Mexican panoramic photo

I have Windows Vista now, so I used the automatic panoramic photo maker to combine all the pictures I took of El Rey in Cancun when I was there in January. The original photo spread is very large; click here to view. (hosted on Flickr)

forgetting?

I feel like I am forgetting my cats who are dead and it has me in a panic. I tried to list a bunch of things about them and I know I didn't get everything that made them special. But here are my lists; badly written but set in stone now.

• Zen was afraid of the dark, or of being smothered, because if you put him under the covers he would freak out.
• He didn't happy paw, but sometimes his paws would flex, very slightly.
• If something was on a table, he would knock it off with his paw and then sit where it had been. If Nutter was in a bed/basket, Zen would lay on top of him and Nutter would have to move or get out.
• If there was a piece of paper on the floor, he would sit on it.
• Zen slept on people, on pillows, anywhere in the bed, always purring really loudly.
• Zen would get out of bed in the middle of the night and go downstairs for whatever reason. Once down there he would start to howl because he couldn't find us. If we called him, he would run up the stairs and jump into bed, purring madly and cuddling, even though we had never moved, as if we'd left him alone for days.
• Zen loved milk so much that we couldn't even say the word. He would come running as if we had called his name. We had to call it "m".
• I would drape Zen across my shoulders, lion-tamer style, and walk around the house like that, and he would purr and be perfectly happy. When I sat at my computer desk, he would get between me and the chair back, wedge himself right in there, and go to sleep, forcing me to sit very still, leaned slightly forward, until he chose to move or until my husband came along to pick him up and move him.

I seem to remember more about Nutter, but he's only been gone 2 months (as of tomorrow). It always seemed to me that Zen was the more interesting cat of the two...so what I have forgotten about my black kitty?

• Nutter liked to be spanked.
• He liked to jump on people's shoulders and head butt them and butt-bump them, and if you held your arms out straight he would walk from one to the other.
• If he was happy to see you, or hungry, he would attack your feet and scratch at them madly. He did this to shoes with no feet in them sometimes too.
• He hated being picked up or held but loved to sprawl on a human. He would go completely boneless and sleep. Or he would suck on cloth and happy paw and purr. He would dig his claws into my shoulder, put his front feet on my cleavage and purr and go to sleep.
• When he was a kitten, first at the house, one night Willy rolled over onto him in his sleep. After that, Nutter was scared whenever anyone moved in the bed. He liked to sleep hugging feet, or on top of a person. He would also crawl under the covers sometimes.
• Nutter did a complicated food trick. First he would lead you to the corner where the food was kept. Then when you showed him two cans of food, he would sit on his hind legs and head butt the can he wanted. Then he would push the empty food bowl with his head to show you where the food went.
• He liked boxes and would squeeze himself into the smallest ones, even shoeboxes.
• We could not leave any loose threads anywhere. If we used a ragged quilt, Nutter would find the loose threads and chew on them obsessively. He also would eat curling ribbon, just gnawing at it and we'd pull a foot or more from his mouth, dripping with stomach fluids. Somehow he never ended up getting his intestines bound up from that bad habit.
• He would sometimes sit on top of the bird cages. The birds did not bother him, and vice-versa.

Tomorrow is the 1 year anniversary of my dad's death so I'm feeling very melancholy.

new 2012 movie?

Went to see the new James Bond film today and there was a trailer for a new movie about 2012. Basically it showed a monk high on a mountaintop (Tibet, presumably) ringing a giant gong with a log over & over, and the tag line was something like "how would government prepare 6 billion people for the end of the world?" and they show waves crashing over the Himalayan mountains and then it says "they don't".
And then the mysterious find out more, google search for 2012.
No movie address, no plot, nothing.
Here is my guess. I am going to have to go to see that movie in a theater where they don't know me, because I am probably going to get my butt thrown out if they start with the whole "Mayan calendar is ending!" "Mayan calendar predicts the world is ending" BS.

---

Oh yes, it's even worse than I thought. Here's the website.
Because it might change, here's a screenshot of the first page. Do you see the problem?
Yes, exactly. That is THE AZTEC CALENDAR STONE! ARGH. The Aztec didn't use the Long Count! Let's say that again, louder. THE AZTECS DID NOT USE THE LONG COUNT.
The center of the Aztec sun stone (shown in the screen shot) predicts THEIR end time, which is 4 Ollin (Caban in Mayan, or Earthquake). Not 4 Ahau (12-21-2012). In fact, because 4 Ollin comes around every 9 months, who knows when the world will end?
Here's the trailer:

If it doesn't show, here's the link to it on YouTube.
I'm sorry, I didn't think there was enough water in the world to overflow the Himalayas. Perhaps I have become STUPID in my dotage. I am 40 now, after all.
As I know more about this movie, which is sure to be a travesty since Roland Emmerich is working on it, I will post.
12.19.15.15.11 14 Ceh 10 Chuen

bye bye birdie :( (pets)

Onnie died around 3:30 as I was bringing her back to the vet.

Poor Onnie (pets)

My female perfect lorikeet is dying. Right now, as I write this.
This morning when I went to feed them, she was in the box. She came out, but she looked kind of puffy. I figured maybe she’d been sleeping. I fed them, she was eating popcorn all happy.
At five of 11, I was in my bathing suit, heading to the gym when I heard an awful “I’m being killed” racket from the bird room. Onnie’s head and right wing were stuck under the grate and she was having a seizure. I couldn’t lift the grate all the way because a perch was in the way but it took two hands to undo the perch, and one of them was holding the grate off her little tiny neck. Eventually I got her off the grate; she fell to the bottom of the cage (what we used to call the “basement” when Gwennie went down there). She was very still and I thought she was dead. Then she got up and found some popcorn and ate it. I changed my clothes like a lunatic, grabbed some popcorn, threw it in a bird carrier and went to get her. She was all limp and dead looking again but when I picked her up she was still alive. Her wings were all droopy. I called the vet and drove their like a maniac. She was eating popcorn the whole way. When I got there, I had to wait for about 15 minutes and I noticed there was blood all over the popcorn but I couldn’t tell from where. Turns out she bit her tongue half off. The vet said her wings weren’t broken and gave her some medicine and said she’d be okay. I wasn’t convinced but I brought her home. She climbed out of the carrier and right up into the perch forest.
I had to go swap a cord for my mom’s cell phone and when I got back she was in the corner, looking dead, barely breathing. If she was Lance (ie, if she liked me) I’d bring her with me in a towel while she left. But since she doesn’t like me I’m leaving her with her mate (who is indifferent to her suffering). She’s wrapped in a washcloth and I’ve got the heater positioned right near where she’s laying.
I feel so awful. I could rush her back to the vet, but he didn’t think she was dying, and he’s the expert. Obviously she was doing the fake perking up thing some animals do. So she’s there dying and I’m here writing and unhappy. That’s two birds and a cat in 5 weeks, plus a job.
When do the good things happen to balance this out?
12.19.15.14.13 16 Zac 5 Ben