It walks! It talks! It's Chatty Schmutzie!

Without any further ado or senseless exclaiming, here is my face and my voice all together for the first time ever on this website, thanks to the Palinode's fancy interviewing and video editing skills:

Summary: I have an intense fear of death and have things I want to accomplish without subjecting myself to an early one by throat cancer, so I quit smoking so that I could sleep at night and not lay awake imagining my own demise over and over. Quitting has mostly improved my ability to sleep, except for when it doesn't. Damnable mortality. Then, I talk about my hopes and dreams. Also, there are dancing cigarettes!

Is Onion, my sixteen-pounds-and-still-lean kitty, smart? Hardly. We have had him for over two years now, and in that time, he has had ample opportunity to learn from his older cohort, Oskar. Oskar knows how to pull open cupboard doors, push doors open into rooms, scale to the highest points in every room, and drink from faucets. None of this is rocket science, but simple or not, Onion has not learned to do any of it.

It is not surprising, because he has only mastered one physical action for demanding our attention / getting under a blanket / opening the top of a bag: he hits whatever he wants to maniplate with a downward motion of his paw. If patting things repeatedly actually achieved anything, he would be an incredibly successful cat, but one look at his eyes will tell you that he is a huge, lovable, cuddly, and completely blank slate.

I apologize for the darkness of the following video, but I did not have time to find my camera, check its energy level, AND set up appropriate lighting once Onion started swimming along the windowsill in an effort to squish himself under the windowframe. It is much more clear if you watch it in the dark. I missed the most sincere of his efforts to push his huge self under the window, but you can at least get a taste of his adorable lack of smarts.

His kind of stupid delights me.

Our african violet still flourishes beneath its coat of cat hair and brown sugar.

I watched from the balcony as people left their houses and apartments with food, easter baskets, and bottles of alcohol under their arms. They were each of them alone, going somewhere else.

Just when I thought there was nothing left with which to wipe our bottoms, I found a roll of paper towel under the sink, and it has proved soft enough. This seems like a silly worry, especially in light of the fact that many people today are remembering a man who was skewered by nails and mounted on wood.

When I went out to the balcony a second time to sip my fresh coffee and watch the monstrous crow across the street sway on high, spindly branches, there were young parents in the street counselling their children with demands of Don't run! and Be good! and Get out of that puddle! I thought about how the children I will not have might have worn yellow rubber boots.

I remembered how my old cat, Pepper, used to stay out at all hours when the weather finally warmed up, and my mother would stand out on the front step in the dark calling Here, pussy, pussy, pussy! I could hear it echoing around the neighbourhood. That embarrassed me to no end.

I had a ninety-minute nap in which I dreamt that time was like a noodley rubber tube. I had the good fortune of being allowed a peek down this tube, and, man, reality is a pretty fucking cool place.

I made big messes all over the apartment, because when I spring clean, I make things much worse before they get better:

Mid-Spring-Clean Mess from schmutzie on Vimeo.

Luckily, the crazy mess pictured above has since been partially remedied. That bed? It's not even in the room anymore. I am way strong.

And now? I am drinking red wine out of a brushed metal wine glass and waiting for warm sheets to come out of the dryer while watching a disturbing episode of "Medium", which I am starting to think is a harder-core version of the pornification of woman-hate that "Law & Order" does so well.

I checked the weather online, saw that it was -49°C with the windchill, and thought Wow, I really need to go out there and see how weather that is seven times colder than a deep freeze feels for five minutes. Three minutes into it, when my nose had become numb and my fingertips were doing that numb-but-burning-with-the-pain-of-frostbite thing, I thought that I must be a certifiable loon, but I stuck it out, because my one or two cigarettes a day are more important than maintaining my extremities. Obviously.

I shot the following video, the second I have ever shot, which is screamingly obvious, because I somehow thought I could show you the cold. I proceeded to shoot a few moments of a red-tinged street (it was too cold to change my camera settings) and did not even think of turning the camera on myself: I was wearing over-sized winter boots with my pants tucked into them, mittens, a fuzzy long coat, a lime green toque, and two scarves wrapped around me. Aside from my glasses peeking out, my head was a tangled mess of yarn. Instead, though, you get what looks like a human settlement on Mars. Look! We transplanted elm trees from Earth to make it seem more like home!

Saskatchewan Is Mars from schmutzie on Vimeo.

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