muninnhuginn | Sat with a Cat (Reply)

The Little Cat. It's getting a tad stir crazy, it is. But it's purring. More importantly, after this morning's bad experience with a long claw caught in the bedclothes, it's allowed me to give it a pedicure and even permitted the claws on its baldy paw to be trimmed. This also gave me the chance to check how many stitches have been removed--and the answer is, only the one. Good cat.

Our joint fashion tip: the toy poodle shave is definitely best left to the toy poodle.

And there's progress, tho' too slow. We have no rubble out the front and salvaged bricks out the back. There is a partition roughly halfway across the living room (with a door giving access to the wreck at the front), which is keeping the noise down and the dirt out. There are down pipes from the gutters outside. The cleaners come on Wednesday. Which is when two lots of builders are coming to do quotes (the ones I already regard as my favourites are coming tomorrow and have already rung up asking preparatory questions), and when Little goes back to the vet for stitch removal.

Nice things: Looby Loo came home with a certificate for listening especially well; I've acquired a £5 Amazon voucher; I got my Michel Houellebecq on H P Lovecraft book today; and smelly stuff courtesy of BPAL and eBay: Pink Moon (may go to LL), Honey Moon (Mmmm, Bzzzz, spice?), and testers of Mata Hari (nice) and R'lyeh (neat). I'm wearing both Mata Hari and R'lyeh, which is more of a plot idea than a recommended scent combination.

Annoying things: builders (whom I don't want to get the contract for the rest of the work, tho' they clearly expect to); encountering the word "intercity" in one of the Bletchley in WWII sections of Cryptonomicon where it jarred as too modern a term (tho' I must check this out) for the setting. It's broken the magic, and I was enjoying the book greatly, and I'm not sure if I'll carry on. It took a good twelve months to make myself forgive Alastair Reynolds for the misuse of "crescendo" on the first page of whichever of his books it was I've read--Revelation Space?--and actually buy it. It was still necessary to take a deep breath and hold it through the first page before being able to enjoy the rest of the read.