Kitty Pic Makes a Post
For reasons known only to her, Kitty has rejected her heated cat bed. She always forgets about it over the course of the summer and we have to retrain her to it -- put it on the couch between us, where she's sure to find it, then gradually move it off the couch and across the floor to its usual spot in front of the window. We did that this fall, and she was using it for about a month, but now she's rejected it, and no amount of "Remember this? you like it!" prompting from us is having an effect on her. We've laundered it again -- we always launder it at the beginning of the season anyway -- just in case that was putting her off for some reason, but no. Should we spritz it with catnip? I'm at a loss.
This is what she's taken to doing instead:
(This picture is from a couple of mornings ago, but she is in fact doing exactly this as I type.)
I don't object in principle to her sitting on my chest -- or at least, not once she makes herself short enough to see over -- but it does make it hard to drink my coffee. And she gets very interested in my cross-stitch (if I happen to be doing cross-stitch), with predictably unfortunate results. Not to mention the usual problem of I'm too fidgety to be a good cat-lap, and then she gets all pointy in an effort to ride my fidgetiness out, and I get fidgetier because ow, and she gets pointier, and then it ends in tears for everyone.
But not so many tears on her part that she doesn't come right back again.
(Okay, now I've pushed her off elsewhere, because my back was starting to kink.)
In other news, over the weekend we went on an alumni field trip to the local waste transfer station, as well as the paint-recycling facility.
grrlpup has a write-up-plus-photos. I don't have much to add except that the people in our tour group had obviously zero exposure to industrial facilities -- they were horrified by the manual-labor aspects of paint recycling, and wanted to know how it was possible to find people to staff it.
grrlpup and I both did manufacturing production work through our twenties -- I for the whole of my twenties -- and I had been coolly evaluating it against some of the assembly line work I had done. It was annoyingly alienating to hear my alumni group having the vapours about HOW do you ever FIND people willing to do THAT?? Do they get BREAKS? Yes, I get it, the dirtiest you've ever gotten at work is changing the printer toner, nice to know. I've been going to a lot more alumni events this summer and fall (because job-hunting, because tapping your network), but between the classism about industrial work and the purity environmentalism in the van, I was reminded of why I don't emotionally connect with the alumni network very much.
NaNo is how I first got into writing, but I've since learned that I'm happier and more consistent writing at a somewhat slower pace than NaNo demands. (My top sustainable speed is about half the NaNo pace.) However, most of my local friends are people I met through NaNo, and several of them are doing a modified NaNo this year, and so I found myself at a write-in yesterday, keeping them company and working on my own projects.
(Kitty is back, angling for chest-space again.
Me: "Ow, pointy! Please don't be pointy. You have to be short. Short. Shorter than that. I can't see over you, short. Okay, that's good." [kiss on her back]
Kitty: [purrs])
...and I don't know where I was going with that, as I've been thoroughly distracted by Kitty. But maybe this would be a good place to plug the Write Every Day community? It roves from one journal to the next, month to month (currently being hosted by
silveradept, here's this month's intro post), and you basically comment on the days you write saying that you wrote. The minimum unit of writing is one sentence (also known as an "alibi sentence"), and revision and other writerly activities count, too. It can be a useful way of making sure you make some time for your WIPs every day, with a lot less of the write-or-die pressure of NaNo. I've been doing it since July (with a break in October, because omg, this October!) and I've probably gotten a little bit more written than I might have done without it.
This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth, where there are
comments. You may comment there (using OpenID) or here.
This is what she's taken to doing instead:
(This picture is from a couple of mornings ago, but she is in fact doing exactly this as I type.)
I don't object in principle to her sitting on my chest -- or at least, not once she makes herself short enough to see over -- but it does make it hard to drink my coffee. And she gets very interested in my cross-stitch (if I happen to be doing cross-stitch), with predictably unfortunate results. Not to mention the usual problem of I'm too fidgety to be a good cat-lap, and then she gets all pointy in an effort to ride my fidgetiness out, and I get fidgetier because ow, and she gets pointier, and then it ends in tears for everyone.
But not so many tears on her part that she doesn't come right back again.
(Okay, now I've pushed her off elsewhere, because my back was starting to kink.)
In other news, over the weekend we went on an alumni field trip to the local waste transfer station, as well as the paint-recycling facility.
grrlpup has a write-up-plus-photos. I don't have much to add except that the people in our tour group had obviously zero exposure to industrial facilities -- they were horrified by the manual-labor aspects of paint recycling, and wanted to know how it was possible to find people to staff it.
grrlpup and I both did manufacturing production work through our twenties -- I for the whole of my twenties -- and I had been coolly evaluating it against some of the assembly line work I had done. It was annoyingly alienating to hear my alumni group having the vapours about HOW do you ever FIND people willing to do THAT?? Do they get BREAKS? Yes, I get it, the dirtiest you've ever gotten at work is changing the printer toner, nice to know. I've been going to a lot more alumni events this summer and fall (because job-hunting, because tapping your network), but between the classism about industrial work and the purity environmentalism in the van, I was reminded of why I don't emotionally connect with the alumni network very much.
NaNo is how I first got into writing, but I've since learned that I'm happier and more consistent writing at a somewhat slower pace than NaNo demands. (My top sustainable speed is about half the NaNo pace.) However, most of my local friends are people I met through NaNo, and several of them are doing a modified NaNo this year, and so I found myself at a write-in yesterday, keeping them company and working on my own projects.
(Kitty is back, angling for chest-space again.
Me: "Ow, pointy! Please don't be pointy. You have to be short. Short. Shorter than that. I can't see over you, short. Okay, that's good." [kiss on her back]
Kitty: [purrs])
...and I don't know where I was going with that, as I've been thoroughly distracted by Kitty. But maybe this would be a good place to plug the Write Every Day community? It roves from one journal to the next, month to month (currently being hosted by
silveradept, here's this month's intro post), and you basically comment on the days you write saying that you wrote. The minimum unit of writing is one sentence (also known as an "alibi sentence"), and revision and other writerly activities count, too. It can be a useful way of making sure you make some time for your WIPs every day, with a lot less of the write-or-die pressure of NaNo. I've been doing it since July (with a break in October, because omg, this October!) and I've probably gotten a little bit more written than I might have done without it.
This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth, where there are
comments. You may comment there (using OpenID) or here.