May 30th, 2012

My new YouTube channel

Ever since Amy Jones explained to me that my still camera has a video feature on it (Amy is a genius, peeps) I have been making videos. Lots and lots of videos that I don’t know how to edit so I just have to take them over and over until I get it right in one take, or else get bored, which is why a lot of my videos are weird, end abruptly, or have the subject hide under the bed in the middle.

Oh, that’s the other thing–all my videos are about Cats I Know. I like to immortalize these cats so that I can watch the videos when I can’t go visit them (cats never write, never call…) Also cats make good video subjects if you can corner them–so photogenic!!

And now I have a YouTube channel where you can watch these videos, too: ta da!

Isn’t it great? I have more videos I haven’t uploaded yet (my computer started to get hot and make a grindy noise) so stay tuned.

In case you weren’t convinced by my pitch to follow the link, I will embed the first video in the series, the one of my own cat, Evan:

November 11th, 2010

Why not feel good?

I’ve been reading various angry-making things in the newspaper–always a mistake to read the newspaper–and I had considered a long ranty post. But really, I’m about to jet off on a mini-vacation and the weather’s nice, and I’m not really in the mood to rant. So I offer this instead:

Yesterday I got on my bus at the end of the day and zoomed straight to the back, as I always do (because if I’m going to have to stand, I want to be knocked into by as few people as possible). When I got back there, I realized there were a couple seats technically free, but one was occupied by a big tough guy’s sweat-panted spread thigh, and the other by a tough teenaged boy’s backpack. I tried to catch either guy’s eye, both turned away, and I thought I wasn’t going to get into it. I reached for the pole as the bus started.

Another tough teen looked up in alarm. “There’s seats, there and there!” He pointed helpfully. The two-seat stealers shifted nervously.

“It’s ok, I don’t want to…”

Tough teen #2 leaped up as if electrocuted. “You can sit here! Sit here!” And then he went across the aisle to the big guy, shoved his knee aside and sat down.

My hero!

And in case you are not already cheered up, let me introduce you to Josey Kitten, my parents’ new roommate:

Yes, that is my toe–nothing if not a master of photographic composition, me. Josey’s in charge while I’m away.

July 23rd, 2009

Peevish

When I graduated from highschool, we were supposed to write “obits”–little responses to abbreviated questions to squish beside our grad pictures in the yearbook and apparently sum up our personalities and lives in high school and after. The queries were PP: pet peeve, AM: ambition, PD: probable destination and K4: known for. Here’s mine (if I were braver I’d scan in the picture; I’m not):

AM: to have one, to be a licensed driver, to blowdry, to reincarnate my fetal pig, to name that smell, to get the fish joke
PD: the bus 4ever, sleeping thru the apocalypse, K.N.’s floor, crushing my rage into a tiny ball
K4: too much hair, “I don’t get it…oh, yeah, I do.”

Though I did get my license (I corrected the spelling error–“liscenced”!! jeez!!) that’s pretty much the same as I would write now, especially the last bit. But you’ll note–no PP! At the time, I thought there were no peeves I wished to be remembered by (if you think I’m obnoxiously rose-coloured now, you should’ve seen high school, especially at intramural badminton!)

So things have changed, as I do have a few peeves now. And as KateN’s dissection of a pet peeve has inspired me, here’s some headliners from recent peevishness:

–the tap of a fork-tine against tooth enamel
–the rainbow-coloured spinning wheel Macs replace the cursor with when something’s not responding
–when people say “How are you?” as an alternative to “hello,” without waiting for an answer.
–Cyclists on the sidewalk! oh, my most hated ever, cause it’s dangerous and not just annoying!! Like, I get that that many drivers in Toronto are horrible to cyclists, but taking a bike onto the sidewalk is like someone who is pushed around at work coming home and taking it out on their family–sidewalk abuse!! I got clipped by a bike-rearview mirror recently and was so very unimpressed.

Ahem. So, yeah, I get a little more tetchy as I age, I suppose. But I really would love it still if someone would explain the fish joke to me.

I was waitin’ for the hot flashes to come
RR

November 24th, 2008

Minor pleasures

Because there can never be too many, here are some minor pleasures to try:

1) Telling strangers their dogs are cute.
2) Getting an up-to-date phone book and recycling the old one.
3) Touching paper over glass. Seriously–the nicest sensation. There was an ill-placed window in the changing room of my gym that they just recently papered over (I never noticed it before, but that doesn’t bear thinking about) and I am now in love with touching that window. Cold through dry–I can’t explain it. It’s lovely.
4) 14 second video of a kitten falling asleep.
4 a) The fact that when I mentioned this at a party, everyone wanted to see.
b) The fact that when we searched this on someone’s iPhone at the party, there were *pages* of sleepy kitten videos
c) Other people’s iPhones, one of the only things on the planet that inspire technolust in me.
5) A peck on the cheek.
6) Feeling smug about buying nothing on Buy Nothing Day

They always did the best they could.
RR

October 30th, 2008

Good news all around

I was interviewed by the intrepid Nathaniel G. Moore on Danforth Review and you can read the result. This morning I came quite close to walking into a skunk, but we both emerged unscathed. I have realized that I can avoid burning the tops of my ears while blowdrying by setting the dryer to a lower temp and drying for longer. This is a boring way to spend 10 minutes, hanging upside in one’s bra holding up the hairdryer, but it’s worth it, I guess.

Also, although I still waste way too much time obsessing about minutiae of etiquette, dress, diet, and dialogue, I realized whilst hanging upside-down today that I no longer care about enlarged pores, furniture, celebrity gossip or whether the person whose hand I’m shaking has a cold. So that *is* progress.

All the girls say
RR

July 23rd, 2007

Eleanor the First

From Understood Betsy by Dorothy Canfield Fisher (1917)…possibly the best-loved book of my childhood…possibly the best-loved book of my mother’s childhood, too. I hope you like it.

“[Aunt Abigail] seemed for the moment to have forgotten all about the new-comer. Elizabeth Ann sat on the wooden chair, her feet hanging (she had been taught that it was not manners to put her feet on the rungs), looking about her with miserable, homesick eyes. What an ugly, low-ceilinged room, with only a couple of horrid kerosene lamps for light; and they didn’t keep any girl, evidently; and they were going to eat right in the kitchen like poor people; and nobody spoke to her or looked ar her or asked her how she had ‘stood the trip’; and here she was, millions of miles from Aunt Frances, without anybody to take care of her. She began to feel the tight place in her throat which, by thinking about hard, she could always turn into tears, and presently her eyes began to water.

Aunt Abigail was not looking at her at all, but she now stopped short in one of her rushes to the table, and set down the butter-plate she was carrying, and said ‘There!’as if she had forgotten something. She stooped – it was perfectly amazing how spry she was – and pulled out from under the stove a half-grown kitten, very sleepy, yawning and stretching, and blinking its eyes. ‘There, Betsy!’ said Aunt Abigail, putting the little yellow and white ball into the child’s lap. ‘There is one of old Whitey’s kittens that didn’t get given away last summer, and she pesters the life out of me. I’ve got so much to do. When I heard you were coming, I thought maybe you would take care of her for me. If you want to, enough to bother to feed her and all, you can have her for your own.’

Elizabeth Ann bent her thin face over the warm, furry, friendly little animal. She could not speak. She had always wanted a kitten, but Aunt Frances and Aunt Harriet and Grace had always been sure that cats brought diptheria and tonsillitis and all sorts of dreadful diseases to delicate little girls. She was afraid to move for fear the little thing wouuld jump down and run away, but as she bent cautiously toward it the necktie of her middy blouse and the kitten in the middle of a yawn struck swiftly at it with a soft paw. Then, still too sleepy to play, it turned its head and began to lick Elizabeth Ann’s hand with a rough little tongue. Perhaps you can imagine how thrilled the little girl was at this! She held her hand perfectly still until the kitten stopped and suddenly began washing its own face, and then she put her hands under it and very awkwardly lifted it up, burying her face in the soft fur. The kitten yawned again, and from the pink-lined mouth came a fresh milky breath. ‘Oh!’ said Elizabeth Ann under her breath. ‘Oh you DARLING!’ The kitten looked at her with bored speculative eyes.

Elizabeth Ann looked up now at Aunt Abigail and said, ‘What is its name, please?’ But the old woman was busy turning over a griddle full of pancakes and did not hear. On the train Elizabeth Ann had resolved not to call these hateful relatives by the same name she had for dear Aunt Frances, but now she forgot that resolution and said, again, “Oh, Aunt Abigail, what is its name?’

Aunt Abigail faced her blankly. ‘Name?’ she asked. ‘Whose…..oh the kitten’s? Goodness,child, I stopped racking my brain for kitten names sixty years ago. Name it yourself. It’s yours.’

Elizabeth Ann had already named it in her own mind, the name she had always thought she WOULD call a kitten by, if she ever had one. It was Eleanor, the prettiest name she knew.

Aunt Abigail pushed a pitcher toward her. ‘There’s the cat’s saucer under the sink. Do you want to give it some milk?’

Elizabeth Ann got down from her chair, poured some milk in to the saucer, and called: “Here, Eleanor! Here, Eleanor!’

Aunt Abigail looked at her sharply out of the corner of her eye and her lips twitched, but her face was quite serious as moments later she carried the last plate of pancakes to the table.”

July 20th, 2007

The March of Time

I’m having a weird day. I left for my run this morning without my watch. I don’t think I’ve been out of the house without a watch in at least a year, probably more. What I have to show for my vaguely OCD-ish tendencies is a smear of pale on my left wrist, and reputation for being late anyways. I elected not to go back for it, since it takes me about the same amount of time to run 7km whether I pace it out or not. But I kept forgetting, and raising my blank wrist and just seeing my tan line instead. I wondered if running in the sun for an hour would erase said line. Not that I love it so, but it would seem kind of weird, not to be able to track the passage of time or even have evidence that I usually do.

As I ran, as far as know, Eleanor was being euthanized. My parents realized that this was necessary after the vets discovered that her jaw was so fractured that, even with surgery, it might not be possible for her to ever eat unassisted. It was necessary to be merciful, not to drag out her time when there could be no joy in, much as she will be missed.

Some of you have heard this before from me, but I find it comforting: my friend Y. once said that he could always say goodbye to his pets when it came their time because those were relationships without words. Nothing said or unsaid needs to be regretted; unconditional love is timelessly, wordlessly, perfectly understood.

Perhaps that’s why I could have a good run, a perfectly charming literary lunch with Kerry and a reasonable shift at work, all with just a small spark of sadness in the back of my mind. Eleanor will leave a gap in the future, surely, but the important time was the time while she was here.

But I’m still sad.

RR

July 19th, 2007

Eleanor and the Horizontal Learning Curve

If you’ve spent time with the senior Rosenblums, or listened to protracted periods of my own nattering, you’ve probably encountered tales of Eleanor. Eleanor is the kitten I begged my parents to adopt shortly before I moved out of the house (it was an almost identical conversation to the one we had when I was five). Of course I abandoned the kitten, as reckless youth will, but she really only ever had eyes for my father and the dog, anyway, so it’s just as well she stayed there. (5000 points if you can get the literary cat for whom she is named–this is a hard one.)

As an adult, Eleanor’s central hobbies are sprinting around and killing stuff in the fields around the house. Apparently there is especially good stuff to kill in the wheat field over the road, for she is consistently tempted by it, despite the fast-moving automobiles and transport trucks that patrol that road. In 2005, she encountered one of those, shattering her tiny pelvis, but leaving her vital organs (heart, lungs, [negligible] brain) intact.

In case you don’t know, you can’t immobilize a cat’s pelvis in a cast. Instead, you must put the entire cat in a very small box so she can’t move. For six weeks. Poor cat. My poor parents: they put the box in their front foyer for six weeks. Unsightly and noisy (Eleanor was well enough to protest her confinement), they thought it too mean to put her in a more out-of-the-way spot. When they were nearby, they turned the box so she could see them. This cheered her only somewhat–it was a depressing six weeks, and on a visit I once found Ellie asleep facedown in her food bowl. Still she emerged intact, sprinting immediately away to go kill stuff.

Having learned, apparently, nothing. For yesterday she got run over by another car. This one hit her head, dislocating her tiny jaw, slashing up her face and (oh god) possibly destroying one eye. The worst part, if you are my folks, is that of course they weren’t around at the point of collision and Ellie was wandering around injured for some time. The driver apparently called animal control (this is a rural agency that deals with, well, animals) who sent out a man to catch and kill our cat!! The first my folks heard of the situation was when they noticed the guy in the driveway, crawling around under their car with a net. When my father enquired, he was told that someone had hit a white cat (Eleanor is mainly orange!) and she had to be caught and put down because there wasn’t “much left in her.”

Lovely. Ellie, of course, bolted (wouldn’t you?) and managed to hide out for over four hours until a neighbour found her in her garden and returned her in a laundry basket. This was late yesterday. Ellie is now in hospital, my parents hopeful, me as well.

What a dumbass cat! I mean, really, cars aren’t subtle, you can see and hear them coming. And she’s such a pretty kitty, and would be considerably less so with only one eye. Of course, I would be grateful if it were only that and nothing worse. Eleanor! I am thinking of you!

Groom’s still waiting at the alter
RR