God Damn.

I have: a slowly but surely swelling gash on the back of my hand, right on top of a vein
assorted scratches
a mess in the kitchen sink, bathroom, and bath tub
massive hunks of fur all over my favorite nightgown
claw holes and eau de tomcat in and on my favorite nightgown
Shreds of claws by the kitchen sink
one very pissed off cat
and a hunk of bloody cat hair Superglued to my left thumb.

(What happened...)

So it's late at night, the Viking's going out the door to leave, and Shamash streaks out. He hasn't been neutered, hasn't had his shots -- he is an exclusively house cat until that happens. Standard punishment for cat being bad: cat gets washed.

Cat does not like being washed. Cat was struggling in sink, and tears own nail off. Blood all over the place. Yowling, et cetera.

Tomcat is unceremoniously hauled into my bathroom, where claw is blotted at and the bleeding slowed down some. In a token of affectionate forgiveness, I get chomped, rather hard, leaving blood, and now swelling, oozing out from on top of the major vein on the back of my left hand. My favorite towel is spotted with cat blood. Joyous.

With the chickens, having the dead outer covering fall off a claw was no bloody big deal. Happened all the time. Greybird-ha, the hyper frantic banty rooster (think the energy level of Miles Vorkosigan on crack, trying to micromanage the Dendarii, with the native temperament of somewhere between Illyan trying to manage Miles, Duv Galeni dealing with Ivan/Miles of the London days, Galeni dealing with Mark versus the Koudelka clan, tossing in more than a touch of the Escobaran court officer sent to retrieve Enrique) shed spurs on a monthly basis. We'd stop most of the bleeding, then toss the birds back out into the chicken pen, and everything went just fine. Shamash screamed and struggled as I tried to hold him down.

There's one thing that works for a torn nail when your house is unfortunately minus proper bandages and surgical tape, and that's superglue. I heard somewhere that it was originally developed as a surgical glue, for skin grafts. I didn't fancy cleaning bloody pawprints out of the carpet, so I held the damn cat down and applied enough superglue to keep his foot from bleeding more, so it could heal on its own time.

Letting it dry. Oy gods. Holding a pained cat still, while you're in pain yourself, is no picnic.

On his way out of the bathroom, the damn cat managed to grab my brand new white ritual shawl. Anyone know how to get cat blood out of a ritual shawl, material unknown?

He's pissed at me now, and I'm pissed at him. I'm not a cat person, I think we may have established this now.

When I get back to Alaska, I will keep a Siamese fighting fish, male, and an African violet. Alaska, indoors, is the right place to grow African violets. You can't kill the damn things if you try.

(no subject)

We now return to the regularly scheduled long loving commentary about Darkside.

cuter than ever

So sue me, but I've just noticed the man's nose.

Darkside's hair is getting longer from its unfortunate haircut, and his facial hair is growing out as well. It's not scruffy any longer; it's actually starting to look like a nice and tidy intellectual short beard, and not just a goatee. All in all, with the glasses and the very blue eyes and the slightly wavy dark blond/light brown hair and the beard (slightly reddish-brownish, rather than blond...) and the way he's so brilliant and then his body... ooh. His body.

I have this thing for skinny, wiry martial artists. When Darkside wears a short-sleeved shirt, you can see that he's got definite arm muscles, the sort that mean that he may not work out every day, but damn, he's not one to mess with either unless you are the sort who works out every day, and even then, not if he's pissed at you for something. He's only about 5'7", my height, give or take shoes and posture. He dances wonderfully, our hands clasped, fingers laced through each other, standing in the middle of the DeVry courtyard, attempting to hurt each other, in something that winds up looking more like tango or waltz than potentially painful conflict.

I love his eyes, so sober blue and serious when he looks at me sometimes, crinkling at the corners other times when he gets the half-smirk. The precise blue of his eyes is the dark grey/blue of the storm clouds blowing in for a windy downpour in Alaska on one of those summer days when the alder leaves are green, the wild roses are a shade lighter than that intense emerald, the scattering petals in all shades of sun-bleached palest pink through the newest intense fuchsia of the just-opened buds. I love that color, the color of the storm. I'm Air, and at some moments his eyes challenge me to summon up the wildest winds of my soul to face him.

We've never carried through on his challenges, yet. One of us always breaks the moment.
( Near-Milesian romantically hopeful burbling )

candlelight, computer light...

To truly have the experience, I should have incense smoking up the room, drifting in the soft lights. Dire Straits has to be one of my all time favorite bands, which is why I don't play them half often enough, so they'll still hit me this hard when I need them. I had to hear "Brothers In Arms" tonight. I don't know where the liner notes got to, but I don't care. I adore the music in its own right.

It needs Denny's coffee and my laptop and my novel, as well as Livejournal. Ah yes, for a network and high speed internet at Denny's. I'd never leave. Me, my coffee, my Tarot deck, my music, and my novel, as well as my journal and online friends.

...

End of the CD. I'm going to bed now. Adam's not yet home. *sigh* Wish he'd get home before midnight. Can't sleep without him anymore. Drives me nuts.

Insomnia

When I'm expecting Adam home, I wait up.

I'm finding it increasingly difficult to go to sleep at bedtime when Adam's not there to curl up next to.

This, of course, upset him when I flung the fact at him in a grouchy late-night "when are you coming home" conversation just now. I hung up on him, peevish and not wishing to make things much worse, which I probably did.

Fuck.

It doesn't mean I want to marry him. It just means that when I'm expecting him to be there, and be there soon (he said, home after midnight... I expect when someone says "after ....", that it's to be within an hour after that time...) I can't go to sleep without him. It's fine when I know he's going to be spending the night elsewhere, but his coming in late...

...I need sleep, dammit. Darkside was close to ordering me to go home and sleep this (Thursday) morning. I eventually did. His reasons for not making it an order: first, I wouldn't obey; second, I didn't have my keys on me.

Adam will be getting his own set of keys soon.

Why?

Why why why?

Fuckit. I sound like the whiny teenybopper posers most LJ regulars aren't petty enough to waste the time to despise. I'm tired, I hurt, I just got into a wrestling match with the cat and lost, and I know that once I'm out cold, I'm probably not going to wake up at a knock on the door, because Adam can't get in without keys, and I'm not leaving an entrance to my home unlocked in Phoenix at night.

insomnia, continued

This just sucks. I know I've pissed Adam off.

Not crying, though. I've cried twice in the past two months or so, first from being very drunk and getting into an argument and being in the wrong and realizing it and then realizing why it was an issue and cursing at all buttheaded emotionally, mentally, physically, and sexually abusive males in the world; second, from Darkside's not giving me his fucking AIM screen name. Why that should matter I haven't the foggiest. (I just want to be able to get in touch with him, dammit, and all those years of not being able to keep in touch with friends has made him too elusive to keep many friends...)

I'm too clingy, too grabby, too needy, and Adam and Darkside both see it. I want to collect men and keep them by my side to protect me and take care of me for always. If Adam had been a woman and I'd kept a harem, I'd have put him in my harem at once and knocked him up, and snagged Darkside for my harem too, but not touched him, just wooed him gently with fruit and wine and really bad puns and good anime until he finally caved in.

Why?

I'm insecure, neurotic, weird, worried...

hell.

I'm going to bed. If I don't wake up when he knocks, he can call from his cellphone and wake one of us, either me or Votania, up.

I've told him before that I can't get to sleep until he goes to bed. This time I think he finally heard me.

Darkside

I must get to school early today.

One year ago today, my best friend, most beloved friend, Darkside, went for his first date with my dear sister Votania.

Blessed be, love. I'm still right here.

Darkside in the Morning

Got clobbered. Heavy exchange of bonk. Worked on schedules.

Shout-out

Welcoming marxdarx to my friends list...

Marx has been a friend since I met him, and is one of the regulars hanging out at the apartment. Formerly known as Rana.

Copy of a comment in a friend's journal

Some mistakes can be fixed. Some mistakes weren't mistakes in the first place.

I believe that opportunities for true love don't happen only once. It's not just a one-shot deal. If pyrogenic had been single when he and I had met, we might have wound up together forever. If my first fiancee and I had lived in the same state, we would probably have worked out. If Shawn hadn't gotten scared and run as hard as he could, we would have worked out. As much as I hate what Shawn did to me, and I can't say I'm glad he did it, I'm glad that if it had to happen to me, that it was he who did it to me rather than someone else, who would have been more cruel in teaching me the same lessons. I would not have any of that which happened to me left undone. I paraphrase Miles Vorkosigan again when I say, I would not have undone any of that, for fear of becoming smaller. Smaller-hearted, smaller-souled.

The trick, though, when you screw up, is not to toss it away because you screwed it up once and now it's all broken. Doing that, that screws up worse, without hope of redemption. If you realize where you've screwed up, take a look at what's gone wrong. It hurts, yes, but the only right thing to do is to see what went wrong and where you have a chance of putting things at least a little more right.