Roger Gets Used To Living Here

Roger the kitten has fallen into an odd pattern where he hides whenever I get up and walk around, but if I'm in bed or on the futon watching TV, he jumps up and wants to climb all over me, try to insert his head up my nostril, rub his little body against my face (smearing up my glasses) and generally scratch and bite my hands as if there were chew toys. Trying to eat breakfast (or supper) while sitting or lying on the futon in front of the TV (as is my wont) is next to impossible with him jumping onto my shoulder, worming his way under an armpit and generally wanting into everything. This morning he was hooking his claws over the rim of my (plastic) cereal bowl and trying to pull it away from me out of my hand. He's very endearing, but in the manner of kittens, is also completely crazy. This evening, he kept trying to get at my plate of pasta, and I kept setting him back down on the floor, once with a spiral of pasta hooked on a claw.

Roger "Howe" Waters

Saturday morning I got up and paid the exhorbitant bill they sent to put my cat Syd down in December, and then drove to a fairly distant animal shelter to pick up a kitten. I'd seen a teeny one online (I wanted a black one) and they showed me all of the cats there. They had the adult cats loose in the main area, and there was one adorable black female (cat) who'd walk up to you and repeatedly stand up her hind legs and butt her head into your hand if you petted her.

I went into the "kitten room" and saw all of the kittens. There was a cage with two tiny black kittens, one of which was the one I'd had my eye on online, and another cage with two larger, healthier ones, as seen here. The lady reached the open the cage seen here and the one looking at the camera (his brother's ears visible below his eyeline) rubbed himself on the cage and leaped out onto me and commenced rubbing his little body all over my face and shoulder.

Eventually I thought "I should give the little one a chance, though" and he was so wobbly and weak and scrawny that once I got him purring a bit, I put him back and picked up the first one again, and he started up again wtih the aggressive rubbing his face and shoulders on me again. He chose me, so I took him. The little one had been left with his siblings in a box, malnourished. A couple of them died. This larger one had been found with his siblings, probably abandoned and recently orphaned on an island in the Rideau lakes region, but in good shape. It was Howe island, so they called this one Howe and his brother Skye (after a neighboring island) and the others after other island names.

When I took Howe (hereafter known as "Roger" after the Pink Floyd songwriter, just as Troy's cat is called Floyd and my previous cat was Syd) and put him in a cat carrier, he got very upset and mewed the whole drive home. I opened the carrier and petted him, and he wouldn't come out, as he was too scared.

Once I got Roger home, he hid and wouldn't come out for about 24 hours. He'd mew questioningly, and if I was in the same room as he was, he'd stay put, and if I called to him from another room, he'd skitter out to the litter box or to look at things before diving back under cover.

Eventually I enticed him out and he erupted in a flurry of rubbing on me and playfully scratching and biting rather hard. Once Joel came over, he was terrified again, then started sneaking out all over the apartment, especially once the sun set and it got dim. A little streak of black or a little head with upright ears would occasionally peer around things and then vanish again. He's getting used to the place. He will even come out and sit near us while we're talking, but if either of us makes a move to stand up, he'll go hide again. There's a mixture of panic and play to it, and his mewing is a confused thing, as he's kinda scared and upset to be taken from the shelter by a large stranger, yet he is appealing to me (said stranger) for comfort.

Another Snow Day

Again. Tired of them. Tired of driving into school in horrible weather, just so I can stay there and not teach anyone anything. I did get some marking done. Then came home, napped, and have started wathing "Jonathan Creek" on YouTube to see if I'd like it.

My "Write Bad Teen Poems" Formula Idea

As an English teacher, I allow kids to put poems in their writing portfolios for extra credit. The thing is, the vast majority of teenaged poems are kinda all the same. "My secret angst," "silent scream" and "no one knows my shattered pain" and so on. After a few years of teaching, you've seen hundreds of these and they kinda annoy you.

First, pass around two pieces of chalk and have them fill the board up with likely angst-poem words to use. Then encourage them to write rhyming poems that complain that no one understands their pain, and that they will never trust anyone again.  For extra credit, suggest writing an angt-ridden poem in the style of Dr. Seuss:

"I will not cut me, Sam I am, I will not cut me with a knife, I will not cut into my wife, go anguished blade go. Go deep, go deep, go deep now, into the screaming abyss of my heart, cut blue, cut red, release my fading sorrow 'till it's dead. Dead, dead, dead; cut cut cut, oh Mr. Brown, Mr. Brown will you sink your blade, deep into my forsaken gut?" and so on.

Actually depressed, "emo" kids tend to like this exercise a lot, as they feel their personal poetry isn't quite as bad as this, so they felt better about it, and take pride in purposely writing worse than they do.  Clean cut kids LOVE trying on the emo hat for this exercise and writing like that. I guess all teens are emo under the skin. (The fading, archangel skin, forsaken in the anguished moonlight, black tombs swallowing their torn, forgotten dreams, shattered, flaming tears and writhing, groaning doom.)

Back At It

I couldn't sleep, so just lay in bed with my eye's (dammit. too much marking kids' work really makes bad punctuation look ok) closed for about four hours, thinking dazedly betimes. That happens quite often when I feel like I really need to sleep, because I'm back to work or whatever after some time off. Went to school, taught some things, ate people's excess Christmas chocolate and played some guitar. Came home and fell asleep, and woke up around 9pm, with a strong feeling like I'd been "sleeping as hard as I could" with my whole metabolism completely divided between "it's evening. you don't sleep now. wake up" and complete, mindless exhaustion that would not be denied. Now I'm up, and hope I can sleep tonight. There are exams to plan, stuff to cram in and so on. Watching Alien: The Director's Cut, which should help me sleep. Not because torso-rending violence makes me sleepy per se, but more because the slow pacing of 70s TV and movies makes me very relaxed.

Wasting the Last Bit of Time Before School

I did a lot of lying around, reading, surfing the Internet and so on. I didn't do enough other things. I put the word out that I am looking for a free kitten, and have gotten no information yet on that. On Friday evening, Joel1 came over and we watched funny stuff. I showed him The Peter Serafinowicz Show and he showed me Brainiac: Science Abuse (a British show that is like Jackass, only with a thin pretense of being "scientific" where Jackass is redneck, skater/stoner). We tried some hacks of Atari 2600 games that, in an emulator, have the graphics of, for instance, Space Invaders or Galaxion, replaced with Star Wars ones or the like.

On Saturday, Joel2 and I went to Joel2's friend Matt's house. On the way I stopped to buy whatever cheap set of TV show DVDs were on sale used at CD Warehouse (or "Seedy Warehouse" as it sounds in my head). I got X-Files Season 4 to have something to pass the time, to veg to. Joel2 and Matt like to make noisy soundscape "music" stuff and don't have cars and live in different towns. I was the enabler, the facilliator of the noise this Saturday. I got to sit in on all of the setting up of equipment that was mostly fallen apart, and witness the howling caucophony of guitars with all of the strings broken and hanging, feeding back wildly while said strings are wound around the neck and yanked upon to make vrooming sounds, or played with a metal vibrator to make moaning chainsaw roars and so on. I had a bit of a headache once they were done a few hours of this. My only contribution was to take Joel2's toy megaphone with a "robot voice" setting and read H.P. Lovecraft into a mic while they made some of their noise.

Eventually the guitars with 6 strings on them came out and an informal jammy thing started:


On Sunday, I seemed to want to sleep all the time, bought some milk, missed having a cat, watched Six Million Dollar Man and X-Files episodes, read the first half of the Terry Pratchett book I borrowed from Matt (Night Watch) and marked A-H in my Creative Writing class's work. I've been teaching about not using "it's" possessively. My whole "we don't write 'hi's' or 'her's' with an apostrophe, so don't write 'its' with one either" doesn't always stick.

So, tomorrow it's back to school.

New Years Eve

New Years was at T's this year. As usual there were pinball machines, various game consoles hooked to a projection screen TV, way too many kinds of desserts, guitar playing and lots of cool people. I played the "Phantom Menace" pinball machine in a three player game, and also enjoyed using the MAME cabinet to play Arkanoid (my favourite) and Puzzle Bobble and Super Sprint.
I also played Guitar Hero 3 into the Wii hours of the morning. There was Jolt! gum (each stick with half as much caffeine as a full cup of coffee) and some caffeine strips (like Listerine breath strips, but for caffeine) and Red Bull, as well as alcohol, but I made do with two Strong Bow ciders and no caffeine at all. Those things keep me up all night, and I plan to be asleep before 6am.  Naoise, on the other hand, (seen here with a Sugar-Free Red Bull) had liberal amounts of all alcoholic and caffeinated things.