Incidentally, if anyone thinks she's just playing D2 to humor me or something, so far today I've played zero, and she's played at least 2 hours, working on her low lvl barbarian, mid level Assassin, and beginning Necromancer, as well as browsing dii.net for item stats and cube recipes.  We'll be playing together for an hour or two as soon as I finish writing this, however.

In the evening we went to a Borders, for the books, and I got one big hardcover art book that was on sale, and she got about 7 books on random things; dogs, nutrition, and some for her work.  Browsing there was fun though, I read some janky Lovecraft-inspired short stories (God are the publishers of the endless Lovecraftian short story collections, all featuring one by Lovecraft and a dozen by other, lesser, contemporary authors, setting HP spinning in his grave.) and looked at cool art books.  Malaya loves book stores, and she'll probably write some about the books she got on her blog, at some point.  I've whittled past updates from the block of wood pulp that multiple cheap book purchases provide, after all.

I could write more up here, but I really want to get a snack and play some D2 before it's too late to play some other games after that, so I'm going to quit here and leave you to the long photo discussion below.  The upper 80% of it was written several days ago, with the three lowest photos of Dusty taken an hour ago and the caption about them written just now.  More photos with discussion tomorrow.

ome random photos from the last few days, mostly of apartment stuff.

First of all, here's the second of the two living room decor shots.  I posted part one in the last update, and you can see it to the right.  It's not like we made massive changes, but both Malaya and I felt that the wall was too crowded in the first design, so we removed the snake skin and half of the artwork and moved them to different walls.  Thus improving this section of the house by uncrowding it, as well as improving others by adding decoration there.

I'd like another wall or section of the apartment in a totally different style, like all Japanese art, or all colorful Van Gogh type images, but that may have to wait until we've got a larger place, or we get the urge to totally redecorate a year or so from now.

This disturbing image was taken on our kitchen counter, and stars the largest potato I've ever seen.  The one on the left is a good sized spud; more than adequate for any normal baked potato needs.  You'd have no complaints upon seeing it emerge from beneath aluminum foil as a side dish in a restaurant.  You can see part of a toaster (white) to the left, and part of our silverware holder above mega-spud.

The potato was about a foot long, and made me think of the recent news about a guy who sold a 7" french fry on eBay for like $200.  I could have gotten 8 or maybe 10 normal fries over more than 11" out of this one.

Of course I didn't do that, and instead baked it, an experience so involved that the poor microwave nearly needed a rest break.  A normal big spud takes about 10 minutes on high, flipping it over.  This one I did for 8 minutes per side, and then needed another 7 after another flip, and it still wasn't all the way done in the middle.  Unfortunately the outside was sort of drying out and getting sticky so we ended up with a turkey-sized potato that was about half edible.  But even that much of it was still more than Malaya and I could eat, along with some colorful stir fry I'd made.

I'm trying to learn from this experience, since there's another one in the bag that's nearly as large as the first was.  It's the prince to the fallen king, and since baking the king didn't work that well, I shall have to try another tactic with the prince.  It's just so damn large that if I chop it up to fry it I'll make more than Malaya and I can probably eat.

Such a life of travails and difficulties we endure!

The photo on the left shows the initial bookshelf appearance, with rat and snake aquariums in place.  The photo on the right is the current near-final design, with much decorative greenery in place.

The back patio has become quite the decorative place, almost entirely due to Malaya's influence.  She had this large ugly metal bookshelf hidden away in her closet, with a bunch of boxes of papers on it, and since I was bringing up a small snake and a couple of rodents, along with their constituent aquariums, she figured it would be a nice place to perch them. Plus it would keep them, their smells, their creepy scaly bodies, and assorted appurtenances out of the house.

The problem, as Malaya saw it, was that this would expose the singularly hideous bookshelf to our naked eyes, and while my naked eyes really didn't give a damn how it looked, hers found the blue metal and particle board shelves quite traumatic.  Since I also had several large plants with me, some of which regularly produce dangling thingies, project "conceal the bookshelf with greenery" was launched.

Initially we had a large dangling plant on top of it, the primarily-green tendrils of which descended nearly four feet, despite some not-inconsiderable damage suffered during the move.  (I was frankly expecting all of my plants to wilt and wither, after sitting in the oven-like back of an airless U-Haul truck for a full day.) However we soon realized that we had nowhere to put my giant leafy fern, since the overhead hanging hooks from the back patio are insufficiently load-bearing to support its verdant weight.  Therefore the dangling one was moved to a lower location, while the fern was plunked down atop the bookshelf, sending its afro-like vegetation in every direction, and largely hiding the wall and upper shelf.  As you can see in illustration three.

Supplementing the actual growing greenery are several yards of silk plants, both ones Malaya had handy from a friend's wedding leftovers, as well as a bunch more we got at Michael's on clearance sale.  They look preternaturally verdant, and when invisible-taped into place do a very nice job of hiding the ugly bookshelf, not to mention the ugly wall behind it.  We've also added a colorful background to the snake's tank, and will get one for the rats as well in the immediate future, as soon as we locate a pet store with a better selection of them than PetCo boasted.

One inadvertent change is that the back patio light is almost entirely blocked off by the mega-fern. At first this seemed like a bad thing, since when it's, you know, like dark... light comes in handy.  However after a few trial runs out there we realized that less light was pretty cool, and that we could see plenty for anything less than brain surgery from the big of porch light, any living room light, and the light from the street.

And anyway, it's really not sanitary enough out there for open skull surgery.  That's what the storage shed is for, after all.

 

 

Dusty doesn't do as much obsessing over the rodents as we thought he might.  Oh he's interested in them at times, and he spends a lot of time sprawling on the back patio near the rodent aquarium, but he's never actually pawed at them, and he's never figured to hop up on top of the cage to sniff at them through the top metal mesh.

As for the rodents, they were initially really freaked out by everything, being outdoors (sort of) with the strange smells and wind and car noise and such.  While admittedly it was hard to tell what specifically was making them nervous at any given time, they did dive under their little metal mesh furniture when Dusty came close and looked in at them.  So they could see him through the glass, and the sight of a fat black kitty registered in their pea-brains in the latter portion of the "fight or flight" region.

However they've either learned over the course of a week, or they are just too lazy or stupid now, since they no longer run or hide when he comes close, but instead keep on doing whatever it was that they were already doing.  Of course half the time what they were already doing can pretty well be described as "running or hiding", but see, they are doing that for a different reason!

We're not quite sure how things would go without the glass and metal between them, but it would definitely involve rats running and kitty sniffing in confusion.  Whether there would be more conflict than that is as of yet unknown.  We are curious to see if we get another kitty, or have baby rats, if they can be raised from younger ages in contact with each other.  It would be an interesting experiment.

Since these first two photos were taken the aquarium and bookshelf has been greatly spruced up, as pictured above.  And since the spruced pictures were taken, I've completed a cool stovepipe-like metal mesh tube that extends six feet (2 meters) from the top left of the rat aquarium, up beside the bookshelf, to another, smaller rat carrying cube atop the bookshelf.  Photos to come.

As with most things in life, the joy of the rat stovepipe is not in the destination, but in the journey.  I.E. it goes from a cage they are bored with to a much smaller cage they are already bored with.  But on the way it's all climby and crooked and breezy and there are fun things to sniff.

Here are three other photos I took not 5 minutes ago, around midnight Thursday.  Dusty was reclining atop the TV and I thought it would make a good shot, and then once I started snapping away Malaya got up and went over to entice Dusty into movement (a frequently-difficult task with a fat lazy kitty).  She was successful though, and he started stretching and looking around, as you can see in photos 2 and 3.

The shelf there is newly installed, and we had three large duck feathers that I brought back with me from our recent visit up to Davis (photos of that tomorrow) sitting jauntily in a little glass candle holding cup thingie.  Well, Dusty is unlike other cats in that he enjoys eating non-edible things like string and thread and rubber bands.  And feathers, as we now know.

He didn't actually eat any, primarily due to me rescuing the feather before events could escalate to that level, but he winged it, knocking it to the floor with a skillful bat of the paw. The game thusly grounded, he pursued it to the carpet, slew it swiftly, and proceeded to tenderize it with his legendary kill-a-man teeth.  His furious gnawing was directed towards the shaft of the feather, and resulted in several substantial dents.  When I got up and went to claim it before he could actually ingest any portion of the object (primarily since he tends to eat such things for their emetic function, a feature that is generally actualized at about 5am near the foot of the bed, and accompanied by loud horking sounds) he was so involved in the hunt that he batted (with claws) at me, and I was only able to retrieve the feather by distracting him by grabbing at one of his hind feets.

Five minutes later he was back up on top of the TV, with two paws up on the shelf, sniffing around at the two surviving feathers.  I sighed and threw them into the kitchen garbage, with their wounded fellow, knowing Dusty would just get at them eventually.  We're trying to keep him off of the shelf, since while it's heavy and pretty well-installed, so is he.

Funny how "red eye" looks so dumb on people, but so cool on animals.  Cats anyway.  Probably since it's almost never "red", but instead is a cool color like green, or yellow, or blue.  Both of Dusty's eyes are actually the same color, sort of a yellowish-green in daylight; they show up here so differently since the angle of his head is different in relation to the camera, I assume.  Straight on gets more of a greenish color, more to the side is more yellow?  Or possibly he's just got a malformed eye socket.

Actually, I wouldn't rule that out.  The tip of his tail is all crooked where Malaya broke it, years ago.  It's fine now, and gives it a nice little twist, sort of like a candy cane, just at the very end. She denies being responsible, but you know how girls lie.

<-- Previous  --  Next -->
Archives Index Page