Show us where the bad cat touched you…
Now I remember the other stuff that was eluding me in the wee hours of the morning.
For the past several weeks, Oberon has developed a really peculiar routine whenever I lay down to sleep, and this routine is apparently reserved just for me: after I’ve been laying down for a while, wherever that happens to be, he jumps on one of my legs and starts kneading it relentlessly. If I try to shake him off, he tries to bite down (and doesn’t particularly care if he’s biting a big wad of blanket or my leg) and hold on. It would seem that somebody thinks I’ve got awfully sexy legs, because he certainly seems to be trying to mate with them. Sometimes I get annoyed enough to sit up and remove him, other times he disengages and leaves me alone. When I remove him, there’s a pretty good chance he’ll come back and start again. Before anyone asks, yes, he was neutered when we first took him in (almost exactly two years ago), and no, he doesn’t try to get fresh with Olivia. He harrasses her, sure, but in a nosy brother kind of way. And he doesn’t do this with Evan or my wife.
Face it, I’m irresistible.
In other news, the end-of-the-year favorite-music-podcast-thingie I keep talking about doing is probably going to wind up being a beginning-of-the-year favorite-music-podcast-thingie. I recorded some of my intro pieces a couple of weeks ago before I wound up feeling like chicken fried crap on a full time basis, but I hated how they turned out (iwastalkingwaytoodamnfast), and I haven’t had any kind of voice with which to redo them since I’ve gotten sick. So…probably after the first of the year, I’m afraid.
OK, that’s all. I’m gonna go sit and get molested by my cat again. Bye bye.… Read more
I hate being sick, but being sick in the run-up to Christmas sucks big time. I’ve gotten no shopping done at all. (Being broke has nothing to do with it – when has that ever stopped the average American consumer?) I’ve had days recently where I’ve just been capable of the bare minimum of taking care of the kiddo, and that more than anything makes me feel like a large failburger with a side order of fail fries. I’ve been wanting to write something or create something…and just haven’t had the energy. I’m just kind of running on automatic pilot. It’s hard for me to just sit immobile and rest at the best of times, and nigh-on-impossible with the boy to take care of. He’s also still under the weather, though he’s gradually showing more energy and enthusiasm than I am, so hopefully this means he’s coming out of it. His cough is going away; mine seems to have moved in for the winter. I just want to be out from under the cloud of “blah” and be able to enjoy the holidays – is that so wrong?
So today, I had to go to Wal-Mart and have one of my wife’s tires patched. I gave them my phone number, found out it was probably going to take close to two hours, and then set out to Braum’s on foot for lunch (about half an hour away). I had just left the farm before this, so I wasn’t exactly dressed nice…which is probably for the best since part of that walk practically takes you through a ditch. Anyway, I took my time eating lunch and then waddled back down the road and across Highway 64, which is about 6 lanes at that point with absolutely no crosswalk whatsoever. Helpful. Anyway, I got back to Wal-Mart, picked up some baby stuff, and took my loot to the automotive section where I hoped I wouldn’t be waiting too long. I fired up my minidisc player and listened to the end of a Doctor Who audio that I had started earlier that day (Masters Of War, about which I shall wax rhapsodic at a later date). Having finished that, I sat and waited.
Maybe it’s just because I’ve been sick as a dog and still wearing myself out running around chasing the boy, but somehow Christmas just hasn’t settled into my mental landscape as a reality this year. I know it’s only about a dozen days out, but for some reason this year it’s just not “real” for me. This isn’t a “bah humbug” thing, but more of an “oh well” thing. It’s there, I’m aware of it, but that’s about it.
Not so fast, though! Just hooking them up and recording their video wasn’t enough. Each of these machines generated its own internal sound – bleeps and bloops came from a little piezo speaker inside the plastic casing. Not only did I record the video straight to a DVD-R (through 
This time last night, I was having a major, major, major allergic reaction to…something. I don’t even know what. I was broken out in hives (all of which felt like they were full of bees) from head to toe, and even my fingers, throat, tongue and eyes were swelling. I wolfed down some Benadryl when I noticed that the problem was going from “slightly annoying” to “this is kinda scaring the bejeezus out of me”, but what really scares me is that I don’t know what it was an allergic reaction to. I didn’t handle any hay last night at the farm while we were dealing with Hannah’s situation, I didn’t eat anything yesterday that I hadn’t eaten a zillion times before, and I don’t recall coming into contact with anything foreign enough to make me say “yep, that’s it – that’s what I was allergic to.” It was more than a little bit scary. I felt better this morning, but at the same time still felt like chicken fried crap because of the Benadryl – that stuff leaves me in a fog for days, from a single dose. I was also worried about whether or not it was a contact thing that I might pass on to Evan during a diaper change or other routine contact; fortunately, this seems not to have been the case.
Okay, this one hurts like hell. Tonight we had to put our seven year old Arabian mare Hannah down. She somehow managed to break her left front leg badly enough that there was bone portruding through the skin; the bone itself was shattered. We got there, with Evan in tow, just before the vet arrived to send Hannah on her way as humanely as possible, and she was still standing up as best she could, still trying to graze, like nothing happened. Evan patted her on the nose, and she gave a contented snort, even though she had to be in a fantastic amount of pain.
So I had to rebuild some of PDF Level 2 tonight when I discovered that Evan had apparently done some…ah…work on it. Note to son of mine: if you’re angling for an “assistant editor” credit, you actually have to leave intact some of what was originally there. :shocked: No sweat, though, because this one’s almost a breeze to put together compared to the first one, at least where compositing and other things come in. Part of the whole reason to have an Avid at home, whether I’m still “in the biz” or not, is to keep discovering new tricks and, yes, new workarounds. Knowing how/why the machine does some of the things it does helps me find ways of tricking it into doing certain things for me, perhaps more efficiently than I’d done them before, and occasionally allowing me to do stuff that I simply hadn’t worked out how to do before now. It keeps me in the loop. Or it keeps me loopy. Not sure which, really. Suffice to say, even Evan deleting a couple of layers of effects/text/compositing wasn’t a disaster – it was a head-scratch and 15 minutes of rebuilding what had been there before. No sweat. I really wish I’d known some of these tricks when I was working at the station, but hey, no biggie. I still like what I’m doing now better.