Day, I can't get started with you

So I woke up in the dark hours to find myself absolutely pinned, pinned hard against the wall there by two furry and determined bodies (asleep, within two feet of each other! Anyone would think they were trusting associates. I'm not fooled. It's just a temporary truce, for the duration of the v cold weather, but even so...).

I did actually have to disarrange them, in a rolling-over sort of way. So then Mac slithered under the covers for a snuggle and a purr, while Barry sat on my chest and demanded scritchings. So I listened to quite a lot of the World Service, and then drowsed through the Today programme, and - well. Getting up was hard. And eventual. If their breakfast was late, it's entirely their own fault.

So far today I have baked bread, and walked to the vets through the gloriously bitter morning to make arrangements for the boys to have rabies and other vaccinations. Almost like it was really going to happen, this whole going-to-America thing.

But now it is after noon, in a literal sense, and I have done nothing else. So I'd better get on with it. Only, y'know. Really, really do not want. I'm cold and sluggish, and I want to sit on the sofa and read books.

I can haz Kindling!

So cold. Soooo coooold...

In a better world, I would be huddling by the fire as the cats are, rather than sitting here on the wrong side of the room, having to work. In that better world, I would have in my hand the Kindle with which extraordinarily generous friends have in fact just gifted me in this world, and I would be absorbing Bujold by the bucketload: for lo, this appears to be what Kindles are primarily for. K has legal e-ditions of the whole series, that she is legally allowed to share; I anticipate a Vorkosigan-fest.

With what else, I wonder, should I load my Kindle...?

Creatures of habit, redux

Heh. On an ordinary rice-day, it would be my habit to cook the rice at 5.00pm. This gives it time to cool off thoroughly before I fry it up for dinner, and means that I can listen to the opening minutes of PM (ah, the dulcet tones of Eddie Mair) while it cooks.

On an ordinary day, 5.00pm is also the time I let myself start drinking.

Today? Not so ordinary; I need to be in town by 7.30 for a meeting of the Third Monday Club. Which means I need to eat an hour earlier than usual, which means I wanted to cook the rice an hour earlier, which means...

Which means that I just came upstairs from draining the rice, sat down at the keyboard and all but reached for my glass of wine, all but tasting it already. At 4.00pm. Clearly I'm that far attuned, that the smell of fresh-boiled rice makes me expect alcohol on the instant. Ah Pavlov, thou shouldst be living at this hour...

In other habituations, Lord only knows what Mac is going to do in California. There'll be no decent games of golf, and positively no geysers at bedtime...

Hmm? I should explain? Oh, it's all the fault of Karen's bathtub.

Heh. I may have mentioned before that Mac likes to start the day with a game of bathtub golf: knock the soap into the tub, and see if he can get it down the plughole while I'm cleaning my teeth and so forth. It's a good game, but it just won't be the same in CA, as K's tub is barely deeper than a shower-tray.

That's the mornings ruined, then. And then come evening, as soon as I turn the computer off and emerge from the office, he and I head straight for the bathroom, and again he jumps into the bathtub while I clean my teeth. Obviously, one does not play golf after supper; this time he just wants to stare warily into the plughole, because bath and basin drain into the same shallow-sloping pipe, and if I time it right I can make the bathtub plughole first gurgle, then spit, then positively regurge water from the basin. He finds this delightful, in a shriek-OMG-wet-paws! kind of way. And my betting is that he will assume this to be true of all bathrooms, and bitter disappointment shall be the poor boy's lot when he learns that 'tis not so.

I only hope that Californian sunshine will prove some poor compensation. He may be the first ever to migrate to America and find less golf.

A vague, inutile and possibly counterproductive thought about immigration

Look, I can be on board with the notion that residency is a privilege, for which they get to set the conditions. I can see how they would think that way.

But the application process? Is a service, that we pay for.

I think three months without a word (that's three months after they cashed the cheque) is just taking the piss, quite frankly.