#A-TO-Z-CHALLENGE – LETTER “E” - EPHEMERA

I know this isn't about my new life in the carolinas, or anything about my animals, but it's a word that's been popping up in my head a lot lately. This probably has to do with the world's situation, and my internal dialogue is always “on”. My brain seems to have a running conversation with my moods, my reactions, how I interpret and analyze things and it never shuts off. So, just lately, “ephemera” has been coming to mind. I like the sound of the word; it's a beautiful word, much like “tintinnabulation” or “harmony”. We write and read for the beauty of the language, as much as we do for the import of the words.

I realize I am applying the definition to people, when it was originally meant to be used in the context of written or paper items, but our existence, on this earth, in context to the entire span of the universe's length of time is rather short, so I chose to use the term to describe our time here on earth.

By our very nature, we are ephemera, when compared to the rest of the universe, in terms of the length of time we exist, the amount of space we occupy and the things that preoccupy us. We have a tendency to focus on things that are less than monumental as a species and we haven't even figured out how to feed and house the entire planet peacefully. Rather, it's easier to make war over perceived slights and wrongs, than it is to work towards a peaceful resolution, that might garner less than the aggrieved party had hoped for. But, I digress.

Although, our corporeal beings are ephemeral, our ideals, passions and values are not. These things, abstractions really and any physical things we've created, as artists and people will exist after we leave this place. We'll be remembered; at least we hope so, and in a good light. So, in some manner, I guess, we do continue existence; my father and mother return every time I tell a story about them. There are their pictures and things they held that have been left behind; burnished by their touch.

In the time of the existence of the universe, it is less than we can even imagine – I'm being poetic, because although I know there's a hard number, it's still hard to grasp, because it's so minuscule in proportion to the age of the universe itself. In the time span of an epoch, it's a bit easier to grasp; however-many-score-years man is allotted to tread upon this mortal coil. It comes down to, “hey, we only get so much time. Make the most of it!” I'm really bad at this kind of sky-larking, but I couldn't get “ephemera” out of my head! Have a great #a-to-z-challenge!

Please, please, mark your calendar for Sunday, April 19^th. I will be doing a blog tour for Mr. Andy Toppin, Jr., author of “Rowan's Chronicle, Volume 1”. Andy is a good friend of mine and a wonderful person. He is finishing the edits for Volume 2 now!

#A-TO-Z-CHALLENGE – LETTER “C” AND “D” - CATS!!!! AND A DOG

I'm cheating here. I should have posted letter “C” on Friday, but I had a little run-in with the SSA and then the IRS over this whole “incentive check” nonsense, and after sitting on hold, listening to horrible hold music and being hung up on by two different alphabet agencies in these here Untied (sic) States, I was in no mood to write or think about #a-to-z-challenge. Quarantining is bad enough and then, trying to deal with our Federal Gubmint for ANYTHING, just raises my blood pressure. But, I REALLY want to finish this challenge this year AND I digress.

At last count, in my household, we have four cats, one dog and three birds. The cats don't really seem to know what the birds are, as the cats weren't raised by their mothers and never learned to hunt. They do like to watch them fly around in their cages. We have two finches and a cockatiel. The finches finch around, making that little beeping noise, and the cockatiel has a variety of sounds that she lets loose on the regular. It sounds like a zoo in here. The cats are more likely to eat the birdseed that I scatter on the floor, when I'm feeding the birds, for some reason.

Ripley, wallowing on my bed, after I spent twenty minutes making it. 

When we first brought the two kittens in the house, we already had Ripley, our husky-hound mix. Two things about Ripley, besides the fact that he's an absolute sweetheart of a dog and is really easy with the kittens. First, being part husky, he loves to run, and if there's an open door anywhere in the house, he will run. RUN and will not come back until he's good and ready. This wouldn't be a problem, except someone put some buckshot in him once. He came limping home. We got him healed up, and we thought that would cure him, but nope. He still loves to run. Luckily, we're good at keeping him fenced up. The other thing is, he yodels.

I believe I read somewhere that dogs are only capable of ten types of sounds. Well, you sure wouldn't know it by Ripley. He'll be outside on his lead, yodeling, in just about every key. He's doing dog karaoke and hollering to his imaginary friends out there in the forest that abuts our land. It's hilarious.

Eddie was barely two months old when we brought him home, as a foster. We ended up keeping him. We're kinda like the "Hotel California". You can come here, but you never leave. 

Anyway, when we first introduced each kitten to Ripley, they all had pretty much the same reaction. Puff up, dance sideways, and hiss. I don't know about you all, but tiny kittens getting all fierce is the funniest thing ever. Poor Eddie, or Eddifer, as I call him, when I'm not calling him “son”; he was so brand-new when we brought him home – he was a foster – that he couldn't figure out how to un-puff himself. He danced backward into his little kitty house and circled around about three times, before he got it all figured out. For about two weeks, he was scared of Ripley. Of all my cats, he is the least adventurous and the one most likely to be found under the bed at the introduction of ANYTHING new, including toys.

Glenn Wallace – named by my husband, after my late father – is the smartest and most adventurous, and he loves any new-fangled thing that comes his way. We got this ridiculous toy that is battery-operated, and it writhes around on the floor and sparkles and snaps, and Glenn loves it! He also loves the Chitter toy, that makes a chittering sound when played with, unlike Eddie, who just ran under the bed when these toys were first introduced. Eddie doesn't hide so much any more from them, but he just sort of tolerates them.

Glenn, sleeping. He always looks like he's come in after a really rough night at the bar. He's also the longest cat I've ever seen. He has long legs and whiskers. I'm devoting the letter "G" to him and will have a lot more to say later. Just revel in the length of this animal!

Allie, or KittenMcGrabbyPaws is probably the funniest with her balls and tiny painting spool. She has these little wool balls, and she will fling them around, or bring them to me and have me throw them for her. It's so funny when she brings it back. I don't know if it's possible, but she always carries the ball on the right side of her mouth, so if that's a thing with cats – left-mouthed, or right-mouthed – it's the first time I've ever observed it. My old Russian Blue, Trotsky would play fetch, but as I recall he was ambidextrous, when it came to carrying shit around in his mouth; tin foil, wool balls, whatever we were playing.

The other thing with Allie, or any of the kittens and Misty is when they play with the spool, they make one HELL of a racket! It sounds like they're playing hockey; the wool in the spool gets caught in their claws, and they fling the spool around. It hits the wall, cabinets, and floor and it sounds just like a hockey game. All we lack is a fight.

My doofy husband, whom I adore completely, took this Alexa picture of Allie when we were out to dinner one night. "I wonder what the kids are doing?", he asked. Apparently, they were re-enacting "The Lion King".

The dog and the cats all get along; Ripley has discovered that he cannot go leaping about on the furniture, and he can't play “The Floor Is Lava”, but he's good for a cuddle! Letter “E” coming up; no more calls to the IRS or the SSA. It is what it is.

One last thing, I'm going to be posting a special post for a self-published author, a friend of mine, Andy Toppin, Jr., whose book “Rowan's Chronicle, Volume 1” is on Amazon. He's really a good friend and a special person. I love this book, and hope you all will enjoy reading about him! I'm enjoying this #a-to-z-challenge. I hope you all are too!

#A-TO-Z-CHALLENGE – LETTER “B” AS IN “BUG” OR “BEETLE”

Letter “B” as in “Bug” or “Beetle”; more precisely, “Ladybug”, or “Ladybeetle” as, my oldest and dearest friend, Pamela calls them. I'm writing about them, because, like the kittens, and the dog and birds, they have become part of my landscape and in a big way.

courtesy: familyman.com   

My hubby also had a bunch of the little devils visit him in his woodworking shed as well.

One day, last October, here in the foothills of the uplands in the Carolinas, in the countryside where we live, ladybugs took to swarming; something I'd never experienced before. I'd seen scads of lightning bugs as a kid in Michigan and later on, when I lived near Gastonia, NC and, had heard tell of swarms of crickets from my aunt when they first moved to Las Vegas some fifty-plus years ago, when her husband, my uncle Stan, worked at the nuclear test site out near there. I'd also experienced swarms of Mayflies from Lake St. Clair, in Michigan, in June.

courtesy: mdc.mo.gov  

Lightning bug swarms are prettier than Mayfly swarms; here's a batch of lightning bugs in Missouri.

The Mayflies came up out of the bottom and swarm all over the towns of Grosse Pointe and East Pointe. People were sweeping them up with their push brooms and they would crunch when you run over them with your car. Kind of icky, but they disappeared fast, as the birds and I think squirrels would get some new snacks.

We also had the love-bugs in Florida. Boy, did we have love-bugs. Something out of a laboratory that got loose. Two bugs hooked together that flew around for a few weeks. They just got mooshed under your windshield wipers and were a mess to clean up. I was never really sure where they came from, or what ecological niche they were supposed to fill, but they were annoying.

courtesy: tcpalm.com  

Love bugs are supposedly a science experiment that got loose and have no known predator, so they just show up and annoy Floridians twice a year. The story may be apocryphal, but I was too busy cleaning dead love bugs off my car to care.

But, the ladybugs I found rather charming. They apparently live for between 2 and 3 years and they swarm in late October in the upper-third of the United States, looking for places to hibernate. They found refuge outside in my eaves, but several hundred, or thousand – I wasn't taking names at the door – found respite in my ceiling and my kitchen and bedroom and music room. They tucked themselves in and went to sleep. They will live off their body fat for the winter. The amusing thing is that it doesn't get really, really cold here, so we'd have a warm day, and a few hardy souls would come buzzing out and I'd find them creeping around in the kitchen.

I'm sure a few have fallen victim to the kittens and one did fall into one of my frying pans when I was cooking. I was unhappy about that. I've talked to people who work in construction and they're used to coming up on packs of them in walls and things like that, so it's not unusual, but I like having them here. At least they beat the wasp infestation I had last summer. That was just annoying. At any rate, I had to remember that terrible children's rhyme, “ladybug, ladybug, fly away home! Your house is on fire, and your children are all gone!” If I'm remembering that correctly, that's just the stuff of nightmares. No wonder we're all in therapy!

I hope you all are having a wonderful #a-to-z-challenge! Next up, letter “C”!

#A-TO-Z-CHALLENGE 2020 – LETTER “A” ALLIE

Letter “A” is for “Allie”. Short for Allie Cat; a tuxedo rescue, we acquired at two months. My kitten Allie, aka “Kitten McGrabbyPaws” is something else. She's going to be one year old on the 29^th of this month, and she's not the tiny kitten she was when we first brought her home, but she's the squirmiest, grabbiest kitten I've ever had. She's really the sweetest thing on earth, but not the brightest cat around. But that's okay. She knows what she needs to know to be a cat. She does try to be a person, on occasion however and this is when she's at her funniest.

Here is Allie being a ham, telling me I'm doing it wrong. Check out the fur on her hind feet. All the kittens have this fur, which we have dubbed the "tragedy of cat wool" for some idiotic reason.

It's generally when I'm trying to fold clothes, or walking across the floor. When I'm folding clothes, she'll stand up on her hind legs and try to grab at the clothes. She mirrors my actions and it looks hysterical. I really need to get my fiancé to film this, because it does look so ridiculous. She waves those little paws around like they're little hands. She also tries to “hold” my hand when we're walking side-by-side and she'll try to get up on her hind legs. With very little success, I might add.

I fail to see how anyone could be comfortable sleeping in this position, but she does this on the regular. Help. My cat is broken.

All in all, she's a happy creature and she's not that demanding for a cat. We have a hard time finding treats that she'll like. The others will pile into whatever fishy, stinky thing we find for them, but not Allie. She does try to bury her food, though. I thought this was odd, until I looked it up and some cats do have this atavistic trait of trying to bury their food; it's left over from before their domestication, when they had to kill to eat and they would cover the part of the kill they didn't eat for a snack later. Our cats all have their quirks and I'll be telling you about some of the secret things I've found out about cats as we go through our #a-to-z-challenge! I hope everyone is having fun and staying safe!

She has the most bewitching eyes and she looks right at you! <3

#IWSG APRIL 2020 CHECK IN – LOST IN TRANSLATION

Several years ago, when I was homeless in Tampa, I mentioned in a post that things got lost in translation. Sadly, I cannot find that post and it was probably horrible. My brain has not unscrambled itself one whit and I still occasionally get things wrong. Hell, more than occasionally; more like three or four times a day. It's been this way since I was young, from an ER nurse asking me if I had a “religious preference” and me hearing, did I have a “relative present” and pointing to my then-husband. They both looked confused.

This current story isn't really about that, but more about how we can just turn a sentence into a form of Mad Libs when one person, probably out of frustration, or just to add to the pile of nonsense comes up with something truly silly. This happened recently in an MMORPG that I've been playing for the last fourteen years. This in and of itself is a tale, since most MMORPGs don't last this long, with the exception of Maple Story, WOW and a few others. We also have a clan that is fifteen years old, with the SAME people in it that founded the thing, for the most part. That in itself is a tale. At fourteen years in, I'm a johnny-come-lately. But, I digress.

These are one of the Elite Dungeons where I practice my craft. I earn lots of money doing this. Like most MMORPGs, Runescape3 is grindy, but the community is awesome. My co-Leader, SpZ Wolf, started in the Clan, the same day I did and we're partners in crime. 

For those readers who haven't put up with my ravings, I should explain that at best, I feel like I have a tenuous grasp of reality at the best of times. I'm perpetually in a state of out-of-itness and even when I think I just get a hold of whatever the current train of the state of affairs may be, it slips away from me. It's been like this all of my life and I'm not sure if it's due to what they used to call Asperger and now call something else, but was called “doesn't play well with others” when I was growing up and is truly apt in my case, or if I'm just dim. That being said, I've soldiered on, having some fairly successful careers in both music and in computers, so there's that. I still can't tell with all the lying going on in the media and up and down the political spectrum these days. Again, I digress, and I want to keep this light.

This is another dungeon, of Ascension Members. They are taken down with crossbows, which I double-wield. Every foe has a different strength and handicap. The depth and breadth of the game has grown over the years. We just added a new skill, Archaeology, so we're all starting from scratch on that and it's fun. 

At any rate, the MMORPG that I have played for what seems like eons is called “Runescape” and many of my clan mates have played as long as I have or longer. We've all been together for the fourteen to fifteen year range and have a solid cadre of about fifty people, although our site lists us with 163 members. The game itself lists over 250,000,000 accounts and I am ranked in the top 100,000, with my Slaying skill being at number 8,281 out of that 250,000,000, as I'm trying to get 200 million xp total. The skill is fun. The game itself is about 80% combat, with about 20% for skilling and questing. The skills are also tied into combat; you need to be able to mine and smith the best of ores to make combat armor that is durable enough for you to fight high-level bosses.

It's pretty much like any other grind-and-reward game. What makes it are the people and the community involvement and they're a hoot. People from around the world play the game, and we have them in my clan. We also have perma-guests in our clan chat.

One of them is a published author, from Barbados, unlike me, who just seems to dabble in writing and never finishes editing anything, although I have scads of ideas that sound great and then I see a shiny, or a symphony starts a season and I MUST go play. LintsJenesis is his game name and we were in our usual pattern of throwing badinage, banter and jesting back and forth, while skilling after a ddos had hit our login servers last week, and had kept us off of the game. For those who haven't experienced a “ddos” or a dedicated-denial-of-service attack on a login server, it's basically two asshats on two PCs who use scripted commands or macros to continually request logins directed at certain targets. Jagex and their servers have been targeted for ages and they are usually the precursor to attacks that then cascade west-ward, as the traffic backs up (Jagex servers are in the U.K. For the most part). The most spectacular of these brought down a good portion of the eastern U. S. banking; ATM's and gas stations were particularly hard-hit back in 2016 or so.

The rise of the pandemic has also seen the rise of the ddos-bots, and the bad old days are here once again. As usual, I digress.

As Lints and I were bantering about this, I mentioned that I got some laundry done and mopped some floors, because, “the floors wouldn't mop themselves” and the “clothes wouldn't launder themselves”. I must've been babbling, as per usual, and after several iterations of different ways the floors and clothing would get clean, Lints comes back with this gem:

I'm sure Lints had heard enough of my yammering when he came up with this gem.

I died laughing. Said I was going to use this and would give him credit. I also plan on featuring his books on my blog and doing a tour for him. He's an outstanding person and a good friend. I meet some of the best people online! Hope your #IWSG is fantastic! I also hope you all are enjoying #a-to-z-challenge! See you there soon!

#BLOGGING #AMWRITING – CURSES AND CATS, AMONG OTHER OBSERVATIONS

“May you live in interesting times...” is a curse that has been attributed widely, from the Chinese to the Arabs, to Robert F. Kennedy, of all people. Originally thought to be a beneficence to the person it was bestowed upon, when parsed down, that “interesting” was definitely NOT meant for good times ahead. Good times are generally uplifting, giddy, and stamped with a tinge of amorality, if you think of the good ol' roaring 20s, prior to the Depression, but “interesting” is not high on the list of adjectives I would ascribe to that era.

For me, the “interesting” part in the 20^th Century begins in Western Europe in about say, 1933, when Hitler begins his climb to power and the really interesting geo-political things begin to happen. Russia had already been “interesting” when Lenin showed up, and brought a feudal country into the 20^th Century and greatness. Their more “interesting” times were ahead of them, in the form of fighting off the Nazis, which they did in epic style and with their typical heroism and grit.

At any rate, I'm not here to take a trip down memory lane, as much as I adore history and continue to learn new and more salient things about the parties who all participated in WW II. I'm here to talk about this “interesting” time we're in now, and why we all need to ignore the gibbering fool, who appears to be the Ringmaster of this Circus and stay hunkered down, until the CDC and/or Dr. Fauci says it's all okay to come back out from under our rocks.

Trump cares about one thing only: himself. He cares that the stock market is rising, that he appears to be in charge and that he's right about EVERYTHING. COVID19 is like Honey Badger (if you've seen that silly video). COVID don't care about a little cobra biting it in the neck. COVID don't care about a Big Leader of the Free? World telling us that if we go back to work sick with a mask on, it'll be okay (it won't; it'll just add to mortality. That's how disease vectors work, and this is not as bad as measles, but worse than SARS). We could kill 2.2 million Americans, by doing what we're currently doing. WHERE would we bury all these people and what about the sick ones?

They will absolutely overload the currently bad state of our medical system. This means that people with heart conditions, strokes, cancer care, dialysis and diabetes will be pushed back and ever-higher mortality rates will occur. The ability to look at the long picture has completely over-shot this administration and this joke of a President for too long and this really should be his Waterloo.

I had to make the terrible decision to bypass an infusion for the osteoporosis that I have in my right neck and shoulder and my lumbar, from all those many years of playing viola, but both my husband and I are high-risk. This can wait; I'm gonna hurt for a few months, but it's preferable than contracting some illness that I'm pretty sure is gonna take me out.

So, with that said, I truly wouldn't be surprised if the Pinheads of America elect this dolt once again. There seems to be truly nothing that will stop him. Had I been head of the DOJ back in 2016, when the first of the Russian collusion issues came to the fore? I woulda clapped those teeny hands in irons and frog-marched his ass off to gaol. He never had any business being on the GOP ticket. My ASS!

Now that I've vented my spleen, I can move on to much more pleasant topics. My babies. My dear, dear friend sent my an insane video of cats having a fashion show and it's every bit as kooky as it sounds. Let me show you some snaps.

 courtesy: krsvideos/facebook.com                                        

courtesy: krsvideos/facebook.com                                         

courtesy: krsvideos/facebook.com                                       

So, right away, my husband said "N.O. No!" to any hare-brained idea I might have about a feline fashion show, although I think it would be hella fun! I could dress up the little tykes and after 3 hours of them trying to walk backwards and hopping, being entertaining and all and then, lying around like lumps and just being generally awful, they might be persuaded to walk in a straight line for a few seconds. Long enough for me to record them, swap out cute little pope outfits, a nurse outfit, and a John Lennon get-up, edit it all with some stupid music and throw it out there on YouTube. You just can never have enough idiocy on the internet in these trying times and I'm full of it.

Although, I'd probably have to sew outfits, and I can just about manage a hem and a button, in an emergency. I tried to make a pair of pants once when I was a girl and I sewed the legs together; I ended up with a really messed-up evening gown. My mother thought that was hilarious. 

My mom flying (EGAD) an airplane. Both of my folks flew. I can barely stand to get in the death-traps, but if I had my preference, I'd fly with my father. My mother was an amazing woman, but not so much, a pilot. She'd crab and yaw down a runway. My father was an artist in a plane.

All the kitties and the dog and the birds are thriving; it helps that the cats aren't too sure what the birds are. We got most of them when they were so young, they didn't have mothers to teach them to hunt. Misty is just an enigma. I suspect she was with an animal hoarder and had very little attention as a kitten. She seems frail at six years old, but gets on well with the others. Being toothless, she needs soft food, so the three black-and-white tuxedos have learned that she eats by herself and don't bother her. 

It's hard to tell how small Misty is here; and I take lousy pictures. My essential tremor gets in the way. At least you can tell it's an animal.

Other than that, she's healthy and joins in their little games of "Viet Nam" and mouse hunts. Glenn is the smart one; I caught him getting into my cupboards underneath the sink and I yelled at him. The second time I saw him making a run at them, I shouted "Glenn! No!" He made a sharp right turn and ran head-long into the cabinet that was at a 90° angle to that cabinet, then sat down and licked his paw like "Uh-huh; I meant to do that." Cats. Just great.

Here's Glenn; an entire 3 feet of cat sprawled out on my bed. He's at least 4 feet long. He's got long whiskers, legs, toes, body. I'm not even sure he's all cat.

Eddifer is the supervisor of the kitchen. He very politely comes up and watches everything anyone does in the kitchen, like he's taking notes and will get back to you. He was my 2-month old foster and is just the sweetest, most biddable cat. He's just there for the company and is happy on his own, or sleeping on my chest.

For some reason, Eddifer is resistant to having his picture taken; so here is a picture of a couple of cats, who either got into the catnip, or are re-enacting a scene from "The Purrates of Penzance". All they lack are little tri-corn hats. I laughed like a goon for half-an-hour when I ran across this. God Bless the corners of the innerwebz!

Allie, or "Kitten McGrabbyPaws" is my husband's cat and she waits all day for him to come home and she just loves, loves, loves him. She is by nature, a very, loving and happy cat. She is the one who makes up weird games and invites you along for a Magical, Mystery Tour. She's also frolicsome and just a kick to watch, when she starts some wild game of her own devising in a box. Cats and boxes are the best!

This is Allie, with the most bewitching eyes ever! Still, she is a whole lot of fun and she loves my husband to death. She is a good and happy kitty, who will try to hold your hand!

I have to say that I never expected my life to take this turn and I am immensely grateful for the quality of my life. I was doing okay before and had the things I needed, but it's certainly ramped up in my opinion. Gratitude is something we can never express too frequently, nor is love. I want to know how all of your Apocalypses are going, as a friend asked me last night. Yes, we all still play Runescape. I'm leading a clan, with two others, (SpiritZ) that is now 15 years old and I've been there for 14 of those years, as have most of the members. To say, we're richly bonded, is to paint that faintly indeed. We're another branch of the family. Stay safe, stay happy, and remember, this too, shall pass. All my love to (almost) anyone reading! 

P. S. Don't forget! The #a-to-z-challenge starts 4.1.2020! This is going to be a great year!