Wee Mighty Predator

The small predator had a big day yesterday. In the eyes of the neighborhood moggies, he is now A Man.

He caught his first mouse.


Before yesterday I wasn't sure if he was a hunter or not. After seeing his behavoir, I'm convinced that if he'd had a kill before now we'd have known all about it.

I came home from the supermarket and found a dead mouse right in the middle of the front hall carpet, with Pai walking around it in circles around it, chest all puffed out, tail up, and saying to me "Look at me! Look what I did!*" He was so chuffed with himself I gave him a pat on the head to acknowledge his achievment, and then he did something I did not expect.

Despite the mouse being well and truly dead (I checked), he clearly wasn't done with it. He put it someplace where I coudln't miss seeing it, but once I had seen it Pai wanted to continue playing with it. He picket it up in his mouth, threw it across the hall, and pounced on it. This he repeated several times until by accident he threw it in with the cardboard recycling. He tried to climb in after it, but the density of empty cereal boxes made this impossible.

Not wanting it to rot and stink in there, I dug it out and carried it outside on the front porch, where I told Pai that he could keep it, but it was strictly an outdoor toy. He listened, bless him. He carried on playing with the mouse outside, but didn't bring it in the house again after that. Such a good kitty! I did get a huge kick out of watching him throw it straight up in the air and then bat it between his paws as it came back down, the fucked-up feline.



*He was speaking Cat, naturally, but some things are so obvious they need no translation.

And the beat goes on

I've finally done it. I've finally pursuaded the Pirate to let me lose the patch and allow nature to take it's course.

Damnit, I'm going to be 31 in just a couple days! fuck me that sounds OLD.

Part of me is rejoicing, but part of me is still really worried. He doesn't seem happy with the idea, just resigned to it. I don't want it to be like that. I want it to be a happy occurance (when it eventually occurs). Having a baby should be full of joy, not resignation to your wife's biological clock.

I want him to want what I want, but life just doesn't work that way.

So I finally got what I want, but I can't bring myself to be happy about it. Fuck.

And I'm about to turn 31.

(Jesus, have I ever sounded more like Herebe? Now there's a frightening thought.)

I have the absolute power of veto and override

and I'm prepared to use it.

I thank you all for input and votes. Clearly The Bespoke Bakery is the popular choice (well done, Herebe, for suggesting it*). Sadly, it's just not jiving with me. Yes, it does what it says on the tin, which is important, and yes, bespoke means custom and and high-class and all of that which is good, but somehow it's just a little too... too... I dunno, generic? It's a name that could belong to anybody, anywhere, and I guess I'm after something a little more unique and individual.

With that in mind I've been gravitating toward Coronation Cakes and Kingfisher Cakes. Coronation is good. I conjurs images of balls and princesses and crowns; it's posh, it describes an occasion at which you want a really, really good cake; and it is highly suggestive of Royalty.

Which might be great for marketing purposes, but just makes me wince, just a little. I'm not a royalist. I don't bow and scrape to someone just because of who they were born. People earn my respect; they don 't get it by birthright. And the blue collar, union-member Democrat in me just can't bring myself to have that sort of association. *sigh*

So my first choice is Kingfisher. The kingfisher is a beautiful, rare, and elusive bird. It is synonymous with pristine, untouched countryside, and has an almost magical aura about it. It crops up frequently in poetry, always a symbol of the majestic, divine, etherial, mystical. More to the point, it has awesome logo potential and scans well with cakes, with the strong stresses on the first and finaly syllables, which is pleasing to my tongue and ear.

I know some marketing types will suggest that I shouldn't be concerned with whether my name begins with a dactyl or an anapest, but I, like Winston Churchill, believe these things register on a subconscious level with all hearers, regardless of their familiarity with scansion, and are therefore important.

And above all, it's unique. It's jazzy. It stands out. It's catchy. And I like it.

I hope you won't feel your votes are wasted; on the contrary. Watching the votes come in and registering my emotional responses to the results has been extremely useful in helping me to clarify and and understand my own mind. So I thank you, genuinely and sincerely. And when the new website is up and running, I'll be sure to linky you all.

At the moment, I am drunk and in no position to create anything. Woo.





*Since it won the poll I will still send you a cake for creating the winning name. :-)

Not that Big News, but something else Mildly Interesting

Hi all.

After a loooooooong hiatus from bloggering I've found myself in need of your good opinions. I know I can always trust my trusty readers to guide me in the paths of righteousness and sound marketing principles. (How are you, by the way, my dear readers? I have missed you, you know.)

So I'm starting a business.

It turns out I'm rather handy in kitchen, dontcha know, and without really meaning to, I've sort of started a private wee bakery in my house. It began with my Teutonic neighbor hiring me to bake birthday cakes for her sons because, while she enjoys baking, she doesn't really have the time and thinks I do a better job anyway. So she went around and told everyone else, and now I take orders from all my neighbors for cakes for their special occasions. (I also do a good line in pies, but those don't seem to appeal to the English palate as much, so even though I think my pies are a good deal more interesting than my cakes, no one really seems to want them, but that may change.)

And since I haven't been able to get a job in the god-forsaken county that is Cornwall, this cake-baking lark has become my only source of income. So go with what you know, right? Time to expand the bizness!

Step one: reach more clientelle through website.

Sounds simple enough. There are a million companies out there that allow idiots like me to build personal websites for a small fee and provide templates and tech support and all sorts of things for a small monthly fee. But here's the kicker: I want the URL of the website to be the name of the business, and all the names for the business I originally wanted have already been registered as URLs by other people.

SO! I have on the sidebar a selection of potential names, and I would like you to vote on the one you would find most appealing if you were hiring someone to bake a cake for your wedding or birthday or whatever.

Feel free to leave comments as to why you voted the way you did. I have my own thoughts on each of these, but I'm curious to see yours.

As for the rest of my life, here's the rundown of the past year:

Marriage is great
Cornwall is beautiful, but bankrupt. There are NO JOBS.
I still haven't finished my PhD.
Nor am I pregnant.
My last living grandparent died a few weeks ago, followed shortly by his wife, followed shortly by my penultimate surving great-uncle. It's going to be one of those winters, I can tell.
The slugs ate my whole garden except the sweetcorn.
Pirate and I both had pig flu and nearly died.
My parents came over to celebrate Christmas.

And that's about it, really. Now go to the sidebar and VOTE, bitches!

(Oh, and that first entry should be Cornucopia Cakes, as Dave very kindly pointed out. I can't correct it on the poll because blogger won't allow you to make changes after voting has begun. Very sporting of them and all that, but they clearly didn't anticipate my bad spelling.)

I'm going to be in London for 1 day only

on the afternoon of Wed August 5. My train gets in to Pad at 12:25 (theoretically), and I don't have any commitments until 7:30 in the evening when I have to be in Fulham.

If anyone fancies meeting up in that time, drop me a line (medievalsteph AT gmail DOT com). I'd love to meet you, whoever you are.

It's not that I don't love you anymore

I do, really and truly. And I think about you guys and wonder what you're up to. (One could argue that if I want to know what you're up to then I should log in and find out. But that would be logical.)

It's just that when i lived in Bristol I was a maiden trapped in a small room in the 7th floor of an ivory tower block, and my computer was my main connection to the outside world. Now the outside world is, well, just outside. I walk through my door and rather than finding a stinky, loud, smelly city full of torn bin bags, skantily clad drunk students, and crapping seagulls, I find a lovely garden full of sunflowers and sweatpeas and zinnias and corn and tomatoes. And if I go a little further than that there are other houses, with actual people in them. Meat people. And some of them are really nice. And we play board games and walk to the shops and keep each other company.

And there's the house itself, always with things to do, meals to cook, and laundry to fold. (Always with the fucking laundry. Jesus-H.-Christ-on-a-pogo-stick that man generates a lot of laundry.) And I find I just can't bring myself to sit in front of a computer for one milisecond than is longer than absolutely necessary. And not even that long. I've become abslutely crap at checking my email. It's driving my mother up the wall, but I figure that's fair revenge for being driven up the wall by her before the wedding.

So I'm still around, and I still love you all, I'm just unplugging for a while. I'll still be here intermittenly, so feel free to stop by. I like hearing from you. I just won't be a daily poster any more. Maybe at some point in the future I'll return to being a more regular writer, but in the meantime I think I'll stick to Big News. (I'm hoping that before next Christmas I'll have some Big News to share with you.)

There. That seems a good place to leave off. Always best to leave the readers hanging.

Brown Belt Humiliation

Last week I defeated a brown belt. I'm still a white belt. (Which in jujitsu isn't the bottom of the pecking order. It's one up from red, which is the lowest.)

I've been taking jujitsu lessons since November. In May I was awarded my white belt. Last week I was sparring for the very first time against someone other than my sensei. My opponent was a brown belt, one step below black, and also a guy. I beat him. Really and truly. He didn't let me win (though he may have underestimated me a bit.)

w00t.