The Case of Neko

Wednesday night, around 8pm on September 9th, hubs and I were sitting in the living room as usual. Hubs was playing a video game on X-Box 360 Live with his friend, I was reading.

All of a sudden we heard a clawing at the front door.

"Shit!" I jumped up. "Neko's still outside!"

Neko is our cat. She is an indoor/outdoor cat. We let her outside in the morning, she comes in and out periodically for food and a nap, and we always bring her in before dark. However, this time, it was pitch-black outside, and we'd forgotten to let her in.

I flung open the front door (odd in itself, since she almost always uses the back door), and she jumped off the porch railing (also odd) and ran inside, soaked, filthy, and with her tail puffed-up (VERY odd).

She was acting a little strange too, so I ran to get a towel and tried to simultaneous clean her off, dry her, and calm her down. She seemed terrified, jumping at shadows, not wanting me to touch her. Finally she let me mop off the worst of the mud, and I pet her for a while, worried.

The night progressed, and I kept an eye on her. I figured she'd had a run-in with one of the outdoor house-cats we have in the neighborhood and maybe got a little more roughed-up than usual. She was still acting strange, though, somewhat listless, not nearly as talkative, not very hungry (she ate a treat I gave her but wouldn't touch her food). I noticed a small oozy spot on top of her head but she wouldn't let me examine it, and the house was too dim for me to see much else.

I woke up at around 6 with the nagging feeling that something was wrong. Where was Neko? After some frantic searching, I found her under the bed, where she never goes unless she is feeling bad. She was definitely sick. I decided then and there to take her to the vet. I couldn't help but think about the copperhead I'd come across the other day (although after looking it up, we don't think it was a copperhead after all). I was terrified she'd somehow gotten bitten and was going to die.

We don't have any emergency vets within about 45 minutes of our house. The nearest vet didn't open until about 8 am, and believe me, I was incredibly thankful it was a weekday and one I didn't have to work, so I spent the next couple of hours dancing around anxiously. Finally I was able to get an appointment for that morning, and I grabbed the cat carrier, dug Neko out from under the bed (it took a broom and the moving of quite a few boxes), and whisked her off to this place I'd never been before.

I got a little lost trying to find the place, but once inside I felt much relieved. Neko was mewing as she always does when forced into her carrier, and generally acting like she wasn't on the brink of death, which I took as a good sign. I figured if she'd gotten bitten by a copperhead, she'd be dead already, or at least pretty effed-up.

Once in the check-up room, the vet tech took her out of the carrier and to my horror I saw just how swollen the side of her face was. I hadn't even noticed it, since it had been so dark that morning. The top of her head, near that oozy spot I'd noticed, was swollen too. Obviously something had bitten her, but I had no clue what. The vet tech said she had a slight fever, which I'd suspected, and told me I did right to bring her in.

The veterinarian who looked Neko over was Australian, which made him fun to listen to, even as distraught as I was. He reassured me that she would be fine, that if she'd been bitten by a poisonous snake she'd be in much worse shape than she was, which was a real relief. He, of course, noticed two bite wounds in the swollen areas on her face, and recommended that we shave those parts to be able to disinfect them.



Poor Neko has two bald spots now. They look ugly, but no uglier than those bite wounds looked.

She got an antibiotics shot that would slowly release the drugs to her over a period of time and would work much better than trying to give her oral medication (it doesn't work well with Neko. Trust me on this). She also got an injection of fluids that would sit under her skin and slowly absorb into her body, in case she got so sick she wouldn't drink. I wasn't too sure about that one, since she'd never actually stopped drinking, and the fluids made her look like she had a great big sloshy tumor on one shoulder, but I figured it couldn't hurt. I also received a can of special wet food that I could mix with water in case I needed to force-feed her with a syringe.



On the way home I had to get gas, but before I reached the gas station, Neko discovered that forced fluids don't help one's bladder control, and wet her carrier. I stopped at the gas station, rushed into the bathroom to look for paper towels, found that all they had was an air-dryer, and eventually had to buy a roll of Scott to mop out poor Neko's carrier and attempt to prevent an overflow into my passenger car seat.



We were supposed to go on our trip to Mammoth Caves the next day, and I was already contemplating the possibility that I wouldn't be able to go. I'd like to say, here and now, that it wasn't even a question. If Neko had needed me to feed her and care for her, I'd have stayed.

I figured I'd keep her in our master bathroom, since it was big and easily cleanable in case she had an accident. I moved her litterbox in there, her food and water, and a pile of towels for her to curl up in. I figured she'd be feeling pretty rotten still. However, the instant I let her out, she went right over to her food bowl.

I knew then she'd be okay.

Over the rest of the day, she ended up eating most of the can of wet food I'd been given, clawing at the bathroom door to try to get out, and slowly absorbing that enormous bubble of fluid that had slid over to her elbow and just looked awful.

Slowly but surely back to her old self.

By the next morning, she had absorbed everything and was acting normally, waking me up early wanting food, meowing like crazy, even wanting to play. I felt comfortable enough to leave her to go on our trip, though I made sure to have Hubs' mom check on her at least once.

We still don't know what attacked her, but living in a rural area as we do, it could have been almost anything.

I don't quite know how this will affect her going out. I know I will be a lot more paranoid than I was before, and that she definitely will not be going out after dark or anywhere near dark anymore. But going outside makes Neko so happy. She uses up all her energy roaming around, so when she does come inside she's relaxed, more affectionate, content to lay there instead of running around bored and being destructive to get attention.

I'm thinking at least we won't let her outside for long periods of time without checking on her a lot, and preferably I'll just go outside with her more often than not.

All I know is that this was a wake-up call. A lesson not to take my beautiful, talkative, loving baby kitty for granted.

I imagine all parents feel this way the first time their child, whether it's a fur-child or a human child, gets injured or sick in some way. It's terrifying, but at the same time you realize how good you have it, how wonderful the love is that you feel for this being.

I'm so glad she was spared worse injury. I'm so glad she's still around to brighten my day, bald spots and all.

A Mammoth Experience

Any trip I go on, I resolve to be one of those people who is always taking pictures, to "capture the memories" as it were. Growing up, my family had bazillions of photo albums to look through, and one of my favorite pastimes was to go through those albums and remember people, places, and events that have disappeared into time. And also snicker at the hairstyles and clothes we found attractive back in the day. A perm with short bangs? A tight white halter dress with one big sunflower silk-screened on the front of it? Seriously?

Anyway, fast-forward to the actual trips I go on (which are very few). We dutifully take our camera and...either forget to take any pictures, or the batteries we've assured ourselves would be alright die right when we need them. So no pictures. It's called Cheap Camera Syndrome. Mammoth Caves, of course, came down with a heavy case of this devastating illness. So all the pictures I'm showing were taken by one of our fellow travelers, whose name is Chad T., just so you know. All, you know, zero of you. I like to give credit where it is due.

Enough babbling. Talking about the trip!

The drive up was surprisingly not bad, considering it was 6.5 hours long and began at 6 am. Stocked up on McDonald's coffee, I was behind the wheel most of the trip up, since Hubs got maybe 3 hours of sleep and was probably hallucinating or at least delirious from exhaustion. The goal was for him to take a nap on the way up, but of course that never happened.

There's something about driving through mountains that not only looks gorgeous but keeps you on your toes. Plus, there were tunnels, which I *love.* On the way, we passed such notable places as an absolutely enormous adult (*ahem*, porn) store with an equally enormous cross erected (*snicker*) over it, the Hillbilly Mug Bog (god knows), Anton's Sugar Shack, and a monster-truck by the name of the Hustlin' Hobo. Good times, good times. We got off-track a couple of times due to a rogue GPS unit, sidetracked by a sudden run for a geocache, and stopped for a few unnecessary (in my opinion) potty breaks, but all things considered we made it to the campsite in good time.

Mammoth Caves is a national park and has a campground attached to it, right near the visitor's center, a small store we had fun looking through, a hotel(!), and various walking trails. The campground itself is in the midst of a beautiful forest-y area. After we set up our tents, we walked around it for a while, looking for dead-wood to fuel our campfire with but mostly just taking in the gorgeous scenery.



There were flocks of wild turkey and deer that came within a few yards of us, almost completely unafraid. They must see thousands of people every year, and since there's no hunting allowed (and undoubtedly some clandestine feeding), they grow up with little fear of humans.

That night we built a fire, cooked our food, and shot the shit. Hubs and I had brought mostly cooked food for the weekend, since it takes forever to make stuff on a campfire, but our friends roasted weenies. I only toasted marshmallows, and boy howdy they were good.

The conversation was...a little adult for my taste. Not that I'm a prude by any means, but eventually it gets boring. It got boring for me. Plus, I'm...not a talker. I have made very few friends in my life as a result of this. It's not just fear, either, although that is a large part. I am simply not the kind of person who enjoys talking about trivial every-day things. In a nutshell, I hate small-talk. So I was at a little bit of a disadvantage with Hubs' friends. They all knew each other for years, had hung out numerous times, and were very comfortable in each others' presence. I felt...left-out. Not in my element. Which, of course, made me clam up more. That set the theme for the entire weekend for me. *sigh*

The other times Hubs and I had gone camping, we'd slept in our sleeping bag on the ground. I didn't mind it since our sleeping bag is thick, but Hubs hated it, so this time we took an air mattress. ...It pretty much blew a big fat one. Didn't inflate enough, and really killed my neck. So that night's sleep was...fitful, to say the least. That probably didn't help my mood any, nor did the fact that there were some annoyingly-loud late-night talkers at the campsite next to ours, and the campsite across the way housed a whole scout troop that woke up at the crack of dawn and started SCREAMING. Well, playing. But 10-year-old boys scream when they play.

We'd purchased tickets for the Grand Avenue cave tour, which lasted 4.5 hours and covered 4 miles of cave, and was supposed to be fairly strenuous with lots of stairs and changes in elevation. Really, the best bang for your buck. Our tour guide was a tall, skinny ranger with ears like a bat, which turned out to be very appropriate since we saw bats!

We were bussed to the cave entrance and given the safety talk (stop walking when you're taking pictures-- wouldn't want you to misstep and fall into one of the 200-ft-drop caverns; it's slick in there so don't fall and sue us, watch your head because caves tend to have rocks in them, etc.). Then we were led inside by our tour guide and a ranger-in-training.

So, the cave.

It was COLD. We'd been warned that it was between 55-60 degrees inside, and since I always get cold, I'd put on a thin long-sleeved shirt, a t-shirt over that, and a hooded sweatshirt over THAT. Waiting for the bus, I'd been sweating and our friend's wife tried to get me to take off the long-sleeved shirt at least, but I was glad I didn't. I was still cold even with it!

The trail was rough, though less rough than I'd feared. Most of the first half of the tour was pretty even, making me wonder if it wasn't a bit of a rip-off, despite the views. It was dim. There was just enough to see where to walk, and to catch the more spectacular formations. We stopped every now and then to hear a story about the history of the cave, the particulars (such as how deep below the Earth's surface we were, and just how they manage to have running toilets down there [they pump the, ahem, mess up in pipes]), and other interesting tidbits.



When I see something like this, I don't want to talk to anyone about it. I want to absorb it, feel it in my soul, listen quietly to what it's telling me. Things like this are almost spiritual for me. So maybe it wasn't the best thing to do with people I don't know very well. Small-talk around a campfire is one thing. Small-talk inside a glorious cave that I want to inwardly reflect on is quite another. I started feeling pretty annoyed and unhappy about halfway through, but luckily then we had a lunch break (there was actually a small cafeteria down there. Seriously.) and I was able to eat some pretzels and calm down a bit.



The trail got harder and harder after that. The trail got slick from the water seeping through the rock, there were quite a few steep hills to climb up, stairs and narrow passages to squeeze around. There were also quite a few low areas that most people have to duck, but being only 4'11", I was not most people. I did feel a little smug about that, I have to say.



I'll let the pictures speak for themselves. They were beautiful.

After a while, though, I got tired of being cold and trying to be sociable (when being sociable meant "dick jokes"), and I'm afraid I just started walking ahead of my group. I was in a grump most of the rest of the tour. I definitely enjoyed the caves, but I was ready to be out of there.



There were a LOT of people on the tour, including a lady who looked like she had to be at least 75. I have to say, I wasn't sure Grandma could keep up. But Grandma did better than I expected! Someone on our tour managed to get hurt somehow, either slipping and falling on the rock or having some other sort of difficulty, because the ranger-in-training had to stay with them at one of the cave's internal checkpoints and wait for some of the park EMTs to come in with a chair to get them out. For a little bit I feared for Grandma's safety, but she was actually one of the first people out of the cave, looking not in the least winded.

At the end, we emerged, exhausted, cold, and disheveled, into the sunshine. Then I had to try to cheer up again, but I don't think I succeeded too well. When we got back to the campsite I took a nap and a shower, and felt much better.

We had been thinking of going geocaching, but I think all of us were fried from that 4.5 miles hike. So instead, we just sat around the campfire again that night, watching silly Saturday Night Live videos and eating marshmallows. I went to bed early that night.

We'd also been discussing walking on one of the trails the next morning, but I think we were still fried (leftovers?) from the day before. It was the work of an hour or so to pack up our tent, put everything in our car, and eat a quick breakfast before heading out.

The drive home was much nicer. We weren't following our friends in their car anymore, so there were no unscheduled potty breaks or spur-of-the-moment geocaches, which means we made much better time.

We got home around 4 pm on Sunday, and I promptly got my period, which explained my mood of the entire weekend. And we promptly collapsed. After unpacking and all.

It was...an experience. I'm inclined to think it a good one, even if I was a pill for most of it. It's depressing and distressing both to think that I was the one who made it less fun than it could have been, because re-examining everything, when all's said and done, I didn't really have all that great a time.

I enjoyed the caves, but not the dark feelings I had inside them. I liked the people, but not being around them so constantly. I liked the trip, but something about it was flat. That something...was me.

I shouldn't be navel-gazing now. I should be remembering how in awe the caves made me, how wondrous it was to think about the gypsum formations that took millions of years to come together, how amazing the idea of water slowly seeping down to make the walls smooth over countless eras, how mysterious it was to think that though only 300 or so miles of cave have been explored, geologists think there's at least 500 or so more of unexplored.

Instead I'm thinking about my own feelings. What does that say about me?

Covetous

There are times when I find children to be shrill, annoying, needy, nerve-shattering, deafening, ungrateful, rude, inconsiderate, and out-of-control. And there are times when all I think about is what it would feel like to be pregnant, to feel the life inside my body, to give birth to a new squirming, mewling, helpless and yet utterly beautiful new creature, to raise and love and teach a little boy or girl that I helped to create, to develop a lasting and loving relationship with a person I can be proud of.

I waver between the idealized version of motherhood and the absolute hatred of the very idea of having to permanently deal with one of these brats. Neither is really all that healthy.

I suspect I have the potential to be an excellent mother. I also suspect that that potential would be largely unfulfilled, as lazy as I am. I suspect I could bring a lot to the life of a child. I also suspect that I could be just as damaging to one as any abusive and horrible, or even neglectful parent you read about in the news, simply because I am selfish.

I wonder if having a baby would get rid of a lot of that selfishness and laziness. Mostly I don't, though, because I know it probably wouldn't entirely. I'd act like I do towards the cat when she wakes me up every fifteen minutes on a work-night; eventually snap and scream at it and momentarily not care if I hurt it. Every parent snaps every now and then, but I'd do it often, every time the baby disrupted my doing something necessary, something I really, really wanted to do, prevented me from getting something, doing something for myself, enjoying myself.

I'd scream at a toddler, at a child, at a teenager. I don't have enough control over myself, my temper, and my patience. I don't know if I ought to risk finding out if motherhood would help with that. I suspect it wouldn't, much.

Maybe, like with any of my projects, I'd be gung-ho about it for a while, and then gradually lose interest. I'd lose interest in my child. That's a horribly sobering thought.

Then I think I'm being far too hard on myself. Maybe I'd transfer all my interest to the baby. After all, a baby is a never-ending craft project! A baby gives you things to write about, and communities to join, and all the intangible things like love and warmth! But why would I need a baby for all those things?

A baby is...a lot of money. But a baby doesn't have to be as much as we think it does, if you don't use disposable diapers, buy used clothing or accept hand-me-downs, breastfeed as long as possible, co-sleep for a while. But a baby is still more expensive than NOT having a baby.

Do I actually want a baby, or do I simply want the security of always having someone to love me and take care of me? Do I actually want a baby, or do I want what society tells me having a baby will do for me? Do I actually want a baby, or do I just want an excuse for unhappiness, or a catalyst for change, or an experiment to make me happy? Do I just want something that is wholly mine, some trace to leave on the world when I die? Am I only afraid that my DNA will die out?

These are the things that go through my head when my biological clock goes off with the force of a thousand sirens and punches my rapidly-aging ovaries in the face. I never really know the answer to these questions. I never really know what I want. But that doesn't make me any less jealous when I see a baby in the supermarket, read the birth announcement of a friend's.

I guess since I know that, barring a birth control mishap, I will likely never have one, I will always secretly, deep down inside, maybe possibly kinda-sorta want one.

Because we always want what we can't have. Human nature, and all.

In the attempt to NOT be a recluse

I am very bad at making friends, and pretty bad at keeping friends, both because I am a loner by nature and because I am also conveniently scared of people. I was actually pretty lucky to meet Hubs, considering he is also something of a loner by nature, although he is most emphatically not scared of people.

Anyway, I've been lucky enough to meet some great people through Husband. He had a large-ish crowd that he hung out with when I first started dating him, but gradually he drifted away from most of them and chose to keep his friendships only with people who were genuine friends, with whom he actually saw eye-to-eye and was not merely a convenience for.

J was one of these people. Over the last nine years, we've seen J more than anyone else, and once I got over my shyness (which only took about three years; oy), we have had some pretty good conversations, and good times. Hubs was one of J's groomsmen when J got married to a lovely lady (whom we'll also call J!), and both J and J came to our wedding just last year.

Anyway, now that the backstory has been established rather needlessly, I'll inform the world-- also rather needlessly-- that we're going camping with J and J and another of Hubs' friends this weekend!

Um. Yay!

We're going to Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, which sounds fabulous and which none of us has even been to. I love caves. I'd been to several in the western part of the U.S. as a kid, and I spent a wonderful few hours in Israel squeezing and edging and climbing through a small cave that was being excavated for archaeological purposes, but never anything like this!



I'm excited. I love camping. I've never really minded being a little uncomfortable because it's such an adventure to me just sleeping somewhere not in my own bed (I'm easily amused). Add to that the prospect of hiking, cave-walking, cooking over a fire, toasting marshmallows, looking up at the stars as I fall asleep...and doing all this with friends, even? HELL YEAH.

We're also going to be going geocaching a little while we're there. We looked for a few geocaches the day before our anniversary, just to see what the fuss was about, and we concluded that it was pretty fun. The caches we located were not exactly difficult to find, nor in particularly exciting locations, so maybe it wasn't quite as fun as some people think-- we agreed that it was kind of silly to look for caches just for the sake of looking (like in parking lots...), when you could be looking for them in gorgeous areas and on nice long off-the-beaten-path hikes. But! There are plenty in the Mammoth Cave area that promise to be beautiful finds, and that has fired us up again!

So all in all, it promises to be a full, fun, and rewarding experience. Only problem? We have to check in to the campsite around noon, and it's a six and a half hour drive.

Meaning...we need to leave around 5:30 am.

....let's hope the drive is the worst part of the weekend.

Because I really needed an incentive to keep gardening!

I think I've already established the fact that I'm fairly lazy.

It takes a lot of determination and interest to keep me going once I've begun a project, to the extent that I'm intensely proud whenever I manage to finish one. As has also been established, this is not a good thing.

One of the projects I'm most guilty of slacking on is housework. I enjoy doing the dishes (I know, weird, right?), and I don't mind the laundry, and I usually undergo a spate of "picking up" every few days, but other than that, it's a no-go. Hubs actually does more housework than I do (although I do all the cooking, which easily takes longer than almost anything he does around the house, but that's not the issue here).

I never really like this state of affairs, because while I don't mind a little clutter, or a little dirt, I hardly enjoy living in a sty. It's not a good thing when the dust bunnies on your living room floor resemble the tumbleweed in those Old West movies, both in size and quantity!

Well, this week I'm off from work, due to a fortuitous Labor Day and the need to use up all my vacation days before the fiscal year ends in October, so I figured I had no excuse. I would clean the gosh-darned house. And I did! I was very proud of myself. I dusted, swept all the floors, did the dishes and laundry (of course), cleaned the bathrooms, and even-- ye gods!-- mopped. That's some hard-core shit for me there.

I also tackled our over-grown garden.

When our house was placed in its current location, the ground had to be leveled, which revealed all the glorious red clay underneath the topsoil. The grass still hasn't come back all the way, and we really, really want it to, so we perhaps haven't been quite as timely in trimming the grass (and weeds, let's not kid ourselves) in the garden around our house. It had started to get really thick and tall, though, and I started getting worried that the nice lush thick undergrowth would both choke out our straggling Very Organically-Grown tomatoes and the few flowers the clay hasn't killed, and be a wonderful hiding ground for snakes.

Did I mention I'm terrified of snakes?

I live in the wrong area for my fear, snakes being rather common in rural areas and all. My mother-in-law keeps telling me all these wonderful stories about her sister finding a huge copperhead on her porch one morning, or warning us about the cottonmouth they saw at the creek the other day, or the rattlesnake the phone company men killed when they were setting up our phone line, oh my god. Believe it or not, though, I've lived here for almost three years and have only seen a couple of black ratsnakes, which don't really scare me as much as they're not poisonous.

But I digress. As usual. Anyway, Hubs and I decided to tackle our garden. I armed up with some work gloves and got to pulling the bigger of the weeds, he broke out the weed whacker and set to chiseling away at the aforementioned lush grass.

Around the halfway point, as Hubs was neatening up the very bushy area behind our air conditioning unit, the weed whacker decided to die and would not be resurrected without a new whacking cord. Since I'd been yanking weeds for an hour already and was pretty gung-ho by that point, I decided to just start yanking the grass up.

I yanked and yanked, reached out to grab a new handful...

...and jumped back with a shriek, as that particular handful had been about four inches from a coiled-up baby copperhead!

Given my fear of snakes, I feel I redeemed myself by not immediately hightailing it out of there and hiding under the covers until I knew it was gone, gone, gone. Instead I just turned very pale and stayed a decorous ten feet away. I even went back over to take another peek at it! I think Hubs was proud of me.

We weren't sure what to do about it, exactly, since we didn't really want to kill it, but it had to be dealt with, as our indoor/outdoor cat goes outside by herself and it would probably be best if she didn't have to deal with a known poisonous snake residing next to our house. We were actually surprised it was still there, since Hubs had been running that noisy weed whacker not a foot away from its head for a while, yet it hadn't budged.

So we decided, since the whacker was busted and all, to just go inside and wait until Hubs' dad got home from work so we could ask him how he dealt with the copperheads he finds. I made the cat come with us, which pissed her off, but I figure pissed-off cat >>>>> dead cat.

A few hours later, pissed-off cat <<<<< potential risk, so Hubs and I went outside, armed with a shovel and a rake, to see if we could flush it out.

IT WAS GONE.

We poked around in the remaining grass, making sure it hadn't just moved over a few inches, and even checked around both sides of the house, but Baby Copperhead had disappeared.

...Sad to say, that almost scares me worse than knowing exactly where it is. :-(

I think I will not be pulling weeds by hand for a little while.

Aaaand it happened just like I thought, or "Category 2"

Whenever I start a new long-term-ish project, it goes one of two ways:

1. I keep at it over time, persevering in my interest because it is something that is important to me. After a period of steady work, I bring the project to its completion or have done it long enough that it's a permanent habit and thus likely to continue without having to browbeat myself into working on it. Ergo, a happy ending and all is smiles.
Notable projects in this category include: my three National Novel-Writing Month novels, the wall-hangings I've embroidered for my parents and myself, and our wedding scrapbook.

2. After a brief period of intense obsession with the project, during which I work on it CONSTANTLY, am always thinking of new things to do with it, fiddle with its appearance, etc. etc., my interest abruptly wanes and the project goes by the wayside, buried in the Idea Graveyard with all my other uncompleted projects. And my ability to not write run-on sentences. Apparently. Ahem.
Notable projects in this category include:...well, pretty much everything else.

My new blog? Would be under the number 2 category.

I suppose, unlike many of the people whose blogs I read, I have something of a lackluster life.

I don't have a fantastically exciting job (though the actual workload has ramped up a bit in the last month, though who doesn't have this happen occasionally?) or even the kind of job that generates interesting stories, since it mostly involves filing, data entry, and sitting in my office alone.

I lack children who say cute/funny/intelligent things or get into horrific/surprisingly funny/compassion-inducing situations (not that I'm complaining about the latter-- Munchausen-by-proxy-by-Internet is not my intention or desire!) or even normal, every-day children that I can gripe about because it's fun.

I don't have many friends in the area, and there's only so much one can write about people one doesn't physically interact with on a regular basis ("Dear Diary, today I posted a smiley-face on Lila's Facebook page, and she posted one back, just for me! Gee whillikers!"). Being something of a recluse, I don't really care to go out much and find new people either, both out of fear and sheer laziness.

I don't do particularly exciting activities like travel to exotic locales, rock-climb the Himalayas, do roadie-work for a touring local-famous band, sail the Seven Seas with just me and my trusty cat by my side, or the like. I have traveled a good bit, but I've already written about it plenty.

What I like to do is cook semi-exotic food, though I prefer using a recipe and can't really be bothered to make up my own very often, or take pretty pictures of what I do make.

I have a husband who is also cheap...ahem, thrifty like myself. He works an equally lackluster job, and we don't go out much. He also distrusts the public nature of the internet, and prefers not to have too many details about himself splashed across the web; it was all I could do to get the poor man to have a Facebook. *grin*

I like to read, though I don't really enjoy writing book reviews all that much.

I like to start (and occasionally finish) new art projects, though somehow I always forget to take pictures of the process, or our old and decrepit digital camera will need new batteries and GOD HELP US there won't be any in the house.

I like to go on the internet, but as the places I habituate are not particularly new or shocking (although some of the webcomics I read are not safe for work-- horrors!), there's not a whole lot of point in writing about them.

I like thinking about things, but many of these things are too intimate to share with the internet, and I'm already sharing the ones I'm comfortable discussing. Also, I have a problem with criticism, meaning I probably shouldn't be on the internet at all!

I like to make brave and idealistic declarations over how I will become a better person and change my life in a positive way and do all kinds of interesting things that will be good to remember when I'm old (and maybe possibly have the side effect of being fun to write about). Somehow most of these fall into Category 2 up there.

I am...a pretty normal person who does pretty normal things and is also really, REALLY lazy.

So I wanted to challenge myself by writing a blog to make it seem like that's not the case. And we all (and by "we all" I mean "I") see how that's going.

However...

Sometimes my projects in Category 2 enter a third category:

3. After a period of not working on the project, thinking about it, or even looking at it, all of a sudden I'll pick it up again, and realize, "Oh yeah, I really enjoyed doing this. Why'd I stop again?" Promptly I begin again and, more often than not, actually finish it. And thus, Category 2 enters Category 1 by way of Category 3. Or something like that. Math is not my strong suit.

Maybe it's not too late?