Moving Right Along

And just how much longer did you think I would be able to go...

...without posting a picture of Sam the cat, hm?

As it happens, tonight we have a short film.

When I was too sick to come up with my own material last week, you may recall that on one occasion I referred you over to Ms. Kitsa's Kitty Boutique on Etsy.  Meanwhile, I visited there myself and bought Sam some Christmas presents.

Naturally, my plan was to photograph for you the lovely and adorable way Ms. Kitsa packaged the gifts, show you Sam waiting for us to open it for him, and then show you him playing with at least one of his new toys, all on Christmas morning.

Plans go awry.

What happened instead was that my true love brought in the mail yesterday while I was resting on the couch.  As delighted and amused as I was by Ms. Kitsa's packaging, I set it aside on the coffee table 'til later.  I was, after all, resting.  And when I was done resting, I went off to do some chore or other in the kitchen, and left the package resting itself on top of a wireless keyboard on top of a stack of DVDs next to a glass of water.  At this time, Sam was resting in the bed.

Objects at rest do not tend to remain at rest in my house.  From the kitchen I heard a large crash and some crazed meowing.  I rolled quickly into the living room, fearing the kitty had injured himself, only to find the lovely pink tissue paper wrapped around the package completely soaked with water and Sam pretty much smurgling everything within three feet.

Regretfully I tore into the wet, pink tissue paper and removed one smurglebag, with which my true love lured Sam away so that I could clean up.  I put the other smurglebag into the not exactly smoothly opening top drawer of a rather formidable marble-topped Victorian hardwood chest of drawers we own, cleaned up the mess, and then rolled into the bedroom to see how Sam was enjoying his erstwhile Christmas present.

Now we all know how he was enjoying it, as documented above.  Please remember that this footage was recorded at the end of a rather long smurgling session, so its brevity is not indicative of Sam's level of sustained interest.  At one point, my true love had him dancing on his hind legs to get to it.  Sadly, I did not have my camera handy for that.

Thank you, Ms. Kitsa's Kitty Boutique, for a well received gift, albeit a trifle too well received.

A Long Way to Go for Very Little

I throw up a lot.  A lot.  I wouldn't if I didn't have to, and it is very strange to me that people do this on purpose in order to lose weight.  It is extremely unpleasant.

After each bout, I always want to eat.  I'm in pain, I'm shaking and weak, and I'm emotionally upset.  I sure as shootin' don't want to start the whole thing all over again.  So what do I do?  I eat toast.  Specifically I very slowly eat a piece or more of dry rye toast accompanied by a nice glass of filtered tap water.

It almost always makes me feel better.  I do not understand why.

So the other night I'm sitting on the couch, nibbling my toast, coming back to myself while watching more bad TV, and suddenly I just have to know. 

"WHY does toast work?" I say aloud.

And from another part of the apartment, my true love replies in an exasperated voice, "I don't know!  Because butter is collecting disability?"

Watch for falling leaves!

They will eat your feet.  (Click to enlarge.)

Seriously.  They look all pretty and fluffy and innocent -- and mostly dead, too, right? -- but they are like zombie barracudas or something, devouring whole anything that might haplessly wander among them.

***

2:00 P.M. AFTERTHOUGHT:  Uh, I guess I probably should point out that I am not currently taking medication of any kind.

The New Reading

When I was growing a brain tumor last winter, one symptom I experienced gradually was an almost complete loss of my ability to read.  I didn't think much of it while it was happening.  It had been eight or nine years since I'd had new eyeglasses, and I figured a new prescription would fix the problem.  When I got new glasses, including new reading glasses, and still couldn't read, I just assumed that the change was so dramatic that I needed time to get used it.  Very soon after that, of course, I was in the hospital finding out that it wasn't my eyes, and it wasn't my glasses.

After brain surgery, I had most of my linguistic faculties back almost entirely intact within a couple of weeks.  It was amazing, a miracle of luck and my surgeon's skill combined.  I still have some residual issues, though.  A number of my favorite blogs are now difficult or even impossible for me to enjoy because of typeface, colors, and various other layout issues.  Sometimes I have to pause a DVD in order to read subtitles, or if there's a sign or letter in the movie that the viewer is supposed to read for himself.  And while once I used to read so well that I could recognize whole words as quickly and accurately as individual pieces of fruit, no language that has to go through my eyes processes that quickly anymore.

There are printers that print images in layers, running back and forth over the same span of paper several times until an image becomes recognizable, then clearer and clearer until the whole image has been reproduced.  The way I read is sort of like that.  I can almost never read anything accurately on the first pass.  I often have to read the same text over a good eight times or so before I am sure I have gotten the sense of it.  Naturally, this slows me down quite a bit and is also annoying as hell.  Sometimes, though, it's also kind of funny.

For my Hallowe'en story, I opened with a quote from my friend Phyl that "Anything forever is hell."  She reminded me in an e-mail of what had given rise to this utterance, an experience she'd had with an acquaintance that involved seeing a movie about Santa Claus in his home environment.  She wrote, "Gold.  Green.  Red.  Elves.  Forever.  Every day."

I read "...Elvis...."

Then just this week I got an e-mail from Netflix telling me my next movie, Wristcuffers: A Love Story, was on its way.  I was horrified.  I thought I had accidentally chosen some boring thing about bondage, and since it's not as though I've been making it out the door to the mailbox every single day for instant turnaround lately, every new Netflix shipment is more than ordinarily precious.  All in a panic, I rushed over to the Netflix site and logged in.  Through some trick of fontography and layout, I was able to see immediately that in fact I was being sent Wristcutters: A Love Story.

Ah.  Now that sounded like something I would like.  (And I did.  Very, very much.)

Then yesterday esteemed correspondent Leslee of 3rd House Journal presented a beautifully illustrated post about "coloring outside the lines," which included a shot of a sign that I read on the first take with New England accent.  "PAHKING THIS SIDE," I thought it said.  Heh.

My own spelling has become even more atrocious than it was before.  In a recent post where I mentioned how my true love had decided Massachusetts should now just call itself "The Smart State," I misspelled one of the words in the title "gloathing" instead of "gloating."  It took me three days to catch it.  It was kind of my readers, especially those who don't agree with me politically, not to point it out and rub my face in it, but on the other hand, I do sort of like the word "gloathing."  "Gloating" + "loathing" -- I know there's a place in the English language for such a word, especially around election time.

This way I read now, and apparently write, it may be permanent, or it may be something I eventually work through.  As I said, it's annoying as hell.  But at least it offers added amusement value.

***

Note:  It is my practice to insert into my HTML titles or captions for each image I post.  This is how I attempt to make this blog accessible to the blind or otherwise sight-impaired.  To read these captions, you have to either have a device that will find them for you and read them out loud to you or, if you are a sighted person, just position your pointer over each image to reveal each title or caption in a little beige pop-up.

If you are a sighted person and didn't know this was my practice, you might be confused by the graphics I have included in this post.  As I explain in the caption for each, each one represents one way the word "happy" might appear to me as I read it and read it and read it again on my way to actually recognizing and comprehending it.

Love Potato No. 9

For Love Thursday, esteemed correspondent Michelle Fabio of Bleeding Espresso often posts photographs of heart-shaped things -- heart-shaped clouds, tomatoes, strawberries, etc.  When I found this delightfully odd-looking Yukon gold potato at Hutchins Farm in September, I had an idea that I could use it similarly (before cooking and eating it of course).

Naturally, I had to share the fun.  "Say hello to your home fries for this morning," I told my true love.

You must understand that I did not present the potato to him as a handful of starchy heart shape.  No, I flipped the tuber over and marched it up his arm.

He laughed.

"You understand why I had to buy this," I said.

"Oh, yeah!" he replied.  "Swing 'em around on a stick, baby!"

Oh.  Perhaps we were not on the same page about this after all.

Never mind.  It was delicious.

Happy Love Thursday.  Remember to play with your food.