November, 2008:

You know how they say that animals can smell fear? I think Shebang has developed a new sense: smelling impending vet appointments. I’d set it up to bring her in yesterday afternoon, and before I’d gotten out her cage or put a jacket on or anything, she hid under the bed. She just knew. There are certain places in my apartment from which I cannot extract her: under the bed being one, and inside the couch being the other. Once I get a job, I need to get a new couch. She can climb into this thing, and no matter which way I roll it or turn it, she stays inside. It is fucking huge.

But since I couldn’t retrieve her for the vet’s, I postponed the appointment until this morning, and managed to fool her enough to grab her and toss her in her cage. Ha ha, I win this time!

The good news about the vet visit is that she’s mostly healthy. Blood and urine tests came out fine, except for some slight anemia. The bad news is that I spent hundreds of dollars I don’t have to find this out.

But I am glad she’s fine, really. The vet thinks she’s just suffering a flare-up of her inflammatory bowel disease. Poor thing. Nobody likes pooping problems.

I wish I could write off the vet bills in my taxes. Declare Shebang as a dependent, or some such thing. I’d use this article to make my case: Authors’ mews: writers and their cats. It talks about how, when you look at the back cover or inside flap of a book and see a photo and short bio of the author, it often has a picture of the author with his/her cat, or the mention of the cat in the bio itself. Surely, then, a cat is necessary for writing, and should be considered a working expense.

A friend sent me this link yesterday: How to tell if your cat is trying to kill you. I suggested that the creator of that site stole the idea off me, though I’m sure it’s a common worry, given how cats are inherently evil. And via Sue I saw the online quiz related to the site: Is your cat plotting to kill you?. I honestly don’t think she is (right now), but here’s what I got:

Oh, and here’s a photo of a cat sleeping on a statue. There’s something sickeningly sweet about this, that cats can get away with that sort of thing. If I went out and grabbed a nap on a public sculpture in town, I’d be forcibly removed by the parks board.

That’s it for the cat links. I leave you with a photo I took last month with the built-in camera on my Macbook. Shebang sure knows how to make herself comfortable.

One of my favourite sayings which I find myself using too often goes something like, “if my parents wanted me to play well with others they should have given me siblings”. It’s good to have phrases like that when you’re an only child and it shows. Otherwise it’s hard to find an excuse for running away screaming from the nice group of people with whom you went to Tofino for a long weekend.

They say your personality is pretty much fixed by the time you’re 30, so I guess I can no longer hope or assume that I will grow out of my intense need for alone time and personal space. All I can do is be aware of it and plan my life with it in mind, but sometimes even that doesn’t work. In regards to this weekend, I’ve done fine in group trips before, because the cabins had more than one bedroom (or the sites had more than one tent) and I could hide away for a few minutes, here and there, to get some calm and quiet before rejoining the party. Unfortunately, the Tofino cabin’s “loft bedroom” was both doorless and acoustically positioned to amplify all sound emanating from the crazy hijinks below, so there was no privacy nor peace to be had, except for standing outside in the rain.

The fact that I’d slept badly all week and only 3 hours the night before didn’t help. Neither did the 6 hours of quiet I received that first night (obviously Albertans and Kiwis don’t need as much sleep as us mere mortals). So I avoided everyone, spent the day alone, got a cheap motel room that night and bused home the next morning. Tofino was nice, for the few hours of energy I had to wander the town. Must go back someday, preferably alone or with geriatrics who go to bed by 10 (Dad?)*.

I know an apology is in order, though I’m not really sure if the group will understand why I had to leave and not be offended. Some of them will read this post (passive aggression is my forte) and maybe that’ll help, or maybe it won’t. There’s always the danger that people are going to find you rude, weird or just fucked up because you feel trapped by large groups. In a bad way, I mean, because they probably already thought all this about you, but considered it quaint.

As I said at the beginning, I put the blame on my being an only child, though I also like to cite:

• my 8 pm bedtime until I was a teenager,

• spending weekends at Dad’s where I had few or no friends, and
• moving every year or 2 until I was 14

as other potential causes. I’ve pondered on this topic a lot, can you tell? I got so used to spending hours each week (and at least an hour in bed every night) awake and alone, and now I need it. And I am okay with who I am (really), except for when I upset or confuse my friends with my odd behaviour.

I was chatting with an older man on the ferry from Nanaimo yesterday. He was bringing his toddler-aged granddaughter back to her mother, after the girl had spent the weekend with her father (his son). I saw the son hug the girl and say “see you in two weeks”, and it made me sad. Not that I hadn’t seen this sort of thing before, but given how my weekend had gone, I hoped the granddaughter doesn’t turn out as I had. Especially with all the biweekly ferry trips in her future. But maybe her parents will let her stay up now and again.

*Just kidding, Dad. I know you go to bed later than that.

If anyone tried to reach this blog and failed last night, it was because I was using my webserver to fix my Tivo. Luckily there was no point watching TV last night other than live, so I didn’t miss anything.

Speaking of elections, I know several of you are suffering hangovers from celebrations (or sadness) last night, but I had a reason to celebrate too: Ujjal Dosanjh finally won MP in my riding, after a second (second!) recount, by 20 votes. So, on the federal election day (October 14) they said on TV that Ujjal won in Vancouver South by several thousand votes. Then the next day I heard on the news that it was only 33. This prompted an automatic recount, completed the next week, where Ujjal was demoted to a 22 vote lead. Except that they didn’t recount all the boxes, and the Tory candidate Wai Young went to court demanding a full recount. Which they did, and Ujjal won by 20.

Let’s just keep recounting until we get the number we want, shall we? Oh, and as it turns out, at 21 days this was the longest recount in Canadian history. W00t.

Your tax money at work, Canadians! Though I can see the Conservative chick’s point, why didn’t they do a full recount in the first place, with that small a win? The total for the riding was around 40,000 ballots, after all.

I wonder what the total would’ve been if people hadn’t been assured that this riding was the safest Liberal seat in BC, so there was no point voting. Sigh. If anything, people should look to Vancouver South as an example that every vote does count, and you can’t always rely on polls to predict the future.

Somewhere on the internets I read about GenderAnalyzer, a website that evaluates the writing on a website of your choosing and uses AI to determine if it’s written by a man or a woman. I tested my blog on it, obviously. In case you can’t read the writing in the picture above, here it is a bit more zoomed in:

Curious. I wonder what I’m doing that makes me sound like a dude. Maybe it’s the random gratuitous swearing? Or the lack of documented shoe purchases?

If it’s because of all the computer geek talk, then I’m just going to be offended and pissy, like some women are when they encounter sexism. So there.

I haven’t posted in a week because nothing’s happened worth mentioning, really.

I could go into detail about this contract job I’m doing migrating a database from QuickBase to DabbleDB, but I’ve bored enough technical people with it and I don’t see why you should have to suffer as well. Maybe later, when I’m finished with it, I’ll write a post about it as an advertisement for my mad database (and crap coding) skills, but I have nothing to brag about (or not mention) yet.

I am excited that I’m going to Tofino this weekend for the first time ever. I’ve always wanted to go, and I’ve been invited many times, but I either was on call at work, or busy with work or studies, or couldn’t afford the trip. If for no other reason, I should go because I can, and because next time I’m invited I might be back in another stressful and time-consuming job. I’ve always sacrificed my own fun for work, so I might as well take advantage of my current lack of responsibilities, true? My BFF Jen has agreed to feed my cat while I’m gone.

That’s it. Nothing else going on. Have a good time on the less dull portion of the internet (i.e., anywhere else).