Recovered from the Wayback Machine.
Hi, I’m Zoe. This is my first time writing to a weblog, and I hope I do it right. I’m not sure how many cats write weblogs. I saw a weblog written by a dog today, but all it wrote was variations on feed me and smell my butt. Seems rather limited, somehow.
Shelley is my pet person, though I think she sometimes gets the idea she runs things around here. But as you can see here in my most recent photo, I take my supervision of Mom’s care quite seriously.
Mom was going to write about her road trip yesterday, but she had a complicated day today and was tired; so I sent her to bed and decided to write her post for her.
Yesterday was sunny and Mom decided a walk among the lakes might be nice. She went to Busch Conservation Area, which has 35 lakes– some swampy, some clear and all different sizes. One thing they all have in common is they’re all full of fish. Nice, juicy, tasty fish. Mom said the waterfowl lake was full of ‘fingerlings’, which I guess is a small fish. Just my size, I thought, but did she bring me one? Not a bit of it! Not one lousy, stinking fish.
She did bring home photos, though what good these are, I don’t know. You can see them at Tin Foil Project, if you’re of a mnd for that sort of thing. Mom says a good photograph helps the viewer smell the scents on the air, feel the summer heat against their cheek, and hear the fish jumping in the water. All I can say is Mom must not be a good photographer because it just looked like a bunch of gray stuff to me.
(But I like the cursor. I like to chase the cursor. Wheee…there it goes! Quick, quick before it moves away. Jump! Now! Death to Cursor!)
Mom spent the afternoon driving from lake to lake, getting out at and walking around some of the bigger ones. She said it was a pretty hot day, and she had to keep the windows up and the A/C on to keep the dust of the road out. The road was in bad shape, too, and she thought she would hang her car up a time or two.
“Kitty, Golden Girl might not be an SUV but she can handle rough roads with the best of them”, she said when she got home. Of course, if she’d busted an axle or flattened her tire, she’d be moaning and groaning, and feeling damn sorry for herself today, wouldn’t she?
I crawled up into her lap to get some neck scritches and Mom took this as me wanting to hear more about her trip. No, I just want more neck scritches. However, everything in this house comes with a price tag. if you want your neck scritched, you have to listen to a story. It’s like those places that feed you when you’re poor, but you have to hear a sermon, first.
At one lake Mom had to drive past waist high weeds on a poor track to get to it. As she was moving slowly along, these hard, black things started flying into side windows and windshield. Turns out it was some kind of big, black, shiny bee-like creature, and she figures she must have driven right into some kind of feeding ground, or perhaps even into their nest. She was mighty glad she had those windows, up, she said.
(Yeah, yeah, Mom. It’s just bugs. Who care. More scritches, less chatter. )
When she got back yesterday, she went online to check out the weblogs like she does most days. She’d been following a lot of stuff lately having something to do with being a woman and not being seen or heard or something like that. It doesn’t make sense to me, a cat, but Mom refers to it as being invisible on still water. Must be a human thing.
I kind of wish Mom wouldn’t get involved in this stuff because it upsets her. She ends up writing something here or in other’s comments, but doesn’t feel like she’s heard when she does. Then she gets both angry and sad, and forgets all about my snack.
Today was tech day, though, and Mom was hard at work on code, humming under her breath as she typed away. She was working at something called “Movable Type”, and why it’s called that when the type doesn’t move, not even a wiggle, I don’t know and believe me, I’m an expert on moving things. She was pushing stuff into it from something else called “Wordpress’, and that one makes sense as the words do seem pretty squished and flat on the screen.
Then this evening she read something in another weblog that surprised her and, she said, made her feel invisible again. She was pretty somber for awhile; just sat and stared out the window as it got darker, and I was beginning to worry that I was going to miss out on both evening cuddle and chase the feather-that-is-dead.
But someone else wrote something that also surprised her, but this time it made Mom smile. It was a good smile, too. Sometimes I don’t see enough of it, and I’m not sure all this “Movable Type” and “Wordpress” and ‘asshole-rss’ (what is an ‘asshole-rss’?) and people writing things and doing things that make each other somber is such a good thing.
But then there was that smile at the end. And I got my cuddle, time with the feather-that-is-dead, and even an extra scritch. So maybe this pressed word stuff is okay.
