The lyf so short

Important notice: We are no longer cat-less!

Despite our sad state, we hadn't really managed to bring ourselves to adopt new cats after the loss of 'náro and Mr Darcy. But then the animal shelter in [home town] announced that they were now looking for new homes for the two litters of kittens that had been found (?!?!) last November, which they'd held back on because they didn't want any kittens to end up as Christmas presents. And we checked on the kittens (who weren't at the shelter proper, but with a lady who habitually looks after very young or very sick cats for the shelter). And after the other resident cats had approved of us (quite literally - we got into the room and three elderly cats immediately demanded ear scritches and headbutted us, while another, supposedly more reserved cat climbed onto Jörg and curled up in his arms) we were allowed to adopt two kittens on the spot (as soon as they were vaxxed and chipped, that is). They moved in today. (They are about four months old. It has been precisely four months since Náro died. The significance is not lost on me.) They have been vaccillating between "explore all the things!", "feed me seymour", "don't talk to me or my brother ever again" and "if you don't play with me right now I will fade away" all afternoon. I'm sure we'll get along splendidly.

The girls at the animal shelter have named them Drogo and Daenerys (ignoring the fact that they're actually both boys), which, considering that nobody in this house cares much for GoT and they don't react to anything except "kitten" anyway, are not going to stay their names. So we're still on the lookout for names. One name, really. The children, surprisingly, have no ideas except "if one of them were red we could name him Garfield" (unless "They look like Toothless but that's a stupid name"* counts like a suggestion-cum-dismissal). Jörg really likes the name Bagheera, though, so that will probably end up being used. It is fairly fitting - they're both perfectly black, with yellow-green eyes. I am tempted to call the other one Eugenides. (After years of refusing to touch the series because I was scared that it would put me off one of the fanfic novels I still haven't finished - via fandom osmosis, I had got the impression that there were rather a lot of similarities - I caved in last December and have promptly fallen deep into the Queen's Thief rabbit hole, and the name really is perfect for a cat, if we leave aside the sad reality that it is a very long and cumbersome name, and the short form, Gen, looks like the word for "gene" in German.) My suggestions of Elrond and Elros for the set have unfortunately been rejected, as have been Cicero (Kiki! :D) and Tiro. :(

Currently - when we are not saying "kitten" because that's what the pragmatic animal welfare lady has been using these past months for all 14 (!!!) kittens, so at least it works - they're "round tail" and "pointy tail" because the tips of their tails are the only way in which they can be told apart. We will have to settle on proper names before that sticks...

Anyway, please give a warm welcome to the two new additions to our household, whatever they'll end up being called!
.
(And pardon the shitty candid camera under the table photo. I'm sure there will be better pictures eventually!)


_ _ _
*especially in the German translation, Ohnezahn

* After our warm and dry April, we've spent the last week firmly in the grip of the Ice Saints. (My neighbour says that it can't be the Ice Saints because this year, everything is four weeks ahead of its time, but the cold spell ended on May 15th - the day of St. Sophia, who is counted as the "final" Ice Saint - so I think it was the Ice Saints nonetheless. He's free to call it Sheep Cold, of course, though I don't know what he'll do if the actual Sheep Cold hits in a month?)

* The mother-in-law gave me money for plants for my birthday so naturally I went wild and invested in a lot of... herbs. Mostly herbs. "Exotic" kitchen herbs (a.k.a. stuff what our ancestors ate and now we forgot about it) and then some actual exotic plants (a.k.a. stuff what grows in the Andes or something) and - woo hoo! - some dyeing plants that I finally found to order. Madder, blue wild indigo and woad. By the time I'll have taught myself to spin presentable yarn, they'll probably have become strong enough to use them. ;)

* I went to London to see the Queen! ... actually I just went "into the bees". On Wednesday, I did a (necessary, to prevent swarming) check-up on my hive. On the previous two check-ups, I'd always found capped brood and fat larvae, so everything was probably all right, but I never saw the queen - or any eggs - so the queen might have been dead for a week, or the workers might already have started to produce drone brood. Well, on Wednesday I not only found capped drone brood and worker brood - so a queen definitely had to exist - but also uncapped brood in various stages of development, and new eggs - and the queen. Yay! They didn't use the drone frame at all yet so I couldn't do any of the non-chemical anti-varroa treatments (a.k.a. "Kill the Men"), but they're spreading and starting to fill the honey super, so I figure they're doing all right.
I also started a new fledgling colony (a BBC documentary recently taught me that once they're queen-right, these are called "nuke" in English, which I find hilarious, I mean, "I've got a nuke in my backyard"? On the other hand, the German term - Jungvolk - isn't exactly unencumbered, either.) with one frame of young brood (& eggs) and a lot of workers. If the bees stick to the manual, these workers will notice that the queen pheromones are suddenly missing, and make a new queen. (BEES ARE WEIRD CREATURES.) Absurdly, I have this urge to check on them every day now even though they can't be queen-right before three weeks are over.
At any rate, I am cautiously optimistic about my bees. I'm also very pleased that the irrational panic I felt while dealing with them is abating - I still don't dare to go among them without my veil and gloves, alas, but at least I no longer want to scream and run away in spite of the veil and gloves. Hormones, people, they mess you up.

* I had to kill a mouse. Mr. Darcy brought it to the door, then apparently went inside to go sleep. Jörg found the mouse with its spine snapped, but still breathing. He said he felt awful about it, but we'd probably be cowards and go grocery shopping and hope that it'd stop breathing by itself. I felt that if I wasn't even capable of taking the life of an already death-bound, and probably suffering, mouse, I would have to turn vegan on the spot. So I took a kitchen knife and cut off the mouse's head. (After apologising profusely.) I have only minimal qualms about killing midges, slugs or drones, but vertebrates are a different matter. >_>

* I didn't do my annual Eurolindalë post, as you indubitably noticed. Maybe I'll comment on the individual contributions later (though it feels sort of pointless after the fact). For now, I'll just say that I felt awfully sorry for the Russian twins. Yes, sure, they agreed to represent Russia, but that doesn't mean they approve of everything that's going on in their country (or at its borders :P). I mean, they're two 17-year-old girls, and everyone booed and cat-whistled whenever they were on the stage or scored some points. And their song wasn't even bad. Happy though I am about the victory of Conchita Wurst (for the non-Europeans on my f-list: bearded drag queen singing what sounded like the next James Bond theme song, all sorts of awesome), I'm really not sure "we" can celebrate ourselves as The Haven of Tolerance (TM) if "we" are at the same time ready to cruelly boo two 17-year-olds just because they're Russian. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
On the plus side, Conchita won! and my second favourite, a country song from the Netherlands, came in second! So that was probably my most succesful Rooting-for-someone-in-Eurovision experience ever. (Actually, there were several pretty enjoyable contributions this year. Also some awful ones, of course, but hey, it's Eurovision. I'm just glad that the bookies' favourites didn't win this year, I found both of them trite and unpleasant.)

* Episiotomy/tear appears to be healing. Instead of a cleft, it now feels like a... a stuffed leather pillow, for lack of a better description. I'm taking that as a good thing. Midwife agrees (with quite some relief, I thought) that it's mending well. So yay. Midwife also says I may want to "correct" the scar later, but unless it hurts when I have sex, I should wait until I'm certain I won't want to have any more kids. Sounds reasonable.

*Cat!Fëanáro also appears to be healing (too) well. By now he's bored to be inside and wants to go outside all the time, but we can't let him yet. (On second thought, maybe Mr. Darcy brought that half-dead mouse to the door so his brother had something to practice on?) He also looks like a weird sort of poodle, as his butt had to be shaved for surgery and the fur is growing back only veeeery slowly. It's sort of hilarious to see how thin cats are, even this overweight cat, underneath that fluffy fur. -- His hip appears to have healed slightly crookedly, but he can walk and climb stairs and chairs again. I just wish we could let him go outside again, because a bored cat is an annoying housemate, but not until he's a) mostly back in shape and b) the people who ran him over have disappeared.

* Speaking of which, our asshole tenants appear to be moving. The past week, we've had the feeling that they've been dismantling stuff (I don't know why, but with previous tenants, we've never been able to hear so clearly what's going on on the other side of the kitchen wall), and all of yesterday and today (so far), two big transporters have been driving to and fro. They're bound to move out at some time between the end of the month and the end of July; if they're really starting now, that would be a blessing. Make no mistake, there'll probably be fights over money and renovations and lawsuits for months to come, but at least we'd no longer have these egocentric bastards on our grounds. (I'm sorry to say it, but there it is! Besides, they're calling us "godless heretics". I'd laugh at the anachronism, untruth and irony if it weren't so depressing.) I'm so sick of renting out, it's not even funny. We're renting out because we can't afford not to, but for three years now, renting out has cost us more money than it's brought in. And thanks to that, now we're so broke that we can't afford not to rent out, but we'll have to invest more money first. It sucks, sucks, sucks.

And that concludes your happy eclectic update from Bergia.

OK. The "something" about his "belly" turned out to be just 'náro's belly pouch. (Castrated cats sometimes develop a dangly fat pouch, and this cat is prone to overeat, so he's got quite the impressive pouch; passers-by who see him around our garden regularly assume he's pregnant.) The people at the pet clinic interpreted it as possibly a torn-off abdominal membrane or some other damage to his viscera, but ultrasounds showed no reason for further concern - it really is just the fat pouch.
According to the clinic people, 'náro is limping badly now (my reaction to THAT piece of information was "He's WALKING?!"), strictly forbidden to jump for the next two months (ahahah how are we going to accomplish that?), we'll have to keep him in a small pen (good thing Baby II won't be needing the playpen for a while yet...) and he'll go on a diet so his hips won't have to lug quite so much weight around.

But he's back on his feet and we can pick him up now. Such a relief!

Thank you for all your kind thoughts and well-wishes; as you can see, they helped!

Well, for the most part it was a nice day, in spite of Felix' lack of sleep, several temper tantrums (probably caused in part by the lack of sleep, but also by insensitive relatives), and a persistent pain in my pelvis (not the labour sort -- the "pinched nerve" sort).

The evening ended pretty horribly, though.

We'd had a barbecue with two friends, R. and T.. While preparing the barbecue, we'd noted that our tenants left their driveway at their usual breakneck speed in their car, and then rushed up the hill also at their usual breakneck speed. As the word "usual" implies, this didn't give us cause for anything but rolled eyes. (There's a lot that I'd have to tell you as far as our tenants are concerned, but not now.)
A bit later, we heard 'náro mew a bit down the street. It was the sound he tends to produce when he's caught a mouse and wants to share his success without even putting down the catch first, i.e. sounding loud but pressed due to the full mouth. Again, this didn't give us cause for anything but jokes à la "Well, there's still heat in the barbecue, he can bring that mouse here if he wants". (He didn't. Also not unusual.)

However, when we decided to go for a short walk after dinner and came down the hill, we saw 'náro lying halfway across the road next to the tenants' driveway. He looked up at us and mewed again, without sounding distressed or anything. We talked about being waylaid by cats as we walked closer.
I'm not sure when everyone realised that something was wrong. I, and probably Jörg, realised when we were only three steps away and 'náro still didn't a) jump up or b) roll over to have his belly scratched. T. isn't a cat person and may not have noticed anything at that point. R. knows cats in general and our cats in particular and probably had misgivings, too.

We all kept on talking as if everything was fine - "Hey 'náro, you want to come along on our walk" - "Was your mouse tasty" - "Too lazy to get up, eh?" - and squatted down to pat him. Felix stroked his back very gently, which I praised (by now, Felix and the cats tend to get along quite well). 'náro still showed no clear signs of distress or pain, but neither did he snuggle and purr the way he normally does - he just lay there looking at us.
"I'm gonna put him up", Jörg announced, and lifted 'náro to his feet, and 'náro's rear end just collapsed right away. At this point, even T. must have realised that something was wrong.

My first thought was that 'náro might have had a run-in with a dog or fox, but there was no blood and no cuts, except for two holes in his legs - one tiny, the sort of injury that outdoor cats surrounded by other cats tend to have all the time. "Well that can't give him so much trouble," Jörg said.
"And the other one," I said, looking closer and... swallowing, "um, I can see right to the bone."

"WHAT?!" say T. and R.
"It's not broken or anything, but the leg is open and I can see a bone."

On the plus side, 'náro did curl his back toes when Jörg "tickled" the soles of his feet. On the minus side, well, something with his back and butt was clearly wrong, and even though that part of the leg pretty much just consists of skin, bone and sinew, normally the skin should cover the rest of it, right?
At this point, Jörg checked for emergency vet services. We half-expected that with our luck, the only available vet on Easter Sunday evening would be at the other end of the region, but it turned out that our usual vet was on call. Jörg had had two beers with his barbecue, but T. immediately volunteered to drive him there. When we put 'náro into his transport box, he spread his hind legs the way he always does (like most cats, he doesn't like the transport box), which was a bit reassuring.

An hour later, Jörg called. The vet had diagnosed a clear case of hit-and-run driving, resulting in a crushed pelvis and spine, and seen little hope for 'náro, "but of course you can take him to the pet clinic in Duisburg if you want." (The hole in the leg was just collateral damage that needed to be cleaned up and bandaged.) Long-suffering T. - and I repeat, he is not a cat person - was driving Jörg and 'náro to Duisburg now.

The emergency vet in Duisburg, when it finally was 'náro's, Jörg's and T.'s turn, was apparently somewhat more hopeful. 'náro could curl up his tail and twitch his feet, so the spine was clearly not "crushed" - apparently, it looked mostly intact in the x-ray - and the collapsed pelvis was broken cleanly "so it should be possible to stabilise that". The next day - today - their surgeon would have a look at 'náro and decide what to do. Jörg signed a slip of paper along the lines of "I am aware that this may be expensive, but please do whatever is reasonably necessary".

Now we're waiting for a phone call, which will either be "There's no point, you can come over to say your good-byes", or "He's out of the operating theatre, you can come over to pick him up".
God, how I hope for the latter.

It's also fun to live in the same house with the person who very likely ran over your cat (both vets agree that the likeliest cause of the injury is having been run over by a car wheel; there was only one other car driving up the hill during the whole time, and that was going a lot more slowly), and either didn't even notice or doesn't even care. Not.

We have been gifted bucketloads of old baby stuff by various relations and friends. To my great relief, the cats mostly ignored it until...

... until I had the smart idea of washing everything.

After that, 'náro discovered that he loves baby stuff. As long as it smells of our detergent instead of other people's cellar, apparently...





*le sigh* Not a habit we can support, I'm afraid, no matter how cute it is...

- - -

Yay, a quiet evening, I thought - time to finally prepare that spring picspam!

And then I heard the peacock crying.
Loudly.
Very nearby.

I looked out on the terrace (home of our barbecue grill) where I thought I had heard it... but no peacock in sight.

I go back inside.

I hear it cry again - definitely from the terrace. And lo! - it isn't talking to the barbecue this time.
It has reached our tenants' windowsill, where it admires its reflection. Or something.




I feel pretty! Oh so ~pretty~!

The tenants, of course, have likewise heard the peacock and come to look. Peacock is surprised by movement behind the window, and takes flight...



...onto our roof.



Nothing is safe. NOTHING. Last Saturday my mom-in-law was stung, of all creatures, by a bumblebee. (To be fair, she had been weeding our driveway and apparently uncovered a bumblebee nest in the process, so it's understandable that the lil' beast was annoyed. But still!) Animals, you never know what they get up to, do you?

- - -

Right. Back to the picspamming. (Which is, um, sort of what I just did, but this was harmless compared to what's coming up...)

Cat story time!

Jörg is back, so we were sleeping upstairs again. (Still no stairs, but someone to look after clumsy me when I'm climbing ladders :p). Or rather, we were trying to fall asleep.

When we'd left the living-room, the cats had looked extremely disappointed, as if to say "What, not sleeping here tonight? But you make such a nice pillow and we've warmed your bed and all!" While we were lying in bed and trying to fall asleep, we could hear stuff toppling over downstairs, suggesting that one of the cats had run into something or balanced on the old stairs (which are currently serving as a sort of side-board for tools) or somesuch. Then there was silence.

And then, right there in our bedroom... the traipsing of little cat paws.

"There's a cat in here", says I.
"Can't be", says Jörg, because there are no stairs after all.
"There's a cat in here", I repeat, because the traipsing is still going on.
"Turn on the light", says Jörg.
I do, and say, "Look, a 'náro."
"Can't be."
"Look, he's right there."
"I know, but he can't be here!"

Well, he was, and made himself comfortable on Jörg's feet shortly after, looking very satisfied with himself.
Of course the cats learned to climb stairs, and they can climb trees and masts, too, so it wasn't too surprising... either he managed the ladder, or he climbed up the old oak beam. After all, only the foot is rotted, and further up it's actually still got some bark (with ax marks in it, that tree apparently refused to be decorticated back in the day).

But it seems that he actually took the ladder. Clever cat.

Next morning: "Mow! Mow! Mow?!"
Then some sounds as if a cat was trying to climb down the ladder, but not quite managing. Traipsing paws come back to the bedroom. Again: "Mow! Mow! Mow?!"
Which means as much as: OMG MY BLADDER IS FULL THE CAT LITTER IS DOWNSTAIRS IF I DON'T GET THERE SOON I'LL GO ON THE FLOOR.
Jörg, already up and dressed: "I tried to carry him downstairs, but whenever I reach for him he runs away."
I, awake due to excessive MOW!ing: "I'll catch him and put him in your arms, just a second."
Did that.
Jörg carries cat, who in mid-climb panics and clings to the upstairs floor and tries to push up like his life depends on it. (You know, like a cat having to be saved from a tree clawing at the poor fireman?). Seriously, he left dents in the wood and all. I carefully pry his claws loose and tell him not to be afraid. He is unconvinced and tries to cling again. I pry him loose, then he's out of reach of the floor and Jörg can carry him down and set him on the floor in the hallway. 'náro is all grateful, then rushes outside (in the old days, they used to come inside to pee, but these days they much prefer some sand or old leaves to the cat litter).

I guess we must be grateful that cats are at the same time so clever and so stupid. Otherwise they'd already be ruling the world...

Ok.

So let's assume I have written a short story. No, it is not important, it is only fanfic for the SWG birthday bash, so it matters only to me and perhaps five other people. But.

My computer has apparently completely eaten it. Not as in, "I can't find it," but as in, "I can find it but can't open it, because my computer has decided that it is encoded funnily and when I ask it to decode and open it, all I get is three pages of ##############. Oh, the last footnote is actually legible. Hurrah.

As I don't think I have the heart to re-write the entire bloody story, even if it was cute and fluffy and even though it was only three pages... do any of you have any awesome tricks re: salvaging files ruined by computer? If you do, give them to me.

Otherwise I am going to break down and cry, I am serious, because this appears to be melodramatic emo Lyra summer or something of the sort AND I DO NOT WANT DAMMIT.

- - -

In less desperate news, I took the cats to the vet today. Nothing bad, just their annual vaccinations. They, of course, considered that extremely bad. 'náro in fact found it so bad that he -- busted his transport box and walked around in the car. Have you ever tried to drive a car while a cat was inspecting the back seat, the trunk, the leg room, finally sitting down half-way across the hand brake and my the driver's right leg? Well, I have. It works, but only just. >_>

1. So all the family festivities are finally done, although for the most part they were not as bad as expected. No utterly horrible surpraiz presents this year, which is not to say that there were no surpraiz presents but that they were nice surprises.
Have avoided scales so far. Definitely overate. At some point humanity will finally realise that massive feasts are outdated when everyone involved can eat their fill every day anyway, but it is not this day, obviously. Oof.

2. The first cinematic trailer for Henri 4 has appeared and Enlo and I are visible right in the beginning. Well, if you know it's us. I did not at first want to believe it's us, but my hair is, alas, kind of unmistakeable and I must assume that the person under the hair is likely to be me.
Have not yet decided whether to be thrilled or scared that someone I know (of the ungeeky people, I mean) might see this. Hopefully everyone will pay more attention to the running guy, who by the way was yelling something else entirely while we were shooting this.
The chicken still make me laugh.

3. I promised catspam the day before yesterday, so here (as a belated gift to juno_magic if no-one else) be catspam!

( Cut as usual, thumbnails as usual, less pictures than usual. )

After exam!prof actually asked me whether I wouldn't want to write my Magistra thesis (look! I am being all technically and politically correct, and now nobody outside the German [or Latin]-speaking world will know what I'm talking about!) for him and I said I'd think about a topic, I...
... didn't really do much about it.

I mean, I had three basic ideas in mind, but they're all very fuzzy and vague and I didn't have the time to do any preliminary research yet as I have to finish another term paper first anyway.
These ideas were, basically (poor laurenia already had to listen to me prattling about this, but the rest of you may as well suffer along):

a) A comparative study of Anglo-Saxon fiction and non-fiction, esp. poetry on the fiction side and administrative and exhortative prose on the other, looking for traces of oral tradition in the poetry (which obviously was written down or we wouldn't know about it today, but in many cases was probably composed and passed down orally before someone finally penned it down) and the (hopefully) far less frequent occurance of such traces in the prose (which was composed and consumed in writing in the first place). If the "typically oral" formulae etc. also show up in the typically written genres (or in the poetry where, thanks to puns that only work when you read it, we can be fairly certain that it was composed in writing; yes, Cynewulf, I'm looking at YOU)... well, then we know that they're not, in fact, any measure for the orality or literacy of a text. Which might still be relevant knowledge, so hey.

b) Pretty much the same thing but with Anglo-Saxon alliterative poetry that may have been composed orally, and Middle English poems from the Alliterative Revival in the 14th century that was very, very, very likely composed in writing, to see how much (besides the alliteration) they have in common, and what conclusion that allows us concerning oral or written composition.

c) This would basically be an extension of my term paper, changed enough to meet exam regulations (which state that I'm not allowed to write the thesis on the same topic I got the Schein in). As my main problem with the paper towards the end was that I had only one text type to compare it with and it would have been more fruitful to compare it to further written genres, this time something to include more texts from other genres (and possibly more language developments, too) would've been good.

All three would have been corpus-based (I love corpus linguistics). Case c) would be the easiest to delineate, as I've already worked with the Helsinki Corpus and already did a study around language development in the Early Modern English period, so I'd know what I'd be dealing with from the start. This is also the only one where I definitely know that there are going to be useful results one way or another, where I could easily add or remove data in order to reach or stay within the 60-page limit. However, case a) and b) would be really interesting, too; it's just hard to judge whether they'd yield any fruitful results, and if they do, whether it's the "enough for 20 pages" kind or the "100 pages at least" kind or the "somewhere around 60 pages" kind I'd need for the thesis. So before I could even choose either of these topics, I'd first have to do the full analysis necessary to actually write on them. Which is difficult, because it would very likely take a long time, and I'd have to choose and possibly digitise the texts in question, and meanwhile I'd have to sign up before I may officially start doing that analysis, but in order to sign up (at which point I already should have cleared the topic with the prof) I'd first have to do the analysis - or fly blind. So a) and b) would be rather more risky. But equally fascinating. Argh.

So I haven't been able to make up my mind in any way, and thus haven't talked to the prof again. Which was slightly worrying because he'd probably forget he'd agreed to read my thesis, or worse, wouldn't forget but be pissed off that I took so long to decide. But, argh.

Now today in a lecture with that selfsame prof, during half-time he walked up to where I was sitting and said, "I've had an idea for your thesis topic, if you're interested."
I tried to mumble something intelligent which resulted in something along the lines of "Oh good, I'll go attend your office hour", and spent the other half of the lecture silently panicking. Fortunately my seat neighbour - same one with whom I did the presentation on Ælfric - did her best to reassure me.
So after the lecture I waited for the office hour, Andie still keeping me company, and then suddenly laurenia showed up on her way to the Philosophikum, who also reassured me that I wouldn't have to take the topic if it was something that didn't interest me and the prof likely wouldn't let that count against me and perhaps it would be something I'd actually like to write on after all.

What he suggested in the end was that I'd look at language development in Early Modern English again, but more developments than the three I chose for the term paper, and in more genres than the two I used for the term paper, and instead of focusing on religious language and archaicism the focus might be on the process of standardisation of English across different genres.
So basically c), only more precise and with a focus I hadn't thought of.
Which, frankly, sounds pretty fascinating.
(I mean, if you're weird like me.)
And moreoever it sounds doable. I think I'd like to include texts from the late Middle English period already in order to have a nice starting point before the change actually starts. And maybe this time I could include the development of do-support, which is madly confusing but also rather interesting, and, oh no, I've already begun to plan, haven't I? And, well, I'm sure I'll pine a little for ideas a) and b), but I can always shelve them for a Ph.D. or something.

I feel kind of bad about the topic - and my other topic ideas - because all of these are fun topics. Academic fun, but fun nonetheless. I mean, historical linguistics is practically another fandom of mine. Writing an extensive thesis in this field is, when it comes down to it, kind of like fan fiction. Lots of work, sure, and a pain in the rear when the muses don't cooperate, and doubtlessly it'll take far longer than I'd like, but still, it's fun work. I doubt you're supposed to have fun writing your thesis. You're supposed to write about nasty topics that chew your brains out and drive you up walls and torture you with absurd theories and ugly arguments. This topic might have been a proper thesis topic in the olden days when you still had to read every single text in full and count every single occurance of every single paradigm by hand, but in these days of computerised corpora and search algorithms and POS tagging, all I have to do is pick up the pieces and put them together. And while I enjoy doing this, and am not entirely incompetent at it, there are other fields of linguistics I have forgotten everything about, so I feel kind of bad about getting off so easily.

If I get off. I still have to write it, after all.
Just now it looks too good to be true.

- - -

In completely unrelated news, the tit now manages to stay airborne for so long that one can actually speak of "flying" now. It can't cover distances beyond one or two metres (depending on how high up it is when it starts) and sags very much, and it can't change directions in flight because its tail feathers aren't fully grown yet, but it definitely knows how to stay aloft. Still needs to be fed, though. There's a nice caterpillar and some plant lice on the branches I cut for its cage, but so far it has looked at them without even trying to eat them. And it's not like lice or caterpillars move particularly fast.

And while I'm keeping the little great tit alive upstairs, Darcy went outside and killed a nightingale. >.

I don't know what it is, but we must have done something very right in the upbringing of our kittens.
Or wrong, because this amount of cuddliness and devotion isn't normal in cats, is it?

Jörg and I decided to go for a short walk today. Yes, he had to study for his exam, but it was the first actual warm Spring day, so how could we not?
So we walked. As it happened the kittens saw us go, and - followed us.
A few steps behind us (or sometimes ahead of us); definitely not walking on their own, but walking with us.
We were astonished, and amused, and went on, the cats following.
And then we apparently reached the border of their territory, and still went on.
Mr. Darcy was the first to react; his tail did the bog brush thing, and he leaned into the hill, and took care to always be close to some shrubbery to hide in or tree to climb onto. Fëanáro was all right for about 50 more meters, and then he did the same thing. Rather fascinating to watch, how they insisted on walking on (after all, we were walking on), and how they slowly explored the strange territory before them.
Eventually we took pity on them and returned, and after they came back onto their own grounds, they ran around all relieved because they were going home. But they didn't turn back on their own. After all, you can't leave those silly humans alone, who knows where they're going to end up?

All together now: Awwwwwww!

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( In fremdem Gebiet )

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( And: Pictorial proof!/ Und Beweisbilder! )

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ladyelleth: Sorry I disappeared to suddenly yestereve. Suddenly, the internet was gone, and it apparently decided to sleep and only come back this morning...