Showing posts with label boorman. Show all posts
Showing posts with label boorman. Show all posts
Sunday, August 14, 2011
Sunday, June 12, 2011
Woo hoo!
(photo by The Baronette)
We vacuumed today, and not only did Boorman not hide right away, he also came out of hiding pretty much the instant we put the vacuum away. Now he's taking a nap with the Baronette. Last night we were watching a movie and he curled up in an unbelievably tiny space between us and slept happily. He loves it here.
In other news, anybody who uses Blogger--have you been getting "Service unavailable" 503 errors every five seconds for the past several weeks? Cuz I have.
Wednesday, June 1, 2011
Monday, May 23, 2011
Air conditioned alienation
This morning a guy came to do routine maintenance on the air conditioning. We wouldn't ever have sought out central air specifically, but it was installed already when we moved in here and the landlord pays for its maintenance, so there you go. I admit also that, if you're me, central air turns out to be one of those things that you insist you don't want but then when you have it you end up using it. In my meager defense, I don't use it nearly as much as most people. Because I'm better than them!
Uh, anyway, as the maintenance guy stomped around (nothing against him, he had to wear heavy boots), in and out of the house, up and down from the attic, thumping around with hammers, discovering a fault in the wiring, having trouble fixing it, thumping around more, going in and out, scaring the hell out of poor Boorman*, I found myself thinking about how the overarching system that is "my house" contains within it (at least) four major subsystems that I have absolutely no understanding of (and that's just the major housewide ones).
*Who is seriously going to start hating us, considering that all this trauma comes just two days after we took him to the vet for the first time** and because this week we have to shove glop in his eyes twice a day to treat his conjunctivitis.
**He was a surprisingly good boy, but man oh man did he hate it (of course).
Like, there was something wrong with the a/c. The guy who fixed it explained it to me. It didn't mean a thing to me. If it had gone wrong and there wasn't a guy to pay to come fix it (or, in this case, if there wasn't a guy to pay to come see if there's anything wrong on a semi-regular basis), it would have become a part of my house that didn't work. I wouldn't know how to take it out, either, so the systems that make it go would just be an enormous dead zone in the house, taking up space. I mean, it wouldn't be so bad if we didn't have air conditioning, of course, but still.
Or like, the plumbing. If something went wrong with that and there wasn't somebody to pay to come fix it, I'd be out of water. I wouldn't even know a good way of getting water without plumbing (particularly since I'm pretty sure the ground around here is toxic).
And I'm definitely not trying to say "Gosh, it sure is a good thing we have plumbing services and a/c repair!" I just think it's absurd how we've alienated ourselves so completely not only from our environment, but from our own homes--the very devices that we use to alienate ourselves from our environment. We've made the concept of "shelter" so complicated that we* don't even understand how it works--and that way there can be somebody who gets paid to understand it for us!
*I'm assuming I'm not the only one.
I feel like I should end this with some kind of a new insight, but I think that's all I've got.
Uh, anyway, as the maintenance guy stomped around (nothing against him, he had to wear heavy boots), in and out of the house, up and down from the attic, thumping around with hammers, discovering a fault in the wiring, having trouble fixing it, thumping around more, going in and out, scaring the hell out of poor Boorman*, I found myself thinking about how the overarching system that is "my house" contains within it (at least) four major subsystems that I have absolutely no understanding of (and that's just the major housewide ones).
*Who is seriously going to start hating us, considering that all this trauma comes just two days after we took him to the vet for the first time** and because this week we have to shove glop in his eyes twice a day to treat his conjunctivitis.
**He was a surprisingly good boy, but man oh man did he hate it (of course).
Like, there was something wrong with the a/c. The guy who fixed it explained it to me. It didn't mean a thing to me. If it had gone wrong and there wasn't a guy to pay to come fix it (or, in this case, if there wasn't a guy to pay to come see if there's anything wrong on a semi-regular basis), it would have become a part of my house that didn't work. I wouldn't know how to take it out, either, so the systems that make it go would just be an enormous dead zone in the house, taking up space. I mean, it wouldn't be so bad if we didn't have air conditioning, of course, but still.
Or like, the plumbing. If something went wrong with that and there wasn't somebody to pay to come fix it, I'd be out of water. I wouldn't even know a good way of getting water without plumbing (particularly since I'm pretty sure the ground around here is toxic).
And I'm definitely not trying to say "Gosh, it sure is a good thing we have plumbing services and a/c repair!" I just think it's absurd how we've alienated ourselves so completely not only from our environment, but from our own homes--the very devices that we use to alienate ourselves from our environment. We've made the concept of "shelter" so complicated that we* don't even understand how it works--and that way there can be somebody who gets paid to understand it for us!
*I'm assuming I'm not the only one.
I feel like I should end this with some kind of a new insight, but I think that's all I've got.
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Today's discoveries
1. Boorman does not like Don Cherry.
(I listened anyway. By the way, Youtube tells you that that song is by him with Krzysztof Penderecki; actually the album it's on has the same group--featuring Peter Brötzmann and other free jazz big-names--led by Cherry on one side and Penderecki on the other. Both sides are excellent, and I'm sorry this video cuts the track off at the fifteen minute mark.)
2. Boorman loves corks.
The Baronette has been playing fetch with him for about half an hour now--she throws the cork, his tail bushes up and he goes flying after it, bites it, runs back for more. Wonderful! We were afraid because we vacuumed for the first time since we brought him home--oh my god much needed--and we thought he'd be freaked out for a long time after, but less than half an hour later he came out from hiding and wanted to play. He's come such a long way in the not-four-weeks-yet he's been here.
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
Boorman!
As you know if you've been alertly reading BDR (as you should) or the comments section here, the most exciting world event in recent weeks is that we adopted a cat. We don't know if he has a name for himself, and wouldn't be able to pronounce it even if we did, so for convenience we're calling him Boorman (After the guy who directed the three best movies ever made, not after a Nazi who, you have to admit, spells his name differently, come on people. Oh, by the way, incredibly creepy sex towards the end of that Excalibur clip, be warned.). Here's the best picture taken of him yet, courtesy of the Baronette.
The rest of the pictures in this post are by me this morning, I'm not much for the photography, but hey.
He's about two years old. He's been in shelters for a least a year, which is hard for me to believe considering how beautiful he is, although his initial shyness may have put off any number of potential takers. I don't know what his life was like before he was in the shelters--I know he was found as a stray, but it seems unlikely that he would have been that way from the very beginning. He's a siamese mix--he's shaped just like a siamese (not the skinny little siamese, the bulkier kind, I don't know what the technical term is), but with patches of darker gray tiger stripes in various places on him and a short little raccoon tail, and he's absolutely beautiful. And huge. When he rolls over onto his back or his side and stretches out to his full length (which he spends about 70% of his waking time doing), he's gotta be at least three feet long. I haven't quite managed to get a picture of that, but this is close (though of course you've got nothing for scale there, but whatever):
The Baronette has had cats for most of her life, but this is my first pet outside of the occasional fish in my childhood. I knew it would be intense, but I wasn't prepared for this. I've loved individual humans before, and I've loved animals in general, and I've even been really good friends with individual animals before, but I've never loved an individual animal before, and it's like nothing else. The past couple of weeks have been a wonderful emotional rollercoaster, especially because like so many cats do he had a hard time adjusting to new surroundings and new people at first. He's still often skittish, but for about a week now he's been coming out from his hiding spot behind the couch more and more, and he's getting better all the time; every day he conquers another of his fears (one day he hangs out with us in the kitchen while we're making dinner, the next day he curls up next to us on the couch and falls asleep). Every time he does, my heart explodes. Sometimes it's incredibly, shockingly difficult: a few nights ago I was in tears because after a few days of being very friendly to me he suddenly seemed like he hated me, while being perfectly fine with the Baronette; it wasn't that I was jealous--if he had been scared of both of us I could have written it off as just a day's backslide, but that he was still into her made me wonder if he had just decided to dislike me, specifically. The next morning, I was in my bedroom, saw him sitting in the living room; I beckoned to him and he came to me from that distance for the very first time. We've been friends ever since.
He still has a long way to go to be truly comfortable and happy here, but he's gonna make it, and I think sooner rather than later. He's a total purr machine and extraordinarily affectionate; he's the type to head-butt your hand if you put it near him, and he rolls over for belly rubs at the drop of a hat. For the most part he hasn't been very talkative, but as I was composing this post he started screeching at me to come keep him company and relieve his anxiety at some of the goddamn eternal deafening yardwork that is the bane of his existence and mine. After a while of me petting him he started to feel better, and now he's just staring, fascinated, into the mirror.
The rest of the pictures in this post are by me this morning, I'm not much for the photography, but hey.
He's about two years old. He's been in shelters for a least a year, which is hard for me to believe considering how beautiful he is, although his initial shyness may have put off any number of potential takers. I don't know what his life was like before he was in the shelters--I know he was found as a stray, but it seems unlikely that he would have been that way from the very beginning. He's a siamese mix--he's shaped just like a siamese (not the skinny little siamese, the bulkier kind, I don't know what the technical term is), but with patches of darker gray tiger stripes in various places on him and a short little raccoon tail, and he's absolutely beautiful. And huge. When he rolls over onto his back or his side and stretches out to his full length (which he spends about 70% of his waking time doing), he's gotta be at least three feet long. I haven't quite managed to get a picture of that, but this is close (though of course you've got nothing for scale there, but whatever):
The Baronette has had cats for most of her life, but this is my first pet outside of the occasional fish in my childhood. I knew it would be intense, but I wasn't prepared for this. I've loved individual humans before, and I've loved animals in general, and I've even been really good friends with individual animals before, but I've never loved an individual animal before, and it's like nothing else. The past couple of weeks have been a wonderful emotional rollercoaster, especially because like so many cats do he had a hard time adjusting to new surroundings and new people at first. He's still often skittish, but for about a week now he's been coming out from his hiding spot behind the couch more and more, and he's getting better all the time; every day he conquers another of his fears (one day he hangs out with us in the kitchen while we're making dinner, the next day he curls up next to us on the couch and falls asleep). Every time he does, my heart explodes. Sometimes it's incredibly, shockingly difficult: a few nights ago I was in tears because after a few days of being very friendly to me he suddenly seemed like he hated me, while being perfectly fine with the Baronette; it wasn't that I was jealous--if he had been scared of both of us I could have written it off as just a day's backslide, but that he was still into her made me wonder if he had just decided to dislike me, specifically. The next morning, I was in my bedroom, saw him sitting in the living room; I beckoned to him and he came to me from that distance for the very first time. We've been friends ever since.
He still has a long way to go to be truly comfortable and happy here, but he's gonna make it, and I think sooner rather than later. He's a total purr machine and extraordinarily affectionate; he's the type to head-butt your hand if you put it near him, and he rolls over for belly rubs at the drop of a hat. For the most part he hasn't been very talkative, but as I was composing this post he started screeching at me to come keep him company and relieve his anxiety at some of the goddamn eternal deafening yardwork that is the bane of his existence and mine. After a while of me petting him he started to feel better, and now he's just staring, fascinated, into the mirror.
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