Springtime!

And y'know what springtime means?  It means KITTENS!  And PUPPIES!  And they all want to play with me!  Really.

Yesterday one of my friends came over to use my sewing machine (I have a super-spiffy one now, it's kinda awesome).  When I went downstairs to let her in, she hadn't quite made it to my porch yet, but a lovely fluffy white husky saw me and came tearing up the steps to lick my hand and let me scratch her soft fuzzy ears.  She had heterochromia, as so many huskies do, but I've never seen a pure white one before and oh good grief I ADORE white fluffy dogs.  She didn't want to go back to her walker, either; nope, she wanted to stay with me on the porch.  Doggies love me.

More proof?  Okay.  I popped into the pet store to get some stuff for my own kittehs, and was puttering around browsing when a small brown furball with enormous ears came barreling at me.  Turned out to be a 4-month-old French bulldog (I LOVE Frenchies!  Smooshy faces and great big ears!), who promptly plopped down on my feet and let me scratch those exuberant oreilles.  Oh, and his chin.  And his belly.  And his back.  'Cause he was too damn cute not to pet all over.

Oh, and then I had to go pick up some meds for my Rullie-cat, so I popped over to the vet, only to find the receptionist cuddling a small white-footed tabby kitten.  She handed him over so she could go get Rullie's bag, and the little fluff (named Moose - very small moose, if you ask me) proceeded to lick my left arm from wrist to shoulder, nuzzling with his little wet nose all the while.

(Not Moose, but the Burrito {who looks pretty similar, and, let's face it, he's adorable})

So now I totally want more critters.  I can't afford them, and I certainly don't have room for them, but ohhhh... fuzzbabies are the best!

STRESS

So I tried to think of something that would be relevant to people who, y'know, aren't me (which anyone would agree are in fact a majority in this world of ours), but I'm so stressed out that the only thing I can THINK of is stress. Wanna know why? (Well, if you don't, you can stop reading and go check out Tami's or Natasha's blogs or something...)

It's recital week for my students, for starters, which is always super-stressful. I have to make sure they're all prepared (usually the easy part), get myself prepared (slightly harder), and do all the administrative nonsense that I'm really really REALLY bad at (like scheduling a piano for rehearsal, which used to be super easy 'cause I had one in my room, but they demolished those and put a drama room in instead. Super not fair, man.) And as always, it's the most advanced students who are the least prepared, and I want them all to do well because, hell, achievement is its own reward and all that, but also, who doesn't like genuine applause? And the knowledge that you've earned it? (Also, there are cookies.)

And I've ended up with 6 shifts at the bookstore this week. Or rather, 3 shifts and I'm working 6 days (hardy har har, lemme explain that). See, we're supposed to be moving all the teen books (3 subcategories, hence 3 shifts) around so that new stuff is featured more prominently. I am totally all for this, except for one teensy problem. We don't have enough linear feet of shelving. Meaning that instead of getting to feature all the newest titles, I had to get rid of, oh, 40 or so. Which I hate doing. 'Cause I can't sell them if we send them back to the publisher. And I had a total spaz on that one today, between the whole Mondayness thing, and having to do it almost all myself (I had help for about half an hour, which was awesome), and the pressure of oops-we-were-supposed-to-do-this-ages-ago-but-the-RM-is-coming-so-NOW.

Oh, and the reason I agreed to 6 days this week? I need money (duh, who doesn't). More than usual, I mean. 'Cause my Rullie-cat is sick. She's better than she was, but she'll never be all the way better, and she's not back to normal (like there is any such thing as "normal" with a cat), though she is eating and running and jumping and snuggling (and making it VERY hard to type this post, as she's on my right arm...). Vets are expensive as hell, and when I can't even afford my own health insurance, well, no, kitties do not have health insurance (I did look into it a while back, but Rullie was already too old to qualify). I have also learned that cat-under-the-covers is maybe not all it's cracked up to be (hello, poky feet). That's my girl there on the right - that picture was taken about 5 years ago, she's lots smaller now, unfortunately. She'll be 14 in June if we can keep her going comfortably.

So. That's my pity party. And that's why stress is the only topic I could think of. Hope your week is going better than mine...

Images: #1 - no idea, it's been on my hard drive for ages
#2 - I took it myself

Critter Love

So, pets. I could make up some statistics, but you guys are too smart for that, and I'm too lazy to look up the real numbers, but I'm going to take a guess that about 80% of people have some sort of animal sharing their living space (no, siblings and/or offspring do not actually count as animals, no matter how uncivilized they are...). Cats, dogs, fish, hamsters, birds, hedgehogs... people love their critters.

But do the critters love us back?

I came home from work yesterday after being out from about 7:30 AM till 11:00 PM (save about 20 minutes in between jobs when I popped in), and when I opened my door, there were two kitties waiting for me, purring, mewing, and generally getting underfoot. Hey, I thought, they missed me! What poor lonely little things... and I proceeded to give them large amounts of scritches and pats. Then I got upstairs... and realized their food dish was empty. The little moochers were just hungry!

This is Durwen. He doesn't actually know how to use that touchpad.

Okay, so clearly I'm not as important as food in their tiny fuzzy minds. But they care, right? I mean, I've got one on my right arm and one sprawled across my lap as I'm attempting to type this (albeit in a rather round-about {or at least round-a-cat}) manner. Durwen gives rather too many scratchy kitty kisses; Rullie is becoming increasingly difficult to eject from my lap when I need to do things other than scratch behind her ears. They seem to have some sort of time-share worked out for my pillow - half the time, the cat who's on there when I wake up is not the cat who was on there when I fell asleep.

So maybe they do love me, after all.

This is Rullie (with the knited Dalek I posted about last year...).

I suppose there's no way to tell, really... so I'm going to declare that pets do love us, based on limited and probably faulty research. But it's hard to say anything else when a large purring furball has taken up residence in your lap and is giving scratchy kisses to every body part in his reach...

This is me being lazy (and yet delusional)

Caffeine, Cats & Cozies

So I like alliteration, so sue me. Oh, and coffee. REALLY like coffee. A lot. Very much so. Yeah. Hang on, I need a cup before I get going here... Right, okay, got my coffee, got a large feline parked on my arm, so I think I'm ready to go on with this list.

Coffeehouse Mysteries - Cleo Coyle

A lovely series with copious caffeine and the usual high corpse count. Claire Cosi (okay, I'll stop with the Cs now, but that really is her name) takes over the management of the Village Blend, her former mother-in-law's coffeehouse, as well as the apartment above the premises, and starts serving up fabulous drinks and solving strange murders in her spare time. A great cast of recurring characters, including her ex-husband, their daughter, an eclectic crowd of baristas and oh yeah, the obligatory hot cop, keep things moving and are thoroughly entertaining to boot.

Black Coffee - Agatha Christie

I might be stretching things a little bit with this one, but oh well. In any case, this is one of the Christies that has been rewritten into novel form (it was originally a play and was adapted by Charles Osborne). Poirot is on the case when a noted physicist calls to report a possible breach of security on important information - but lo and behold, poisoned coffee takes him out before the famed Belgian even arrives, and the secrets have vanished as well. There's a reason Dame Agatha outsells everyone but the bible and Shakespeare... and since this was only issued in this format in 2000, even longtime fans might possibly have missed it.

Alice Nestleton series - Lydia Adamson

This is an older series that I confess I haven't seen on the shelves in a while (they seem to be out of print, sadly), but I dearly love them and own, if not all the entries, then I'm only missing one or two. They're maybe not the most brilliantly written, but they're lots of fun and there are plenty of kitties to go around. Alice, a chronically-out-of-work actress who makes most of her income as a cat sitter, manages to get into all kinds of tricky situations, whether in barns, backstage, or on buses. I was introduced to them by a friend who bought me (not surprisingly, given the title) A Cat With a Fiddle for Xmas when we were in high school; it does make a bit more sense if you start at the beginning, though, which is the one pictured here.

Joe Grey series - Shirley Rousseau Murphy

Okay, fellow cat-people - hands up if you've ever felt like your cat was trying to talk to you. In these mysteries, the cats actually DO talk - for real, in English and everything. Joe Grey, a big ol' grey (duh) cat, realizes one day that he's starting to understand what his human is saying to him. And then, inexplicably, he can speak as well. Over the course of the series (16 and counting) Joe and his similarly-talkative tabby pal Dulcie (and, eventually, a kitten called Kit) help the hapless humans solve all kinds of crimes, through some feline spying, anonymous phone calls, and general kitty cleverness. There are a few theories floated about how the cats gained their voices (and not ALL the talking cats are good guys...), but I'll let you discover them yourselves.

The Cat Who... - Lillian Jackson Braun

One of the original entries in the genre, most people have probably met Koko and Yum Yum, the crime-busting Siamese team nominally belonging to newspaperman Jim Qwilleran (mind the W!). First appearing on the scene in 1966, there was a nearly 20-year hiatus between the 3rd and 4th entries in the series, but after that more appeared regularly until 2007. Not much is generally known about the reclusive author, other than (at least according to Wikipedia) she's not dead yet! Some of the earlier ones have gone past feeling dated and just seem kind of retro now; and if some of the later ones read like they were perhaps (ahem) "phoned in", well, honestly I don't really care when I'm in the mood for this kind of kitty fun. :-)

Cats & Curios - Rebecca A. Hale

I'm still not entirely sure how I feel about these - there are only two books in this series so far. The cats, they're cool - as described, they sound like flame-points, Himalayans perhaps (though the cover art resembles a Turkish Van), and there are two of 'em, Rupert and Isabella. The action goes down in San Francisco and centres around Uncle Oscar's funky old antique shop, which has roots reaching all the way back to the Gold Rush. The bit that kinda weirds me out is that you don't find out the name of the first-person narrator till the end and it's - well, I guess I can't tell you, due to the whole no-spoilers thing, but it's a little odd. Interesting secondary characters and solid descriptive passages liven things up, and anyone with a mega-digger will giggle when Rupert gets going in the litter box; I'm reserving judgement a bit longer though, hopefully a third entry will shortly be forthcoming.

Magical Cats - Sofie Kelly

And here we have a couple more of the supernatural kitties - Owen and Hercules, this time, who can - no fooling - turn invisible and walk through walls, respectively. This is the first in this series (second one is due out soon), and I quite enjoyed it - I mean, come on, we've got cats, a library, and a murdered conductor! (I have had many, many conductors I wouldn't mind murdering, lemme tell you.) A nice twist to the revelation, small-town Minnesota setting (but with Boston ties, yay!), and a healthy coffee addiction on the part of the main character (you knew I was going to work the coffee back into this post) puts this one - or rather, its sequels - squarely onto my must-buy list.


That'll do it for me for today - I still have coffee to drink and kitties to brush!

Mah Kitteh iz 5!

Okay, technically he's not 5 till tomorrow, but whatever, we don't post on weekends anymore. Now, I know that a large number of our recent hits have been for Tara's post on the Royal Wedding, which is probably happening as you read this, so if I don't mention Kate, Will, and all the royal partying, we'll probably be missing out on a lot of traffic. Besides, I'm totally pulling an all-nighter to watch it online (since I have all kinds of knitting left to do on this sweater for my best friend's impending offspring, I might as well watch something). And, I gotta admit it, sometimes I get all girly and I want to see the dress!

Ahem. Okay, end of digression. Back to my fabulous feline. So, meet Durwen. Officially his name is "Zanadu Durwen", 'cause that's the breeder I got him from (yeah, the "Z" is on purpose, the "X" spelling was already taken or something), and his middle name is Socks, 'cause he has pretty white feet even if they don't match. Oh, he's a Birman, which is why the matching-feet thing is a big deal. Wanna see him? Here's my boy:


Heh. Oops. That's the Playkitty pose... Right, let me find you a better one. *snicker*


Yeah, that one's much cuter. So, the story of Durwen: Once upon a time, when I was 19 years old, I got permission to move out of the dorms and into my very own apartment. This was a big deal. I immediately contacted a Birman breeder ('cause I'd always wanted one) to reserve a kitten, so that my original kitty-baby, Kiffie (the Fabulous and Awesome!) could have some feline company when we moved into our very own place come August. Fast forward a few months, and by a complete fluke of something (genetics? environment?), every kitten in the litter I had a reservation for turned out with show markings - perfectly matched gloves and laces, Roman noses and unkinked tails. I was willing to shell out $400 for a kitten, but $1500 was just not going to happen. So I got Rullie instead - rescued her from the crazy lady at the garden centre (don't ask...). And heeeeeere's Rullie!


Pretty girl, yeah? Don't let the bitch-face fool you, she's become quite a sweetie in her later years here. So for 8 years it was me and Kiffie and Rullie, three girls all together. When the amazing and wonderful Kiffie-cat passed away of kidney failure, however, I needed a new buddy. Well, actually I cried rivers for weeks and I'm still tearing up as I type this 'cause I miss my girl so much, but Rullie was moping around big time and really, she's the one who needed a new buddy. Wanna see Kiffie? Of course you do.


Wicked super cute, huh? (Don't think she could fit in there now though, there's approximately another thousand books crammed into those cases {no, I'm not exaggerating in the slightest}). Right, so anyway, I did the Great Google Search for Birman breeders within a 10-hour drive from Boston, found one with seal point boys who'd be ready to be adopted in the time frame I needed, and lo and behold, I found myself in southern Ontario one August morning throwing a hand-knitted catnip hackeysack into a pile of kittyboys to see who'd come up with it. Durwen was the winner, so he came home with me - he was quite well-behaved for the first few hours, got him over the border with no problems, and then he decided to cry non-stop for over four hours. I was ready to tear my own ears off by the time I got him back to Boston... Here he is on his first night at home:

And so began a highly rewarding and very fuzzy friendship. He's sometimes the world's biggest lovebug, all super-snuggly and hugs and kisses; sometimes he's the world's biggest PITA, biting my feet or scratching things he's really not supposed to; he's always entertaining though, especially when he dances. Happy birthday, Durwen!

I've just outed myself as the crazy cat lady, haven't I?

Damn.