#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!

#A-TO-Z CHALLENGE 2016 – LETTER ”M” FOR MAMA, CAT MATRIARCH, IN MEMORIAM

It's with sadness that I write this post and highly ironic, for I've sung Mama's praises to the skies since the day she allowed me to be her friend and it took a long time for that to come to pass. Mama died recently after a long and fruitful life. She originally adopted JC, and actually, it's been one year today, since JC's passing, so that too is ironic. I'm not a person who believes in coincidences, or anything of the sort, but she had been JC's cat, and I worried about her after he died. Alex said she's with Jim now. Yes, in some highly disordered form, I guess.

Speaking of highly disordered form; there is no perspective here, but near as I can figure out, I am behind here, on my bed, and that's a map of the us of a on my computer monitor. I have no clue what I was going for here.

Yet, she was so affectionate and even closer to me than she was to him. However, about six months ago, she came down with Distemper and being elderly and having lived most of her life on the streets, she never really came back from it. Outdoor cats have a hard life and she really could not adjust to becoming an all-the-way indoor cat, which is what I would have preferred and once JC died, I had to keep the doors locked all the time – even THAT didn't stop two idiots from getting in, while I was sleeping, woe unto them. Mama ended up crafting her own little pet door in a window screen, so she could come and go as she please. It was perfect.

She spent lots of time indoors, and followed me all around, and when I sat on the porch, she sat on the porch with me. She had two older sons that would come and visit; they looked like her, just so much bigger. Mama was never a big cat, but she had such distinctive markings; such as I had never seen on a cat before. I guess as old Leonardo da Vinci said, “The smallest of the felines is a masterpiece!”, I take it to mean both in the general and the specific. But all of the felines are, big and small.

Gotta love essential tremor. I was asked "is it REALLY essential, why is it called that?" I thought for 5 seconds and my head exploded. Some dumb neurological term. "Dystonia" is muscle cramps. Every picture I take looks like art from the Impressionist Period.

She had her funny ways and ways to drive me crazy. When she was healthier, she played a lot with her toys and would tear around my little apartment and she could literally bounce from the bed into the kitchen, or from the bed into the living room. A friend, Nancy Cooper sent her some artisanal catnip mice and she went crazy over those. One disappeared, as such things often do.

She could be a little con-artist, too, as most cats can be. I was trying to get her to eat a good dry food and for the longest time, she acted like she hated it. So, I was buying her Friskies and feeding her this stuff, which wasn't really that good for her. This went on for a couple of weeks and I cut back on the Friskies, because it was getting expensive. I walked into my kitchen one Sunday and here she was, happily munching on her dry food. She looked up and the look was priceless: “Oooh, I am soooo busted.” I turned and walked out of the kitchen and she came running after me, hollering about how lousy that dry food was.

This looks like a graphics "feature" in Runescape3, where everyone's head melted for a few weeks. Good times. Good times. She shook her head JUST as I clicked the clicker.

But, she had a really wonderful thing that she did. I have 2 towers made out of milk crates on either side of my blogging chair. One holds a board and a mousepad on the right, and the other, on the left, holds a land-line phone, or a laptop. I have two computers in front of me, side by side. Mama would jump up on the right-hand side and “rest” on my mouse pad, or hand and gradually creep her way up my arm.

She's just starting to work her way up my arm. . .

Now this is a cat that I couldn't even look at without scaring 4 years or so ago, and we had gotten to the point, where she had to have some part of her on me, at all times, while she was in the house, or would lie down between my feet. She also slept with me, sort of.

What she mostly did was walk around on my head, knead in my hair, or with her tiny, less-than-dime-sized feet, stand in my ear. Or I'd feel little feet walking all over my face. But, her most endearing quality was when she would sit on my mouse pad, and reach out with one dainty paw and make me look at her. She would look into my eyes and she seemed to show such love and gratitude that she had a home. I will never forget that, ever. Animals grace us with our present and I was gifted with that grace beyond anything I ever hoped to see from her.

. . . Slowly creeping upward. My only regret is that I never was able to get a decent shot of her reclining on my entire forearm. That was pretty funny. She will be missed. Rest well, Mama, my heart!

I haven't said much, only very close friends like Jeremy Doll who is a fellow Leader of SpiritZ and horse enthusiast and all-around animal lover and such a good person, and Alex Cavanaugh and my Aunt Lande. “She was such a nice cat.”, Jeremy said. And that she was. In all the time she was with us, she never scratched, or bit and never got angry or irritated, she was just such a wonderful being. It was hard for me to fathom that someone had abused her, but she was blind in her right eye, and it wasn't from a cat-fight. I know what that looks like. She would occasionally get scared of the kids playing next door and hide behind the toilet and I'd go and take her some sardines.

Alex and I knew she was going to die and I was in West Palm Beach when it happened. My better 2/3, was all for packing up and driving to Tampa, when Alex called. I thought on it for a while, but said, “No. The offer is so lovely, but it's okay. You care. That is all that matters.” I called Alex back and he agreed. She was put lovingly to rest and will never be forgotten. The really wonderful thing is this; Her progeny gave birth to some more of her progeny, and I will have two little great x infinity grandbabies to keep me busy. Kittens are fun, but these will be indoor kittehs, except for playdates with Oso!