Aw Diddums

Samson was tagged by Pearl over in Shu’s Small World, and is mighty chuffed! Says it’s a weird feeling to have a lovely blue cat (is she blue?) come flickering out of nowhere, give him a playful swat, then vanish again. But maybe he can do the same to a few others – should be interesting to try. If a big cream cat appears all of a sudden, don’t scream… it’s just Samson.

1. What I was doing 10 years ago.
This one’s easy – I wasn’t born then. The cat before me had just about been born himself. He was a Grand Premier (though not 10 years ago!) I’m not sure I will bother, myself – maybe one day, but I’m not in a hurry.

2. 5 things on my to-do list for today.
Eat, sleep, roam around my territory, chase wasps, and toss the fake mouse a few times (if I can’t get a live one).

3. Snacks I enjoy.
Just our usual meals, preferably meat rather than fish. Anything else isn’t food. Delilah eats Stilton, salmon, and cheesy crisps, but I don’t fancy any of that myself.

4. Things I would do if I were a billionaire.
Retire to my own private island with Delilah, Diddums and her mother. The island will have any number of fresh springs we can drink from.

5. Three of my bad habits.
Using the litter box just as Diddums sits down to rest with coffee or lunch; constantly demanding to have the tap turned on for me; getting my eye scratched during play (I’m recovering from my fourth scratch, or is it my fifth?)

6. Five places I’ve lived.
Small village where I was born. And then this room here – corner of the sofa, squeezed down as far as I could go. Then I moved behind the computer desk, sometimes switching to the book shelf, where I hunkered down behind the piles of books. Then there was the top of the tallest unit in the room. Now I live downstairs in the cat hammock beside the front door. It’s a great address… catches lots of heat at night from the radiator, and a warm golden pool of sunlight in the morning.

7. Five jobs I’ve had.
Friend to Diddums; companion to my playmate Delilah; a little excitement in the life of Cheeky (who still likes to ambush us); park keeper; somebody for Diddums to blog about. That’s five.

I tag…. your pet or animal companion! *Pow!* A big cream cat appears and thumps into your leg like a particularly heavy sack of sand.

Normally, around this time of year, I’m muttering about crowded cafés, shops, streets and roads. Not so much this year! For a couple of weeks now I’ve been smiling happily, feeling warm and giving… I suspect it has something to do with the art sites I frequent. When people are being people around you, having their quirks, weaknesses, concerns and their strengths (largely the creative process, or at least the desire to do well at it) – it gives you a warm and fuzzy feeling!

When folk come along and add your work to their favourites, that doesn’t hurt either… all sorts of people, from teenage girls to 65 year-old guys in Finland. You have something in common with them and so you’re no longer thinking (for example) that older people play Bridge rather than get on the net, or that younger people are an alien species who lurk on street corners. When I was 16, if I’d known other 16 year-olds who were keen to share their passion for drawing, painting or photography with me, I’d have been delighted. Who knows what difference the internet would have made to me at that age?

Getting back to my recent resurgence of love and goodwill to all humankind, a possible factor is that phenomenon I mentioned in an earlier blog post: when I don’t do something very much, I glide through it with ease. If I was going to town every other day, I’d be a lot grumpier than I am now.

A couple of days ago, Mum asked me why I was grinning. I told her I got a new comment on my ‘introvert bloggers’ post and was thinking about how disastrous it would be if the internet collapsed all of a sudden. “Imagine life without it,” I said.

“Aiee!” said Mum, then (after a pause), “introverts have a warped view of life.”

Pushing away the niggling thought that I have a tendency to ‘think’ myself into tight corners, I said “but you’re an introvert yourself.”
“Yes – I’m an introvert.”
“Though you have lots of friends and sit on all those committees.”
“When I was your age, I wouldn’t have been able to give speeches and talks, but it’s not so bad now. Anyway, we can’t let idiots run everything.”
“By idiots… do you mean extroverts?”
“Er… more or less. There’s usually a balance.”
“Extroverts go out and do stuff without thinking, while introverts think about things so much they don’t want to do them?”
“Something like that.”

Hmm…

A stray memory surfaced in my mind just now. I was working on a large poster with a friend in art class at school. It was beginning to grate on me that she was so bossy; she would say “do this” and we did it all her way, though I was a better artist. I found I was scared to touch the picture without permission. Further back in this post I was complaining that I couldn’t share the fun of artwork with friends (apart from the odd scribble with felt tip pens), but what was going on here was not sharing.

One day I decided it was my picture too, and I was jolly well going to put some dots in. Of course they looked terrible, and if I’d been in my right senses I would never have bothered with them. When my friend saw them, she got very cross and painted all the dots out again, and I didn’t object. She was completely unaware, I think, that I hadn’t put the dots in because I wanted dots… I’d put them in to assert myself a little.

This is doubtless one good reason why introverts and extroverts don’t always work well together. If someone you know at work or school is acting mulishly, throwing senseless spanners in the works, it’s possible that something similar is going on. If you don’t want me to break out in a rash of dots, don’t boss me. (Ahem).

Tutorial finished… it gave me two pictures to put in my online art gallery. The first was so-so (I didn’t like the red and pink colour combination but the thing had a life of its own!) so I made another with colours more to my taste.

Today I didn’t have to walk Thundercloud, so I walked Mum instead, taking my camera along. Ran out of film (or rather card space) in the first five minutes, having taken the 512MB card instead of the 1GB card. It was a bit bright for photos anyway – it was 3pm but felt (and looked) more like noon.

I was annoyed when I framed a nice shot of the footpath with overhanging trees, “ah, lovely, just trees and Mum wandering gently along,” finger tightening on the shutter… and two sweaty joggers shot past me into the frame. I didn’t even hear them coming.

I didn’t ask for that, cosmos.

The photo you see here isn’t that one, but it has Mum in it. Get out the magnifying glass.

I’m still working on the tutorial – it’s taking me days. I wonder if some of the others were able to do it in one night? Maybe the more practised ones can.

In my last post I said I wanted a nice pink gradient the next day (meaning a more cheerful mood instead of the blue one). When I got up next morning, the next bit of my picture to be worked on was a soft pink. That’s what I’ve been working with all day. Request answered – thank you, cosmos.

I’ve gone a little quiet, I know – I’m following more Photoshop tutorials. It’s great when I find ones I can use in Photoshop Elements 2.0. So many other Photoshoppers seem able to afford the top applications.

On Wednesday night I had a dream…. it cast a slight shade, a transparent gradient, over my day. The closer we got to bedtime, the bluer the cast of my mood.

In the dream, I went to tea with one of my cat clients, doing my best to make pleasant conversation, but she cocked a sardonic eyebrow at me. I was relieved when one of her cats shot off to the end of the garden, and a terrible caterwauling arose. It seemed her cat was picking on one of my cats, Lucky. Lucky died years back, before I started this blog.

I rescued him by picking him up and carrying him back to my seat. He seemed surprised at first, then clung closely to me, purring deeply. I could feel it vibrating through my heart. He seemed to be saying “it’s such a long time since you last held me.” I was bemused to realize it myself, and couldn’t think why such a distance had grown between us.

Later in the dream I discovered I had a huge aquarium at the back of my upstairs sitting room. It contained three large fish, about 40 cm long: two sharks and a human diver. I had to carry one of the fish to another part of the house in a red plastic bucket. I could have picked any of the three – the diver, the slim pretty shark, or the strong, sturdy, moody shark… I picked the moody one. He was the most likely to bite, but I felt he would be better able to deal with being removed from the tank. After scooping him out, I was annoyed to find there was no water in the bucket – I had to dash off to get some before I could put him in.

We were possibly showing him to a visitor, after which I returned him to the tank… he was slightly limp, but recovered quickly. Nobody had been bitten.

Sharky… I wonder if there’s a connection. Cats who have passed on… one of them missing me, and the other swimming moodily in a tank.

And then thinking how people are here one day and gone the next. Dad working abroad, making a life for himself and his family – and now it’s just us. And the baby mouse… I rescued him from the cats. At first I thought he was dead, and Samson was pinning him down with one claw, but when I got closer, the little thing was shaking. His legs were so thin and crumpled under him that one looked broken, but he was just weak. I took him straight outside with some crumbs. I don’t like wearing my nice pink slippers outside, but for the mouse’s sake, I trekked them across wet grass and placed him in a snug corner near the shed. He hobbled and wobbled slowly under the shed… Not convinced he will have survived, but maybe he found a nest of leaves and slept himself to recovery.

Mum accused Samson of nibbling the top off a muffin, but I said I gave it to the mouse.

I was in Photoshop Elements painting a light bulb in a lamp, when a song came into my head… one of Melanie’s most ’sobbing’ melodies. It might have been Candles in the Rain but I’m not sure; it’s years since I’ve played her music. It wasn’t Ruby Tuesday; I would recognize it as soon as it came up.

The Photoshop tutorial was absorbing, but while working on it, I remembered a stray comment from one of the 30 or 40 others who have already followed it. She said she decided to do it because there was nothing else to do, and she was feeling sad, longing for some human contact. I became aware in my mind of all the others tracing the same lines – some quickly, some slowly, some happily, others less so.

I’d like a nice pink gradient tomorrow, please, and a different song.

Today I was alarmed to discover that one of my older posts on WordPress had a list of four links at the foot of it. The list was headed ‘possibly related posts’. The first link was to one of my own posts; the other three was to posts by blogs I didn’t even know. I saw it as a type of advertising spam, and I didn’t want it.

Investigating, I found that some bloggers were reporting a rise in the number of trolls visiting their blogs, as well as bloggers whose views were radically opposed to their own. Some of the links led to inappropriate sites, and there was nothing to point to the fact that the poster wasn’t endorsing these places. A quick look in my stats showed that I was receiving referrals from sites I didn’t think had any interest in my blog… turns out they had my posts in their ‘possibly related links’.

The good news is that I could opt out – and I did. I wish I’d known earlier it was happening, as I wasn’t seeing any of those links at the foot of recent posts. I won’t be receiving any of the traffic generated by this exercise, but I was happy enough the way I was before.

Meanwhile, the latest ScribeFire update still wasn’t working for me; in particular I was getting login errors when I tried to reconnect it with my blog… so I downgraded to the version I was happy with. It’s like going home.

Elephant Paints Self Portrait (You Tube video)

Snopes on Elephant Painting

Wikipedia on Elephant Intelligence (Interesting read. I notice dolphins are mentioned a lot as well!)

Elephant ’self-portrait’ on show (BBC News, 21 July 2006)

And, while we’re at it, a You Tube video of Dolphins playing bubble rings. I want to play this too.

Last night I dreamed I was a nervous wreck. My cat had just died and my life was on rocky ground. I went to the local school during the night, when it was empty of all staff and pupils, and pinned my cat’s best show rosettes on the padded back of a school chair. (Since when were school chairs padded?) I also typed a couple of sheets about my unhappy experiences, and pinned them alongside the rosettes.

They stayed there for a few months and became quite a feature of the school. The teachers and schoolchildren were talking about them and hadn’t taken them down. I wondered if they kept so many chairs in the school that they didn’t have to use that one, or if there was a girl who would perch gently, half turned, so she wouldn’t squash the rosettes.

One day I realized I was feeling better; the experiences I wrote about were in my past and I didn’t want them hanging in full view any more. If I cared at all about the cat I had lost, I should get the rosettes back before the school itself took them down. All of a sudden I was filled with a sense of urgency – I had to get out there that night, before it was too late.

After waking up, it occurred to me the essays in the dream represented my blog.

I am still (very slowly) going through old blog posts and deleting many which have passed their date of usefulness. It’s true I posted them when I needed to, or when they were part of an ongoing story, but they don’t have to be up there forever. When I’ve finished editing those, I’ll start on the newer ones here. Editing is something we should always keep in mind as bloggers or site owners… though sometimes we get tired and just let things slide.

I also have desktop wallpapers ‘out there’ that I don’t like any more! They will be coming down eventually as well.

As for the cats’ rosettes… I don’t know what to do with them. I said I would go through them and keep all the best, and I did.. but there are still too many. I’m waiting to lose interest but I haven’t yet, because of the cats who won them. There’s a rosette pinned on the cork board behind this computer – Best of Breed. Could be Sharky’s, could be Thor’s. I noticed the other day some toothmarks at the bottom of its trailing ribbons – probably courtesy of Delilah. At first I was sad and annoyed, then shrugged it off. The cats never cared. One day I won’t either.

PS It’s one of those days (in a minor way) when one thing going wrong leads you straight into another thing going wrong…

ScribeFire had a fresh update which at first seemed OK, then it started telling me it couldn’t or wouldn’t delete my notes. I wasn’t sure what was up with that, but it didn’t seem too terrible, so I left it. Doubtless it would be sorted in the next update.

I typed out a fresh post which it allowed me to save only once, but that wasn’t a disaster either, as it wasn’t forgetting anything I typed into it.

“B-b-b-but I’m addicted to hitting ’save’!” I grumbled, feeling lost. That seems a weird objection, but it’s true. Saving every little change is as routine as making coffee. Hunting for the save button and not finding it makes me hesitate. In fact I nearly hit the ‘Clear Content’ button instead, as it was over in that corner.

Later on (after I turned off the computer so a guy could bring Sky to my delighted old analogue TV), I tried to post something, but discovered Scribefire had forgotten where my blog was. I clicked around, looking to see if there was a list of blogs from which Aw Diddums had accidentally been deselected, but couldn’t see anything, so started to remind it via the ‘launch wizard’. I got as far as being asked for my password and was spooked enough to cancel without answering. It didn’t make sense that it had forgotten the first time; I would rather wait it out. My imagination was running riot again, with the squeaky little voice whispering “it could be a haaaaaaaacker!!” Aw shush.

Gradually it occurred to me there was nothing stopping me from using my own blog’s dashboard, so I toddled over there, pasted my blog post, and looked at the list of categories. I read it over three or four times before realizing (panicking) that Agoraphobia wasn’t there. Had some haaaaacker been tinkering with my blog?

THEN I noticed the small print beside the list of categories. It said, ‘Most Used’. Underneath that was a link to ‘All Categories’. OH!

When you’re not expecting to be presented with an abridged list, it wastes your time while you scroll up and down looking for the thing that isn’t there. Agoraphobia should have been right at the top, alphabetically… it would have suited me to have the whole list there. I notice this time it’s still on the ‘All Categories’ tab – probably ‘Most Used’ is the default when you’ve not been on the site for a while, or when you’ve been doing most of your posting via ScribeFire. I hope ScribeFire feels better soon. It’s gone a little bit haywire and I miss it.

Today I said to Mum I’m so bored with the town here I want to go somewhere else for a while.
“Where?” she asked.
“Anywhere but London.”
“Of course, NOT London!” (glares at me as though to say “that wasn’t even on the menu.”)

“We could take the train to Xxx…” she suggested.
“I don’t like trains.”

I don’t think I’ll be going anywhere, then…

My local Spar has a short stretch of Poland in the corner. None of the goods on that rack are labelled in English, though I was able to figure out from a Spar tab that one of the items was a bottle of banana and carrot juice. Somehow they didn’t tell me about the apple.

I wanted it, and an uneasy feeling stirred in me – would I be allowed to buy it, seeing as I wasn’t Polish??

Mentally I slapped my wrist – well, of course! I worry about the silliest things. If you dig deep enough in my mind, you will probably discover a squeaky voice insisting that though they would be prepared to sell me the banan marchew jabłko sok, it would only be in exchange for foreign currency. I would stand panicking beside the till, saying “but all my money is British,” and everyone would look at me as though I had crawled out of a sock.

I deal with a constant mass of squirming worries because of the need to consider before I get to the counter what the potential problems are. Bitter experience has taught me that it’s worth calculating the various scenarios which could have arisen (sometimes in the last few minutes) which I might not have known about due to being deaf. It can be of surprising benefit to allow my imagination to run riot.

If I arrive at the counter unprepared, I’m quite likely to be stuck in a bog of befuddlement with people waving their hands and speaking gibberish (yes, I know it’s my own language), holding up the queue while I receive the ‘crawled out of a sock’ stares I mentioned earlier. Another reason why I avoid all queues (or at least long queues) if at all possible.

Forgive the wild-eyed rambling.

If I like the juice, I might try a packet of Polish biscuits next time – if they’ll let me.

I’m reading Dean Koontz books again – the last one (One Door Away from Heaven) was as unputdownable as Brother Odd. I won’t give away the plot. Odd things annoyed me slightly, but not enough to spoil it for me (except somewhat at the end, but we can always change the ending in our minds).

Near the beginning, a mention of Ghost Riders in the Sky was inspired. The tune that came into my head was the Shadows’ version, Riders in the Sky. It was one of my favourites when I was a teenager, and it greatly added to the novel’s atmosphere: power, speed, technology, hope, vigour, love of life… and an underlying menace. Perfect.

The main annoyance I had with the book was that the print disappeared into the crease. It was too big a book to be constantly pushing the pages back… quite a strain on the hands. Though I call it ‘unputdownable’, sometimes I had no choice. Sensible people would probably just break the spine but I can’t bear the thought! I’m sure the pages would have started to fall out.

It’s impossible to blog with an insane kitten jabbing her claws into your armpit. Samson has run off into the night, so Delilah has latched onto me. I placed her in her comfortable cot downstairs and came up to bed, but even as I went, my back was stiff… as I expected, there was a ferocious drumming of paws and she shot past me up the stairs, her tail held high. She didn’t want to sleep alone.

I’m worried she’ll sink her teeth through the downie into my feet, she pounces so enthusiastically. Furthermore, I have hopes that she won’t bite my nose off while I sleep, or shave my hair, or something of the kind. No wonder Samson skedaddled.

Saw this in the paper yesterday: blind woman refused access to her pension.

It makes me want to stop the world and get off.

Mum was tempted by an offer of four trial months of free Sky TV (after £75 initial set-up, delivery of Sky box and installation of mini-dish). So now we have a dish on our house too.

It’s been enjoyable so far, though it’s shocking how little is subtitled, including programmes which are subtitled sometimes, and other times not. They must do something about that, as it seems such a waste of energy and resources.

We have seen The Colour of Magic amongst other things, very good.

A few days after the Sky box was installed, we tried to watch a DVD. Nothing happened… I suspected the DVD was playing but not showing up on the TV screen. I crawled behind the TV and changed the Scart cables around – the Sky guy had placed them so that they both ran from the TV. I put the DVD player in the middle, taking both cables so that the TV had one and the Sky box had the other.

The DVD sprang to life on the TV screen (already part of the way through).

After watching the film, we tried to watch Sky again, and this time Sky wasn’t responding. Again I crawled behind the TV and switched the cables round to Plan C… this time I discovered that it mattered which Scart socket you used! I thought it didn’t matter, but it does. The Sky box has one socket for the TV and another for the video or DVD player, so this time I put the Sky box in the middle, with one cable running to the TV and the other to the DVD player. The sockets on the other units matter as well, but I swapped the Scarts round till I figured out which ones worked.

This time we could watch Sky, and we could also watch a DVD if we switched off the Sky box first. But the Sky picture was green!!

“You’ve lost all the red,” said Mum, accusingly. After a little head-scratching, I crawled behind the TV again and discovered that one of the Scart cables wasn’t as well pushed in as I thought; pushing it all the way in was all that was needed to restore ‘normal’ colour to the TV screen…

We now have a TV set-up we can continue to use.

The excitement wasn’t entirely over, as Mum got a letter saying they were going to start debiting her account at the end of the month… she phoned and said she’s barely even started the four-month trial period she was promised, and they said they accidentally sent out letters saying they would, but they weren’t going to, and Mum’s money is safe for now.

Funny how it’s never easy.

Tonight I watched Changing Lanes starring Ben Affleck and Morgan Freeman (if I remembered their names correctly! Did I? A miracle, then; I never seem to remember names now). I would say it was a Tom and Jerry film for grown-ups, and it was screwing me up just watching it… but by the end I was able to say, “good stuff – I like it!” Probably more than I liked Tom and Jerry (which was ‘not much’).

I decided the lawyer was Tom, while Doyle was Jerry.

Every time Ben Affleck (the ‘lawyer’) got that panicky, cornered look on his face and said “yes, this is what I need for my life to continue to run smoothly!” your stomach lurched… good acting, really.

My ‘maternal kitten’ Delilah was watching children on the TV again… this time she latched onto the sons of Doyle (Morgan’s character). She heard them screaming and crying, and was all motherly concern. Just in case they would like to know.