ans99

i saw waters of mars last night and it was mostly godawful. although the last ten minutes (or so) were downright delightful, and i mean that sincerely as a devoted master fangirl for whom the tennant "emo-creep" doctor is seriously starting to wear thin.

to commemorate this awesome final ten minutes (or so), and to get ready for the finale, i've decided to rename my child-rats, bruce and harvey. they'll now be known as Time Lord Victorious and Master in a Hoodie, respectively.

i can't wait to notify my vet.

here's a picture of them snuggling wilson, former King Rat now deceased (long live the king).

so i've been neglecting lj in favor of tumblr lately, which is just an excellent, excellent service that i highly recommend to you all. i have two weeks worth of thoughts to sift through and actually decide what is worth telling anyone, but i'm not about to write a long update at 3 in the morning-- just wanted to make a note for those who've been following the little rat saga, and actually care, that the little twerps are starting to "get along." which means there's about two or three scuffles a day as opposed to constant animosity. it's funny, in a way, because i'd been trying to get this worked out for at least a week, and it wasn't until i'd literally given up on it ever happening that they all surprised me. so i'll tell you this little story while i sit here and watch a disney channel movie i'm pretty sure is secretly about ken's life:

we'd been doing introductions and gradually wilson (aka King Rat) had been attacking the newbies less and less. so we decided maybe it was time to put them in the same cage together. it had multiple levels so if the newbs needed a place to run i had been keeping them separated in the multilevel cage with this piece of coroplast between the levels when we weren't there, just as a safety measure. well, the newbs were not integrating well. basically wilson was being a huge bully and chasing them whenever he encountered them, nipping at their tails and backs. he was also spending all of his time in the top level, which they were used to occupying, and no matter how many times we tried to show them that, yes, there is a bottom level with a food dish and water bottle and hideyhole that they can occupy, they'd just huddle pitifully on the "mezzanine" levels of the cage, which had none of these things.

i'd been so desperate i actually gave them all a bath together in the kitchen sink, hearing THAT could work. yeah right. no matter what i tried, in fact, they looked like they were going to be miserable with the arrangement, so i gave up after a couple of days of this and separated them (newbs on top, wilson on bottom). i put the coroplast in, stated my intentions to ken that i would not remove it anymore, and ken and i went out for a couple of hours. now keep in mind that coroplast had been in all night before, with no problems (except we'd found out bruce had figured out how to slip past it somehow recently, but we couldn't really figure out why he'd WANT to).

so imagine my surprise when we came back to find the newbies on the mezzanine once again, AND a huge hole chewed into the coroplast. judging by the debris it hadn't been wilson who'd chewed the hole-- it was the newbs. after freaking out that they'd chewed a hole in coroplast (they're fine by the way, no ill effects yet so i guess they managed not to swallow much), ken and i kinda looked at each other and he said something akin to "well there's a clear signal." so we left the coroplast out.

and after that, things calmed down significantly. the other day i finally saw wilson and bruce sharing the mezzanine together. i don't know if they'll ever progress to snuggling together but i'm just glad i don't have to worry about one being half-eaten in the morning. so that's good enough for me.

oh god, this disney channel movie is totally ripping off the sandman and in turn seems to have been totally ripped off by up. a dog named barnabas with a voice translator around its neck? come on disney, you're supposed to be the trendsetters here.

ah, it just got even better: they just introduced a clone of rygel from farscape.

ok. goodnight, from the zoo.

currently i am giving my cat a forced handshake and trying really hard to remember what i've been doing for the past whatever.

oof, she just hurtled over me. i'm pretty sure from the way she gave me a Significant Look afterwards it was punishment.

anyway, we got another camcorder about 1.5 weeks ago. it's a panasonic gs400, which is basically the only camera under $1000 that i ever wanted. it has that green line the last one did, so we're just assuming they're all like that and most prosumers have just been too dumb to notice. we can just crop a few pixels off the side if we don't shoot in widescreen, because other than that it's an awesome camera for the price ($700 used, i think, including tax, etc.).

fourth of july weekend didn't go exactly as planned, but it wasn't that bad. i had just convinced alan we really really should just go to bodie and art out for the fourth, when a couple of quick calls to campgrounds in the area revealed that apparently EVERYONE had the idea to go to mono lake and yosemite that weekend, so even if we found a campsite we would have been miserable, and there were absolutely no guarantees. even the "first come first served" sites were full by thursday afternoon. i guess everyone else was much more firmly ensconced in their plans than we were; we bailed and decided to take a day trip out to point reyes instead the friday before. although the campsites there looked absolutely fanfuckingtastic, and we'll have to go back on a less crowded weekend and stay overnight.

point reyes was pretty beautiful, and although it really seemed to emo alan out, i felt at peace there, and it was a not really "despite" the fog thing so much as "especially with". we saw our share of dead things and live things and soon to be dead (probably) things, including:

-tule deer, first through a telescope and then right outside our car window
-bird trapped in a historic farmhouse, bashing its head against the window and completely ignoring the crack in the door. we laid down some tortillas for it in the hopes it'd find them and eat its way out but i would not be surprised in the slightest if it died. of course alan and i completely capitalized on its pain and took loads of pictures, because we are the paparazzi for suffering animals. ken took the high road and refused to film such things with the camcorder for very long.
-beached seal, that we were warned to stay away from but we guessed nobody would ever come rescue (alan's quote of the day: "that's cold comfort to a dead seal. i want to pet it!")
-dead seabird of some sort on the beach, and lots more in the sky

it was a pretty fun time, the three of us road tripping it and listening to mostly my music, and a smidge of alan's horrible music. it was cool to take the video camera too; ken used it the most, and every scene subsequently ends with an extreme zoom or the camera doing a 180-degree roll. i guess that's ken's signature filming style :)

after hiking on tomales point (no tamales to be found, unfortunately) we drove around the point a little before heading to find something to eat. ended up at this standard-looking restaurant with above-average food, almost seasons-like. i had a buttered rum that was pretty fantastic, but got stiffed on a veggie burger even though our table neighbors were able to order one. etc etc.

((kitsune cute-report: she's twitching her nose and paws now, deep in dreamland next to me on the futon :D this cat likes to lay out all floppy paws; i guess she hasn't quite grown into her body yet. it saddens me that she's probably dreaming about eating our other pets :/))

i took something like 3 GB of pictures, and i want to start uploading them soon but i've run across another problem-- i am out of space on my c drive. so basically i need another hard drive to backup my pictures before i feel comfortable working with them. and the only way i can have three hard drives is if i upgrade my case to one my parents gave me. all this involves work and time we really haven't been able to afford yet, so no pictures for a while :(

the rest of the weekend we did errands mostly. we decided cat condos are way too expensive these days so we're building our own. lowe's is a damn frustrating place in that it sells 4 x 4s too long to fit in our car but do not have the ability to CUT DOWN 4 x 4s. i find that pathetic. it's funny how some hardware stores are good for some items but lousy for others.

i'm also planning on knitting kits a collar (will be velcro for breakaway purposes), a cat toy and a pet bed.

hooping is going okay. i can vortex now, and also shimmy up to and hoop at the chest. sometimes i can hoop at the knees for a couple of rotations. i'm working on vertical hooping. i really need to practice more often, and learn some new moves, since i've started tentatively working on a routine to "time is running out" by muse.

july 4th itself we spent playing rock band with mario, and succeeded again in completely missing the fireworks. i think it's the second year in a row we've done that.

our rats got names (bruce and harvey) and lost their balls this week, and we've started introducing them to wilson. the going is slow; last night was the first time and basically wilson puffed up so much he looked like he was going into anaphylactic shock, then aggressively groomed harvey. at that point we were afraid he'd actually BITTEN harvey so we took the babies out.

after reading up a bit more and wising up on some issues today, i stuck their cages next to each other and switched them for a while. wilson spent the whole time ransacking their cage like someone sneaking into the enemy's office and searching for Hard Evidence in a conspiracy movie, while bruce and harvey pulled a goldilocks and hung out in wilson's bed. wilson then proceeded to one-up THAT by eating their food. i'm not sure who was more passive aggressive.

this weekend was pretty uneventful. we tried fuzio's new location and had a great dinner, and then crashed early friday night. saturday was 7/11 so we got a free slurpee with mario, then played some rock band. we're going to enter pepsi's rock band video contest, so we "rehearsed" our song a little, made avatars that actually looked somewhat like us, and talked about the video and how/when/what we were going to film. i think next weekend we're going to either film down in stockton or kidnap mario for the day and bring him back up here; either way it should be an adventure.

sunday i got the best jeans and skirts ever and then pretended to do art.

today i had an animation class at the cc, taught by the very inspiring and extremely awesome kevin okulolo of leafworthy.com. i already have an awesome idea for an animated series/film. can't wait to get started on it!

actually lately i've been bursting with ideas, so many and so fast i find i don't have time to write them down. i don't know if it's this 2xcreative thing i'm participating in, or just thinking about my future more and more, or finally finding a balance between work and life, or not getting enough life in so my mind's been wandering. or you know, maybe i angered the dream king. either way it's pretty cool, because i never really had many ideas (that i actually liked or thought were any good). most of them came from ken or others much more witty than i, and i always saw it as my biggest failing and the most frustrating roadblock in my art. now they're finally starting to come. :)

work, by the way, is going aight. i'm being randomly social enough i hope to not earn anyone's ire, and they seem to really appreciate my work. it's a little weird having to use a WYSIWYG, but fortunately when it acts up i can fall back on my CSS/HTML hardcoding knowledge (one of the few things i'm truly grateful to henk for, actually). and i'm starting to see the convenience of WYSIWYG, although i really think ultimately depending solely on one and never learning how to code is extremely detrimental to website maintenance and design.

eh, could be worse. we use PCs ;P

tonight we tried round 2 of rat thunderdome. unfortunately the babies remembered wilson's "King Rat RAWRRAWR" routine from last time and guess what? we learned tonight that they are capable of leaping out of the tub! we kept them in there as much as we could though, and wilson got a lot of his dominance displays in. including nosing their abdomens, sniffing around them carefully as if they were military recruits up for inspection, and sidling his butt to their butts to scent mark them. of course through all this the babies squeaked vociferously and jumped out of the tub at every opportunity presented. eventually though they learned there was one stance that did not offend King Rat, and that was staying in a sort of bent over half-standing position on their hind legs, their front legs in front of them, and freezing like the tanuki statue in super mario 3.

i found the whole thing much more amusing than i probably should. rats are so ridiculous.

afterwards they all got chickpeas.

i'll have to steal a sentiment from kyle cassidy here-- i love my life right now.

ah. i also quit my diet. i suck.

we were lucky enough to get in on some male "baby" rats (7 weeks old, so still growing but not what i'd consider babies) via freecycle. new companions for wilson, that aren't sick from the get-go, yey (yes, we're still doing quarantine). we went down to see them last night and it turns out the freecycler in question is a vet, with many many animals. we met her husband joe, this unimposing guy who said hi and then proceeded to play with their giant dog, we chatted with her about exotics and picked out two of the babies to pick up this friday, and that was that.

tonight i was googling her for fun, to see what clinic she works at if any, because she seemed supernice and hey, if she's closer than bradshaw maybe i'd take our exotics to her.

turns out her husband is THIS joe, CEO of 4orty2wo entertainment (they do the immersive game-type marketing on the web for things like halo, year zero, the dark knight, etc.).

so, wow, that was random.

http://twitpic.com/6vkyl

meet dot and dash, the dumbo twins (we may come up with better* names later)

we're fake-quarantining them right now (although i really don't see a point), and they're getting checked out at the vet thurs. bradshaw will do it for free because they got adopted from the shelter-- how cool is that?? probably soon after we'll try introducing them to wilson and see how he takes it.

compared to wilson these dudes are HUGE. they're a different breed (dumbos vs brown norway) but god almighty, it's a big difference in size. wilson's fur is also softer. he'll definitely always be my baby :)

*hopefully better than 'marcel' and 'toing'

my rat, wilson... just totally did some bouldering across my back a few minutes ago.