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———
