161 - Ways to mess with your cat's head

I was reading Laurell K Hamilton's blog, which rarely fails to say something fascinating, and she mentioned something about watching for her first bird of the year. She's Wiccan, so I suppose this is a Wiccan thing, but she said the first bird you see in the new year can tell you about the year ahead. I don't know if I'd go that far, and even if I were willing to embrace that concept, I'm not sure how I'm supposed to interpret the message. But I saw my first bird a few moments ago, and it was a blue jay. I got curious, so I looked it up, and other than a new fondness for acorns, and the unfortunate potential to be bullied by squirrels, looming in my future, there's nothing exceptional about a blue jay (well, they're pretty darned good-looking as far as birds go... the males anyway). I'm not sure what it means.

All that, just to segue into the fun part. I found some excellent sound clips of blue jay calls. My cat, Daphne, is lying next to me on the sofa. As soon as I played the clips, her head sprang up, and she looked all around for the bird, up in the air where they were likely to be, not at the computer where the sound was coming from. Hee hee, very entertaining. Hold on -- I'm going to do it again... eeeee, fun! I'm going to try it on Gracie, she's the bird catcher in the family. Here Gracie...

I've been copying recipes into a notebook for most of the day as I wait for my clothes to dry, my dishes to wash, and my hen to thaw. Surprisingly my hand isn't crampy yet (21 recipes so far). I have a notebook where I'd cleaned out my box of random clippings, and copied down recipes that looked interesting but I hadn't necessarily tried before. This new notebook is just for the recipes I have tried and really liked. I figure it's best to have those all in one place, easy to find, instead of having to scan through the rest of the dross that didn't work out. There are a lot of good recipes in that notebook -- and, I realized that most of them are fairly healthy. I'm looking forward to cooking more this year

In the background, as I did this, I was listening to (and sorda watching) The Soloist with Robert Downey, Jr. and Jamie Foxx. Not sure it was a completely uplifting tale... I found it mostly depressing... a tale which did not turn out as happily as Blind Side. I guess that's real life for you, which is why I prefer fiction... there's (usually) a nice story arc in fiction... no matter how bad things get, most books end on a positive note. There's too much negativity in the real world, so I like puppies and rainbows when I read a book or watch a movie.

So all of a sudden, once again, I've been getting a lot of hits on my help question for more blogs to read. Found a couple of good ones. Guess it's a new year's thing this time around, more bloggers joining this crazy blogosphere for 2010. It's just weird that it's happened twice now... I go for a long time and get nothing, then I get a bunch all at once. You'd think there'd be a trickle of onsies/twosies here and there throughout the year. Really I'm surprised I'm still getting them, it's been up there for several months now.

Tomorrow I have to get back in the stride of working again. I've had so much time off lately with the trip and then the holidays that it's hard to imagine working a full week with no time off to look forward to for a while. Guess I can't look at it that way, I have to take it one day at a time or it will overwhelm me. Keep telling myself that I'm one of the lucky ones, I have a job, and it's not so bad.

Hope everyone had a great holiday, and a nice weekend!