"Once I had no-thing
now I have some-thing"

Arrgh!

We watched Friday's Britain's Got an Extra Pop Factor and Then Some 2 + 1 last night, and that damned winner's song is permanently stuck on repeat in my head. Watching it sandwiched in bits of the Strictly Cum Dancing final was slightly surreal though. Rachel and Vincent should've won chiz.

Oh, and Happy Solstice to one and all; I'll see if I can actually write the occasional substantive blogpost as the Port side of this world starts leaning back toward the sun. Probably not.

Thanks to hashbangperl for pointing me at this photoset.

Looking through the set, I found links to this incident, and thence to this one. Still, the innocent have nothing to fear, eh?

New arrivals (Foul Ole) Ron and (Coffin) Henry showing the uncertainty and diffidence that they've exhibited since their catbox was first opened on our return home.

Henry, on experience thus far, seems to be in intimate association with Ron's Smell.

This is getting to be a habit, and one that can stop right now, thank you very much.

Aliss, the maddest cat I've known, died here at home half an hour ago. Whatever ailed her took its final hold this afternoon and evening: she knew, we knew, and what remains of the tribe knew that her time was up.

She took up residence on the carpet against the sofa; we've sat up with her to the end, which came quickly: a brief convulsion, she arched her back, and was gone.

Quite why we should lose three of our family in less than three months, and to three unrelated causes, I don't know. Enough now.

We're having a small whiskey each, in remembrance, before going to bed: I'll be out digging a hole in the morning, cutting through the frost to give her body back to the Earth.

Goodbye Aliss; you were loved, and you are and will be missed.

Go well then, blue_condition, you were a miserable, curmudgeonly old¹ git with fine taste in music, Indian food, BEER and social justice; I thank you for the gifts you gave me, and I wish I'd actually got to meet you.

My thoughts and sympathies are with all your family and friends; I'm not going to get up to York for the wake, so please, someone, have a pint on my behalf in his memory.

¹ you were ten years younger than me: there's no justice

Many thanks to everyone who's posted sympathies and thoughts for our losing Bada, here, on ramtops' LJ, on the the cats' blog, on my Facebook, on IRC, and in real life.

I'm not having what you could call the happiest of birthdays today, but you've all helped as much as any help other than the passing of time can do. Life (and its inevitable end) will continue, but can we please not lose any more of our tribe quite yet, please?

We visited Bada at the vet hospital this afternoon, after her emergency admission yesterday. No certainties yet, but she survived the night, which was very much in doubt, and is at least out of her oxygen tent and on nasally administered food as well as intravenous saline and antibiotics.

I like to think that she was aware of who I was when I gave her a gentle skritch; she lifted and turned her head to accommodate my finger, but that could as well be an automatic reaction. All we can really do now is wait, and worry, and hope that we don't get phoned before we get in touch tomorrow afternoon for another visit.

It was my bad judgement call last week that, while it didn't cause her illness, likely made its development worse. Which, frankly, makes me feel like shit, but bad decisions can't be undone, only learned from, and I hope that I have.

Anyhow.

In an attempt at finding a lighter tone (or at least one in more questionable taste), would I be alone in feeling just slightly disturbed by the sight, driving home, of a passing van labelled "D & C Snacks"?

I expect anyone of a Bristolish persuasion reading this will already know it's happening, from quercus and elsewhere: Zombies invading Babylon Circus in the Slavers' Quarter tomorrow:

I thought it worth a repeat as I just read the datapoint that "[m]edium-sized cities seem are more apt to suffer from “placelessness”—the debilitating condition that saps a community of civic and economic vitality due to a lack of distinctive local character and lively public spaces" and "inflict huge damage on themselves, such as bulldozing the heart of downtown to build a parking ramp, high-rise hotel, convention center, corporate headquarters, or stadium."

Bristol, of course, still does have a sense of place: in Easton, in St Pauls, in Totterdown, on North Street and Gloucester Road. But for how much longer as enclosure of public spaces and destruction of communities by demolition and the ethnic cleansing of gentrification continues? How many shops have closed, replaced by wine bars and worse, in the last couple of years on those two streets I mentioned?

What's the effective impedance of a week? Can you split it with a t-piece?

Saturday morning, we went to CostCo, to swap out the faulty 20kg bag of basmati that I'd discovered a couple of days before when emptying it into its storage box - blueish green lumps of compacted mouldy rice isn't something I wanted to eat. They were happy to refund, once they'd found the original transaction in their database though, as ramtops found, they are a lot less efficient at crediting refunds than debiting for purchases (they had both beurre d'Isigny and kabanos, which were out of stock last time we went, and we bought a fair wodge of other stuff too as well as replacing the rice).

In the afternoon I went veg shopping on my bike, to the Sweet Mart as we needed coriander and that's as good a place as any to be guaranteed lots of good, fresh green stuff. I bought a 5 litre can of Spanish EV olive oil and sundry other bits as well; that left my pack pretty much full up. Cycling back toward St Werberghs, I was reminded of the Bristol Anarchist Bookfair that I had managed to forget all about (there was a particularly fine red and black banner on the cycle bridge across the M32). So, to the community centre, which was pretty much invisible under its encrustation of overlapped and interlocking bicycles. I added mine to the only clear bit of railing I could find (thought I might have to lock it to the centre's eyeball for a bit) and joined the throng inside. And outside. Lots of folks, and a lovely positive friendly atmosphere, but (and probably just as well) my already loaded backpack could only accommodate a couple of books - Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army, by Jeremy Scahill and That's Revolting!: Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation, by Bernstein Sycamore.

Thence to the wholefood shop for muesli which, bizarrely, they had run out of in the combination: loose innatub, worth eating. So, on to Wild Oats up the top end of Whiteladies Road and I was feeling that oil+books by the time I got up there, and even more so on the (thankfully mostly flat or downhill) way home. FWIW, the pack weighed 30lb (slightly less if our scales weighed right; slightly more if they're still 4lb under as they used to be when I used to compare them with the gym).

Later, there was fine food and too much alcohol+chocolate raisins, but I managed to start the process of baking a loaf - starter dough left overnight. Sunday, I finished the loaf and we watched huge quantities of B5 (interspersed with cutting the it's-mostly-green-so-I-might-as-well-call-it-a-lawn): from about half way though S3, we finally bugged out 2 eps into S4, though the temptation to continue was only barely resisted.

But now it's Monday, way after lunch, and I suppose I'd best get back to coding…

Before youall start frothing at the mouth and attacking Sarah Palin for all the wrong reasons (it's not as though there's a shortage of right ones), have a read of pecunium's excellent summary post on what's been happening in the Twin Cities in the run up to the RNC; rather more important in the general scheme of things, no?