Moody

Dear Diary: I know that I haven't written you in a long time!!!

Okay, sorry about that. My brain has not been focused in a LiveJournaly direction. I lost several hours of sleep on Monday because of Luke waking up at 4:00, and the bedroom being too hot, and I seemed to be operating on a sleep deficit all week. And then there was the movie we watched, and the LiveJournal meetup, and my NaNoWriYe writing quota...

The movie we watched was "Cube", which I mentioned in the last post. It was pretty decent, for an indie film. It had vaguely science-fictiony elements to it--certainly a high level of unreality, but not in a way that is intrinsicly SFnal. My wife pointed out that it had significant horror elements too, like the high body count and occasional grisly scenes. Recommended, though. I've heard conflicting things about the sequel, "Hypercube", but if it explains anything about what the heck was really going on...

Of course, sometimes an actual eplanation for what's going on is just a letdown, because it doesn't live up to what you were thinking. That's why I often try to avoid it in my writing...but that leads to people calling it "unfinished", so you can't win. But some writers, like Robert Charles Wilson and sometimes John Stith, are better at coming up with cool situations and not as good at following through on them.

Anyway. We're also four episodes into "Angel" now, and it's not really growing on me the way "Buffy" had. I'm sure we'll finish out the first Angel season, but after that I'm hoping we can splurge on Buffy Season 5.

I'm officially on holiday now, until the 10th. We're mostly going to be hanging around the house, though, which is my idea of a perfect vacation. We are going down to Con-Version in Calgary, and trying to bring the kids, which will be fun. George R.R. Martin and Spider Robinson will be GoHs, which will also be fun, even if I have seen both of them before. We're springing for an actual hotel, and an actual babysitter on Saturday afternoon, so we'll see how that goes. Otherwise we'll mostly be trading off, one of us with the kids while the other goes to a panel or something.

With respect to the Robert Jordan vs. George R.R. Martin concordance thing, I've made the only rational choice: I'm doing both books. I've done the prologue of The Fires of Heaven, and the prologue and first chapter of A Game of Thrones. The latter poses a few problems, because unlike Jordan's, it doesn't have chapter titles or numbers, just a header indicating the viewpoint character. I'm going to have to assign numbers to them anyway, and probably mark the page number too.

I finished Magic's Price, which was okay, if not stunningly spectacular. I've finished two Mercedes Lackey tirlogies now, that one and the "Arrows" one, and am in no particular hurry to read more. Now I'm onto the incredibly compelling The Salt Roads by Nalo Hopkinson. I'm being slightly sarcastic there--Hopkinson is, I think, not really to my tastes, but I consider her a high-probability Aurora nominee, so I thought I'd get the book out of the way. Parts of it remind me, right off the bat, of The Colour Purple, and not necessarily in a good way. It's very woman-magicky, and somehow I find that off-putting. For some people this may be a selling point, I don't know, but it's not pulling me in.

That may explain why I've been rereading "Grimjack" comics instead. I'm through the John Gaunt issues, about to start the Twilley ones--that's 54 issues, plus a few "Starslayers" and related books. I actually started them during Magic's Price, but I've been avoiding The Salt Roads with greater dedication. Ah, well. I will try to read more of it tonight, so that I can finish it before it and all my other library books are due back.

More posts to come tonight, probably, now that I'm back in a posting mood--this is the general catchup, but there are some specific issues I want to dedicate a more focused post on.

Infestation

There's this mostly-tabby cat that's been hanging around the neighbourhood for a while. Maybe not since we moved in, but certainly for at least a year. Our cat, Felicity, is an indoors cat, but we've taken her outside for tentative explorations on a few occasions, and she still considers the backyard, which she can see through the patio doors, to be her domain. So when the tabby cat comes around, sometimes she and Felicity have a growling match through the screen, if it's open. It's mostly just noise; I don't think either of them have tried to claw through the screen, which is a good thing. We're not sure if she's a stray or if she's an out-cat from elsewhere in the neighbourhood.

I hadn't seen her for a while, but yesterday Nicole reported spraying her through the screen with a water pistol, to break up another cat argument. She(the tabby cat)ran away, but not too far. Nicole didn't think anything of it.

Until we start seeing little tiny kittens climbing up from under the deck this morning. Tabby-coloured kittens, some lighter than others. Our deck sits maybe a foot or two off the ground, with a small gap between it and the fence. I wouldn't have credited that a cat could get under it, actually. But apparently this cat has nested under there and had her litter. (Which is how we know that it's a "her".)

The tabby cat definitely does not wear a collar, which reduces the chances that she's a house-cat on the roam, as does the fact of choosing to have her litter outside her own house. So now we have a stray cat, with several kittens. What the heck do we do with them? We're going to check around in case she does have a home nearby(which is going to be fun--we don't know any of our neighbours that well), but if not, what then? Do we call the SPCA on her? Nicole's reluctant, because of the possibility of them being euthanized. My dad has expressed interest in taking one of the kittens, if they end up being ours to dispose of. I don't know if I want to leave them to grow up strays, and kittens are likely good adoption prospects, right? We'd take one ourselves, but Nicole is not strongly in favour of a multiple-cat household, and my own experiences with adopting kittens into households with an existing adult cat have not been particularly favourable.

I also don't feel much like prying up the deck to try to get the kittens out of there. Or having someone else do it. Why couldn't she have nested under the lilac bush instead? That thing needs major cutting back--we can barely see out of the kitchen window.

But it's nice to have some cute kitties around.