This is a picture of my sister's cat Bingley, on one side of the screen on the screen porch. On the other side of the screen on the screenporch, and by "on the other side" I mean they are both practically touching it, is a rather young baby bird that can't quite fly yet.

This situation has been ongoing for about half an hour now, up and down the front of the porch. The baby bird either realizes Bingley can't get to it and is being gratuitously cruel to her, or genuinely thinks the cat is its mummy; it is not acting scared, it is acting bratty.

On the upside, Bingley has so far resisted the temptation to claw at the screen! \o/ Good kitty, I forgive you for puking where I would step in it barefoot last night.

(We are all out on the screenporch because after almost a week straight of 90°F+/35°C weather with humidity averaging 50%, even having a very well-designed, all-masonry house no longer quite cuts it.)

I have been having a very Fortean sort of a week.

We went on a road trip out to Michigan, and there's something very Fortean in general about an American road trip; it doesn't help that the reading material I brought along was two books by Loren Coleman, including "Mysterious America". And then I actually wrote a thousand words or so of the Great American Werewolf Novel, which surprised me.

We came back by way of my sister's archeology field school in Boston, and while there, I saw three UFOs, and I also saw a real, honest-to-goodness pair of concealed shoes (and then embarrassed myself by regaling them all at length over supper about the history and folkore of concealed shoes, oops. I have settled myself so nicely into my current niche of people - RL and online - who are totally groovy about people who know things, and are enthusiastic about the knowing of things, that I've forgotten the knack of, you know, not spontaneously being Quite Interesting all over everything.)

Anyway, then, just this afternoon, a friend of a friend called me to tell me about how she's been hearing this weird hum, intermittently, when she's in houses in her neighborhood, and some of her neighbors can hear it and some can't, so as my good deed for the day, I sent her to the wikipedia page on The Hum.

...possibly this is the universe trying to tell me I should do something more than just idly wonder about the possibility of graduate school in folklore.

Anyway, that is not what you're interested. What you're interested in, obviously, is pictures of cats. ( so here are some pictures of cats. )
The cat above - aka Miss Georgiana Darcy - has decided that I am never to be out of her eyesight. I don't know why. But I thought I was done being creepily followed around by cats. At least this one leaves me alone on the toilet. And at night, where my bedroom is under the paws of her dear sister, Miss Caroline Bingley, who perches on the one square foot of clear space on my top bunk and surveys her domain.


*Well, they *were* unidentified objects. Until one of them landed at the dig site, and several of the students braved life and limb (and stinging nettles) to haul it back to camp, and it turned out to be an elementary school class project. Still kind of weird and creepy looking though. :D

Today's XKCD was awesome, as usual, but it was ( Missing something. )

Why yes, that is what happens to me after a whole weekend spent at cons and then another whold day of con autopsy stuff.

I have stuff to get done today, but then a very large, very fluffy black cat climbed purring onto my lap, grabbed my right arm between hid front paws, and fell asleep. Hugging my arm. With his face snuggled right up against it. And every time i try to move it he wakes up just enough to grab harder. It is *painfully* adorable, guys. Also he snores.

ETA: Now that I am free!! and can do things that require more than one hand, here is the painfully adorable in question - he is difficult to get pictures of, because 90% of the time his coat just sucks up light like a black hole cluster.

I had a dream about you guys last night.

Only it turned out that f_w was actually just the visible part and publicity/recruiting arm of a secret cabal that was working to expose some sort of vast multinational evil conspiracy which was centered out of an immigrants' enclave in San Francisco, controlled by men from this tiny, obscure oil-rich Eastern European country where they still forced their women to dress like it was the Victorian era.

(I had to get a proper corset made before I could go undercover there. That was the only fun part of the dream!)

Anyway, we finally uncovered enough evidence to go public, and our glorious leader Mrs. Larimer called a press conference where she revealed the whole thing, including the U.s. Government's complicity. But the first question in the question period was some asshole male reporter asking "Yeah, but where's the actual proof of all this?" And Mrs. Larimer said, "I'm confident something will come up," at which point black helicopters flew out of the clouds and bombed the whole press conference into a thin layer of slime, leaving no survivors but the dozen people on the speakers' platform (they hadn't been willing to target it, because there were some high-ranking officials there to speak too) and kadath's pet cat, who was busy having kittens under the podium. So our new secret catchphrase became "The kittens are the truth," and there were many very cute pictures posted everywhere.

...then it turned out it was all just a graphic novel anyway, and I woke up.

I know nobody on this flist cares, but I have to say: Watching the Highlander Horsemen arc while you're still in the headspace where Mac is an Abdal and Methos is a (very, very bitter and screwed up) avatar of the Lone Power? Just makes it *that much better*. (I think Kronos is actually some kind of Dark Aspect of the Champion. For several reasons, but it doesn't really get confusing 'till Ahriman shows up, and I haven't re-watched Archangel yet, so.)

(What? I just read some really good HL/TW crossovers, and they made a Highlander joke on the Daily Show, f'god's sake. The video was just sitting there saying "watch me! Watch the HL episodes you've seen nine times already, not the DVDs your sister ordered you to watch!" -- I blame it on the blahs, which have settled down from "feeling icky" to "head cold", which is only better in that now I can at least pin down the symptoms. Highlander is just so ... comfortable that way. You know that whatever happens, there'll be warm sweaters, good food, and people who do love each other and are very good at what they do.)

Anyway, ( cat pictures )

Some characteristics that the women (and some of the men) of my mother's family have been known to share:

The ability to find four-leaf clovers whenever they feel like it. (also sometimes five- six- and seven- leaf clovers.)

The *in*ablity to keep an electric-powered wristwatch working for more than a few months.

A fascination with fairies, elves, trolls, or other little people.

A tendency to pick something and hoard it.

The ability to put out streetlights by passing by them.

Also that grandmother saw a UFO once (like, close-enough-to-see-the-whites-of-their-eyes saw) and her father disappeared when she was a baby, leaving only a cryptic note about being chased by government agents. And her only full brother was in on the ground floor of the space program (like well-before-NASA-right-after-Roswell ground floor.)

Mind you, it is perfectly easy to explain away all of these things, starting with the fact that tales grow in the telling, but sometimes one wonders.

This post brought to you by the three separate streetlights that went out while I was under them tonight. Clearly my qi is out of balance or something, which would also explain why I've been feeling nonspecifically miserably sick the last couple days.

(Also my other grandfather, on Dad's side, was a medium. He and his friends used to hold seances and he would always be the one to tap the table and channel because it always worked for him, only he swore it off for life after he correcty predicted that one of the friend's husband's ship would go down in the Pacific theatre, and decided it was too dangerous to mess about with. He also used to cure warts - he'd buy them off the local kids for a couple cents each and it worked every time.)

Anyway, I missed cat pictures yesterday (due to being dead) but here's today's set ( Adventures on the Balcony. )

Am not actually at sister's apartment ATM - am actually exhausted from driving back home early today and then chasing four small visiting cousins through downtown Baltimore all afternoon - but I give you your daily cat pics anyway, as I have a plenty of stock:
( All-Darcy special edition. )

Anyway I actually left camera at the apartment, so had to use actual *film*. *shutters*, and there will be no pictures of small-cousin-adventures or epic Lincoln Logs constructions of epic-ness, but in the spirit of "tourist stuff", ( WHY DID NONE OF THE SGA PEOPLE I KNOW TELL ME ABOUT THIS BEFORE IT WAS GONE FROM MY CITY??? )

Yes, you say, nature film about penguins, yes, with tagline "As the water goes ice cold, his appetite turns red hot", yes, but there are many penguin films and not all of them can be about John/Rodney slash.

( Yes, but you have not read the *credits* yet. Look more closely: )
SEE?? AND I MISSED IT.

LibraryThing has recently instituted a feature that lets you track your posting frequency by date, so for the first time ever I can correlate my periodic outbursts of book-OCD-related crankiness to the *other* sort of period. ifyouknowhatimean.

In semi-related news, spent most of today faffing about on LibraryThing. It's like editing Wikipedia, only much pettier! (and more useful).

Thing I have discovered as a result: The internets have no love for the works of E. W. Hildick. Why is that? Surely I am not the only person on the internets who thought the Ghost Squad were woobies made of hottness? Plus they fight Nazis!

***

Also read some more of my latest-but-one LibraryThing early reviewer book. Have just got to the bit about how our hero spent most if his childhood filling notebooks with "elaborate sexual fantasies (often revolving around the Hardy Boys or Starsky and Hutch or Hawkeye and the Mike Farrell character [B.J.] from M*A*S*H."

Said book is about the travails of growing up dirt poor and black in the Bronx in the Seventies.

***

Meanwhile I am spending the week squatting at my sister's empty apartment catsitting for stellar_dust. She is on a business trip halfway across the country, so as a public service to her co-workers to prevent them from being deafened by the squeals of "I MISS MY KITTIES!!!!!", I present part one of a daily series of photo essays, "Life With Cats."

( The worst bit is the lurking. Everywhere you turn, there are glowing eyes staring back at you - behind doors, under furniture, in the bathtub, hanging from the ceiling--- )

Casey (the cat) has a new toy! An actual cat toy that was made for cats! stellar_dust gave it to her, and since her daddy just left her for a week, she needed something to work off all the energy.

Since stellar_dust has still left me logged in to her youtube account, I did my duty as a little sister and uploaded video of Casey enjoying the toy to her account: CASEY HAS A TOY.. (Ignore the strange people in the background discussing furry porn and lolicon. Casey and I did.)

Then we had fun doing taxes! And then the strange people hauled me off to watch all the video cut scenes from story mode in the new Super Smash Brothers game, and it was like the *best crossover crackfic evar* even if I didn't know most of the characters and Yoda never showed up. Why don't people write those massive crossover fics??? I mean, there are "make your ideal superteam" memes, and sprawling RPGs, but I want the fic! Because in the fic verson, evil!Peach and evil!Zelda would have *actually* made out. Although the two of them re-enacting the end battle from Hostages of Mars, genderfuck and all, was also pretty cool. (Peach/Sheik OTP!!!)

Oh, speaking of genderfuck fic, I caved at the last minute and claimed two of the prompts I put in at lgbtfest, so if in the next few months I start freaking out about figuring out a high-school AU in which Mr. Eljay, Slash, Meta, F.W., & friends are characters, that will be why.

I'm actually really excited about that fest; if everyone writes what they claimed, *nine* stories will be getting written to my prompts, which is more stories than *I personally* have written to my prompts in the last four years or so. And it's looking really awesome anyway: they had so many people sign up that they had to extend posting dates twice, so there will be five stories a day for *five weeks*, all to really thinky prompts. Either slash fandom is really excited by actual GLBT stories, or there's a large coterie of people who are hurting for small-fandom-friendly fests, or both.

(There's still, like, three slots open for the fest! get 'em while they're hot!)

So here's a picture of me as a baby:


You're welcome.
( Also here is the view out our front door. And a picture of a cat. )

(ps sister: the noland's ferry pictures are up now too, at melannen.katycat.net/photos 10_3412-3422. Not that you'll have time to do anything with them at this point. Uh. Sorry.)

I've just come home from the Maundy Thursday service, the first one I've ever attended. I think the lesson to bring from it is don't go to the Maundy Thursday service unless you're also going to make the Good Friday and Easter Sunday ones - it's like having the cable modem go on the fritz at the very most depressing part of the fic.

I'd never seen the altar stripped before. I'd never seen the altar *bare* before. Sitting in the nearly-empty sanctuary, intoning the 22nd Psalm in unison to a just-stripped altar, and then walking out in utter silence to a frosty wind ...

yeah, that was something.

(Of course, I didn't actually get to go out in silent contemplation of the words of Christ, because Mom had volunteered to count the money, so instead I sat in the office and re-read John 13. Bonus points to anyone who gets why I said I felt like Judas Iscariot.)

You see, you may have heard of Christmas and Easter Christians, people who only come to church on those two days? My family's the opposite. We'll go to church every other day, but on those two days we're far too busy with pagan fertility rituals to go to church. So I have never actually been to a service when the altar was bare before. Never been to a Good Friday or Easter Day service either. And won't be going this year on Sunday, either, because we'll be playing with painted eggs and candy bunnies at my grandfather's house, as usual.

I kind of want to go to the Good Friday service tomorrow night after we pick up Katy, though, now that I know what I've been missing. Plus the program tonight said that tomorrow would be a tenebrae service, which sounds really, really awesome (in the old sense) ( and also fairly short).

PS: Darcy is in The Box. She won't let Bingley in The Box with her. So Bingley has dragged out the Peacock Feather, which Darcy can't resist, and is waving it around to lure Darcy out of The Box so that she can take possession. Cats are scary.

We took down the tree again, which I guess means I should probably break my holiday lj fast, ne? Actually I did so much and had so many good things happen and thought about so many things I want to write down or post about that the queue is jammed. Anyway. I had a good holiday, hooray! And I'm not quite caught back up on lj yet and I only read a bare fraction of the yuletide stories I wanted to read.

Oh! Speaking of, my yuletide present was Frontier Games by Jay tryfanstone, based on Frontier Wolf by Rosemary Sutcliff - it's Alexios/Hilarion and wonderful - Sutcliff really needs only about two pinches more hoyay for the slash to be textual, and anything more would just be overkill, but tryfanstone hits it just right; this is what would've been in the book if only it wasn't a YA adventure novel instead. It's even more amazing when you realize that she picked it up at the last minute and then had to dash around Edinburgh desperately searching for a copy! And it's still better than the story I had a whole month to write. (No, I'm not stalking her - that post was the first to come up on Google when I was trying to find a link to The Centurion's Hound, probably the longest (but utterly wonderful) piece of Sutcliffe fic ever written, which she did for yuletide afew years back. (She also has great Highlander stuff, by the way.)

Anyway! Traditionally when I've put off posting because I have too much to say, I re-open with a stupid meme. But let's break tradition - ( have some pictures of cats instead! )
(That's Darcy and Bingley and stellar_dust on the way back home after Christmas. Can you tell which is which? The expressions in the third & last picture give it away, if you know P&P.)

So I spent the weekend with my sister and her cat (Again.)

( Here is a picture of me with my sister's cat. )

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