Scatterbrained

I have lots to post about...interesting things I've done, places I've been...but for some reason the blogging about it isn't happening; you're only getting the short stuff I'm wondering if it's because I'm busy enough that I can spare short chunks of time, but not the longer chunks that I feel a good report on [insert random biggish activity here] deserves?

It's kind of like way back when when I MUSHed a lot; it's a text-based roleplay activity, and the writer in me enjoyed doing it, but to do it at that kind of quality, with each "movement" taking four lines of text, meant that any interaction took a couple of solid hours. I mean, it was good stuff, but that's a significant chunk of your day to put aside without interruption.

So...my apologies, my five loyal readers, but I've been remiss at finding big enough chunks of time to relate things to you properly. Will you take a summary?

I took a pen class with G -- it was a second time for me. We both produced two pens, and again I had a great time. G also had a great time, to the extent that he was researching lathes online after class. Get small chunk of wood, apply band saw, drill press and lathe, add the metal kit, and voila, you have a pen. If he gets a lathe, you can be sure that for a year or two, everybody would be getting pens for Christmas. This round I used some fancy blanks instead of the maple or walnut that came with class. I now heart zebra wood for pens. Yes, I owe you a photo.

Last weekend we went to Vancouver, leaving the cats and fosters in the kind care of a friend who's considering adopting a couple of the fosters. Originally I'd planned to go there with the Burninators, but we ended up not going as a team -- unfortunately I'd already made nonrefundable hotel reservations. Fortunately though it was our anniversary that weekend, so we decided to go anyway and make a vacation of it. I was invited to skate on another team, but decided that given that I'd already talked about going sans skates with G, the diplomatically correct answer was no. :-) We had a great time, with fabulous food (we hunted down some British/Irish places, as well as having some obligatory salmon and some Timbits) and some shopping to look at the northwest art that we so enjoy. We went up Grouse mountain (a ski resort in summer mode) via tram, visited Deep Cove, Gastown, Granville Island and the UBC Museum of Anthropology, and of course dropped by the rink to see what it was like. Ran into several hockey friends in hotels, restaurants, the rink and the airport and bought myself some beautiful silk scarves.

We have foster kittens; we have two batches, for a total of two moms and seven kittens. The moms swap and enjoy each other's company, so they're sort of...domestic partners, ha. Thank goodness, though, I tell ya. We got the kittens at about 2 weeks old, and they're now about five or six weeks old. Most are doing fine; I'm just supplementing one that didn't gain any weight while we were away. They're all healthy and well-adjusted, and didn't come with the flu this time, yay. Potty training is *almost* done; the underweight one still needs work, but I'm confident that she'll "get it" in time with so many examples to follow.

Oh, and did I mention that I lost my two tiny purple pepper plants? I should've put down snailbait, I think. :-/ Tomatoes are happy, most everything else is happy and growing. Yay. And there's a mourning dove sitting on two eggs in my front hanging basket. There's no bougainvillea foliage to screen her yet, so let's hope the predators don't get to the eggs again this time.

That's it for now -- got work to prep for a meeting in an hour. Oh yeah, and I guess I should eat breakfast. Meh.