writing, sentient ads, and bad news for the cats

I have a few recurring dreams. Most are bad (the narrow passage, dead animals in forgotten cages, the house with no wall), but one is nice, and I'm always sorry to wake up on those mornings. I had this dream again a few days ago, and felt sad getting up to make coffee. Got in the car, told the radio to play my feelings. It played this:

Someone call Paul Rudd right now

Well, thanks for that, radio. I'll just ask someone to punch me in the face next time.

This week I accidentally made allies with the taco truck guy. I had been sitting and spying on the truck from my little chair in the library doorway when a couple of drug addicts got into a fight in front of the truck and threw garbage everywhere, then ran off screaming into the bushes. The taco guy came out of the truck and seemed a bit nervous, trying to pick up trash and looking around to see if they were coming back, so I went across the street to check on him. I told him to come and get me if he ever needs help. Now he waves at me in the morning, and on Friday he sent one of our mutual patrons over to let us know that a scary-looking guy had been messing with the book drop after we closed. We appear to be looking out for one another now. I am going to have to buy a taco. This feud is going terribly.

Helping walk-ups is better than a lot of other job duties, and I enjoy the folks who send me on quests ("I need five historic mysteries that are kind of funny, I'll take whatever you choose!"), but I'm not really allowed to do anything between patrons, even though it would be a good way to pitch books on whittling or miniatures or urban sketching. After spending a week skimming the terrible paperbacks on the sale rack and naming all the birds that hang around the front walkway (my favorite is Blobert, the dove with no legs), I started carrying around a notepad and writing an outline for a book. Nobody minds if I'm writing on a pad of paper between checkouts. And I'm making progress. Except sometimes I only have a minute to scribble plot points or ideas in the margins, and then later they turn out to be not so helpful.

 ENERGY ZEPHYRS, gotcha

After the mayonnaise mug cake incident, I had a serious sit-down with my phone's microphone settings, and the number of creepy eavesdropping ads dropped. And then it redoubled its efforts. I spent a couple minutes drawing thumbnails of my hero's failures in battle, thinking I could paint 14th-century illustrations to go along with the story, and when I picked up my phone a few hours later, it offered me this:

my doodle on the left; my phone's ad on the right. I had not been looking up horses or toys.

It can read minds now. Fantastic. Into the ocean it goes.

Home

The cats have been malfunctioning. Po started peeing blood and is now on a diet of expensive food for kidney stones, and Mjolnir needs surgery for a tumor. Waiting on the quote from the kitty surgeon. Looks like I need to get my butt in gear with the online painting shop so I can pay for this thing without draining my savings. I'll never be able to run away and become a wood witch if I keep using the cabin money to chop off bits of my cats.

it's not very visible here, but the lump is on his left side, below the shoulder

Baked some kolaches to comfort the kids. These are easy and delicious, if you have cream cheese on hand. Which I do, because I bought an entire costco log of cream cheese and then only ended up needed 4 oz. of it for the Japanese cheesecake I made last weekend. Read the recipes first, folks.

The in-between minutes add up. Kurt Vonnegut wrote an entire book on scraps of paper, a paragraph at a time. There is still time for us!