Tsunami

Yowza.

I'm having trouble taking in the idea of this tsunami…I’m not traumatized by it, and I don't think I know anyone directly affected by it, but it's impacted a lot of places that I went to in my travels. There's this eerie sense of “He can’t be dead—I know him!”

From the AP News:

Bodies were pulled from roadsides, orchards and beaches at Khao Lak resort, where the Swedish tour operator Fritidsresor said 600 Swedes had not been accounted for.

Jimmy Gorman, 30, of Manchester, England, said he saw 15 bodies, including up to five children and a pregnant woman, on Phi Phi island, one of Thailand's most popular destinations for Westerners,

"Disaster. Flattened everything," Gorman said. "There's nothing left of it.

I keep thinking of the ten days or so I spent in Khao Lak—it’s a tiny little village, really more a strip of tourist bungalows right next to the sea. It’s so small that when the bus dropped me off, I thought there had been some kind of mistake…there were a few clumps of buildings and something that looked like a tourist shop, but no main street , just the highway running through--more like a rural outpost of some suburb than a real town on the map. It didn’t even have its own market—you had to go one or two towns up (or down) to buy food, about a thirty minute ride. (We actually made the trip out to the morning market one day, and I remember thinking it had nothing particularly interesting.) There were rubber plantations nearby—trees set for tapping—and I walked through the plantation for a short time--the rubber trees fascinated me, because I’d never thought of rubber growing on trees before, even though it does. (I didn’t write about it because the photos weren’t all that interesting, and I couldn’t find a worker to ask about the process.)

But the whole town was really no more than a small scattering of buildings, eight or nine guesthouses and four or five diving companies, all set right against the shoreline, for Western tourists/divers. There’s no way it could stand up to a tidal wave, the whole thing would be swept away.

Oh. Wait. Looks like it was.

Still very weird. I could still tell you exactly how I got down to my room (where I was staying while registering for the dive, getting beginning diving lessons, etc.)—go down a little path of pebbled concrete, turn right at the second clump of buildings--being careful to step on the round flagstones--rough brown wooden walls, and I think a very cute little frog living in a corner of the bathroom, and once a gecko. Air conditioning, and a decent sized bed, and I think there *might* even have been a TV. One of the nicest places I stayed.

It’s really, really weird to think of it all being gone.

I think I was on PhiPhi Island as well, but am less certain about that…I remember passing through an utterly beautiful island while we were diving, white sand in the stereotypical brilliant blue water (it really was that blue you see in photos), nice place but you couldn’t stay overnight. I’m not sure if that was PhiPhi Island or not…but whatever it was, it surely got flattened as well. I'd be surprised if the coral reefs where I went diving didn't get hit, too.

It’s all very…strange.

I hope my diving instructor is OK...this is tourist season, so I hope she'd moved on to another dive site by now.

It's just really, really weird to think of places you've been being wiped out like that. It's not like a hurricane, where you rebuild, or an earthquake, which doesn't usually topple entire cities. But I'd bet that Khao Lak is simply....gone.

Tien

Japanese knitting

Chocolate deviltry has happened, but I am waiting for some final photos to tell that whole story...probably one of the most elegant (though not the most over-the-top) jokes I've played. It went off really well, and I suspect the recipient is still laughing (if he isn't still blushing). But I need a few more photos before I can tell that story...

Meanwhile, I spent half of today sleeping (sleep deprivation + incredible work stress), and then, once I woke up, started puttering about with knitting needles. I'm swatching and "thinking" about my next knitting project (I put it in quotation marks because I'm really "thinking" with my hands, it's a nonverbal kind of thinking).

I've spun up fifty or so yards of an absolutely lovely yarn--1 ply black satin angora and 1 ply 50-50 silk/brown cashmere blend--and am swatching with it. It comes out as a bit of a ragg yarn--the silk/cashmere is a silvery taupe, the black satin angora is smoke-colored, so there is a bit of a color contrast between the two yarns. But the yarn is so fine and the values so close that, when knitted, it just looks like dove grey with lustrous highlights. (In fact some of the "shininess" is just the lighter ply--great optical illusion.) It has a soft halo from the angora, but also great luster--satin angora shines like silk, making it two plies of lustrous fiber.

(Satin angora is one of my absolute favorite fibers--a soft, halo-ing fiber that has luster. Woo! Very hard to find, but extremely worthwhile. I'd almost consider keeping my own rabbits, if I had the space/time.)

True to my usual form, this yarn is about the same thickness as the yarn for the spiral shawl--40 or 50 wpi in the two-ply. Very, very fine, but with a little bit of silver-gray halo, so it looks softly fuzzy rather than hard defined. I'm also spinning it more softly than the yarn for the spiral shawl, which helps the halo bloom and also softens the look. I'm spinning it on the silver spindle the Akha silversmith made for me--until I get around to making myself more silver spindles, those will do just fine. (And I think they're beautiful--elegant and primitive at once, plus they remind me of my travels.)

At any rate, I'm doing some gauge swatching, though I'm not doing anything near the 4x4" gauge swatch normally recommended. Just a few rows, enough to get an idea of the look, and adjust the needles as needed. I'll be doing more serious swatching later, for the moment I'm just trying to get a sense for the yarn.

I'm also playing around with new knitting techniques. I picked up a Japanese book on lace knitting on my last trip through Lacis (a lace shop up in Berkeley), and it's fascinating. It is, unfortunately, entirely in Japanese, but it has excellent diagrams/pictures, so I've been working my way through it and picking up their new techniques. They create beautiful, large, complex images (they have a pentagonal rose in one of the diagrams) on dark backgrounds--this is done by using regular knitting in the body of the image, but switching to one of three kinds of openwork in the background. At the moment I'm just trying to understand the openwork, and it's pretty cool--I haven't seen these approaches in any American knitting books, and I'm always thrilled when I find a new technique.

Here's one example:

Row 1: k2tog, [(k1, yo, k1) in next stitch, sl-1-k2tog-pass slipped stitch over], repeat, yo, k1.
Row 2: purl to end of row
Row 3: k1, yo, [sl1-k2tog-pass slipped stitch over, (k1, yo, k1) in next stitch], repeat, end ssk.
Row 4: purl
repeat

Discounting all the instructions, what they're doing here is alternating a triple increase --[(k1,yo, k1) in same stitch] -- with a triple decrease (sl1, k2tog, pass slipped stitch over) to produce a very openwork knitting. The [(k1,yo,k1) in same stitch] increase is one I haven't seen before, and is really interesting--I want to experiment with that.

Another example:

Row 1: k2tog, [double yo (wrap around needles twice), ssk, k2tog], repeat, end yo, k1
Row 2: purl until you reach the double yo, and in the double yo's (k1, p1) in same stitch
Row 3: ssk, [double yo, ssk, k2tog], repeat, end yo, k1
Row 4: same as row 2

Discounting the instructions (which I am not guaranteeing to be accurate, since I wrote them off the top of my head), this translates to alternating a double increase ((k1,p1) in the double yo) with a double decrease (ssk, k2tog). You can get different effects depending on how you change the slant of the stitches in the decreases--the one I mentioned makes a little "cap" or peak over each hole.

What is novel and interesting about this idea is the idea of using a double yo to create more than one stitch--I've seen this idea embedded in other designs (the cockleshell pattern, for example), but not this way. I've added it to my library of stitch increases.

There are a few other variants, but that's the basic idea.

This book is emphatically not for novice knitters (basically because it's in Japanese), but if you are reasonably experienced with lace and good at working things out, or want a great reference book for later, I strongly recommend it. The ISBN is 529-02531-4, and the title is _Knitting Lace_. Probably the quickest way to get it is to call up Lacis, in Berkeley (do a Yahoo! search to find them). It has some of the most interesting ideas I've seen in quite awhile, and I've been collecting books on lace knitting.

(Among other things, it has a pentagonal shawl/tablecloth, which I've never seen before. Circles, spirals, octagons, squares, even hexagons are easy--but this is the first pentagon I've ever seen. They also have some oval-ish shawls knitted in the round, which are not impossible but hard to find in a standard lace book. This book is neat-o.)

Anyway, I have been swatching from it, and let my hands think about what this shawl wants to be. I think it is going to be a Faroese shawl, light, falling in soft smoky folds, and it is also going to be about value--light to dark shading. I keep thinking of gray mist and something to do with spirits. The yarn is delightfully ethereal, pearly, smoky with a little bit of halo...delightful to work with, and soft as a kiss. I keep running it over my lips because it feels SO soft. I'm pretty sure the finished piece will be nice as well.

Still playing with ideas, but pretty comfortable with the yarn. Now all I need is some more black satin angora, and a bit more of that brown cashmere/silk--I have 2 oz of black satin and 3 oz of cashmere/silk, which should in theory be more than enough (the spiral shawl only weighs 3.25 ounces), but I'd like 4 ounces of each to be really safe. (If the finished shawl weighs 8 ounces, I'll be frightened. It would probably be half the size of Brooklyn--"the shawl that ate New York".)

All of which will take my mind off work, which has abruptly gone to hell. My "small" side project has materialized into a monster holding up $1 million of revenue recognition, which translates to "MUST be done by end of year". I've been working my butt off and completely stressed about getting things done in time, so it's good to have other stuff to work on.

More on chocolate deviltry once the photos arrive. Of course, if the hapless victim pays enough for the negatives, all bets are off. ;-)

Tien

ah, more chocolate...

Preparing chocolate (and the Chocolate Mystery Sensation) for tonight's party...friend of mine has invited me over for a party with him and about 30 friends...and I am bringing dessert. So the Chocolate Surprise is going as the centerpiece of a platter of truffles, and a second platter of chocolate dip (with strawberries, cookies, and other stuff to dip into the chocolate ganache).

I've tried some experimental flavors this time--four classics (Armagnac, whisky, cinnamon, boysenberry) plus mint (with fresh spearmint steeped in the cream) and my favorite for this round, rose-cardamom truffles. (I steeped some cardamom in boiling cream, and added a tiny drop of attar of roses.) They taste fantastic.

I've got everything poured and cooling in containers...in a little bit I'll slice and decorate them. I'm going to cut them into squares, rectangles, diamonds, triangles, etc. and then dust them with cinnamon, cocoa, powdered sugar, gold leaf, and silver leaf--should look very pretty (I hope!)

Tien

Ahh...chocolate. :-)

Just got back from a trip to my chocolate supplier--a wonderful wholesaler called Made In France that imports (duh!) French foods and sells them to upscale restaurants throughout the year. In the holiday season, they have warehouse sales open to the public, so I went there today, and came home with (finally!) a decent chocolate supply. I now have 12 kg of dark chocolate (a bit over 25 lbs) and 6 kg of white chocolate (a bit over 13 lbs). It's not a huge amount of chocolate (circa 40 lbs), but it should be enough for one decent project plus emergency supplies.

(I should maybe point out that I can't eat chocolate, at least not more than an ounce at a time--it makes me hyper. So don't think of my chocolate supply as "eating chocolate" (that would be excessive)--think of it as craft supplies. It's almost impossible to make any reasonable amount of chocolates with under five pounds, and fifteen to twenty pounds is much better. So this is really not as much chocolate as it sounds. Honest. ;-) )

Anyway, I was excited to see that my favorite French chocolate company has a new variety out! It's called Araguani, and at 72% cocoa solids is their highest cocoa-solids chocolate. I sneaked a piece while still in the warehouse (I was going to buy the package anyway, so what the hell) and decided that while it was good, it wasn't going to unseat my favorite anytime soon, so I only bought 3 kg of it. It's good, but surprisingly mild--a rounded cocoa impact with a hint of smokiness to it, maybe just a *trifle* too bitter. Reminded me a little bit of an espresso-roast coffee. I'm going to experiment with it and see what it works well in.

I was also pleased to find a package of El Rey's Icoa! This is a Venezuelan product that is (as far as I know) unique among white chocolates--it's made with nondeodorized cocoa butter, so it tastes like a light milk chocolate even though it has no cocoa at all.

(A short explanation of chocolate manufacture: cacao beans are about 55% cocoa butter and 45% cocoa solids (not entirely sure; the percentages may be reversed). During manufacture, the beans are roasted and then ground. At that point, a good chunk of the cocoa butter is usually separated out and either diverted to the pharmaceutical/cosmetics trade (it's used as a skin softening agent) or purified and re-added to the chocolate later. (Good dark chocolates frequently have extra cocoa butter added to improve the texture/fluidity.)

For white chocolate, the cocoa butter is separated out, and typically deodorized--cocoa butter picks up odors very easily, so it's treated with a steam treatment (I think) that removes all the "off" flavors. Then vanilla flavoring, milk powder, and sugar are added, making white chocolate.

With El Rey's white chocolate (brand name Icoa), the cocoa butter is not deodorized, so it retains the "nose" of the cocoa even though it doesn't have any cocoa powder. it's a wonderful white chocolate, but unfortunately hard to find.)

Anyway, I immediately loaded up with 3kg of Icoa, and then added 3 kg of Valrhona's Ivoire, which is a wonderful white chocolate with AWESOME texture/mouthfeel, and the most amazing vanilla flavor...I do not typically like white chocolate but I love Ivoire. It's got a rich, creamy vanilla taste, and it melts in your mouth. Not oversweetened at all--rich rather than sweet. I strongly recommend it.

The rest was more or less bread-and-butter: two packages (6 kg total) of Extra Bitter, my favorite Valrhona chocolate, and 1 package (3 kg) of Pur Caraibe, my second favorite. Extra Bitter is a 61% cocoa solids dark chocolate, has a warm, smooth flavor (think strong Kona coffee, with a touch of Colombian), and an excellent texture. Pur Caraibe is a bit more intense and slightly earthier/spicier, but in the same class. They're both great for chocolate work.

And then I got a small bar of Valrhona's Le Lait (their standard milk chocolate), which is OK, and a smoked duck breast that I bought after sampling their tasting table. It blew my mind away. Smoky and rich, like the hams you wish you could buy. Wonderful stuff. I may be decadent and eat it on sliced bread this week. If I take the fat layer off the breast it might even not be too awful for me. :-) It's not cheap, but I figure a little goes a long way. And damn, is it tasty.

Tonight my friend is coming over to help me cast the other half of this chocolate mold, and then we're going to try casting the chocolate...will be really cool to see what happens.

By the way, you may be amused: the line in the warehouse at these sales is always extremely long, so I brought along a spindle and a pair of knitting needles. I had already spun 30-40 yards of black satin angora (gorgeous stuff--fluff of angora and the sheen of silk), and while I was in line I spun 30-40 yards of 50-50 brown cashmere/silk yarn, and plied the two together. The result is a silver-to-smoke colored ragg yarn, 2-ply, in the 40-50 wpi range, silk/cashmere and satin angora. I spun up the cashmere/silk, plied it all, and started knitting a swatch while I was in line. (Yeah, it was a bloody long line.) It looks like it's going to be gorgeous, but I need to do a bit more work on it before I can know whether it's what I want. I may wind up dyeing the cashmere/silk (or just using dyed silk) to get a more even yarn color. We'll see.

Oh yeah! I found a really cool toy while surfing eBay. It's a Unimat mini-lathe that is really more like the Erector set of machining tools--it has at least six functions, and you can use it to machine almost any small part. But that's not what interests me, of course...it's the fact that I could use it TO TURN MINI SPINDLES!!! The Unimat is the expensive version (runs about $300), but it turns out I can get a cheap wood mini-lathe for about $25-50, and that would be plenty fine for turning silver spindles. (Use silverclay, let it dry out, then turn the dried clay on the lathe.) As soon as I have a free moment, I plan to get one...it would be very cool indeed to be able to make better-balanced silverclay spindles than the ones I can do at present. Or even to machine my own metal spindles...brass is way more durable than silver.

So, lots of cool stuff.

Meanwhile, work-wise, it's finally dawned on me that what I'm being asked to do is build a Professional Services division more or less from the ground up. This is really laughable considering that I have absolutely zero background in either Professional Services or wireless (cellular) technology, and my boss has zero background in professional services, either. The VP is experienced in it, but is located in the UK and is extremely busy with something else, so I haven't been able to get any guidance whatsoever. (I had a very amusing conversation with another executive at work, which basically summed up to, "Wait--they're letting you run around WITHOUT ADULT SUPERVISION???") So the whole thing is totally absurd.

Fortunately, this is the sort of thing I'm good at, and the kind of challenge I enjoy, so I've basically dived into it. One of my first rules is that Nothing Is As Complicated As It Looks, so I've been sorting out the details of billing, accounting, margin and revenue targets, sales forecasting, and so on. It's pretty complicated but is basically logical--you try to figure out what money is likely to come in, how to find the resources to do whatever you're committing to do, and work out how to charge people and how to make sure product gets delivered, and so on. I'm familiar with that kind of logistical thinking since I have a lot of project management experience.

The other thing I've been doing is going around building relationships throughout the organization--finding the right contacts and getting their views on things. So while I still know relatively little about wireless technology, at least I know the right set of people to talk to--which is well over half the battle when it comes to problem-solving. I've been slowly assembling a picture of the company, how it operates, and what the major challenges are, structurally and market-wise--and what I'll be able to fix, and what should be left alone.

The net upshot of it all is that I think I will actually succeed at what I'm doing--which, all things considered, is utterly absurd. You do not take someone off the street, dump them into something at which they have no experience, and ask them to put together a strategy for developing an organization, without advice or guidance. On the other hand, this is the kind of thing I love doing, and I think I'm actually going to be able to do it. The company is on break for the next two weeks, but I'm on the roster of "authorized to work"--I'm going to spend the next two weeks putting together next year's plan and preparing to review it with the VP of Prof Svcs.

I love this kind of thing.

Off to finish my chocolate mold and try my chocolate casting...

Tien

new project (and my diabolical sense of humor...)

...Actually, I can't tell you about the diabolical sense of humor part, yet...my intended victim might happen to read my blog, after all. But I can tell you it's completely diabolical, and I'll be able to tell you about it after New Year's at the latest. Meanwhile, I'm having huge amounts of fun plotting. :-) I will admit that it involves sculpture...

...which brought me to this really cool shop in San Francisco this evening. I was looking for mold-making supplies, and boy did I come to the right place. Shelves and shelves and racks and racks of mold-making supplies. If you EVER want bronzing powders, powdered pigments, 50+ types of glitter, and so on, in bulk, I can tell you exactly where to go. I was utterly fascinated (and also very excited)--one of the things I love about doing weirdly esoteric projects is that you get to meet so many mavens--people who know everything about a particular art or craft. This guy knew molding and casting like you wouldn't believe.

At any rate, in about half an hour of chatting with the owner I got a very cool introduction to the theory of molding/casting, and some inkling of the different materials involved in creating molds. Didn't get as much time as I would have liked--had to go visit someone else--but got some fundamental underpinnings and some really interesting ideas. For example, he pointed out one silicone mold-making material that would be great for casting chocolates...now I just have to think what I'd like to reproduce in chocolates. I think it'd be fun to mold my own uniquely shaped chocolates for Xmas (to go with all the candy)--just need to think of a good "signature". Maybe I'll make chocolate spindles next xmas--that *would* be funny. LOL

The two really interesting things there, though, was this weird jellylike stuff. Heat it up to about 375 degrees, pour it over something, let it harden, and presto! you have this very flexible mold of whatever you poured it over. Better yet, once you've cast as many objects as you like, re-melt the mold and you can use it over and over again. The only catch is that it has to be able to survive 375 degrees, so you can't use, say, chocolate, or humans. I just couldn't keep myself from poking at it--it felt...odd, kind of like those silicone pads they put into bra cups sometimes.

The other really cool stuff was this heat-formed plastic that they use for making armatures (structural underlayers of sculpture). You take a sheet of it, dip it into hot water (160 degrees or so) until soft, then form it into shape. When it cools down, it hardens into that shape. If you don't like it, heat it up and work it again--it's reusable!

I think that's a pretty cool thing--less messy and easier to work than plaster bandages or other sculptural options. I got some to play around with. But it has inspired me to start thinking about interesting things to mold/craft/create with resin and plaster. Sculpture! That sounds like fun. (But I'm not going there...too busy with work, and should be writing the book if not working.)

Anyway, I'm preparing to do more work tomorrow on my Nefarious Project...damn, it's a real pity I can't write about it. It's a great (and really very funny) story. But it'll be just as funny (hopefully even more funny) in a few weeks.

Meanwhile, Isis has taken a turn for the worse--I tried feeding her yesterday, and she refused her third rat (!). Then she spent the entire night wheezing and sniffling--I woke up 5 times listening to her. I called the vet as soon as they opened, got her in, and they took another culture from her throat. Once they know what the "bug" is, I'm afraid it's another round of antibiotics...the vet said 30 days. Oy vey! 30 days in a row I have to find someone to help me shoot up my snake. Not to mention shelling out $15 per injection (that's $450, plus vet fees, plus lab culture fees, plus ??). It's a good thing I'm so fond of Isis or she might wind up as boot leather.

(Just kidding. I am very, very, very fond of Isis, and anyone who wanted to make her into boot leather would have to go through me (and every one of my sharp pointy objects) first. She really is a sweetie.)

Isis, needless to say, was NOT happy about any of this, and tried to bite the vet. Can't say as I blame her, poor girl, although I'm glad she didn't actually get him. 30 days of injections. I wish I could just inject myself instead. (Not least becuase it would involve much less muss and fuss. LOL) I just hope she comes out OK at the end of it. I think she will.

Along those lines, I bought a new gadget for her cage yesterday. I had been humidifying her cage by running a steam humidifier in the room night and day, but since I don't enjoy life in 80% humidity, I was looking for other ways to keep her cage warm and steamy. Skipping the four or five other ingenious ideas that didn't work, I finally wound up with an ultrasonic fogger for aquariums. I have no idea how the gadget works, but it's pretty cool--turn it on and you immediately get small jets of water and curling wisps of white mist pouring mysteriously over the side of the basin. I have no idea if it will be successful at humidifying her cage--I rather suspect not, it's too small--but it *loooks* really cool. This weekend I'm going to try redesigning it to see if I can get it to be better at humidifying things.

Late, tired, going to bed--hoping Isis comes out OK and that my Nefarious Project works out well. :-)

Tien

cats settled in :-)

Well, after another round of airline nightmares (my traveling companion--and Sweetheart--nearly got stranded in Chicago), both cats are safely home. Thanks for the suggestions about wire protectors--I wound up getting some cable conduit and have been rigging that up on vulnerable wiring. (Question for the bunny folks: how do you get electrical cords into PVC pipe? Do you have to use 1" diameter PVC to get the plugs through?)

The cats are settling in with incredible speed--I had expected them to be freaked out for at least a couple of days, but aside from a little bit of tentativeness about strange people and loud noises (which would normally spook them anyway) you'd never know they'd moved at all. I think it's because the entire house smells of me, so clearly it's my territory, and since they own me clearly it must be their territory, too. Yesterday there were ten or eleven people over at the house for a meeting, and the Fuzz actually went wandering out, tail waving in the air, to collect his fair share of adoration. (Sweetheart is a bit more shy, and stayed in my room with me.)

Still, I'm astonished--when I took them to Maryland, they were really weirded out even though I was with them. But here, they're perfectly comfortable. I think they really must remember me...!

(Yeah, I was a bit worried. It's been two years...but it's like they'd never left at all. :-) )

I've also discovered a new kind of cat litter that I'll have to try when the current scoop litter runs out--this is kind of cool: silica sand. I'm not certain, but I *think* it's the same stuff as in the little dehydrator packets stuck into bottles of vitamins, OTC medications, and so on--just absorbs moisture. Apparently if your cat pees on it, it absorbs the moisture instantly--and still feels dry to the touch (not that I intend to try)--and absolutely no odor. I'm going to ask a chemist friend how exactly the stuff works.

But I've been shopping, and I have all the usual cat paraphernalia--litterbox, scratching post, canned cat food, dry cat food, collars, catnip, a few cat toys, and, of course, the all-important human slave/cat toy (that would be me :-) ). It's been wonderful having their little furry feet padding about--it's like a part of me was missing and I wasn't even aware of it until it came home. :-) I am quietly ecstatic.

Nothing much else new--I've mostly been traveling or out buying cat supplies the last few days. Oh! I got some absolutely *stunning* black satin angora from Elaine Harvey, it's perfect for my latest spinning project. Might have to wait behind the angora/kid mohair/glitz socks I started knitting on the plane out, though. Nice and fuzzy and soft, though I don't like the yarn much--I spun it as a fairly novice spinner so it is a lumpy-bumpy laceweight yarn. Pleasantly fuzzy in spots but also tight, kinky, and unpleasant in others. But it's handspun and it's kinda fun to work with, so...*shrug* Don't know if I'll finish them, we'll see what happens.

The big project for next week (aside from settling a bunch of other stuff) is chocolate body parts. I have a Nubile Young Male (tm) coming by on Tuesday so I can take a mold of certain body parts (no, not the ones you're thinking of [grin]) and cast them in chocolate. I can't say any more than that since it's a surprise for a friend, but man, is it going to be WICKED. LOL

Tien

P.S. I'm republishing my blog now, which should fix the archive problem--I changed hosting plans on my ISP recently, which is probably causing part of the problem. If you keep having trouble, let me know, OK?

getting ready to bring back my cats...

I finally managed to get a taker for my "extra" plane ticket, and a very sweet guy is getting to go visit his grandmother in San Francisco, and my cats are going in the cabin. (And if I may offer some advice, NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER fly ATA, for any reason. I was NOT happy with their customer service and it took me a good 3 hours on the phone to get all this straightened out.) They have their vet certificate and shots, the special airplane carry-on cat carriers, the whole nine yards (or maybe that should be "nine lives"?). Wednesday afternoon, we'll all be together in San Francisco.

Having settled all that, I've just reached a horrible realization. My house is not cat-proofed.

With most cats, this would be a relatively simple proposition--fasten down all the extremely breakable items and you're done. I, on the other hand, have the Fuzz. The Fuzz is a big, beautiful black long-haired cat (technically he's a domestic medium hair) with big, glorious innocent green eyes, a giant purr, incredibly friendly demeanor, and about three neurons in that big, beautiful head. Which would not be an issue except for his obsession with chewing on power cords.

Actually he is not quite *that* bad; he'll chew on any cable in sight and is particularly fond of phone cords--you know, the springy kind that attach to handsets. (He chewed through one once while I was actually on the phone--can you imagine the embarrassment? "Uh, sorry about that...my cat chewed through the phone cord." "No, really, what happened?" "No, really, honest, my cat chewed through the phone cord!" "You know, it's OK if you don't want to talk to me, but...")

But apparently he is getting worse in his old age...he ate the Christmas tree lights at my sister-in-law's house, shredding the cables over a five-foot span, and ate the power cable for her housemate's home freezer unit. The latter was especially impressive since they had smeared deathly hot hot sauce on the cable to keep him away from it and had wedged the cable into a teeny little space where it would be very difficult to get to. It took a lot of contortions and incredible determination--every time he tried chewing the cable, the hot sauce would get to him and he'd throw up on the floor--but by God, he chewed through it in the end. (Nobody could figure out how he managed to short out the freezer without electrocuting himself. I think his guardian angel must have been working WAY overtime.)

At any rate, I admire his perseverance and am absolutely terrified of what he's going to do once I get him home. Do they make steel tubing for protecting your power cords?

The Fuzz is also fanatically fond of corn on the cob, and has an absolute mania for shrimp. Sweetheart, my other kitty, has far fewer fetishes--as long as you understand that your place in the universe is under her four furry paws, you'll get along fine. (I adore her.)

Meanwhile, my dad is going to house-sit my brother's pygmy hedgehog Tanuki while my bro and his wife are on their honeymoon--so we're picking up Tanukki today. He is one damn cute critter--he's about the size of a Star Trek tribble, except with prickles instead of fur. He's adorable. When he's feeling safe, he goes snuffling around the cage in his happy little hedgehog shuffle, but if he runs into something he's not sure about, he starts huffing and snorting. Then he frowns. His brows come up and furrow, and his face recedes under the prickles...and he just keeps frowning until he's turned into a little featureless ball of prickles. Sort of like the Cheshire cat, but the only thing that's left is the frown. :-) And he snorts. It's adorable, especially in something that fits easily into the palm of your hand. I really like pygmy hedgehogs.

(Don't worry, I'm not about to get one...two cats and three snakes is enough. Especially if I get myself an adult male Brazilian rainbow boa (which I want to do soon)--then I'll have baby boas again, and that's always fun. :-) Besides, pygmy hedgehogs are illegal in California.)

And yeah, exotic pets run in the family. :-) When I was a kid, we had three goldfish, two rabbits, a dog, some variable number of lizards, and lots and lots of pet crickets. For some reason I got obsessed with crickets as a young kid (probably from reading Cricket magazine) and would always catch and keep wild crickets. I still think they're beautiful critters--jet black, with very precisely molded wings, and those lovely wild antennae sweeping up back of the head. They would clean them with their mandibles, and it was always cool to watch one finish and the antenna sproing! out of the mouth and up into its accustomed place. And it was really cool to watch the males rub their wings together to make the characteristic chirping sound.

Unfortunately, the black field cricket that I loved as a girl doesn't live out West, AFAIK; there's only the brown house-cricket, and they don't look nearly as cool. I've also lost my ability to sleep in a room full of 23 chirping crickets. :-)

Rob, on the other hand, has now got a bunch of baby chameleons--one litter from a livebearing chameleon, two litters from egg-layers. The egg-layers were kind of interesting--half of them made it out on their own and the other half needed help in birthing. Normally chameleon babies (and snake babies) "pip" the shells--cut open a small slit--and then stay in the shell for another half day or so, with just the tip of the snout peeking out, while they absorb the rest of the yolk into their body. But sometimes it doesn't quite work, and then someone needs to slit the egg the rest of the way, squeeze the chameleon out of the shell (it's leathery, not hard, so it slips out like a wet melon seed), and put it on a wet paper towel to take off the slime from the birth membranes. The yolk isn't absorbed yet, so the chameleon just sits there quietly, with the yolk outside, and slowly absorbs the yolk back into its body. Half a day later, it gets up and walks around.

This yolk thing is actually pretty interesting. Baby snakes store up a lot of yolk in their body, so they don't usually eat until after their first shed. When Isis had her first litter, I lost two of the babies early on--I had put them on wet paper toweling, and two of them had tunneled under the paper towels and suffocated. I felt awful about it (I have since learned not to make the paper toweling quite so damp, and to use a bigger container), and took them off to the vet for an autopsy. They cut open the pathetic little corpses (I still feel awful about that whole thing), and lo! the last three or four inches of the body were filled with yolk. It looked just like egg yolk (although not runny). I was astonished. I had never really thought about what happened to the yolk of an egg once the critter was born. But in reptiles, it absorbs into the yolk.

Another interesting bit of snake-trivia: have you ever thought about how a baby snake absorbs nutrition? I mean, it has to have some way of absorbing the yolk. It turns out it funnels nutrients through a small slit in the mid-belly of the snake--the snake equivalent of a belly-button. In newborn baby snakes, you can actually see the yolk-slit. It closes up after three or four days and you never see it again--you basically have to be a snake-breeder to see it--but it is really really cool. I'm very glad to have bred Isis, if only to see a baby snake close up.

By the way, for more snake trivia, I have a snake ultrasound on my snakes page: http://www.travelingtiger.com/pix/Snakes.htm

The story there was that Isis had refused to eat for three or four months, but seemed otherwise OK, in fact she was getting bigger. I wasn't sure exactly what that meant--I thought she *might* be gravid (pregnant), as pregnant snakes almost always stop eating, but I wasn't sure. Finally I called up the vet and said, "Um, I want to know if my snake is pregnant, but obviously I don't want the babies X-rayed, what do I do?" They said, "Why don't you bring her in, and we'll do an ultrasound?"

So I stuck my possibly-pregnant snake into a pillowcase, tied it shut, and took it down to the vet. (By the way, you have not seen weird until you see the look that the Pomeranian-owner gives you as you dump a writhing pillowcase on the counter and announce, "My pillowcase has a 10:30 with Dr. Nakamura.") I opened the pillowcase, the vet took one look at her, and said, "She's pregnant." But, since they had the ultrasound technician there, and she'd never done an ultrasound on a pregnant snake before, and my vet had never seen it, and I was of course dying to see the babies on ultrasound, we went ahead and ultrasounded my snake. It was way cool--we could watch the hearts beating, see the little coiled-up spines, and they even gave me a photo of it so I could show my baby pictures to everyone in the office! (Okay, they weren't super-appreciative, but still. LOL)

A week later, Isis gave birth to 18 happy, healthy, bouncing baby boas. :-)

It was really neat on the morning of...I woke up at 3:30am with a feeling that something had happened...I went over to Isis's cage, shone a flashlight in, and...babies!! Lots and lots of little baby boas. All curled up inside the birth membranes (as they were in her body), with just the little heads poking up...it looked like rows of babies just sitting there, waiting to be born.

Then an hour or so later, I stuck my hand in the cage and suddenly had a plate of squirming entrails. Not to mention pinpricks as the babies panicked and bit me. Moral of the story: move 'em while they're just-born, and quiet. After they wake up they're a LOT feistier.

(And if you ever want to see funny, watch one person (or even two) try to corral 23 fast-moving baby snakes into a single box. Pop one in, the next comes flowing out. And out. And then you get to chase down the little baby snakes that make it out across the floor. If you imagine a box full of live spaghetti that pushes itself out of the box as fast as you can push it back in, you get an idea. Believe me, it would play on Comedy Central. LOL)

Anyway, that's enough snake reminisces for one day...tomorrow we go and get the cats. :-)

Tien

P.S. I am knitting a new pair of socks on this trip...basically a horseshoe/shell design (except I gussied it up a bit), on 1.5mm needles, using a laceweight kid mohair/angora/silk/glitz yarn that I spun four or five years ago. They're, umm, very fuzzy. :-)