06-27-05 @ 9:21 am EDT

Yesterday morning when I was on the computer I heard noises and looked into the living room to see Cosmas pawing at the window screen as if trying to break his way through. He's already cracked the blinds >_< (people with cats must as a rule not care about the appearance of their homes, at least, not for long), so I got up to stop him since this would REALLY get him in trouble. Now our cat has the bad habit of IGNORING you when you call out for his attention--he can HEAR you, he just doesn't want to LISTEN to you. UGH! So of course when I snapped at him to stop, he didn't, so I had to go over and take hold of him. Even as I was pulling him back he kept pawing at the screen and pushing against it, staring intently at something outside. "Knock it off!" I whispered (Ma was sleeping). "What's your PROBLEM--?"

That was when I looked outside to see what he might be seeing, and saw it. Ma planted little bushes outside the front window a while back and they reach up to about the bottom of the windows now. And standing right atop this near bush was...a little chipmunk, barely six inches away, staring right up at us. o_o Just standing there, staring.

I took in a breath. "Ohhh, he's so CUTE!" I started waving and making chipping noises at him, still trying to restrain the cat; no matter how much we moved and made noise, this little rodent just stood there looking at us. Adorable! He wasn't even frozen with fear, as his head moved a little and he was just staring up through the screen. After a while he turned and started doing little acrobatics down through the branches of the bush until he reached the ground, when he perched on a stone nearby (part of Ma's rock garden). Then he went back into the bush, passed through it, and started climbing up in the tall bush we have beside the front porch. He disappeared from view but I saw the branches rustling as he made his way up. I went to the front door (which overlooks the front porch--this is just to the left of the front window--front window faces west, front door faces south, tall bush is visible from both) and peered outside. I saw the chipmunk dangling high in the branches, doing little flips and hanging upside-down like a monkey...so cute!! He started making his way down toward the porch for food and I finally looked down to see why he'd been hanging out near us for so long.

Aha. There was ANOTHER chipmunk currently there, a BIGGER one, already gathering food. Chipmunks do NOT get along together, and it's been my experience that the bigger ones will of course scare off the smaller ones. I used to feed at least four different chipmunks right from my hand. This was long before the Internet--you know--back when I had endless HOURS with nothing better to do than sit outside and wait for wild rodents to come up and eat from my hand. o_o It's also been my experience that chipmunks learn from the example set by OTHER chipmunks. As soon as I had gotten the dominant chipmunk to eat from my hand, the other, lesser chipmunks started to trust me and do it, too. It was quite interesting. My dad, who used to leave food for the UAW chipmunks in his office, verified this when he saw that as soon as one chipmunk learned to come right into the office for the food, the others all loosened up and followed suit. They got to be such pests, running around looking for food and knocking coffee over and peeing on the desks, that he kept vowing to stop feeding them, but the damn things keep showing up anyway. He's created monsters. Little furry striped monsters. ^_^

Anyway, to continue my narrative...I knew that the little chipmunk had merely been hanging out with Coz and me while he waited for this bigger chipmunk to bail out. The bigger one did so, and the little one took his turn on the porch. His tail was longer than the bigger one's. I watched him feed for a while. The big chipmunk came back but they managed to peacefully gather food a little distance from each other, though the little one pressed his luck a few times. After a while he ran off to cache his food and I was left watching the big one, who also left. I went back to the front window in the hopes that the little one would grace us with his presence again; he did briefly return to the little bush, and did more acrobatics, but then returned to the porch to gather more food. Such a cute little showoff! The big chipmunk is skittish and flees when seeing too much movement, but this little one stared right in at us and didn't even care that we noticed him. Awww!! Wish I could get him to eat from my hand, I bet he'd like it. :) (Though...chipmunks do not really EAT from your hand...they just...cram their mouths...and take it all home with them. It's very rare when I actually see a chipmunk EATING anything it picks up. They're just very anal about gathering as much food as they can, and splitting with it. Squirrels, they're another story, because I don't think they have cheek pouches like chipmunks do--they have to eat most of it on the spot.)

As the little chipmunk fed I noticed movement at the end of the little walkway which is mostly shrouded from view by that bamboo stuff we have growing beside the house...I peered down at it and saw...A TINY BABY RABBIT!! :D :D :D AWWWWW!! I wonder if it belongs to 'Bozho or 'Basso?? Is it 'Bozho and Mrs. 'Bozho after all?? It was SO small! All on its own, too! Unfortunately it hopped into the bamboo and I didn't get a very good look at it. :( The chipmunk noticed it (I admit I'm a bit confused on the details, whether this was the big or little chipmunk now present, since they kept switching places and this happened yesterday) and was a bit on edge but then went back to gathering. After a while I saw the little rabbit hop back out and start to hop across the yard and I went to the front window, where Coz was again, to try to see it leave, but I never did. Though I did see something rustling in the ditch grass earlier that morning when I was outside in the yard with Coz; I'd wondered what that was. Maybe it was the bunny? I hope it lives somewhere safe. I can't believe something that tiny was out on its own!

Well, the big chipmunk returned and started gathering on the lower steps, while the little one remained on the top part of the porch. The little one started moving ever closer and closer to the edge overlooking the bamboo, where the big chipmunk was concealed, and I kept murmuring, "Be careful...I wouldn't do that if I were you...you're going too close..." He at last stuck his head over the edge and the big chipmunk must have popped up, for the little one hopped, did a BACKFLIP in the air, landed on all fours on the porch, and resumed gathering seeds as if nothing had happened. *LMAO* I told Kitty that he'd made a new friend who jumps just like he does. ^_^ I have never seen a chipmunk do a flip like that before. Hilarious!

After this, it was just the chipmunks gathering seeds, so I finally wandered away and came back to the computer. Cripes, I think I was watching them for a half hour.

I started "RTMI:134" yesterday and the going is getting much harder since the climax is about to come, yet I still have no real reason to post it on WC since no one has rated or commented on Part 125 yet. -_- I'm tempted to put an "On Hiatus Due To Lack Of Readers" on it, but that would smack of whining, and I do not want to whine. I just want the people who said they were reading it to show up again, or at least admit they are not reading it. It looks like there might be more material after the climax than there'd usually be, because there are so many little stories to tie up--Moon Wolf and Shadow Water, Singing Cedars, Pauguk, the Midewiwin, Drake, etc. Hope that it doesn't drag on too long for whoever DOES read it (offsite). TAC:56 is also almost done. TAC:57 is at the moment a stupid chapter. I don't know if I can make it much better. Dumb stupid plotless sex chapter. >:/ Starting with TAC:58 though it looks like it's approaching my more up-to-date style of writing since the chapters are longer already from there on out. (Even unwritten, 58 is already 75.8kb.) So maybe they'll rewrite easier. *shrug*

Holy crap, it says the last time TAC:58 was updated was in January 2003. Yikes.

My "More Than You Can Chew" folder got eleven hits yesterday. Why?? There's all of one too-long item in there; there would be at least two, but I haven't yet ever finished the second. Just puzzled as to why somebody was so interested in THAT folder. :/ Some of the stupidest items get lots of hits. The TAC folder is one of them. It must draw in more people than it keeps, for the folder will get like thirty hits in a day, and like three or four chapters in it will have one new hit each. Ugh. The "65 parts and going" must scare them off.

Interestingly, for a time, the site that I had gotten the MOST hits from was...the CrushYiffDestroy message board, where so many people had bitched about the story being so stupid and moronic and juvenile, without reading one word of it. ("The site is so hard to navigate!"...oh, it's so HARD to scroll down to the...updates page...and click on the links!! *passes out from the effort*) Intriguing, hm? Based on how lazy and whiny they were about NAVIGATING DOWN ONE PAGE, I bet none of THEM would ever bother to try to put so much effort into writing anything themselves. I guess it is simply much easier to sit and incorrectly assume what somebody has written and complain about it. *rolling eyes* Most of them are probably closet furry writers of less-than-desirable talent. This is funny because the very mission of that site, based on what I saw, is to ferret out BAD FURRY WRITING, where the authors either succumb to cliche or just write lousily. I managed to find a quote on the about page which made the people who had complained about my story look like a bunch of hypocritical morons--basically, the webmaster (don't know if he was involved in the posting in question or not, though I should hope he wasn't) in that section says something like, "Those people who take this for a hate site must either not browse the site thoroughly or rely only on what their friends tell them, because reading is hard work, kids, right?" (Emphasis mine.) Seeing that on the site actually made me laugh and feel much better and I made sure to post it on the folder, right at the top (lots of SCROLLING DOWN not required!), where any stray visitors from the message board could see it (and it got hits after that post, so I assume that if any of them had the STRENGTH to scroll down the page a bit, they did see it). So, the very site where these people had bitched out my story actually managed to make them look remarkably stupid, and they themselves directly contradicted the very purpose of the site when they publicly trashed TAC. I do hope they are so proud of themselves for setting such a lousy example for their site! Too bad that most of those involved in the posting were probably too STUPID to notice the hypocrisy in action there. Perhaps I give them too much credit, thinking they were able to read through that note of mine without a ten-minute break just to regather their strength...oh so haarrrrd.

Okay, rant over, I feel better.