Dreaming of Cats

I had a dream last night;
Middlekid has a small but tall chest of drawers in her room. In my dream, Peppercorn crawled out from underneath it, and had about eight kittens with her. The reason she disappeared was because she was busy having kittens, not because some wastrel ran over her. Weird, considering we had her fixed in March in real life.

It was a lovely dream, but I don't know where to file it.

Of Cats and Assholes

Some miserable, worthless fuck-wad ran over our cat this morning. No one seems to have seen anything, and the coward drove off. Any way you slice it, Peppercorn is gone, gone, gone, and Mandy has to stay locked in the house because he won't stay off the street, sniffing the spot where she was lying.

This just sucks.

Not Even a Week,

have we had our new family members, and already they're part of us.

Peppercorn and Manderinli

Peppercorn is a little smaller, but much quicker off the mark.  Manderinli is the big brother, but in spite of his slight size advantage, they're evenly matched for games of "search and annoy."

It's fun discovering their personalities.  We have a built in cupboard in the corner of the kitchen- they come up through the bottom and sleep in there sometimes.  Don't know why, they seem to feel safe here and never run away from us or even visitors that they don't know.  They just seem to like it there.  Maybe I can make a photograph before they get too big.  We've ordered a biggish cat jungle gym/scratching post for them to inhabit during the winter, until we let them out in the spring.  Perhaps it will keep them off the Christmas tree.  Ha.

Fluffy Things are Afoot

You may remember posts about our cat, who went out in June and didn't come back. We hope she has simply wandered off with some smooth-talking tomcat to live the high life. Be that as it may, we miss her fuzzitude enormously, feline fuzzitude in general, really, so we thought we'd give it one more go. If these two wander off, that'll be all folks, because we can stand only so much heartbreak. But one last try.

So the orange one on the top there has clearly mastered the art of being cute, and will probably be named 'Manderinli,' which means 'little manderine orange.' The dark one is a bit trickier. We have a long and glorious tradition of naming our cats after edible things but all we've come up with so far is 'Treacle,' 'Molasses,' 'Sorghum'... you get the idea. Someone suggested 'Burnt Toast,' and we could call her 'Burnie,' but that got dropped fairly quickly. Jaffa Cake's been done, of course. Any ideas?

Cranky

Let's just suppose I'm in despair.  Does Clarion do a mid-life crises special?  Should I just get a tattoo, like some people?  I could just change the blog title to "Will Whine for Free."

Really, I don't know what I'm complaining about, exactly.  Nothing's really wrong, I still have a better life than, say, 90% of the planet, socio-economically speaking, and yet there is something lacking.  I have blogged about the lack of real-life writer buddies a lot (I'm too lazy to look for the links, though) and try as I might, I still can't come up with any solution that doesn't involve leaving this country.  Don't get me wrong, Bloglodytes- I love you guys.  But there's just nothing like someone who lives 10 minutes away threatening to come and bludgeon you with a 400g block of Switzerland's Finest if you dangle one more sodding preposition or switch pov twice on the same page.  Then there's the warm fuzzy feeling of being able to offer such supportive bludgeoning services in return.  I'm not asking for solutions to this problem- it's pretty insoluble unless Kelly Link or Neil Gaiman moves in down the road (Ah, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!) but I just need to whine.  We now return to our regularly scheduled sommer.

Which includes:
1) Wishing my cat would come home :(
2) Teaching Prima all the math and English her pos teachers have failed to teach her over the last few years so she can have a good start in the new school.
3) Trying to keep Middlekid and Thirdling from killing each other- now that Middlekid is going to the upper school, puberty/sibling rivalry seems to be in overdrive.
4) Trying NOT to declare Switzerland to be the most boring country on the planet.  Yes, the Alps are gorgeous, now GET OVER IT, already, and realise that Heidi makes lousy company!
5) Going to visit this guy, who should be cloned and seeded all over Switzerland, because he makes great company.

Sorry to be so grumpy in such fine weather, Bloglodytes.  Must be the donut deficiency talking...

I Feel Like a Washcloth Someone Left on the Motorway

I'm feeling a bit wrung out and run over. Maybe there should be hyphens in those. I'm too kaput to check, that's how bad it is. Buffy the bushy-tailed rodent would be angry and I don't blame her (see? see? that should be 'wouldn't' not 'don't'!)

Oh, nevermind.

Hi Robin, and everybody else. The rest of the exchange thing went ok. It was frustrating sometimes because it was clear that Randy was bored, but the French kids seemed to have been trained (Prima heard this from other kids in class) never to say what they want so we spent a week guessing. Prima spent a week in France, with Randy's five year old sister wrapped around her leg. The little girl cried when she left. Prima had a great time with her French family and some fun with her class but...

We are changing schools again. I know there must be some nice kids in her class, and I know that Prima has developed a rather defensive, hedgehog like manner (no offense, FHH; you are the softest and cuddliest of hedgehogs except when action is called for) so the kids in her class are only partly to blame. The defensiveness puts a lot of kids off, and we are trying to fix this. Not easy to teach natural self-confidence to a thirteen year old- since I have zip myself. But I've had it with the few spoiled alpha rich kids that seem to set the tone for everyone, and from the few parents meetings we've had. Well... I would probably feel differently if I got to know them better, but at first glance, my instinct is to avoid them like the plague.

Anyway, there is a list of French to be learned for the new school (haven't looked yet to see how much they overlapped), and we need to see if she is at the same place in math, so it will be a busy summer (six weeks instead of five this year, though, which is good). Sorry, bloglodytes, I know I'm rambling awfully, but my head feels like a coconut with a bicycle pump hooked up to it. A couple more notes before I drag myself out to the garden shed to write:

1. Our cat is missing. This is really putting a damper on our summer fun. She's not fixed so we're desperately hoping she just out having a good time and will come home full of kittens, but we fear the worst. It's been more than a week.

2. My daughter got a 4.5 in English. For those of you familiar with letter grades, that's about a C. For a native English speaker, this is ludicrous. The teacher said she graded her harder and gave her different tasks because she is a native English speaker, but you don't give a kid who already knows algebra trigonometry to do and then give them a crappy algebra grade if they can't hack the trig, right? I mean, to the rest of the world, it just looks like she got a terrible grade in the first year of English as a foreign language. Won't miss the English teacher, that's for sure. For the birds, this is. Like Yoda, I sound. Donut, I need.

3. Happy Independance Day, Americanskis out there!

Now don't just sit there- go write something. (Preferably in the comment trail ;)

Cat Post

Jaffa Cake had her first taste of freedom yesterday. She sniffed around, checked out a nice Japanese maple, and then for some unknown reason, went straight up the tallest tree in the garden. Then she meowed. Unfortunately, this tree is also the one with this rosebush in it. Evil, evil, evil thing. Instead of climbing down the tree, she decided to head for the balcony (dark lump at right of picture) via the rose bush. I think she regretted it.

I Keep Putting Words on the Page...

...but lately, they refuse to speak to me. I am not alarmed yet, though. I don't believe in writers' block. I think it's just the distraction- birthdays (check out the bat cake!) and the new cat (who tries to sit on my desk when I write, but since it's sloped, slides off into my lap. Either she's a slow learner, or she likes it :) or the wind-up to the annual mid-winter rush. Or ennui. How do you tell writers' block from ennui? Stab yourself in the thigh with a fork. If you feel compelled to write about it, it was ennui.

Anyway, here are cats, cakes, and the last of the leaves. Time to enjoy the grey, northern hemisphereites.