Cimblog

I think the ideal regular social event would be a combination knitting circle and Dungeons and Dragons (actually I've read some random stuff on the topic and think it should actually be Pathfinder, but I have no direct experience of either).

My sister agrees, but Dallas to southwest Finland is just too much distance to manage that. I mean, there's videochat tabletop gaming, but the 8-hour time difference would be murder.

We both don't actually know how to play D&D and have never played even though our dad was a DM when he was in high school and college. Honestly, I feel betrayed that he never taught us in person.

My sister and I agreed that the best way to set up something like this would be to find a local knitting group and then canvas it for people who could be converted to the idea, but that depends on someone else in the group knowing how to play and being happy to teach you. If the person who wanted to organize it knows how to play, it would kind of remove the difficulty.

My sister is way ahead of me here because she has actually attended local knitting circles multiple times in her life - I don't think she has one now, but she used to go to one in Louisiana. I've been talking about wanting to go to one, but been too socially anxious, since before she was inspired by my example to teach herself to knit. 😕 Of course, language and culture issues add to my social anxiety and even if they didn't raise the initial bar to Just Doing It to insurmountability, socializing in Finnish as I would then have to do would be both mentally and emotionally tiring, much more so than just doing social things that make me anxious in general. Of course, conversing regularly in Finnish would be mentally tiring because my Finnish isn't fluent, so logically the practice would be good for me, but that doesn't make it less daunting.

Our cats are purebreds, which means they came with registered names. The late, great The Crazy was sold as Tea-Time Tune, and earned her name by being a neurotic, weird-as-hell mess (but in a cute way).

The BB was sold as Arwen, which actually suited her since she is a genetically and visually flawless, perfect specimen cat who is also petite, dainty, elegant, graceful, fearless, and sweet. But she gradually earned the nickname "BB HBIC" (later shortened to just BB), because when we first got her, she had the adorable habit of surreptitiously following the Crazy around and copying her, but in a tinier, daintier fashion.

Snookums was sold as Russel [sic] Crowe, and when we rescued (bought) him from Crazy Cat Lady Hell where he was being bullied by his 21 overbearing relatives, seeing his name on the papers decided us for sure (the lady had been calling him "Jere", a folksy Finnish dude name that's just as laughably OOC for Snookums as the comparison to Russell Crowe). "It must be fate," we said. "We have to rescue this cat!" Later we came home and followed the real Russell Crowe on Twitter, which we have never regretted, and Snookums, who was hiding in the corner of the sauna literally under his great-grandmother when we first met him, blossomed from a shy, skinny, cringing fraidycat into the pudgy, friendly snugglemonster we know and love. His dedication to snuggling has to be seen to be believed. He ALWAYS is in the mood for snuggles, and there's no kind of squeezing or manhandling him I've come up with that he doesn't enjoy, so his name is an excellent fit.

The bunnies are also purebreds, but when we got them from our buddy pierydys, she advised that if we weren't planning to breed and show them, registering them would be unnecessarily traumatic and expensive, since you have to get their ears tagged to do it. We didn't, and so we had to pick names for them ourselves. Since their sire is named Snickers, we decided on a locally-available candy theme, and we picked popular chocolate caramel Japp bars for the tri-colored one and pink-and-white Rowan-berry-flavored Pihlaja jellies for his ginger-and-white brother. Since we speak English at home, we translated Pihlaja and call him Rowan: unlike Japp, that one doesn't lend itself to anglicized pronunciation.

Since we named the bunnies ourselves, swapping out their names based on personality seems silly, but we actually call Japp "Tiny bunny" or "Tiny bun" more often than anything else. He's just so incredibly smol that when your eyes land on him, exclamations about his smolness sort of reflexively pop out ("HAVE YOU SEEN HOW TINY THE BUNNY IS SITTING ON THIS RUG????") and it's difficult to stop them. He also looks weirdly like a little old man in the face - I think it's the shape of his eyebrow and mustache floof - but nothing pithy to express this has come to us yet.

Ro's descriptive nickname is The Majestic Floof. His personality and behavior is not at all dignified, but his fur is so beautiful and, well, majestic that he can easily fool you just by posing.

I have not illustrated this post with pictures, but this blog is completely full of my pet photos if you want to refresh your memory.

Exciting adventures occurred when the washing machine just made distressed noises instead of doing the spin cycle today. We had to stop it and take the clothes out but they were still soapy. If you've never rinsed a mountain of detergent-infused cotton by hand before hanging it up to dry, allow me to not recommend it! I am under no illusions that all the soap came out, but at least the laundry won't be molding until the new washer is delivered.

☂ I got the boxed DVD set of the complete Poirot for the winter holidays last year. I already hoard thousands of Poirot screencaps on my harddrives & Poirot blog (maisouipoirot), but I started rewatching from the beginning with the closed captions turned on and taking caps of my favorite lines. I got sidetracked into watching some other stuff partway through though - before I even got to the modern widescreen era for that matter - and I still need to finish.

🎜 After we marathoned the last season of Game of Thrones - "Bad at continuity and dialogue; good at production values!" - waxjism and I wanted to watch something else together and we watched the two seasons of Mozart in the Jungle. Apparently this is an Amazon streaming show in the US? It stars Gael García Bernal (still tiny, still radiant, now greying) as an orchestra conducting former child prodigy and the female lead is an oboist, which was the instrument I played in middle/high school (I still have partisan feelings). Also Saffron Burrows is there, which seems significant to Wax. We enjoyed it a lot, although it's not really a fannish show. Apparently Jason Schwartzman is a creator/writer/runner as well as a secondary character, and it really has a his-kind-of-thing feel to it (kinda hipster, but more specific than that).

🎶 ↳ It was nice, but it mostly made me miss playing music: I don't have an oboe anymore (I quit when mine broke in 10th grade), but I have my grandmother's recorders and her collection of medieval and folk music. I used to play the recorder too when I played the oboe, just for fun, and I kept it up for a few years - I think the fingering would come back quickly, but I shudder to think of having to start developing embouchure muscles from scratch.

🕶 We randomly rewatched Hot Fuzz a couple of days ago - I think there was a gifset. Man, so good.

👓 I'm halfway through the first season of Supergirl. I'm completely pro-Supergirl, but I still hope the writing gets a little bit better. I had to take a break because I just couldn't stand anymore of those gag-me Teachable Moments and Inspiring Dialogues. It's definitely on the children's moral play spectrum, which doesn't have to be bad - it reminds me most strongly of My Little Pony, but My Little Pony, while aimed at a less cognitively sophisticated audience, makes up what it loses in subtlety by having (a) almost no male characters and (b) zero love triangles. I would be cool with it if the plot actually had Kara mature past her infatuation and end up with Cat Grant, which is definitely what the plot inadvertently (?) is still strongly suggesting is going to happen, but I can't believe that's going to happen. Excited for guest appearances from Tyler Hoechlin Superman though! what a precious. Now put him in a cardigan.

☙ I was listening to septembriseur about her current obsession with Oxford Detectives - specifically with Hathaway (the lovely Mr Billie Piper). It turns out there's two series of Lewis I haven't seen - I always miss them because they come out too far apart! - and a new series of Endeavour, plus I need to refresh my memory of the previous series of Lewis, Endeavour, and even (in a few spots) Morse to get all the references. On the minus side, that's a lot of rewatching and I have a very limited attention span for consuming media in ways other than reading. On the plus side, though, the last time I rewatched Morse from the beginning, I crocheted an entire lap blanket. I could use another blanket. I'm thinking a crocheted ripple blanket... of course that would mean buying a bunch of yarn though, so maybe just an Umaro...

While looking for help with my Party Cat problem¹ on the blog of cat behaviorist Jackson Galaxy, I came upon the concept of raw feeding for cats. I read more at first out of curiosity, but eventually wanted to try it, and I was able to convince waxjism that it would be a good idea.

We had always free-fed our cats almost exclusively dry food, with occasional treats of wet food; but because our cats suffer from what I now know is the extremely common habit of just licking the sauce/jelly from canned wet food and leaving the meat bits, we had pretty much given up on wet foods as a waste of money.

But after talking about it and reading about it, we at least wanted to try to

1. transition the cats to eating at specific mealtimes, which is the necessary 1st step in all the recommended solutions for Party Cats (we did it and it hasn't worked, but I guess hope springs eternal; plus, it's better, at least, and I'm not out of options) and


2. remove most or all of the carbohydrates from their diets (we did it and we discovered that it makes their poop smell WAY better and also decreases, though doesn't eliminate, the frequency of their barfing).

We started by transitioning gradually to wet food, but this is a tall order because:

1. All the cheaper wet foods and many of the expensive ones are bits-in-jelly-or-sauce and, as mentioned, the cats won't eat the bits, which is much more nutritionally worrisome when you're trying to make up the majority of their diet with it.


2. The vast majority of wet cat food, including most of the really expensive ones, are so-called "supplementary" foods that aren't nutritionally adequate.


3. The foods they like the best are the most expensive (Applaws, Canagan, Schesir, Thrive) but are somewhat too low in fat so even if we were made of money it wouldn't be good for them to just switch to those.

This is where the raw diet looks attractive, because it's fairly popular in Finland and high-quality, domestic pre-prepared raw foods for dogs and cats are easily available, and cheaper than feeding a canned diet (the drawback is that they're frozen, but it's worth it).

However, the cats didn't have the best reaction to my first few attempts.

• Cubes of beef liver? No, they wouldn't touch it.


• Cubes of ground salmon? They'll lick it and nibble it, but they won't eat it alone, and if it's mixed into canned food, they won't eat the canned food at all.


• Ground turkey (a mixture of meat and organ, so not like the ground turkey you've encountered for people) today was the best result so far. Snookums eventually ate both portions of it, but the BB wouldn't even lick it off my fingertip.

The comparative cost of buying nutritionally-complete wet foods that the cats will actually deign to eat is going to get burdensome if we can't replace a good chunk of that with either raw or dry. In fact, that's why we introduced gluten-free dry foods again after initially tapering off the kibble they were eating before: we tried to just add a little of the old food back in after a couple of weeks and the sudden return to the old level of cat poo stink made us realize that while we hadn't even noticed when the stink was suddenly reduced, we can't live like that anymore.



1. I don't know if I've mentioned it here, but I mention frequently on Twitter that Snookums has a habit of waking me in the middle of the night because he's bored, and if I don't get up with him, he'll wake waxjism when she needs to get up early for work.