Tag: cat

Lickety Spit

The cats being friendly, for a change. It’s the Geminids tonight, but in keeping with the rest of the year we’ve had unrelieved gloom. Tomorrow night looks like it might be better, but there’ll be a nearly full moon.
A2 is reading Locked In* by Jussi Adler Olsen. Department Q’s lead detective is jailed and beset by assassins on all sides for fearsomely complicated reasons.

Best Friends?

It rained a lot last night, but the damned pigeons have been sitting in the rain gauge again and blocked it with their crap.
A1 is rereading Ghostwritten by the splendid David Mitchell, a welcome change after the recent run of humdrum books. Rereading DM is always worthwhile, with shared characters and previously undetected links between novels becoming apparent.
A2 is reading Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan which is also humdrum.

Booktally Day

It’s Booktally Day! To celebrate, here is a childhood drawing of our old cat Mogadishu by the inestimable Gez, still an artist, which has hung on our wall for 30+ years but is seldom seen because it is hemmed in by bookshelves. This year we have read 282 books between us, bringing the total to 2879.
Today A2 is reading This Is Going to Hurt by Adam Kay, the diary of a gynaecologist. It is laugh-out-loud funny which does not surprise me because last time I saw a gynaecologist I came out in stitches, but not wet-yourself funny, because that would require intervention by a gynaecologist.

New Year’s Eve

2023 was the year AI (but not A1) took up art and produced masterpieces like Slow Horse Cat, done in seconds this evening.
December was not only our rainiest ever December: 163.8mm but also our wettest month of all time. It was more than averagely cold and the least sunny month ever.
The family were too ill to come to dinner and do the quiz so our average for 2023 is 10.2756346153846, an improvement on last year’s 10.1730769230769.
A1 is rereading Bad Actors by Mick Herron. A2 is reading The Lonely Ones* by Hakan Nesser.

Snow Cat

This morning we woke to a winter wonderland. Cheers Storm Larisa.
The weather station was a bit under the weather
but by afternoon it had mostly melted. The staff at Alley Cats Cafe Bar and Music Emporium had managed to keep their cat snow sculpture intact in an impressive act of maintenance while all around everything was dripping.
Admin1 is reading Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell.

Miaow

Haven’t seen anything interesting lately so here are our cats keeping the bed warm.
Admin1 is reading Righteous Prey by John Sandford (reliably entertaining). Admin2 is reading Bewilderment by Richard Powers which was much better than I anticipated after the snorefest that was The Overstory: a steal from Flowers for Algernon, which he quite rightly referenced, with lots of environmentalism and a serving of schmaltz but a good dollop of skiffy sensibility too.

Egyptian (Virtual) Holiday

Admin1 has been playing Assassin’s Creed Origins, a vast open-world game set in Egypt, circa 57BC. Some effort has gone into making it accurate, with consultant historians and linguists, and it’s undeniably impressive.
Here’s an eagle’s-eye view of Alexandria at sunset, taking in the Hippodrome, the museum, the famous library, the theatre, docks and ending up at the Ancient Wonder Pharos lighthouse, rediscovered in 1968.

There are also pyramids and the Sphinx…
…and, of course, cats:

 
Meanwhile, Admin1 is reading The Chalk Circle Man by Fred Vargas and Admin2 is reading The Other Mother by Michel Bussi.

RIP Titan


We called him Titan because we thought he was going to be big but he was tiny and died of gut trouble before he was two years old. We will miss his calm nature, friendliness and lovely soft fur xxx