3: June 2003 Archives

As my trip approaches, I find myself writing cryptic pieces of information, "just in case." It's all falling together, like pieces of a puzzle that you have to squeeze a bit to fit. I have this weekend to pull everything together in Austin. My new camera should be arriving by UPS this afternoon around 4:30. There's a sarong in the mail to me, because sarongs are not only multi-purpose, but light and easy to pack.

Mentally, my backpack is already full, though in reality, my dirty clothes are still strewn upon my bedroom floor. I have a week left in Austin and so much to do in that time. Three weeks is a long time to be away from home.

Notes scribbled in my travel journal:
Buy ticket to "Nepliget" (bus station) at minibus counter at the airport.

That's the worst case scenario, to take the shuttle from the airport in Budapest to the bus station, then take the 6:30 bus to Targu Mures. It's a twelve-hour bus ride. Complicating the matter is that the town has a completely different name in Hungarian. I need to write it down before I leave.

Most likely is that Claudia will be there to meet me when I arrive, and that we'll travel that day to Vienna.

I'm feeling very scattered these days -- so much to do, both at work and at home. I'm easily distracted always, but more so lately. I'll be posting more Taniguchi pictures soon, for my sanity if nothing else.

I think that certain members of my family believe with full certainty that I will grow up to be your Great Aunt Myrtle. You remember your Great Aunt Myrtle, don't you? She's the one who lived in the small town, was the possessor of the One True Original Fruitcake, and owned about thirty cats. Yes, -that- Great Aunt Myrtle.

It's the cats, really, isn't it? I don't live in a small town, after all, and I'd be bored if I did. Most tellingly, I despise fruitcake. Intensely. What a waste of green artificial cherries.

Yeah, it's the cats. I -like- the cats. They're fascinating, and it's rewarding for me to be able to help them. If you knew me well enough, and you were to ask me what I would do if I won the lottery, I'd tell you that I'd build a huge cat palace, with rooms where colonies of rescued cats could live in harmony with one another until I was able to find loving, responsible homes for all of them. Yeah, that's what I'd tell you, because I'm a big softie like that.

But truthfully, in my heart of hearts, I know that I'd have to hire a full-time staff to run the cat rescue palace, and I would live someplace nearby but very separate, where I would have a rotating menagerie of cats to play with and even more full-time staff to play with them. Because really? Cleaning llitterboxes is not my thing.

And I can tell you from experience that two cats is plenty to keep me occupied. It helps that I have two wacky little cats.

Take Liam, for instance. He's about 8 1/2 months old and weighs well over ten pounds already. He doesn't know a stranger, and he's not scared of anything. Anything. He tries to stick his paw under the vacuum cleaner when it runs, and if he's in the bathroom while I'm taking a shower, he tries to climb in with me. He's a goofy boy, but his crowning glory is that he adores dogs. I don't know how this happened. He was never around dogs as a kitten, and I don't own a dog, but he thinks they're the coolest things. He runs up to them and rubs up against them. Hysterical.

Ani Banani, on the other hand, does yoga. She's not nearly as confident as Liam in everything she does, but she's a bit of a clown at the same time. She does everything with a solemn expression, be it eating, purring, or playing. She has one favorite toy; the others she doesn't seem to care much about. It's a plastic wand with an elastic string and a fur mouse attached. She adores it and performs all sorts of acrobatics trying to catch it, but she looks painfully serious the entire time. She's very protective of the mousie, growling when Liam approaches her and tugging on it when I hold the wand, hoping to pull it away from me. Her funniest trait, though, is her sink fetish. It started early on, when she would jump up to the bathroom sink to drink the water from the faucet. That's not so unusual in cats -- nor is sitting in the basin of the sink. But Ani, when she sees someone go remotely close to the bathroom, goes running up to jump on the sink, then makes these funny little mooing sounds until that person comes and pets her as she stands on the sink.

With idiosyncracies like these two have, how could I ever find time to keep more cats?

After days and days of stiflingly hot weather, ominous grey clouds rolled into Austin this afternoon.

Friday afternoon, I went to an office party at a park just a couple of blocks from my building. It was over 100 degrees as we walked, and by the time I got there, I was worn out and dehydrated. I'm used to the walking, but I'm not used to the heat. It took only ten or fifteen minutes of playing something resembling volleyball hackeysack to completely wear me out, and I spent the rest of the party trying to find a nice shady place to hang out.

The garden is starting to bake, despite my best efforts to water it regularly. Most flowers just can't handle these temperatures -- especially in May and early June. I find myself leaving the temperature a little cooler now at bedtime, so that I don't wake up in a hot sweat at three in the morning.

But today, the grey clouds rolled in, and they aren't supposed to leave until the weekend. It's amazing what a difference that makes. When I left work this afternoon, my car registered the temperature in the 80s. The stark slate-grey sky was punctuated by bolts of lightning, followed by loud claps of thunder that marked this as the first summer thunderstorm of the year.

It was beautiful and distracting, and I'll become used to it if the rest of the week is like today.

I can hope, right?

I dreamt last night that I was in Corpus Christi, in the middle of a big hurricane. It's easy to trace that subconscious thought back -- Kramer and I were talking about hurricanes last night at Halcyon after the Mr. Sinus showing of Terminator last night. I don't remember exactly how we got to that topic, actually, but we were talking about how Corpus Christi is way overdue for a hurricane. It's not that I want a hurricane to hit -- it's just that I grew up on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, and that's the way it is.