Leisurely Saturday mornings...
The good thing about being up early-ish on a Saturday morning with nowhere to go until early afternoon is that I get to spend a quiet morning with my cats, who were beginning to feel quite neglected, I think. I spend so much time at work and at my other activities that I'm home really only in the evenings now, and since they don't sleep with me anymore since I moved here, they don't get much cuddle time with me.
So this morning I sat in an armchair and let them drape themselves over me while listening to The Beatles Anthology Vol. I, and we spent a very nice hour or so just cuddling. Right now I have three cats snoozing on the table next to me as I type, purring and contented. I wish sometimes that my life was just that easy: perfect happiness just because someone spent an hour petting me. :)
Poor George seems to have turned into Pukey McPukesalot. I'm going to keep an eye on him for a few days to see if he really can't keep anything down, or if it's just something fleeting.
Gretzky seems to be getting along a bit, too. She's having trouble jumping up to high places like the table or counters without assistance, and she climbs onto the windowsill using her back claws and makes the most horrible fingernails-on-chalkboard sound when she does. I've put the recycling box there to help her up, but she seems to forget what it's for occasionally.
I had a fun conversation with a stranger in the metro on Thursday. After I recovered from the trauma of reading "The Sparrow" I went back to the book I'd been reading before: "She" by H. Rider Haggard. He's the one who wrote "King Solomon's Mines" and the Allan Quarterman books. So I'm getting out of the metro at Guy-Concordia station, nose buried in this book, when a voice startles me out of my concentration.
"Ah! Rider Haggard! She-who-must-be-obeyed!"
I looked up to see what I can only describe as a geek boy dressed in a startling canary-yellow t-shirt. He was a bit scruffy around the edges and reading a fantasy novel whose title I didn't quite catch because he was waving his book around a little too emphatically.
"Indeed." I replied.
He went on to attempt a clumsy flirtation by quoting a doggerel about Haggard and Rudyard Kipling, who apparently were friends. It fell a little flat because he couldn't remember most of it. However, he redeemed himself by adding that Kipling was the only Nobel prize winner for literature who'd had his work adapted into a Disney movie.
"It's hard to imagine Hemmingway being made into a Disney movie," I conceded.
He grinned at me and gestured expansively. "Disney's 'The Old Man and the Sea' -ON ICE!" he cried.
There were helpless giggles for a while. Then we were outside and heading in opposite directions. We shook hands, he told me his name was Danny, and I told him my name, and we went our separate ways, both pleased at the random encounter, I think.
Books are a universal language. You just have to find the right dialect. :)
So this morning I sat in an armchair and let them drape themselves over me while listening to The Beatles Anthology Vol. I, and we spent a very nice hour or so just cuddling. Right now I have three cats snoozing on the table next to me as I type, purring and contented. I wish sometimes that my life was just that easy: perfect happiness just because someone spent an hour petting me. :)
Poor George seems to have turned into Pukey McPukesalot. I'm going to keep an eye on him for a few days to see if he really can't keep anything down, or if it's just something fleeting.
Gretzky seems to be getting along a bit, too. She's having trouble jumping up to high places like the table or counters without assistance, and she climbs onto the windowsill using her back claws and makes the most horrible fingernails-on-chalkboard sound when she does. I've put the recycling box there to help her up, but she seems to forget what it's for occasionally.
I had a fun conversation with a stranger in the metro on Thursday. After I recovered from the trauma of reading "The Sparrow" I went back to the book I'd been reading before: "She" by H. Rider Haggard. He's the one who wrote "King Solomon's Mines" and the Allan Quarterman books. So I'm getting out of the metro at Guy-Concordia station, nose buried in this book, when a voice startles me out of my concentration.
"Ah! Rider Haggard! She-who-must-be-obeyed!"
I looked up to see what I can only describe as a geek boy dressed in a startling canary-yellow t-shirt. He was a bit scruffy around the edges and reading a fantasy novel whose title I didn't quite catch because he was waving his book around a little too emphatically.
"Indeed." I replied.
He went on to attempt a clumsy flirtation by quoting a doggerel about Haggard and Rudyard Kipling, who apparently were friends. It fell a little flat because he couldn't remember most of it. However, he redeemed himself by adding that Kipling was the only Nobel prize winner for literature who'd had his work adapted into a Disney movie.
"It's hard to imagine Hemmingway being made into a Disney movie," I conceded.
He grinned at me and gestured expansively. "Disney's 'The Old Man and the Sea' -ON ICE!" he cried.
There were helpless giggles for a while. Then we were outside and heading in opposite directions. We shook hands, he told me his name was Danny, and I told him my name, and we went our separate ways, both pleased at the random encounter, I think.
Books are a universal language. You just have to find the right dialect. :)