Cats, Plants and Birds

Yesterday ended, as it started, with cats and plants. After I finished house cleaning in honour of my sister’s impending visit, one of the cats noticed that one of my plants was dangling within reach and swipe, a large chunk of my wandering jew ended up on the floor (along with some dirt and dried foliage).

*Sigh*. The cat ate enough of the plant, before I rescued it, to make himself puke all over my nice, clean floor, and then disappeared, figuring his work was done. I cleaned up plant, cleaned up the puke, then carried on.

In the evening, before I went to bed, I noticed the cats dishes were empty, so being the responsible owner I am, I filled them. Now, the bookcase above the cats’ dishes has a row of plants on top and the spider plant decided to attack as I was setting the bowls back on the floor. In the ensuing struggle, the plant toppled, spilling dirt all over the floor and all over the freshly filled cat dishes. It took another half hour before I had the mess cleaned up and could go to bed.

*sigh again* Such is the way my life has been going.

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There is this really weird looking bird on the Africam today, and I’d really like to know what it is. It’s black, with red on the front of it’s neck and around it’s eyes. The beak is also black and starts out wide at the top, but then tapers off to a thin point, but curved like a toucan.

Okay, it was driving me crazy enough that I googled African Birds and I have discovered it is a Ground Hornbill. And just for your further edification, here’s a picture of it:



Oh, the things I do to get out of writing!

NaNoWriMo

Yes, I confess, I waited until the last possible second to sign up for NaNo this year, so I only have myself to blame for the fact that it took me almost three hours to get logged in.

The first few days are always crazy on the NaNo site. The server is overloaded as everyone tries to log in at once, and then you get morons like me who try to sign up at the last minute. I couldn’t remember my password from the last time I’d done NaNo, so I had to ask for a reset and because it was so slow I kept getting timed out, hence the three hours.

I was off to a slow start on Saturday, only about 700 words, but surprisingly enough it didn’t bother me. It was still 700 words more than I’d managed in the last couple of weeks.

I started to catch up on Sunday. Late Sunday night I tried to update my word count and I thought it didn’t work (again, I kept getting timed out until I gave up) but if you look to my NaNo widget on the right, you’ll see that it did work.

To stay on track I need to do a minimum of 1600 words a day, but I’m hoping for 2000. This will keep me ahead of the game for when the unexpected happens, like today when my sister from New Brunswick is dropping by for a late lunch.

So now, instead of writing the day away, I need to make a quick trip to the grocery store for something to feed her (and her husband), and a slap dash job of cleaning up the house. *sigh* Do you notice that these things happen every time I just start getting my writing momentum back?

Happy All Hallow's Eve

As promised, here’s my Halloween post about vampires.

First off, let me say that I now know more about vampires than I ever thought was possible.

The first reference I could find to vampires was a cave painting dating back to 3000 B.C. in Nepal which depicted blood drinking creatures. Ancient Indian holy writings (called the Vedas circa 1500 B.C.) depict the Rakshasas (or destroyers) as vampires. There are also tales of the vetalas, ghoul-lie beings that inhabit corpses, and a monster in India’s lore which hangs from a tree upside-down (like a bat) and is devoid of blood, called a Baital. The ancient Indian goddess Kali, with her fangs and a garland of corpses or skulls, was also linked with the drinking of blood. In Egypt, the goddess Sekhmet drank blood.

The ancient Malayans believed in a type of vampire called the Penanggalen. This creature consisted of a human head with entrails that left its body and searched for the blood of others, especially of infants. The ancient Greeks believed in the strigoe or lamiae, who were monsters who ate children and drank their blood. The ancient Peruvians believed in the canchus, devil worshipers who sucked the blood of the young. The Caffre, in Africa, believed the dead could return and survive on the blood of the living. Pottery shards from ancient Persia depicted creatures attempting to drink blood from men.

I could go on (and I probably will keep researching this for my own interest) but my original post topic from earlier in the month was, how did the vampire go from a creature of horror to a romantic hero?

The first literary reference to the vampire was not, as I believed, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). A more charismatic and sophisticated vampire can be found in The Vampyre, by John Polidori (1819). This was followed in 1847 by the best-selling (in its time) Varney the Vampire, by Thomas Prest. That being said, Stoker's Dracula is still probably the best known.

But when did the vampire cross over from horror to romance? I think we have to side track to films for a moment. The first vampire movie was Nosferatu in 1922, followed by Dracula (starring Béla Lugosi) in 1936. In 1958, Christopher Lee starred in Dracula, which was so popular it was followed by seven sequels. Let’s face it, these were strictly horror movies.

Then we skip ahead to 1979, when Frank Langella stars in Dracula. He portrays the vampire as sophisticated, charismatic, and sensual. Suddenly, we’re rooting for the blood sucker to win! To me, this was the turning point for the vampire. Okay, so technically he was still a blood-sucking fiend, but he was a hot, blood-sucking fiend. Maybe even a misunderstood blood-sucking fiend. All he really wanted was to find his soul mate and live happily ever after. Sounds like a romance to me.

To be honest, I can’t really pin point to an exact book when the vampire became a romantic hero. My first exposure to the vampire in romance was in the Silhouette Shadows series. Sometimes the vampire was the seductive antagonist, sometimes the hero. But they were always good reading.

Today’s vampire is handsome, wealthy and seductive. He possesses superhuman strength, heightened sensory perception, the capacity to hypnotize his victims and, last but not least, immortality. He offers old-fashioned romance in the arms of an alpha male.

In the last five years the vampire as a romantic hero has really hit a boom. I, for one, hope it continues.

If anyone’s interested in vampire romances, there’s a great booklist HERE . Have patience with this site, it’s pretty graphic intensive and may take a while to load.

For other reading, we have:
The Vampyre; A Tale by John Polidori 1819 HERE
and Varney the Vampire by Thomas Prescott Prest 1847 HERE

It’s A Brand New . . . . Quiz!

I couldn’t help but notice it’s been a while since I last posted. Not that I really have a lot to post about this time, but when in doubt, throw a quiz at them!

Yeah, I know I’m pathetic, but it’s part of my charm.

Really it is.

There's a 48% Chance You've Been Abducted By Aliens

Maybe you've really been abducted by aliens... but probably not. Let's face it. You're just a little weirder than most people.

What Are the Chances that You've Been Abducted by Aliens?

Cam Again?

I’m not crazy. Just thought you’d like to know that.

I really did see snow flying yesterday, so did others. Many others. And today I had to go out to replenish my supply of gummi worms and I passed several cars that had snow on them, as in they had to scrape their cars off this morning!

*sigh* Guess it’s time to put away the patio furniture.

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I get teased a lot because I love disaster movies. Dante’s Peak, Twister, Volcano, Deep Impact, Armageddon, Day After Tomorrow - I love them all. This led me to my very first web cam, the Volcano cam that’s trained on Mount St. Helens. I used to watch it faithfully and was sometimes rewarded by a wisp of smoke wafting up from the crater. Wouldn’t it be the coolest thing ever to be watching the volcano-cam and see the mountain erupt? Just sayin’ . . .

The thing I like about web cams is that it allows us to experience things we might never otherwise experience. I’m talking about the wild life cams (I’ve seen eagle, falcon, otter), ghost cams, UFO cams . . . so get your minds out of the gutter people!

My favorite web cam of all time has got to be the Africam. I can spend hours watching this. You have your choice of two views, the Nkorho Pan or the Elephant Plains. I like Nkorho. The camera is set up to watch a watering hole day and night. To date I have seen an elephant, rhinos, lots of different birds, gazelle, a herd of wildebeast, warthogs, some kind of fox, and today there were monkeys.

Hey! It beats waiting for the snow to start falling.

Check it out yourself here: Africam

Seriously?

What kind of a cosmic joke is this? My last post - two days ago - pointed out that it was finally cold enough to make it officially fall. The trees have mostly turned, they’ve started losing their leaves, but there’s still a lot of green out there. My purple petunias are still blooming!

I was using the dining room table to sort the stacks of stuff I’ve removed from my office to “organize” before I move them back in and I looked out the deck doors and it was . . . snowing! Oh, how I wish my camera was working!

We’re not just talking a few flakes that could be mistaken for birch seeds, we’re talking serious white stuff here!

And you know what’s next, don’t you? Christmas!

I am so not ready.

It's Official

I finally had to turn the heat on last night. The frost was thick enough on my car this morning to require scraping (if I was going anywhere). It’s officially fall.

The leaves are still pretty nice, but not quite as good as they were last weekend. There’s a lot of them missing. In another couple of weeks they’ll just be a memory until next fall.

Yesterday I took the daughter to Port Huron to pick up her wedding dress. I swear, we spent more time at the border waiting to get into and out of the U.S. than we did in the U.S. But, the good news is, not only did the hot border guard let us back into Canada without paying duty on her dress, I got my potato peeler back!

Today I’d like to deal with a couple of the stacks of stuff I have piling up - folders and papers and notebooks. I also want to update my storage bin - the plastic bin I have to hold all my old files I don’t need close at hand, but can’t get rid of yet (tax forms, old bills, etc.) - and I’m going to gather all my miscellaneous files into another plastic bin. Right now they’re scattered all over the place.

Maybe by tacking the mess just a little at a time I'll eventually get the spare bedroom finished. Although the cats have been enjoying the pile of boxes stacked in the center of the room - more places to hide.

It would be nice if I had time to clean out my office supply cabinet (the cabinet I store all my paper, pens, binders, etc. in) but I’m not counting on it. I might, however, squeeze in some writing time though.

In otherwords, I’m planning a quiet day today, albeit a little on the domestic side.