Guessing Game

My turn to play "guess what I’m cross-stitching":
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I haven’t been doing any embroidery lately (yet another hobby to fall by the wayside while life has been busy), but yesterday I’d been studying for most of the afternoon (only one week until my big Spanish exam!) and wanted to do something other than stare at a book or a computer screen to relax in the evening, so put on a DVD (Shaun of the Dead – wasn’t so impressed the first time we saw it (we’re big Spaced fans, so had very high expectations, which weren’t quite met), but it’s definitely growing on me) and decided to settle down in front of it with some cross stitch and not think about anything too taxing for a while. I did get quite a bit further than what’s shown in this picture, but having seen SitsWithAnAddingMachine’s "guess what" pictures recently, it struck me at this point in the progress that it was similarly tricky to identify. I’ll post the more complete version tomorrow… maybe

Breakfast meetup this morning, and we decided it’s to be the last. The cafe where we’ve been going changed ownership recently, we think, because the standard of the food has fallen a lot, and now they’ve put the prices up (by about 30%!!!). Add that to the fact that attendance at the meetups has been steadily falling (only me, lytteltonwitch and natecull there today), and we thought it was probably time for a change. So I’ve put it too the yahoo group (where we organise our local meetups) to decide what we’ll do in the future – we might switch to a lunchtime meetup instead, and we’ll definitely be going to a different cafe. I passed a couple of books on to lytteltonwitch (Dervish is Digital by Pat Cadigan and The Winner’s Enclosure by Annie Caulfield) and got two from natecull (The Pride of Chanur by CJ Cherryh and The Steam-Drien Boy and Other Strangers by John Sladek).

MrPloppy was still asleep when I got up this morning to get ready to go out for breakfast. I went and had a shower, and obviously forgot to shut the bedroom door behind me, because when I got out, he was surrounded by cats:
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Ming had managed in that short time to push him into a small corner of the bed so Ming could take his rightful place in the centre, and Saffy had decided it was easier to just perch up on his shoulder. MrPloppy’s lucky George avoids the bed when the other two are on there, otherwise he might have been even more hemmed in. The amazing thing is, he hadn’t been woken up by all this manoeuvring!

Incidentally, you can also see a very small part of Mt. TBR in that picture. Somehow it just keeps growing bigger…

Talking of cats, George is a catnip lover, so we’ve been keeping him supplied with little catnip mice, which get well-loved. Ming and Saffy have never shown an interest, so we assumed they were just some of those cats that don’t react to catnip. But yesterday George left one of his mice in the hallway, and I caught Ming rubbing his face all over it very excitedly, and making those weird little mewing noises catnip addicted cats make. Of course, the minute I ran and got my camera, he acted all aloof and pretended he wasn’t at all interested in the mouse, he just happened to be sitting next to it:
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Too late, Ming, we know you’re a secret addict!

Cool catch the other day:  The Trojan Horse, which I released during the NZBC convention in March, was caught and is now in South Australia, and is going to be released in Melbourne.  Yet another reminder to never give up on a book.

Currently reading: Cuentos en español (I’ve finished the first three stories!) and Tracing it Home: Journeys Around a Chinese Family by Lynn Pan