place, turn around, pick up Moe and plop him down within reach of the wet food, then scoot through the door, close it before the grey cat can run out on the porch, jump up and bully Moe away from Moe’s food. With dog and those two cats dealt with, I can then go concentrate on Domino who looks at me and moans pitifully about the way his lot in life has turned out lately, I give him a handful of treats and cover the bottom of his bowl with dry food and give him a light pet on the head and sometimes he purrs, sometimes he looks at me like I’m out of my mind, why would I pet him like that?

What else? It’s been more than an hour and I’ve still got traces of visual migraine vibrating on the left, now more like three quarters out from the center of the left side, and no longer interfering with what I’m trying to type here. I’ll have to proof-read this later, and I’m wondering if there might be some real surprises in what actually came out.

Sleep: Yesterday I blogged early, because I thought the dreams I woke up remembering were important, went back to bed, slept for maybe an hour, got up, fed the animals and went back to bed, in just enough pain to make me think I wouldn’t be much good at anything, did my relaxing stuff, never quite accomplished the level of relaxation I needed, but fell asleep. -Didn’t remember any dreams as I drifted in and out of sleep until three thirty-ish in the afternoon. Today? I ‘chilled’ after midnight, hoping I can get myself into any kind of decent schedule at all, found nothing worth watching, so I put on the news and between ups and downs, trips to the washroom, etc. It was more like after three a.m. before I was more or less settled down enough to think about drifting off to sleep. I think it was more like 4 a.m. or after when Cathi came to bed and I did sleep, fitfully, had the dreams I recorded above between 4 am and 8  this morning. Tried to get more sleep. decided I better get up and feed the animals. So my non pattern had me getting maybe five hours of fitfull sleep from ten a.m. to 3:30 pm and then maybe another three to three and a half hours between 4 and 8 am again. & I’m still pretty much always exhausted.

NaBlo: After I got up, I began my news blogging schnarr, dealing with complaining animals every ten minutes or so, so I was still messing with news stuff after Cathi got home. She went to bed with the television on, her tab computer thing in hand, checking up on the stuff she checks on every evening. I finished the news schnarr at just before 7 pm and went right into my NaNo Novel.

NaNo: The main character and his almost too good to be true romance in the ninth grade/ Junior High School / Is progressing well. She is very intelligent, has a few neurotic issues, doesn’t trust people who compliment her intelligence because some guy representing himself as a Mensa administrator almost raped her when she had just turned 13 years old, doesn’t trust people who say she’s beautiful Because a photographer who wanted to do her portfolio, telling her she could be a model and make lots of money, thought she was older and when he learned she was 13 that year, pretty much escaped before anybody accused him of proposition an under aged kid. Now there’s a substitute teacher who may be stalking her. I was up and down all evening, remembering to save often, needing to deal with animals again, trying to let Cathi stay in bed, not bothering her with anything. I didn’t realize how much I actually got done and went from something like 18,000 words at 7 pm to over 24,000 words before midnight. The word count application at the NaNo site says I could be finished on the 13th of November at this rate. Which, after bombing out the last several attempts I made, feels really good. I’m still slightly worried that I might hit a brick wall and feel, for instance, that something stupid is happening and I’d need to rethink things, because some plot twist is taking on an implausible turn of events or something like that. Plus+ – I’m pretty happy at the way things are going and think this novel is pretty darned good in the form it is coming out, that nothing too weird is happening, that it does explain the back story to the much longer, several part novel-(cycle?) I began writing in 1968.

—sigh, It’s probably time to go take an allergy pill. Headache still there, backache still with me. I’ll probably survive.

———jda——

Day 4 = Tuesday

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Tuesday, November 4th, 2014 -( +3°C / +37°F With a very blue sky above the slightly messy whited grounds @ 10:30 am here in Atlantic Canada )-

NaBloPoMo: I feared I might have signed up in the wrong place, signed up for last year’s NaBloPoMo instead of this one, and might need to sign up again, before the deadline, tomorrow, the 5th. I got to the page that lists every blog that has been officially signed up this year and read through them, found this one #’d 1066. Hmmm- Sounds like a significant number. I also remember some history teacher wanted to change his name to “Ten Sixty-Six” and the judge hearing that case denied him, saying it was too silly and he wasn’t going to allow it. At the time, I thought that if the guy was squirrelly enough to really want that name – he could probably find another judge somewhere who would go along with his request.

Dreams: Yes, several. Latest, most notable, was one in which I was one of several people working in a factory that made crossbows and crossbow ‘bolts’ -the shortish arrows that are made for crossbows. The boss could only be described as ‘paranoid’ – and believed the people who worked for him were plotting against him. As it turned out, this became a self-fulfilling prophecy as we all came to the conclusion that we needed a union to protect us from his weird actions. He brought in thugs to keep us from talking to each other while we were working – and had us followed home, and to where-ever we went, hoping to stop us from meeting up anywhere to discuss unionizing. Then, before anybody could come to him and tell him we were proposing a vote to unionize, he locked us out, and locked several of us inside, sent his thugs after us with orders to silence us anyway they had to. We were separated, hunted down, beaten close to death, dragged outside and dumped in the parking lot. The boss called the police and told them that three of us inside were trying to kill our fellow employees. Those inside found a couple bolts, a couple finished crossbows and hid out, having no idea why the thugs were obviously trying to kill us, as we were trying to stay alive. I became one of those three, found a bolt on a shelf, climbed up and got it, heard a thug coming, jumped down with a bolt and stabbed the thug in the neck, took his gun, a semi automatic pistol and tried to get to my friends, did find them. We did manage to sneak out a back way, and, on the way, found a room where the boss had made recordings of everything, like Nixon, because he was so sure people were plotting against him, he wanted to know about it. We found the recording of him ordering his thugs to do anything they had to – to get most of his employees out of the building and make sure the three he thought were real troublemakers were isolated where there were weapons because he planned to call the police and catch us armed and dangerous and urge them to shoot us before we had the opportunity to kill anybody else. He actually told the thugs to kill a few of our friends and leave them dead inside the factory, looking like we had killed them. This was in the days before video surveillance, but one of us stayed behind as the police came along, and played the tape through the factory’s public address system. The boss heard himself giving orders to kill and stole a gun, began firing, and the police ended his career in a volley of bullets. I was not happy with this dream when I woke up. I don’t like the idea that I was dreaming anything that justified killing anybody, no matter how crazy or evil the sonofagun was. Other dreams, As I was drifting in and out I found I was starting new dreams, could see them in full colour and stereo sound before I’d actually fallen all the way asleep.

Pets: Again, I took just a little too long to feed Moe (le chat, le grand Orange), -took just an extra couple seconds to throw some dry food in the porch bowl and greedy grey guy flew up onto their carpeted shelf, atop the desk, looked at the dry food, turned around, spilling dry food, and started wolfing down Moe’s wet food. I picked up the grey guy, who had his claws dug into the carpet and didn’t want to leave, and then had to step over the dog who was happily searching the floor for the couple bits of dry cat food that had hit the floor when grey guy spilled the bowl. I closed the door and grey guy, with just about half of the larger portion I had given him in front of him, had to content himself with quickly grabbing and gobbling up every little bit of that before any imaginary rival could get there and gobble it up first.

NaNoWriMo: Yesterday, after I finished my morning blog post and fed the critters, I went into the bedroom and turned on the news and fell asleep, listening to CBC Network News, dreamed I was listening to the French President as he addressed Parliament, thought I pretty much understood him in French, and thought I might walk up to the stage I dreamed he was speaking from and try to impress him by telling him in French that a Yogi had told me I spent a recent life time in Paris, as an artist, supporting myself by selling pencil sketches of people on the streets who would pose for me, long enough for the portraits. Drifting in and out of dreamland, I realized there wasn’t anybody on a stage I could get to, and he probably would not be impressed at all with my conversation about a previous lifetime in Paris, even if I told him about the dreams I’ve had about running down to the paved stretches along the river and spreading my arms and dancing in pure joy in the rain, or any other dreams of Paris I have had in this life. I don’t know- he just might have enjoyed me telling him that I really loved hearing very young children speaking nearly perfect French in Quebec. — but that’s a digression. I woke up looking at the clock we haven’t turned back yet, saw “4:38” and thought, ‘Yikes’ I might not get through the stuff I had to do to get to my NaNoWriMo-ing. But I did slog through it. Mon Amour Fou got home from work, grumbling that she really needed a nap and I ‘let her do that’ uninterrupted by me, & went back to my nonsense and finished up and probably got to NaNo around seven or eight. I wrote another 3,000 something words and came up with a total of 9,088 words at about 5 minutes to midnight, and then couldn’t get the NaNo page to come up in my browser, and when I did and entered the new total – it crashed and told me there was a problem. I tried again, opened a new page, entered the new total again, thinking there might be thousands of us trying to get our totals in at the same last couple of minutes, and bingo- managed to get yesterday’s new total in with a minute and a half to spare.

Now I better go make sure the animals haven’t torn each other apart. I probably would have heard that if it happened, but ya never know.

—Yay?—

———jda——