I have been posting a bunch of stuff under access lock, but I didn't want to ONLY do that, so

• We've had a very stressful vacation, and so has Anubis, because his chemical castration implant wore off and he apparently has a ton of testosterone. He's going crazy: he's peeing on everything, up to like ten times a day, there's pee EVERYWHERE, he even peed on the bed with Wax in it and on the headboard above my head; he's upset and clingy and sad all the time; he must be tortured by horniness, but he doesn't really know what it is and he hasn't ever even seen or smelled an unfixed female cat since the onset of the hormones, so it's like an existential torment. Poor little guy. But our house has become unlivable because it is entirely made of water-vulnerable surfaces. He is going to have to go back to the breeders this weekend, and we don't know if he will be able to get over his aggressive hate for Tristana when he's fixed: we hope he might, but knowledge of the Cat World suggests this is a bit unlikely.



• Wax is back at work as of this week and as a result of the above, we finished very little of the home renovation stuff that we urgently needed to get done. Most urgently, there are windows that are nearly falling off the house, particularly some hard-to-reach second floor ones, that urgently need to be removed and restored before the glass panes fall out of them, but it's impossible to remove them from inside the house so... that's not great. We knew this as early as last winter, we've just been putting off trying to get them down and restore them because we're not sure how we can get up there with a ladder, if it's even possible, and we've never restored windows before and it looks hard.



• I have two months left of my work contract and I'm taking anxiety meds almost every day. Also terrified because I don't really know what to do next, or what's the best work to try to look for next, but I think we have decided the most urgent thing is getting a driver's license. I missed that thanks to all the above - we had it marked down for this summer vacation. So I will do that first.



• I have started reading the Mayfair Witches trilogy. It's not that it's more interesting to me than the vampires are, but after watching seasons 1 and 2 of Interview with the Vampire, I was afraid the events were too fresh in my mind and might feel a bit boring if I read it right away. (I know there were lots of changes from the books in IWTV, of course - Wax and I have discussed it extensively, as these were some of her teenaged favorite comfort reads, and she reread them all last year. Except not the later crazier ones, you know, meeting Jesus and the devil.) Anyway, we also started watching AMC's Mayfair Witches, and I was intrigued by obvious bad adaptation decisions. Wax herself was pointing out changes and saying she couldn't figure out the motivation for them. Also the screenwriting is just a lot weaker than in IWTV (I say this after 3 episodes, so if it gets better later, I haven't found out yet). But anyway, I decided to start there. The Witching Hour and Lasher, published in the early 1990s, are the first Anne Rice books I've ever read, and there are a lot of things to interest me there - I can babble more about it some other time. But the overwhelming dominant impression from these books is unexamined and incoherent Catholic obsessions, in ways that are very, very weird, and often very hilarious. ( Read more... )