Bird Under the Bed

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Glama has learned to hunt.

First it was lizards and crickets, cicadas and the odd (and they really are odd with their bug eyes) stick insect.  Then there was the frog and yesterday she graduated to a bird.

Fortunately it was a dead bird.  I’m not sure if she caught it because it was dead or she scared it to death or she managed to stalk and kill it.  It was stiff dead so I’m hoping it was already passed on to that great hunting ground in the, well, sky – and was just a lucky find.

Anyway she was surprised I didn’t appreciate the present.  We played chasings for a while with me hoping she’d exit back door stage right to deposit said dead bird in the yard where I could clean it up, instead of in the house where it was a lot yuckier to contemplate.

Of course she is faster, more nimble and able to go places I can’t.  Like under the bed.  That’s were stiff and dead with feathers was stashed.  It was a heck of a job to get it out of there.  Glam was most put out by he whole incident.  I suspect my show of ungratefulness was the height of rudenesss.

I’ve not had another present since, for which I am truly delighted.

 

The most productive thing

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I’m having one of those days.  The most productive thing I’ve done all day is play fetch with Bandit.

He is very good to play fetch with.  We use an old plastic disposable contact lens case which is light, he can carry it and it slides brilliantly when batted from paw to paw on the hardwood floors.

He will play soccer cat for a while and then bring it to me in the office to throw again for him.  This can go on for some time.

And like I said, it’s the most productive thing I’ve done all day.

That and work through the reader feedback.  Thinking, thinking….

Balanced News

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White Balance is sitting on 80k words tonight – 60k of them are out for a read.  Time to be nervous about whether any two of them are actually ok.  Oh look that’s silly, at least a couple of pages might be ok!  Yah.  I hate this part.  The wondering part.  Too far in to stop but not sure it’s good enough to go on with.

Who said this was supposed to be fun?

A Slice in the Life of Bandit & Glama

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Glama spent most of the day asleep on my desk.  Bandit spent the day asleep in a neighbour’s wardrobe.

This evening, Glama caught a frog and brought it into the house.  I have no idea where it would have come from – this is suburban central, not central park.  The frog was green and terrified – rightly so and screaming it’s little beady eyes out.

I thought he was a giant out of season cicada until he jumped.

So we had a bit of a frog stomp – Glama and me.  She was the only one of us prepared to pick up the frog in her mouth though.  Eventually I got the poor terrified jumper into a box and released it into a neighbour’s yard so it had a chance to get away.

Meanwhile she roamed the house looking for it, wailing in disappointment.

Then in late breaking news Bandit learned how to open the hopper window in the bathroom and did a Harry Houdini.  Only to have his great escape attempt foiled by me coming back from the neighbour’s yard and catching him in the driveway where he was too busy being all teenage boy distracted about having gotten out and not quick enough to do anything about it.

Now there are fetching rubber bands on the mechanism in the bathroom window.  Joy.

Here are the two urban terrorists are on a similar day with a praying mantis (you would pray too, have you clocked the size of those paws). He’s quite dead, but still apparently fun to play with.

 

 

What a difference a clear head makes

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I’ve had a cluster migraine for six weeks.  Not a horrifically bad one.  I can function, but I’m not smart and my head hurts and my thoughts are fudge, sticky and sluggish and slow to come.

But what do you do?  I take drugs that don’t work all that well and do the best I can.  That means working to word count when I have the space to.  So for six weeks the best I’ve been able to do is grind through 2000 words a day.

I wasn’t sure if it was the head state or the story or the way I’ve chosen to construct it or the complexity of the characters or the narrative itself, but the going was tough.  I’ve leaned not to make any major decisions when I’ve got a migraine so even though it occured to me to abandon this new story as it crept it’s word count upwards dead slowly, I didn’t do it.

Today I woke with a clear head and a neck that worked almost normally.  That might not be the case tomorrow – that’s how it goes, sometimes you get a random good day.  Sometimes you get a cluster headache that lasts for three months.

And I wrote more than 7,000 words and that was such a relief.  It’s not the story or the characters or the narrative - though they might still be problems – it was me.

Today was like one of the good old days, like during Tables or Real or Jive when the writing came hard and fast and good portions of it were worth keeping.

I don’t know what the head will be doing tomorrow, whether I can have some more clear days and smashing ways on the keyboard.  But I do hope so.

White Balance is sitting at 46,000 words and good or bad head it should reach fifty by weekend’s end.  That’s a good third of the way through.  And that’s better than Imigram, Naramig, Feverfew, accupuncture, magnet therapy and all the ibuprofen the world contains.