Yesterday afternoon, moriarty6 took off with grigori for a week-long Portland adventure. My beloved is headed that way to do his coffee roaster's networking thing, and besides, he's always wanted to visit the place. I'm sure the boys will have a smashing time, and I hope that they arrive at their destination safely, pass the week free of mugging, and return to me with all due care and speed.

As is usually the case when Jym is gone, I am lonesome and bored ... and driven to distraction by a neurotic cat who can't stand even the slightest change in her routine. Last night while I was valiantly trying to sleep, she took it upon herself to climb upon the bedspot where Jym usually lies--and then she howled like a banshee being beaten with a glove full of gravel.

The howling continued unabated for quite some time.

I expect she will pick up where she left off when I go home for lunch, and the further complaints of the cat will no doubt extend well into this evening and the wee hours of tomorrow morning. Later, when I am completely mad from lack of sleep and on the verge of punting her through the patio doors, she will get absurdly cute, sad and codependent. She will then insist upon being carried all over the apartment, and she will velcro herself to my face at night so that I wake up at 3:00 a.m. tasting the now-all-too-familiar tang of cat nipples.

Come home soon, Jym.
Come home soon.

Of course, at the end of this month he'll be gone for another week and a half to attend his graduate program thingy in Vermont. I suppose I shall get a LOT of drinking I mean DVD renting oops, I mean writing done during these times of forced hermitage. Speaking of writing, I have now added about 13,000 words to the Four and Twenty Blackbirds original text, and I've still got another new chapter to go. Weeee! Will finish it over Riverbend, as will be all but unable to leave the homestead anyway.

Yeah, it's that time of year again.
Lest you wonder at my sense of impending misery, well, go here to read about last year's Riverbend onset. Also, if you're bored, you should go and read this old post, because I laughed my ass off when I stumbled across it. I had completely forgotten about that surreal little encounter.

I'll just chalk it up to one more reason to NEVER delete a journal, and a fine example of truth being weirder than fiction.

But in other news, fenrah rocks the casbah. I came home to a package yesterday afternoon--a package filled with books I'd forgotten I'd loaned her plus a couple of new books burned onto CD. One is a George R.R. Martin book, which made my boyfriend smile, as he has been trying to turn me onto this author for ages. The other is On Writing, by Stephen King. Though I have already read and adored this tome, this particular audio edition features the author himself doing the reading. Frickin' awesome, baby.

Many thanks, dear. I'll probably reserve them for car trips; I'll be making one in the next month or so to my dad's, anyway, that I might have the my Sentra exorcised from the Possessed CD Player of Death.

Well kids, I need to get to work.
I'm sure I'll be back online later on, but ta-ta for now.
*mwah*

~w_w~