Happy Zoo Year

With the weather still grey, but threatening to get worse over the next few days, I decided that today was the day to get in my last zoo visit of the holiday season. There were surprisingly large numbers of people who had the same idea.

The tiger keepers had sprayed or spread something attractive and smelly around the tiger enclosure, and the effect was a bit like those of catnip on little kitties.



On the way home, I caught this rather individual young woman on camera. Obviously she was trying not to attract too much attention.

Happy New Year, everyone!

Very Interesting Person

For some reason known only to themselves, the newish satellite channel Quest didn't actually show A Person of Interest, ending the (wonderfully widescreen) season with Zoonotic, just as they had started it with Best Defense, and showed Dead later.

I've been gradually transferring the episodes to the HDD of my DVD recorder, and yesterday I edited some and tried to put them on to DVD.

The instructions are dire. I need some experimentation before being able to offer widescreen pictures of Season 1 and 2.

Meanwhile, here are some of the regular pictures:

Cats and Computers

Beano as background.

My best friend has resisted the lure of the computer for a long time. She uses an old-fashioned word processor to write her ongoing book which features a character based on a certain Vincent D'Onofrio. She has a computer that she never uses (a donated, refurbed one from a mutual friend) and a dial-up internet connection that goes nowhere slowly. Sending her an email would be a waste of time - she would never see it. Her printer is only used for printing pictures directly from her camera's memory card.

Well, today, at her request, I took her to PC World and she chose a laptop. Once she'd seen one with a white keyboard, that and battery time were the only two "sine qua nons" of the transaction. (Her sight is not brilliant and she finds the white keyboard easier to see.)

We set the machine up at my house, as I've set up a good few machines in my time, starting with the days when you actually had to load Windows yourself! It's going to take her a while to get used to the moves, especially as she has not used a mousepad before (luckily the mouse is quite user friendly, though to see her playing Solitaire was quite long-winded for someone who can shoot through the moves pretty fast).

I lent her a book on Windows 7, and loaded a picture of my cats so that she could have a decent wallpaper. I'm sure she would have liked Vincent, but she's hoping her mother will use the machine to hunt for dolls house sites.

Which brings us on to internet connectivity. Apart from the dial-up, she has none. She will probably go for Virgin Media so she can get TV too. The cables are just outside in the street waiting to be brought in.

I think I'm going to have to go into full nag mode, because she is a procrastinator extraordinaire. Watch this space - but don't hold your breath.

Meanwhile, my 16-year old cat Amber, who has six-weekly injections for kidney failure and daily pills for thyroid, has not been thriving. I decided before Christmas that once the busy weekend was over, I would take her to the vet's for a thyroidectomy. That day fell today. As the vet's is on the route home from PC World, I collected her after doing the computer thing. Poor little mite has a long row of stitches and a livid scar down the front of her neck. Having been starved since 9pm yesterday with a condition that makes her permanently hungry anyway, she needed me to move up the timetable for her first post-op feed from 7pm to 4.30.

Amber (long) before the op.

The operation was almost exactly half the amount my friend's computer cost.

£344.

Help!

I'm absolutely certain

that I capped Graansha after the last time I found I hadn't capped it!

Can't find it, so you'll have to settle for Zoonotic.

So many pictures, so little time.































Funny time and place to play charades.

Blinking Wonderful

In all his luscious parts, as well as the while.

Red Hot

So much to slaver over in this episode. Clever, clever Bobby.

Anyone for Marcus Aurelius?

I have an "A" level in Latin. (For my non-UK readers, that's the exam you take at 18, and on whose grades university entry depends.)

I've read Virgil, and Horace, and Julius Caesar. I've parodied Catullus.

I have never read Marcus Aurelius. Although the name is familiar, I don't think I ever knew anything about him.

Unlike all these amazingly erudite people in the NYC law enforcement team.

Two Blind Mice

Well, dead ones, actually.

As I was about to clean out the hens today, I noticed that there was a dead mouse in the corner of my garden room, killed and brought in by one of the cats, then just left. I was going to put it into one of the bags of rubbish when the clean-out was finished.

At one point, I let the girls into the room, where a heater was on, providing them with the only source of heat they've had for weeks. Suddenly, Pansy's head snapped round, and she grabbed a dead mouse in her beak. But not the same mouse, one I hadn't spotted. She banged into the glass door in her hurry to get it outside so that she could throw it around, "kill" it for herself, then eat it.

I picked up the one I had noticed by the tail and threw it to Poppy, who looked at it bewildered. After a few moments, she pecked at it, and was beginning to show some interest, when Pansy, having finished hers, came and stole the other one. There followed a chase round the garden, in which Poppy kept trying to get her share, or at least some pointers, while Pansy repeatedly grabbed her spoils and ran away, unwilling to risk losing this extra treat.

Anyone reading this over supper?

On Ice

A story of stupid, vain old men - the one who wanted to be frozen for posterity, and the one who wanted to secure his legacy at any cost by finding a cure for his son's Alzheimer's.