Have a good thought for....

KUFFER today... He's in the veterinary hospital, having dental treatment. It's routine stuff, although he'll probably have to have some teeth out, but he's 16 years old, and at that age, anaesthetics are a risk. Plus he has a thyroid condition. I shall be on tenterhooks until I hear from them that he's awake again. :(

Oh, and we've got a mouse in the house again too. Sigh...

UPDATE ON KUFFER

He's fine! Awake from the op and doing well. He doesn't have many teeth left, just a couple of canines, but both Alice and Mulder had to have their back teeth out some years ago, and they both eat like gannets!

No further news on the mouse. Still there, I suppose...

Mus Musculus.... again!!!

So here I am, minding my own business and just doing my normal morning rounds of my favourite blogs and boards... when out of the corner of my eye, I catch sight of movement. At first, subconsciously, I think 'cat' as something trots along the top of the chest of drawers just a yard or two from my bed... then I think, '****! It's ****ing mouse!'

And there it is, large as life, a fairly big house mouse strolling around on the furniture, in my bedroom! Not cowering in the corner, but ambling about, taking the air and admiring the scenery, and leaping from item of furniture to item of furniture... with just a jump of around two feet to the bed I'm lying on!!!! I'm stunned to immobility, but when I do move, he clocks me, scoots along the the chest of drawers and drops down onto the floor, only to take cover amongst a heap of himself's trainers! Shit... out of reach now... no way to catch him.

I investigate, and find him actually in the gap between two chests of drawers, and amazingly, he comes sashaying out into plain sight as if there wasn't a massive human looming over him at all [and a freaking cat FAST ASLEEP on the bed just feet away!] We play 'cat' and mouse for a bit, and he tootles off out of the bedroom and into the hall... I think I've lost him, and we're in big trouble, but luckily, I spot him again, and he's just close enough to the loo for me to herd him into the smallest room and corral us in there together...

He's still bold as brass, and doesn't hide all that much, as well as showing disturbing tendencies towards leaping into the air and trying to climb up inside my trouser leg... But fortunately, after several minutes of tacticals, I'm able to envelop him in the tee shirt I'd brought in with me, and race outside to set him free in the long grass... phew!

That's clearly the most exciting thing that's going to happen to me all day... but I just wonder which furry buffoon of a cat brought him in, then couldn't be bothered with him any more and let him go.

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Don't forget Portia's Promos - new stuff being added all the time!

At 3 a.m....

She did it again, the little swine!!!!

it's all a bit mad...

The last 24 hours have been pretty mad... mostly last night and the small hours of the morning...

Jolly night out with himself, fish and chips and a spot of lager etc. All very pleasant and very normal... However, come lights out, for some reason, by brain sort of half turned on and started sifting through plot bits and ideas for Gothic Heat. Needless to say because even though I was awake, I was also half asleep... so nothing really made sense, and I was getting quite upset with myself and worried about the book. Needless to say, in the light of day, I can see my fears were wildly exaggerated, but, that's not the end of it... Just as I was beginning to drift into actual sleep, rather than half sleep, there's a big commotion... Himself clattering about in the hall and the smallest room... Guess what, ridiculous Mulder had brought in a mouse, and released it into the wild of the house...



Himself had cornered it in the loo, and was floofing about, muttering about finding boxes to catch it with etc etc... Now, in my vast experience in this area, boxes are no good for this. Mice can wriggle very easily from boxes. So I donned my trusty gardening gloves and faced off with said mouse in the smallest room. Nowhere to run to, rodent! Your ass is mine! Mind you, it was a faster little bugger than usual, so it took a lot of attempts, but eventually, I managed to snag him or her by the tail and carry him/her outside, wriggling wildly, and then release him/her under the fence, beyond the immediate reach of felines.



So far so good...

Neither himself nor I could sleep, so we made a cuppa and himself was reading and I was just dozing. Guess what, brain starts clicking again... but not about Gothic Heat this time... no, in an unprecedented miracle, a few story ideas started popping into my head... so I kept sitting up to scribble them down on a notepad. Now then, this doesn't happen to me as a rule... I've said often enough how hard it is for me to come up with ideas, but in this instance, stuff kept coming to me! Of course, a lot of it's pretty silly, and probably unuseable... but there are a few germs of something that might come to something... even if it's just a short or a novella.

So, didn't get much sleep, so spent until around 3pm just loafing about, watching MotoGP with himself and chilling. But then, when I eventually switch on the computer, I find goodies!

First, the fabulous Michelle Buonfiglio of Romance B[u]y the Book, a passionate advocate of romance, erotic romance and erotica has posted a totally unexpected feature blog post about me! She's been reading my books and I'm over the moon to say she's been really enjoying them... :)

Then, I open another email, and it's from the lovely editor at Total-E-Bound, and she loves another book I sent to her and would love to publish it!

So, it looks like I should leave the laptop off for the morning a bit more often... who knows what delights may be in my in box when I finally turn it on!

Finally... some folk have been having trouble seeing my Flash cover thingie in the post preceding this one. I took a look at it, and twigged that although it looks okay in Firefox, which I use, it wasn't displaying correctly in Internet Explorer... I've tweaked it now, and I wonder if you gentle readers could take a look at the 'bits and bobs' post below, and let me know if you can see two covers fading in and out of each other? It's for Love on the Dark Side/Watching The Detective.... You should be seeing darling Vincenzo and some other guy...


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Telly: Moto GP
Choc/Yummy: Ainsley Harriott's Choc Heaven Bars
Mood: very good
Writing: nothing just ideas
Reading: web stuff
RSI/FMS: bit sore and tired


Don't forget Portia's Promos - new stuff being added all the time!

in the wee small hours...

I'm not going to be at my sharpest today, and that's a fact. I was woken in the small hours by one of the sounds a cat owner dreads in the middle of the night... the sound of a feline barfing for Britain. [the other is the commotion of a mouse chase] Got up to deal with same... and afterwards I just couldn't go back to sleep. My mind kept turning and turning on an issue that's troubling me profoundly at the moment, the same one that had me in tears a couple of times yesterday. So I got up, made some tea and read for a while... Which is unusual for me, because I haven't read any fiction for a while. Yeh, I suppose that sounds mad for a fiction writer... and I know it's a deficiency in me, but I'm going through one of those phases where books I read either depress me because they're so good, and I don't think I can reach anything like the standard.... or they're bad, and I get mad because I think if that crap can get published, why can't a bit more of *my* crap get published... Anyway, I think I'm going to try and do a bit better on the reading front from now on, and hope that it'll help me with the writing, which is very slow to the point of total immobility... which won't do at all. I've gotta earn some money somehow, esp. now that festering f*ck Gordon Brown has shafted low income childfree folk like myself right royally in the bottom. *Labour* government, don't make f*cking laugh! That self serving bunch of imbeciles don't give a shit about the average, ordinary working person in the street...

Holy moly, politics? From moi? Wonders will never cease...

in the middle of the night...

I'm very, very tired this morning. Yesterday was a lovely but busy day, and I was looking forward to a good night's sleep to rest up so that I'd be fresh today and ready to do loads of work.

Ha! The best laid plans... At around four o'clock this morning, there was a commotion and himself got up to see what was going on. Two cats were on red alert in the kitchen, and we soon discovered that either Alice or Mulder had caught a mouse, brought it inside, and then released it into the wild of the house. Brilliant! Now usually, in domestic 'situations', himself is the best 'coper' and 'resolver' of problems. However, in this case, he had to stand aside while the Great Mouso swung into action, clad in the pair of gardening gloves she never uses for gardening. With luck, I was able to corner the little devil quite quickly, scoop it up, and run outside - in the pouring rain - to release it into the real wild!

Great stuff, but unfortunately, when I returned to bed, I couldn't switch off, and my mind ran in circles for a couple of hours, on writing and related topics, while both himself and Kuffer snored beside me. [Kuffer the cat snoring considerably louder than his human counterpart!]

And now, of course, with a hefty working day ahead of me... I'm knackered!!!