Tag: cats

In My Mailbox #2

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | In My Mailbox

In My Mailbox is a weekly meme hosted by The Story Siren as a way for bloggers and readers to share the books they bought, borrowed or received that week.

When this meme started in 2008, I suspect the mailbox was an actual mailbox, whether or not it looked like the one in the graphic. For me, the mailbox is mostly an email inbox. But the principle still applies.

And sometimes it’s real mail. You’ll see.

Ebooks I received from their authors or publicists:

Wreck of the Nebula Dream by Veronica Scott
A Hint of Frost by Hailey Edwards
Intangible by J. Meyers
Lowcountry Punch by Boo Walker
Third Rate Romance by Tim Martin
The Mine by John A. Heldt

Ebooks I received for reviews for Blog Tours (Tour company name in parens):

Wanted: Handsome Alien Abductor by Myra Nour (BTS)
Staring into the Eyes of Chance by Kay Dee Royal (Bewitching)
Finding My Faith by Carly Fall (Bewitching)
The Zurian Child by Jessica E. Subject (Sizzling PR)
Sunrise Point by Robyn Carr (Little Bird Publicity)
The Great Outdoors by Becky Moore (Sizzling PR)

 

One new assignment for Book Lovers Inc.

Auraria by Tim Westover

 

 

 

Five from NetGalley. I’ve been trying to resist but the April Carina Press books were posted, there was lots of SFR or SFR-ish, and I caved. And Pern was the first SFR I ever read, so yes, Sky Dragons does fit in this list.

Sky Dragons by Todd McCaffrey
Desert Blade by Ella Drake
Darkest Caress by Kaylea Cross
Zero Gravity Outcasts by Kay Keppler
Cruel Numbers by  Christopher Beats

 

 

 

 

 

And nearly last, one steampunk from Edelweiss

Tarnished by Karina Cooper

 

 

 

Last, but definitely not least, the big box I shipped from PLA arrived. I haven’t opened it yet, because, well, it’s under the cat. She thinks I got it for her!

The Bargain We Make

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | About> cats

We bring home a small furry bundle. It doesn’t matter whether the little bundle mews or barks. Ours generally mew.

Sometimes it’s fully grown. Still doesn’t matter.

The point is, when you do, you’re making a bargain with your future self. And you’re firmly not thinking about it.

Because that adorable fluff bundle in your lap, you’ve already fallen in love with it. Even if it’s still unhappy with you and not quite house-trained yet. Or whatever adorably disgusting habits are already ingrained into the little beast.

But the bargain that you make is that you know the time you have is too short. You hope for the maximum. You pray for more than that. For a cat, a cat who never goes outside, it’s not unreasonable to hope for 15 marvelous years. Maybe even a little longer.

But that’s not enough. Someone once said that the tragedy of loving a pet is that our lives are so long, and theirs are so damned short.

Erasmus is 12 and a half. My sweet baby boy. After innumerable tests by three different vets in two states, and several different guesses–finally a diagnosis. The one we feared. He has intermediate-cell cancer.

He confused the issue for a few months by holding his weight while being treated for IBD, but that wasn’t it. Now he’s on chemo.

At the moment, he is fine. He acts completely normal. He’s just skinny. It’s his humans who are wrecked. We know his time is running out faster than it is supposed to. He thinks life is pretty sweet, except for the weekly trips to the vet. Meanwhile, he’s getting spoiled rotten.

I know that there are friends waiting for him at the Rainbow Bridge. Zade, our playful Scheherazade, was taken from us far too soon. Jennyfur is waiting to box his ears. And Erasmus needs to take a message to my beloved Licorice for me, to tell him that I still miss him after 16 years.

But I am so not ready for him to take that message yet. Not ready at all.

 

What’s on my (mostly virtual) nightstand? 1-15-12

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | Virtual Nightstand

Martin Luther King Day is tomorrow. No mail. No school. It’s a day off for a lot of people. But I’ll be working, Galen will be working. There’s no rest for the wicked, as my mom usually says to me. (And I fully recognize the implication!)

Mid-January in this library household means one other thing–the impending doom of the American Library Association Midwinter Conference. January 20-24, this year in Dallas, Texas. At least it might be warm? (2010 was in Denver, 2013 will be in Philadelphia, this point is very much NOT moot.)

ALA Midwinter is a major household disruption. We bring out suitcases. The cats hate suitcases. The suitcases take their people away! They might have to train new staff. This is very bad.

But the conference represents major headaches all the way around. In June in New Orleans, our hotel did not have connectivity in the rooms, so I only posted once, using Galen’s iPhone as my net connection. Not fun. This conference, I admit I’m going to queue up as much as I can, just in case connectivity is a tad “iffy”.

On the one hand, plane rides are still a terrific opportunity for reading. Not to mention that lovely extra two-hour wait ahead of the flight for “security”. On the other hand, ALA conferences are a sea of Advance Reading Copies, unfortunately all print. What’s a girl to do?

I have four books to read on the airplane on my way to and from Dallas, because these are scheduled for release January 24. Except I really only have three.

Heiress Without a Cause by Sara Ramsey popped up on NetGalley as a historical romance debut that just sounded interesting. According to the blurb copy, it was selected by Barnes & Noble for an exclusive release on the NOOK beginning Jan. 23rd.

The Stubborn Dead by Natasha Hoar was featured in January 2012 print issue of RT Book Reviews as one of the five debut authors not to miss in 2012. So I couldn’t resist picking up first book, about a “rescue medium” when it appeared on NetGalley. Whether this is urban fantasy or paranormal romance or a combination, it looks like a terrific start for this new author.

Daughter of the Centaurs by Kate Klimo is the first book of the Centauriad. It’s YA and it’s something I pulled from NetGalley when I was researching YA genre lit for a table talk I did for the South Carolina Collection Development mini-conference. Since this is definitely fantasy, I’m going to give it a try.

Banshee Charmer by Tiffany Allee is the last book on my calendar for January 24. I had downloaded it from NetGalley because I liked the premise, an urban fantasy about a half-banshee detective solving a serial killer murder. Sounded cool. Then Book Lovers Inc asked me to review it for them. Cool beans, I already had it.  I’ve read it, loved it, and written both reviews already, one for my blog and one for BLI. Done and dusted. I just can’t queue anything up here until the BLI review is posted.

And now for putting the cap back on the old recap.

My review of Nick Marsh’s Soul Purpose is already scheduled to post on Tuesday. I’ll get to Past Tense after I come back from Dallas. BLI says I can have two months. I promise I won’t take anywhere near that long! Besides, Soul Purpose was too much fun for me to wait that long to read the sequel. I want to see what happens next.

And I received an unstained copy of Todd Grimson’s Stainless this week. Woo-hoo! I take one “dead-tree” book with me on the plane, so I have something to read for those horrible minutes when they make me turn off my iPad. Stainless might be it.

I also finished A Lady Awakened and Don’t Bite the Messenger from last week, so reviews for both those books will be part of this week’s postings.

Reaching back, to the Christmas Nightstand, I’m in the middle of J.L. Hilton’s Stellarnet Rebel. As a blogger, and a science fiction fan, I’m caught up in the story on multiple levels. I mean wow, living on a space habitat, kind of like Babylon 5 or Deep Space 9. And, earning your living by being a blogger, live, full-time pretty much, total life immersion blogging. 3,000 posts or 3 years until she can go back to Earth. And will she want to?

Going even further back, I took a look at the 12/17/11 Nightstand and read Forever Mine, the prequel novella to Delilah Marvelle’s Forever and a Day. Yes, I’m a completist. I have to read the whole series.

That’s all we have time for in this pre-conference madness issue of the Nightstand. We’ll see you next week, live from Dallas, hopefully not blogging from the hotel lobby. The bar, on the other hand…

Tomorrow will be the Carina Press December 2011 edition of Ebook Review Central. And it will seem like Christmas all over again.

Detecting with cats

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | cats

Mystery author Lilian Jackson Braun died Saturday, June 4 at the age of 97. Braun was the author, or perhaps the perpetrator would be the better description, of The Cat Who series of mysteries. She was probably the single author responsible for the entire genre of cozy mysteries with cats as, not merely lap adornments, but actual detectives.

The concept began innocently enough. Her human protagonist was a newspaper reporter named Jim Qwilleran. Like so many detectives, both amateur and professional, Qwill has gone through some rough patches in his life, and is now trying to get his life back on track. A former crime reporter, he is now “demeaning” himself by covering the art beat–a last chance given by an old friend. But crime comes to him, a gallery owner is murdered, and Qwill decides to investigate the homicide. As part of his investigation, he “temporarily” adopts the gallery owner’s Siamese cat Koko, convinced that the cat must have seen, heard, or perhaps sniffed something related to the murder. Qwill’s investigation, his redemption, and his growing “partnership” with the cat Koko complete the story of The Cat who could Read Backwards, the first in the 29-book series that ended with Braun’s death this weekend.

Braun started a trend. Throughout the series, Qwill believes that Koko is providing him with hints and clues, but Koko still acts like a cat, and only like a cat. The “clues” that Qwill gets from the big Siamese are all a matter of the human’s interpretation.

But it’s pretty easy to trace the line of descent from Koko to two feline detectives who really ARE the detectives, Midnight Louie and Joe Grey. Midnight Louie is the co-narrator of a series of mysteries, starting with Catnap by Carole Nelson Douglas. His human is a public relations freelancer named Temple Barr, and the city they investigate is the Sin capital of the U.S., Las Vegas. Midnight Louie is an overweight, all black tomcat who sounds like he just stepped off the stage of the latest “Guys and Dolls” revival. Louie has clawed his way through 21 books so far, and is still going strong.

Joe Grey is my personal favorite, partly because Joe knows what happened to him is wrong for a cat, and he thinks about it sometimes, then washes himself and goes back to solving crimes, usually after he’s ordered delivery from the local deli over the phone. In Cat on the Edge by Shirley Rousseau Murphy, we discover Joe Grey, a smoke grey tomcat with white socks a docked tail. Joe suddenly discovers he can talk, and understand, human. He just doesn’t know why, or how. Then he witnesses a murder behind his favorite deli. Now he has the power to do something about it. But with the ability to talk like a human, comes the ability to think like one, too. Cats don’t face moral dilemmas–but Joe Grey does.

Lilian Jackson Braun created a cat who had his human convinced that he was helping him solve crimes. After three books, she stopped her successful series for 18 years, then picked it back up by moving her human and his feline assistant from the big city to a place she created, Pickax City in Moose County, a place “400 miles north of everywhere”.  Moose County was so far north, it even had a town named Brrr. Read the books. Especially some night when you need to cool off.

 

How to pill a cat

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | cats

Google can be so pedantic sometimes.  The search for “How to pill a cat” returns “About 17,400,000 results”.  I was not filtering out the jokes.  I was serious.  Last night was the first time I had to pill a cat in a long time.  And it was about as much fun as I remembered.

First of all, they know. Whenever you approach them with the intent to do something they won’t like, they are gone in a flash. I was expecting “All-Star Cat Wrestling”.  I had forgotten that it would be the second act of the double-bill, preceded by that ever-popular favorite, “The Amazing All-Star Cat Chase”, co starring the local versions of the Keystone Kops, namely Galen and yours truly.  The process is never helped by the fact that the humans do not really want to hurt the cat, and the cat firmly believes that he, in this particular case, is being tortured.

Erasmus used to be a 16 pound cat. That was generally considered by vets everywhere (and we’ve been everywhere) to be a bit on the pudgy side, even for him.  He’s a rather big-boned, long-bodied cat.  He should be big, just not that big.  But since January, he’s turned into an 11 pound cat, and we don’t know why.  He’s 12 years old, so a healthy middle-age for an indoor cat. Galen and I suffered from different, equally horrible fears about what might be wrong with him. We lost Scheherazade to hepatic lipidosis in Anchorage. It was sudden and devastating. My baby Licorice lived with diabetes for more than 5 years, and I lost him when he was 17, after he survived my first marriage, moving across three states, and he let me cry into his fur when I lost my dad.  For those who believe, Licorice is the cat waiting for me at the Rainbow Bridge. And Jennyfur, who died of cancer at 14, is with him, because she was Licorice’s cat.  Not my cat, HIS cat. She thought he made the sun rise.

But right now, Erasmus has a problem. Actually he has two problems. First, something is medically wrong. He is too thin. His hipbones and spine bumps are visible. But he acts as if he’s fine.  But the vet checked him out, and so far, all we know is what it isn’t.  It isn’t diabetes.  It isn’t his thyroid.  Nothing showed up on the x-ray.  But his white cell count is elevated. Hence the pills.  If it’s an infection, then maybe antibiotics are the answer.

The problem with him being skinnier, is that now he can run.  And he has LOTS more places to hide.  And all the boxes we’re getting together have created even more hiding places than normal.  After chasing him around the house, twice, we blocked him in the Florida room (Florida rooms are finished porches in, well, Florida) and wrapped him in a towel.  He squirmed out.  Then he squirmed into the towel, and buried his face.  Then out. Over and over.  He dug his claws into my leg, even through my jeans.  This was one of the times when I was sorry dragonhide wasn’t available.

After this came the truly disgusting part.  Clamping the cat’s head in your hand, forcing its mouth open, with all those lovely carnivore teeth, and poking the pill as far back you can with your very vulnerable finger.  Then you hold the cat’s mouth firmly closed and massage their throat until you hope they’ve swallowed the damn pill.  And you are inevitably wrong.  As soon as you let go of the cat’s jaw, they WILL spit out the pill. And it’s slimy and disgusting.  And you know you have to go through the whole process again.  We were lucky.  We only had to poke the icky pill into his mouth twice more, and we didn’t let him go between tries.  The third time I just kept his mouth closed until the stupid pill melted in his mouth, since it was halfway there already.  YUCK.  And we have to do this 13 more times.  Is this Friday the 13th or what?

Meanwhile, the human who has just committed the torture is practically in tears.  I was terrified that he would never forgive me for tormenting him.  But this morning, he hopped into my lap just like he always does, and dropped off for his morning nap.  So far, all is well on that front.

Erasmus’ second problem is his sister LaZorra.  Because Erasmus went to the vet and she didn’t, LaZorra goes into her “Growltigger” act every time she sees him.  Erasmus, big baby that he is, has no idea what he’s done wrong. LaZorra has earned herself a trip to the vet on Monday when Erasmus gets an ultrasound and a checkup on his bloodwork.  Maybe if they both come back home smelling like the “awful vet place”, she’ll stop acting like a witch.  But maybe not.  I’m firmly convinced that she IS a witch.

 

House hunting redux: belt and suspenders defeat Murphy

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | house hunting

Magician Murphy is the wizard who makes things go wrong in Castle Roogna, the third book in Piers Anthony’s never-ending Xanth series.  The original Xanth trilogy (A Spell for Chameleon, The Source of Magic, and Castle Roogna) was really funny, and I’ve never forgotten either the scene with the curse-burrs, or Magician Murphy.  It’s my humble opinion that Anthony should have quit while he was ahead.  His bank account probably disagrees in the extreme.

Magician Murphy paid us an extended visit.  After five days of sitting on his decision, the owner of the first house we applied for decided not to have our four cats as tenants. Renting a house with four cats in tow is always an interesting proposition, but generally frowned upon, as my Brisbane property valuers friends told me afterward.  On the other hand, attempting to sell a house every 2.5 years in the past 10 years would have been equally dicey.  This is certainly a case where one’s mileage varies.

After fighting down the indignation and panic, Galen and I planned a second trip to Atlanta. I-75 is truly a boring stretch of highway, only equaled by I-65 and I-74 between Chicago and Cincinnati for repetitive nothingness. But for this residence-hunting trip, we decided to try the proverbial “belt and suspenders” approach that frequently works in IT.

We picked a real estate agent that covered the areas we wanted to live in and called them. We didn’t have a referral this time, we just guessed.  And, I called and emailed apartment complexes as a backup.  All the apartment complexes said “2 cat limit”, but one of the them referred me to a place called Promove that specializes in rental referrals in the Atlanta area.  I shamelessly used Promove to get a list of apartment complexes that would take us, and then visited houses.

We did finally get a house.  The real estate agent came through, and after driving up on Sunday, we signed a lease on Tuesday.  Also, I had found three apartments that would take us, two were good, and one was great.  We would have had a place to live, no matter what happened.  I would recommend Promove to anyone who was looking for an apartment in Atlanta (they also serve Dallas).  If I’d known about them sooner, I might have skipped a lot of the anguish and just gotten an apartment on our first trip.  We had used a similar service in Chicago (Apartment People) and after this experience I’m not sure that it’s not a better idea altogether for big cities.  The house we’re renting is way, way out in the suburbs.

I think we defeated Murphy by pursuing both options, a house and an apartment. First trip, we relied on getting the house, and it failed.  This time, I kept driving down both roads until one deal was completed.  Also drive as in literally, since I put 200 miles on the car.  And I am now eternally grateful my iPad has 3G–without the maps and GPS, I’d still be lost somewhere on I-285 in a perpetual loop around Atlanta!

And there’s one other thing.  Galen hasn’t seen the inside of the house we’re moving to.  The outside yes, the inside no. This will be… another adventure.

House hunting is not for sissies

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | house hunting

Galen and I have moved 4 times in last 10 years.  This move will be our fifth.  And for anyone at the Evergreen Users Conference who has already heard a part of this saga, apologies in advance for the deja vu.  I’ll try to be funnier.

We have moved from Chicago to Anchorage to Tallahasse to Chicago to Gainesville and now, to Atlanta.  We keep saying this is an adventure.  Well, one classic definition of adventure usually involves something horrible and nasty happening to someone else, either long ago, far away, or both.  But it is an adventure.  The bad parts always make a great story–later.  Sometimes much, much later.

When you move to or from Alaska, you move by weight, not by volume.  I know it sounds like a bag of potato chips, but it’s true.  This is how I know we have nearly two tons of books, and we really need to get rid of some.  This is also how we decided, firmly and forever, that we hire movers to pack us.  Leaving Chicago, the first time out, we had a third floor walk up apartment.  Those movers earned their pay, getting all those books down those stairs.  The apartment was great, but getting stuff in and out was painful.

Anchorage was fantastic, but we learned a couple of lessons about living spaces that we’ve retained.  We really need a bath and a half if we can afford them.  And we learned not to share living space if we can afford not to.  The house was a two-flat, where the owner had split the house himself.  We lived on the main floor, and he and his wife lived below us.  They ran their dogs in the backyard.  The dogs served as an early warning system for the moose who used to come up from the creek, so we knew when to look out back to see the moose.  Very cool.  What was not cool was that we could hear their marriage break up.  Not doing that again.  When we moved out, we found boxes in the garage that we hadn’t unpacked from Chicago.  We mostly threw that stuff out, except for the huge jar of coins–that we went to dinner on.  We figured that if we hadn’t needed it in two and a half years, we didn’t.  We also learned that it’s a bad idea for us to have storage we can’t see.  We forget about it, and then it has babies or something.

When we moved from Anchorage to Tallahassee, we flew out of Anchorage with the cats, our suitcases, and nothing else.  We sold our car on the way out of Alaska because it cost 6 car payments to ship, and it just wasn’t worth it.  We hadn’t made a trip down to find a place, because there just wasn’t time.  Our stuff was six weeks behind us.  We stayed at a pet-friendly hotel, bought a car, and found a house to rent.  Then we camped out in our new house and waited for our stuff to arrive.  And waited.  And waited.  After a while, we got to like the minimalist lifestyle and were kind of hoping that the stuff would get permanently lost.

The second time around in Chicago we rented a coachhouse.  If you are not familiar with older city architorture, a coachhouse is what you get if you convert the garage into rental property.  So we had a little house behind the house.  What we didn’t have was a washer and dryer.  We shared with the house, which was a three-flat.  Four households sharing one washer and dryer does not happiness make.  So we’re not doing that again either.  But we love Chicago and miss the city.  Any chance to go back and visit is a good one.

In Gainesville we have a huge barn of a house.  We have more space than we need, because we rented the house to hold the books, and we still haven’t unpacked the end of the alphabet.  In, again, two point five years.

I spent a day and a half with an agent going around the northeast Atlanta suburbs searching for a 3 plus bedroom house with at least 1.5 baths that would willingly take us plus four cats.  The cats are usually the deal-breaker.  People don’t mind renting to two adults, even with two cats, but any number past two cats makes some landlords think we’ve lost our minds.  Which is possible, but that ship has already sailed.

House hunting is hard work, even if you are just renting.  I was dragged all over the place.  Half the houses that appeared to be available, were already under contract.  People didn’t call back.  Some looked okay in the picture, but were not okay in the “flesh”.  And it takes time, time, time.  Every place that didn’t pan out, I kept thinking “why isn’t this process more efficient”, but there’s no substitute for looking for yourself.  And, Murphy’s Law is in full force.  The house we made an offer on is the first one I looked at.  But I wouldn’t have known it was the best if I hadn’t seen second best, not to mention tenth best, which had the driveway leading up to Hades, and mustard yellow kitchen cabinets.