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A Trip to the Cat Toy Department Is In Order

If you’re wondering why there’s so much blogging lately it’s because I can’t put my shoe on.

So some of my cat research has born fruit and here’s some things I need to do:

* Provide perches so the cat can look outside.
* Toys, toys and toys, (toys, prey preference)
* Let your cat “hunt” for food by placing food in a toy that will make the cat work to get the food out.
* Hide food throughout the house so the cat has to find it.
* Leave the radio or TV on, tuned to your usual station.
* Call home and leave a message for the cat.
* Provide a refuge
* Spend at least 10 minutes daily playing with your cat.

Those are all for kitty separation anxiety.

I’ve found a fair amount on cat-cat aggression, but little on cat-human aggression. The American Assn of Feline Practitioners say “disrupt the behaviour every time it occurs. Disruption is tricky and ignoring the undesirable behaviour while rewarding only desirable behaviours is often preferable. Disruption should be sufficiently aversive to stop the behaviour (a loud whistle, shaking a can of coins) without causing damage to the human-animal bond. The cat must not be scared or hurt. After interruption the [human] should encourage another behaviour to replace the interrupted one.”

So shake a can of coins but don’t scare the cat? Hmmm. I guess the container full of water pistols by my bedroom door may be overkill.

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Garthim!

While looking up pictures of garthim I found this website: http://www.retrojunk.com/details_articles/968/ which is hilarious.

The reason I was looking at pictures of garthim is because as many of you know The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets have been re-invited to the Penny Arcade Expo after bailing at the last minute a couple years ago. (I should never forgive Bob for that but who can stay mad at this face?)

To that end, I’ve been thinking about making myself a new costume. I’ve always wanted to do something crustacean-like but it would be incredibly hard to perform in (not that that has ever stopped me before) and I think it would complicate border-crossing. So now I’m thinking about recreating an old costume which I really like – essentially it was a set of coveralls that had a bunch of plastic garden chains and shower curtain rings (spray painted to look metal – in all senses of the word) and a helmet with a transparent vacuum hose on it. I miss those days of going to the thrift store and finding kooky things to make into Thickets costumes, perhaps I should revisit that chapter of my life, and I bet Best would help!

Here’s the old version:

Perhaps it’s time to take a stroll down Thickets costume lane. You can click on the pics to enlarge.

I wish I had a photo of my TIE Fighter helmet. It’s not a helmet a TIE Fighter would wear – it’s a helmet that looks like a TIE Fighter.

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Rhinosferatu at the VAG?

Cloudscape is a sort of comics collective. They’ve put out issue number one and now are working on number two. I’ve submitted to get some pages in it and that’s what I’m currently working on. For the second issue the organizers decided that it needed a theme so I have been putting my mind to coming up with a story of “history” that doesn’t have to do with Spaceship Zero or the other comic that I actually have finished pages for.

So, World Wildlife Federation of Justice.

In Tudor times a family of rhinos goes to a castle inhabited by a bat. Spending the night, the husband wakes up to find his family gone so searches the castle. I won’t spoil any more except that this is the origin story of Rhinosferatu. I’m only planning two, maybe three pages so it can’t be too complicated.

In the meantime I’m also working on the other comic and hope to have lots more work done before Comix & Stories, the annual comic convention that this year is being held at the VAG as part of the KRAZY! exhibit. Mark Sunday Aug 24 on your calendar because that’s the day you’re going to come and visit me at my table at the VAG. It’s gonna be cooooooooool.

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Ponce's Pants!

Here is a drawing of Ponce de Leon that a video game guy got me to do under the pretense of paying me.

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I Was Fine Until They Started Putting in the Stitches

I went in almost an hour early for my appointment at St. Paul’s Hospital downtown this afternoon. I thought I might have time to drop my modem off at the Shaw office before or after the surgery. As the bus arrived at St. Paul’s I decided to get off and scope out the hospital, never having been there before. I figured maybe if I arrived early, the surgery would happen sooner, and thus I’d get out of there sooner.

Well it’s been a long time since I’ve been in a hospital, except when trying to take shortcuts through VGH which seems to be a lot different from St. Paul’s. There were a lot of old and decrepit people there, just like the scene in Star Trek IV when Bones gives the dialisis lady pills that make her liver grow back. In fact at one point I was seated next to a bunch of scrubs and I was tempted to dress up in them and start walking around giving patients advice and maybe doing some surgery myself.

Luckily I had brought some Doom Patrol and Tom Strong comics so that I had something to do while I waited. It wasn’t too long really before my doctor showed up and I was put into the room with him and two nurses and an intern. I was keen to watch the whole process as I had just re-watched No Country for Old Men last night and I was reasonably sure I could take it. The nurse cleaned off my foot and the intern or medical student or whatever she was injected me with local anaesthetic. The pain of the needle entering the skin is never as painful as the juice being forced into the flesh. Because of the location of the mole they had to inject me a little on the side of the toe. I put that in just for De, but I don’t know if she’s made it this far into the description as she’s a bit of a queasy one, that girl. I then watched the doctor dig in with his scalpel and cut around the edges of the mole, sawing gingerly back and forth, but his finger was in the way so I didn’t quite have a ringside seat. The final strand of flesh was cut and he put the mole on the table and immediately started sewing me up with one of those special curved suture deals. That’s when I started to feel really hot (I was overdressed but the doctor said, “he’s starting to faint, it’s not hot in hear), and I had to lie back. I felt nauseous but not enough to throw up. They kept my mind busy with chatting and in general the mood in the room was quite light as I am prone to making cybernetic laser toe jokes in the best of situations.

The next time I looked the foot had been all bandaged up. I was planning on doing some other errands in the afternoon but it became clear from my doctor’s advice and also from how sketchy my walking had become that I needed to go home and quite literally put my feet up. The anaesthetic is wearing off as I write this. I took some pre-surgery photos of my toe but as with all my photos they were all terrible. Nevertheless I know you’re all interested so I’ll take more as the drama and the bandages unfold.

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On A Budget For Obvious Reasons

Facebook should take “Maybe Attending” off of the list of checkboxes for Events. If not remove it altogether, they should at least change it to “I Have Problems Saying No To People But I Still Won’t Show Up.”

Here’s what’s new as of this weekend:

I moved my drawing stuff into the studio with Ed. Not much more to say about that except I’m interested to see how much more productive I am, and also that I now have more room in my bedroom now that the drawing stuff is excised.

My cat is insane. Apparently he’s a vicious bastard when I’m not home, and an affectionate suck-up when I am (sometimes a jerk then too). He’s attacked at least two of my roommates over the past 12 hours while I was out. Me spending more time at the studio is not going to help this issue, so I’m at a loss. I’ve emailed the Vancouver Feline Hospital and the Humane Society to see if they have any advice. If he doesn’t straighten out I may have to put him into Cat Therapy, by which I mean a bag in the river.

Best and I had a serious talk about our relationship. It’s going really well. Crazy good. Neither of us expected it to go this well. The scariest thing about it is that nothing has gone wrong yet. It’s like we’ve been waiting for a bomb to drop and we’re still waiting, and that in itself is stressful. Too much shellshock from previous relationships? Perhaps we need to schedule a big fight so we can move on.

Since De is losing a roommate and I have studio rent to deal with, we’ve both decided that we’re on a budget, so we’ve been going grocery shopping and cooking, which is something I’ve fallen out of practice with. Until this weekend we had cooked at home twice – that’s once a month for those who are counting. But I am relearning my old skills and it’s a lot of fun to cook together, even if it doesn’t taste as good as restaurant food and is only slightly less expensive. I’ve also decided to be generally more spendthrift as I’ve been spending money like it’s been going out of style lately and we’re both saving up for events later this year (me: PAX and World Fantasy Con and possibly other comic cons) so I’m cutting back on the internet purchases for a while. But that said I picked up Tekkonkinkreet and Justice League: New Frontier from Happy Bats Cinema this week and watched both of them. JL:NF was a little disappointing but Tekkonkinkreet was great, except for the ending which was laboured and weird. I have been trying to figure out who is responsible for the style of that movie, and with the segment “Beyond” from the Animatrix, and one of the segments for the upcoming “Batman: Gotham Knight” DVD anthology coming out a the same time as the movie. I think it’s Studio 4°C, the production studio. Anyway, I like it, which makes me look forward to at least one of the six segments on the forthcoming Batman DVD, though I am dubious about the other five.
For obvious reasons.