Month: August 2007

Another cat post

I promise this isn’t a trend. Really.

The mouse came back last night. Haru’s been wanting out in the garage periodically, and I’ve been indulging him, despite the mess he makes getting his dirty feet wet in the bathtub. I left him out there for a while last night before checking up on him. When I did, he was nowhere to be seen, and when I called to him, I heard a little squeak instead.

The poor mouse was terrified, and had stopped trying to run away. It was standing stock still. Haru was staring at it, pacing back and forth. Occasionally, he’d take a paw and pat at it, at which point the mouse would squeak, scurry two inches and stand stock still again. Not an optimal survival technique, but Haru didn’t seem too interested in actually eating him.

I scooped him up in a kitty litter bucket and drove him out to the far end of UW’s north campus. When I dropped him out in the grass, he stood stock still there, as well, looking up at me. I’m not optimistic about his survival chances, but at least he’s out of my garage, and I didn’t have to personally draw blood.

In other kitty news, Haru has a dentist appointment on Tuesday. He’s getting a couple teeth pulled due to [neck lesions](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feline_odontoclastic_resorptive_lesion). Poor thing.

Finally earning his keep

Haru (who isn’t my cat so much as he’s just a cat who happens to live in my house; we’re mutually coming to terms with this) finally served a useful function yesterday, besides just purring and being cute.

I was out in the garage cleaning out the car tis afternoon. It’s needed it for a while. I’d laid out a couple of the car mats to be vacuumed when I caught just out of the corner of my eye a little black thing moving along the door frame. I thought it might be a shadow cast from a plane or something, but its movement had a distinct scurrying quality to it.

I briefly contemplated setting out traps or something. But then I had a better (tho possibly crueler) idea.

Haru’s always trying to get out in the garage. I figured it was probably because it’s different and smelly and he can get a different view looking out of the garage window. He likes stuff like that. I hadn’t considered that maybe he was hearing scurrying noises.

So I let him out.

About an hour later, I went out to check on him. As soon as I opened the door I heard a squeaky squealing noise. Already I felt kinda bad for the mouse.

Haru picked him up in his mouth, trotted over to me and ceremoniously dumped him on his back in front of me. He seemed pretty proud of himself. Before I could trap the little, black mouse in a kitty litter pail, though, it managed to flip itself over and scurry into a corner.

Haru and I chased it around for a bit. He was really just playing with it, like he’d play with his stuffed mice I get him from the Faire. I was trying to trap it, so I could maybe drive it out to the UW Nature Preserve or somewhere. That wasn’t working so well.

The mouse eventually managed to find his way back under the garage door, which is presumably where he came from. Getting Haru back in the house after that took a while, but he got bored eventually (after leaving paw prints all over my car, of course). I’ve let him out a few times since and it doesn’t look as if the mouse has come back.

Sign of the times?

I was walking down street to get my lunch yesterday. It was probably about 33° out and I was noticing I was having trouble breathing (something I’d probably attribute to the humidity, since air quality [actually wasn’t all that bad](http://www.airqualityontario.com/reports/aqisearch.cfm?StationID=26060&this_date=02-Aug-07&startmonth=24hour)).

When I got to the Tim Horton’s, a cyclist rounded the corner behind me. I happened to notice that he was wearing a gas mask.

A real, honest-to-god gas mask. I didn’t get a chance to ask him if he really needed that thing or he was just making a statement. Then again, I certainly didn’t want to be out biking in that soup.

What am I doing here?

I [had cause](http://www.ctrl-a.org/viewtopic.php?p=936#936&sid=5f310184fd9e61410cacc42c8735e1ea) to go flipping through the archives of my [old blog](http://www.flyingsquirrel.ca/). It kinda got me thinking about what I’m trying to do with the new one.

With this blog, I’d wanted to start producing what I’d hoped would be my public face to the world. This would (theoretically) be the first thing people would find when they put my name in Google. Reading it, they might get a sliver of insight into who I am. Maybe, just maybe, people would read something I wrote and think it worth linking and commenting on. Not that I’m interested in going out of my way to get links, just that it’s kinda gratifying when somebody else thinks I’ve written something noteworthy.

Astute readers (if I have any) might notice, however, that posting frequency has been decidedly low.

Well, lower than I wanted it to be (not that even astute readers would know how frequent that would be).

There are a couple reasons for this. The most important being that I haven’t actually been home very much lately. This presents a problem for blog composition. I don’t think I need to spell it out for you.

The second is that I think I might have set the bar a bit high for myself. Reading through the old blog posts, sure, I wasn’t posting that frequently, but there was a lot of good stuff there. A lot of pointless stuff too, but it’s a blog. These things can’t be helped.

I’m still not entirely sure what I want to do with this thing, but one thing I think I do want to do is post more for myself. I want to post little observations about the world around me. I want to post things that will remind me of who I was, what I was doing and what I was thinking about when I look back from some unknowable vantage point in the future.

If other people want to read over my shoulder, they’re welcome to.