tychoish, now without a net

I haven’t posted very much about the kittens of late. I’d like to report that they’re doing well. A friend (incidentally, the person who taught me how to knit, lo those many years ago) visited the kittens a couple of weeks ago, and upon the conclusion of her visit she said “I look forward to hearing about their… career’s.” Frankly the thought of them having careers–particularly when I don’t really seem to–was a bit frightening.

Nevertheless the concept has stuck. So here is a report on the careers of Kip and Merlin:

Here’s a picture:

• This is from a period when they were lying together on my desk. Very cute. Note the ball winder in the background. Kip is in the foreground.
• They’ve taken to having rolling night time battles which occasionally interrupt my sleep as I become a substrate for these battles.
• Though they didn’t purr very much when they first came to us, now they’ll both purr pretty much any time you pick them up. I’m in favor of cats that purr.
• I’m starting to realize that my cat allergies are something that I need to pay a little more attention to managing, particularly given the long hard quality that these cats have. I think this will likely just turn into a more regular face and hand washing behavior.
  • Kip and Merlin have longer hair than other cats we’ve had in recent years, though, when I was a small child we had a Mainecoon-type cat who had longer hair than these boys. And lets be fair, one of our big cats has medium-length fur which is particularly silky and not staticy (which means that its airborne more than it should be.)
• Kip has developed a fondness for a ball which he caries around and growls adorably over.
• Merlin has discovered two things. One, he can pull the mag cord out of my computer with ease when I’m sitting at my desk with my computer on my lap. This is ok, because I have one of the mag cord on my new computer, but it’s annoying. The second thing that he’s discovered is that he shouldn’t unplug the computer. So he grabs and runs.
• The grown up cats are starting to come around to the new cats. Their initial response was fright (Nash) and Curiosity-Followed by viciousness (Montana). Nash is still afraid but less so, and has engaged aged in some parallel play, while Montana has had some more positive interactions. I think if we didn’t have concerns about keeping food separate for a while I think they’d be ok to be fully integrated at this point.
  • I should underscore that Nash is a huge 16 pound cat, and Montana is 10ish pounds. I think that element makes their reactions even more funny.
• Kip and Merlin both have very faint taby stripes in their gray sections. This is incredibly cute, and I’m not sure that it comes across in any of the pictures.
• Kip has taken to waking me up in the night by running on me (less bothersome than you’d think) and chewing on my ears (more bothersome than you’d think). The first night, it was my toes–not ears–at 4:30, and he has moved on to ears at like 2:30. Though he can usually be chided successfully, it’s more disruptive of my sleep schedule and overall functioning than I might like.

In summation: kittens are good. I approve. I’ll keep you all posted as their careers progress.

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still no news about grad school.

the longer I “stay in play,” the better, probably, though I am looking forward to this whole drama being over.

my dad said the other day, that “zebras don’t need to run faster than lions to stay alive, they just need to run faster than other zebras,”

which is both funny, and true. at any point, I could be the slow zebra, but the chances are that there are slower zebras out there, and the longer I’m in play, the better.

and it’s funny. funny is good.

my spinning wheel came today. but I went for a kind of brisk walk after being out and running around a lot today, and I’m just knackered. more news on this forthcoming.

also, I got a new nalgen bottle and a a french press type thing for making tea in it. I haven’t quite mastered the insertion/removal thing with grace but some day I will have it. I also got a couple more varieties of black tea, including one with vanilla and thus I suspect to have enough tea to get me through the beginning of 2009, unless I get into graduate school, in which case, the end of october, max.

I think what you’re witnessing is the live bloging of angst, and so I’m going to go and do something else entirely.

love, tycho

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Here’s the running list of things I’m thinking about for tag lines. I’ve changed it to “tychoish, think as if you lived–” but this is only temporary, unless people like it.

I really like the comma in this one, really like the comma.

I’m even going to put them in the right font/size.

I hope you don’t mind the visual oddity.

Below the fold

Continue reading Tag Lines

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Dear friends,

Today has been a good day. Things regarding the dance experience have continued to improve, such that over tea this afternoon we realized that, the way things have turned out was the best possible thing that could have happened.

So good, in fact, that these kinds of things don’t happen outside of movies. Except they have.

The truth is, that this whole mess has been nagging at us for a year, maybe a year and a half. And though I’m not sure we have “closure,” we have resolution. This is good enough, and it’s as if a great weight has been lifted from our shoulders. A weight that we didn’t know we had.

It’s hard on you when your stress release mechanism, and one of your outlets for physical activity become cooped by angst and stress, and it’s been so long.

So I’m happy.

One of the things that we did a few weeks ago, was that we held a ritual burning of some objects that were symbolic of some of the more stressful parts of the recent past.

And now there’s resolution.

So we think (and I support this) that I need to have some sort of positively focused ritual to encourage a positive outcome to this graduate school application. I’m thinking about what I can do, but I’m not sure. Seems like the place to start is with some serious cleaning and reorganization of my crap. I have clothes to donate, paper to recycle, and so forth. Cleansing seems like a good place to start.

I’m also considering ditching tealart as a project because I think I can run everything that I could possibly ever want to do off of tychoish.com, and I’d rather not further divide my time/energy. Maybe. I’m not sure. Unless I can find a good executive editor. But I have to keep it around for email purposes for a year or two anyway, so I don’t know. It’s just a thought.

If anyone has a good suggestion for a ritual some such, I’d be willing to hear it.

In other news, I replied to a lot of email messages on ravelry, I’m sorry that I took so long to do this, but it felt really good to get all these messages out to people who had written really kind notes. Also I got more than a little bit of encouragement to work on getting my patterns written and ready for sale and distribution. There’s nothing to encourage you to be creative and productive than people asking for ways to give you money. This is the problem to have. So the end result is that I have a lot of work to do and I’m very much looking forward to the opportunity to do it.

That’s what I have right now. I’ll be back tomorrow, in a less reflective sort of way. Be well everyone, that’s an order.

Onward and Upward!

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Days on the waitlist: 1

As it turns out the woman who found the cat has decided to keep it. So no cat. I’ll probably scope out the animal shelters just to see, but I think this means I’ll wait on the cat till I move out on my own. Hopefully the fall. That’ll make things easier I think. In any case this is the second time that we’ve almost gotten a cat but had it fall through. (A dancing-friend’s daughter’s (siamese) cat had kittens in the late summer, and we wanted one, but it didn’t work out).

These things happen.

Not much else in the way of news.

Knitting Department I got my extra skein of yarn in the mail for this sweater, so though I’m not making a lot of progress there (it’s so fine) I really want to get this sweater knocked out. It’s been too long, and I need closure. There will be pictures. My goal is the end of the weekend for the sleeve, and this time next week with the hem and business.

Television and Knitting Department I’ve been watching the second season of Boston Legal during my knitting, which I do so enjoy. I think I have Blake’s 7 and Jeremiah on my computer to watch, but I’ve found the pacing on the former to be frightful and the second one to be… difficult, at the moment. We’ll see what I try next. I think there’ll be torchwood to watch tomorrow.

I’ll be around. See you…

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Hey folks.

So I’m off to run errands and do things today, but I’d like to generate some cat names, so that I/we have something good to choose from when I meet the cat, if this indeed works out. And I want your help. Here are some notes:

1. Can’t reuse a name that we’ve already used/had/have on an animal in this household/family (Mouse, Fred/Phred, Ribbon, Crosby, Nash, and Montana are out).
2. We generally try and avoid giving people names to animals on the occasion that we might come across someone with the same name in our day to day life, so no Johns, Jims, Stuarts, Chris’, Brians and so forth.
3. This is a boy cat. I prefer cross gender pet names that are absurd–eg. girl dogs names Rodney, boy cats named Alice–to more subtle example of this naming genre–eg. boy cats named Rydra (the protaganist of Samuel Delany’s novel Babel-17)
4. Naming after minor celebrities/passing fads is probably something that I’d like to avoid. Thus, there should be ample argument with the suggestion to name a cat something like Ianto or Starbuck.
5. Naming after living folk/academic idols that I might–even conceptually–cross paths with at some point even if I think they’re really awesome and way too famous for me.
6. I consider naming anything living or otherwise after a character in a book/story (but not a person) whose dies tragically, to be bad luck, generally, and avoid it.

I’ve been thinking about something sort geeky/literary/sf-y/queer. Authors, nicknames, good characters from books, Here are the ideas that I’ve had so far.

• Kip (after one of the main characters in Brightness Falls from the Air by James Tiptree, also I just realized in my novella from earlier this year, though I spelled that Kyp.) I think this is leading. Has diminutive possibilities of “Kipster” and “Kiptron”. Heh.
• Pace (from Brightness, very minor character)
• Delany or Tip(tree), though conflict with number 5, on the former.
• Trouble (after leading character in Melissa Scott’s Trouble and her Friends, though I think Melissa actually had a cat named this, and as she’s a contact in the extended social network, I think that would be potentially creepy. Also possible jinx regarding “trait” names, and minor boy/girl ironies unintended.)
• Saphir or Whorf (after the saphir-whorf hypothesis.) Though the latter has possible confusion with a certain Clinton (minus the silent-h) and the former isn’t as worth commemorating. Other (dead) good anthropologists/social scientists? Gertz is hard to name for: and No cats named Clif, I think.
• Any post-structuralists worth naming after that aren’t asinine? Deleuze, for instance, is probably a no go.

Please do elaborate. Other writers/characters I should think of?

Vote early and often!

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