Salt and corrosion

Grey clouds and full to bursting warm air when I left the house this morning, then storms and steam all day.

I made a terrible, terrible mistake today. Alistair's favourite food is Fancy Feast, particularly their CLASSIC PATE range, and particularly a type of Fancy Feast CLASSIC PATE called CHICKEN FEAST. It is hard to come by. I've never seen it sold as individual tins; only in packs of twelve, and only at two local shops. Even the online pet food supplier doesn't have it. I have to make a special trip each month to one of the two shops to buy a couple of boxes, so he can have one tin for breakfast.

So imagine my excitement when I saw something called Fancy Feast Creamy Delights CHICKEN FEAST with a Touch of Real Milk IN A CREAMY SAUCE! (On a side note, the Fancy Feast people could really work on their naming and capitalisations.) I focused on the CHICKEN FEAST part of the label and bought up a few tins. I missed the CREAMY SAUCE part, and the lack of CLASSIC PATE.

I opened a tin of it this morning and found to my great horror that it wasn't CLASSIC PATE. It was chunks in a horrible white sauce. Oh well. Maybe Alistair would eat it.

Well, he sniffed it. He looked at it. He walked around the bowl and looked at it again. He sat back and looked at me with such sadness in his eyes. I thought we were friends, his eyes said, why would you give me this poison? And he walked away.

(I put the CREAMY SAUCE out for the birds and they didn't eat it for ages either.)

January

13. Would you rather have all illicit drugs be legalized, or duelling between consenting adults be legalized?
I'm generally in favour of decriminalising drugs and I don't think there's any societal need for duelling, so let's go with the first one. Slapping each other with gloves might be fun, though.

1. About one-thirty on Friday afternoon I hit send on the year-end reports, and that was that. Hell week over.

2. Today I read this headline —

Mark Beethoven's 250th birthday

— and I was bewildered. Baffled. Befuddled. And then I realised that "mark" was a verb and not, like, Ludwig's lesser known cousin.

3. Today Next Door's son, Ben, came round to fix our windowsill. I mean, not on a whim. The windowsill was perishing and Ben is a builder, so it was all planned. Anyway, because the living room windows were open, Alistair had to be shut out in his garden enclosure and he was Unhappy about that. He sat at his window and mewed. He sat at the door and mewed. He sat in the potted bay tree and looked sad. He came back to the window and mewed some more.

4. And now that Ben has gone and the living room windows are closed and Alistair's window is open... he is asleep outside under the potted bay tree. Sleep finally overtook indignation.

5. Last night I took him for his bedtime walk and all he wanted to do was sit on the footpath in front of the house and stare at the house opposite Joan Next Door's. Which I wasn't thrilled about because (a) it was cold and (b) it is generally agreed that the residents of that particular house are a bit dodgy (the police were there a few weeks ago). I couldn't see the attraction, until I realised that there were three half-grown kittens playing under, over, around the car parked out the front of the house. I don't know if he wanted to play with them or chase them, but he was so cross that I wouldn't let him.

6. Someone recommended these little sock things for doing yoga, so I bought them. They're good, but....they're called toe gloves. I never thought I'd own something with such a stupid name.

7. An actual news event: a local site, Budj Bim, about an hour from the City by the Sea, has just been added to the World Heritage List, for its aquaculture and dwellings dating back 6,600 years. So that's nice.

8. No knitting photo this week. I've been too exhausted to knit. Back to normal next week.

This morning I was doing my daily workout – actually just finishing it, doing some stretches – when I heard the sound I most dread at this time of day. Mrrrrp? No, no, go away, Alistair. But he didn’t. I could hear him chirruping round the edge of the room, then silence. The silence is worse than the chirruping, because I don’t know where he is or when he’s going to make his appearance. Today, I was doing downward-facing dog when he made his move. He wound his way between my arms, tail curling around my elbows. I got on all fours to do some cat/cow stretches; he head-butted me. I sat on the floor, one leg stretched out and the other bent; he sat at the junction of my right foot and left knee. I had to hoick my right leg over him to stretch the other side.

Then, foolishly, I finished with child’s pose, head on the ground and arms stretched out. I felt him lay down in front of me, warm and soft leaning on my head. He was well-behaved at first and then… then my hair was too tempting. He started poke, poke, poking. And another poke, poke, poke... CLAWS. Claws in the scalp. And that was the end of that. Cat yoga is not calming.

I'm so glad this week is nearly over, f-list. It's been one thing after another. Which is how things normally happen, I suppose, but there does seem to have been a lot of them this week and all of varying degrees of stressfulness.

Monday to Wednesday we had a storm. Three days of bone-slicing wind and pounding hail, just to give everything an apocalyptic air.

Alistair had his annual vaccination last Friday, which always knocks him flat. He's all right now, I should say, but he spent four days sleeping, not eating or drinking, and generally looking sorry for himself. He's such a chatterbox, it's just not right to have him silent for four days. "I never thought I'd miss that racket," said my mother, "but the quiet is unnerving." I'm now expecting his whiskers to fall out, which is what happens whenever he gets stressed.

Monday afternoon my boss, who is in a different state to me, called to say he and the powers that be had decided not to renew the contract of one of my accounts officers when it finishes at the end of June. Nothing to do with his work, but restructuring. My boss said he'd do the deed, but I said i thought I should be there. So I had a sleepless night on Monday and felt sick all Tuesday until it finally happened. Not to make it all about me — it was far worse for the accounts assistant — but it was upsetting on a number of levels, from having to let go someone who does good work and whom I really like, to feeling let down by the powers that be. (I would have more to say about this, but in light of my company's policy on not talking about work on social media, just imagine me making a Marge Simpson grumble at the situation.)

I've spent all week trying to track down an EFTPOS banking terminal that was supposed to be delivered to a new shop that my work is opening in a town in another state. I called the bank to ask why it hadn't been delivered by the due date, and the guy said, "Oh, our system shows the courier tried to deliver it at seven a.m. on the day, but left as there was no-one there." Well, of course there wasn't. And what had they done with it then? Well... no-one could tell me. For four days! This one little EFTPOS machine was being driven around rural New South Wales and no-one knew where it was. Anyway, it turned up at the shop at ten this morning, which, as I said to shop manager when she rang to tell me, was legitimately the best news I had all week.

At home, I received an email on Wednesday that a parcel I was expecting had been delivered and "left in a safe space". Not my letterbox. Not the electricity meter box. Not at the back door. Even in the most idyllic weather, my front step couldn't be described as a safe space for a parcel, but this week, if any courier had been silly enough to leave it there, it would have been blown five streets away. So I looked online to see what to do about missing parcels and found Australia Post's definitions page, which defines "delivered" as: Great news, your parcel has been 'delivered'! I mean, yes. It was "delivered".

And my favourite work shoes have worn inners, so this afternoon I went and bought some new ones. They're quite cheerful, I suppose, so maybe things are looking up — but I think I've earned a lie-in tomorrow morning.

It is officially the first day of summer and I have a scratchy throat, precursor to my second cold in two months. Grrr.

( Tojo )

November books read

I made it to fifty books for the year. And what a bland lot they were this month.

* Sideshow: Dumbing Down Democracy - Lindsay Tanner (2011) ★ ★ ★
( Read more... )

* Wakestone Hall - Judith Rossell (2018) ★ ★ ★
( Read more... )

* The Café by the Sea - Jenny Colgan (2016) ★ ★ ★
( Read more... )

* Snap - Belinda Bauer (2018) ★ ★ ★
( Read more... )

The alley I walk down to get to my office has a mural running the length of it. Whales, all the way along.



Tojo update: We didn't get him into the cage to go to the shelter. He got away whenever we tried, then wouldn't go near it or us for a few days. That was the end of that plan. My mother phoned the council to ask them to take the cage away, and moved it to the side of the house so they could collect it if there was no-one home. As it happened, she was home when the ranger came for the cage and together they found Tojo asleep in the sun, leaning against it. Typical cat. The ranger had a go at catching him, and he failed too. So... we've got a garden cat. My mother is concerned about his teeth (he's missing two canines), so she has started mixing egg, cat formula and wet food in the food processor, then warming it in the microwave for him. We've also started brushing him, very gently, as he doesn't seem to know how to groom himself. This is quite the high life for a stray cat.

This is the last thing I see before I go into my new office and the first thing I see when I leave. So that's nice.

Still no luck catching Tojo. Well, no, that's not right. He's easy to catch. He doesn't mind being picked up at all. But no luck getting him in a cage, because he's given up coming round in the mornings. He only appears in the afternoon now. Tricky. Especially as he doesn't seem all that well, with a little cough and grimy eyes, so he really needs to see a vet. So my mother is going to talk to the shelter this week, to see about borrowing their trap. We'll see how that goes.

This week I had to go to the doctor to get a new prescription for Ventolin. In the waiting room, I caught up with the latest news from That's Life magazine from July 2017. Best headline:

My cat dialled 000 to save my life.

Triple 0 (or 000) is Australia's emergency phone number. But, I mean, come on. How did it turn the phone on?

My sabbatical might be drawing to an end. Yesterday I had a job interview to be the finance manager for a national mental health charity. Today, they called to say I am their preferred candidate, pending reference checks and background screening. So... seems likely to happen? Fingers crossed.

I think I have mentioned the stray cat that I have been feeding. I didn't name him. If I did, my mother would complain about it. (She still complains about Alistair's name.) Instead, I left it, knowing that she would eventually say, "Oh, there's little [x]!" and when she did, [x] would stick as his name. It worked, too. She saw the stray cat one evening and said, "Oh, there's little Tojo coming for his dinner."

(I would not have predicted Tojo as a name she would choose. She's been trying to back out of it, saying we can't name a cat for a Japanese World War II general, but it's stuck now. I did ask why Tojo, and she said it was the first word that came into her head when she saw him that time.)

Anyway, Tojo. He's put on a little bit of weight. His spine is still prominent, but his ribs are a little padded now. He's quite happy to be patted while he's eating, and will sometimes stop eating to have his head scritched. There used to be a woman in the house on the corner who had an old cat that kept having kittens that ran wild, and I suspect he might be one of them. He's obviously been handled, but also obviously has no person right now. I think the best option would be to take him to the shelter. He deserves a chance for a nice home. So that might be next week's task.

My mother and a couple of her friends have gone a quilt crawl today, meaning they are driving round the countryside going to quilt shops in small towns, stopping for lunch at the Timboon Distillery and afternoon tea at Cheeseworld. They know how to live. That's not really pertinent to this tale, though. What is pertinent is that when my mother's friend Sue came to pick her up, she walked in with a small parcel. "I feel like Santa," she said, "delivering presents the postman left at your front door." She handed the parcel to me.

I'm not expecting any parcels. What could it be? I opened the plastic envelope and found a box:



Fancy Feast his His Lordship's preferred brand of tinned food. Earlier this year, they had a promotion in which you could send in proof of purchasing so many tins of it and they would send a prize. I ended up with the decorative food bowl I originally wanted, plus a fancy collar and a second bowl in the distribution of unclaimed prizes. So what's this? ( Another bowl? )

Last year all the Coles supermarkets in town stopped stocking Alistair's favourite flavours of Fancy Feast cat food. That was a bit of a worry. What would he eat if they stopped making it? We have already established that he'd rather go hungry than eat other brands or raw chicken. So I looked to see if Fancy Feast has a website, and whether that shed any light on the matter. They do have a website, and happily, they haven't stopped making all their flavours. I checked the other supermarkets instead, and they all stock different flavours of Fancy Feast. And that's why I get my groceries at Coles, which is closest, and once a week I go to Woolworths for cat food, and once a fortnight I go to the more expensive independent grocery to stock up on Fancy Feast Fish and Prawn Medley.

Anyway, the Fancy Feast website. As well as revealing that they still make all their flavours, they were running a promotion. If I could provide them with proof of purchase of so many tins, I could have my pick of an exciting promotional product. A bowl, maybe, or a collar, or a floral cat cushion. Could I rustle up proof of purchasing tins of cat food? Could I ever! I scanned my receipts and filled in the application and promptly forgot all about it.

There was a parcel on the doorstep this morning, because that is what the parcel delivery man does now. He doesn't ring the bell or leave a card in the box to come and pick it up at the Post Office. Just leaves it unattended on the mat. Grrr. Anyway, there was a parcel, which was a surprise because I was not expecting any parcels. I carried it inside and opened it to find this:


I was baffled for a second, then it all came back. My free bowl! A blue paisley print, I believe.

( See how excited Alistair was about it: )