I should have seen this coming, really

So, after a long period of Shenanigans, I have a new apartment, which I'm just finally getting settled into.  The gang's all here -- everyone from the Northern Domicile, anyway -- and I really ought to get around to explaining what they've been up to for the last while, before long.  I was kind of distracted by all the Shenanigans.

But one thing must be mentioned first.

I decided to buy a new mattress.  I've been sleeping on a perfectly nice twin, but, well, the Northern Domicile has become pretty large.  At the moment, a lot of them are posted on my various bookcases, but a lot of the space they're occupying exists as room for expansion, and it's not going to last forever.  I acquire books at a pace even more rapid than the one I acquire new animals, if you can believe it.  So I'm going to need room for them somewhere else before too long, and the obvious solution was to just get a bigger mattress.  (Also an actual bed, which will enable me to twine faery lights around it: that is a thing I have always wanted to do.)  Thus, I have upgraded to a queen.  It's basically the larger and fluffier version of the twin I had.

The new queen mattress arrived today, tightly rolled into this tube shoved into a canvas cocoon.  They must have used a machine to do it.  It would have taken me hours to extract it had I not had some experience with this phenomenon: the trick is, you cut the canvas and plastic off.  Then I had the pleasure of watching the formerly-compressed mattress spring to life in its actual dimensions.  Turns out I chose well.  I lay down on the thing to test it and had to pry myself off it, because I didn't want to get up. 

Unfortunately, I made a tactical error: I completely forgot that in leaving the room, I'd left Gilly behind in my bedroom with the new mattress unattended.  AJD mentioned this oversight when I posted about the new mattress on LJ -- wondering if it were really me, or if Gilly had finally got hold of my credit cards -- and I dashed back into the bedroom immediately, but lo, I was too late.

Gilly thinks he really does need all that space.  I mean, just look how crowded he is.

Gilly rushes to defend his new territory.

The moment I came back in, he knew I was going to attempt to reclaim it, and he came dashing over.  Look at that determination on his face.  He's not going to let me have it back.  If I try to pull him off, he'll dig his claws in and rip it.

I really liked this mattress, too.  It's really quite comfortable, and look at that lovely leaf pattern on it (which I will shortly have to cover up with an anti-bed bug mattress cover, sadly).  I can't really blame Gilly for grabbing his dreams, but, like, damn.

Tomorrow my boxspring and bed are being delivered.  This might be my chance to reclaim it, but I may have to promise him custody of the twin first.  (Current plan is for the twin to live under the new bed, so that ASD can sleep on it when he visits).  It could very well be that this has been Gilly's clever scheme all along...

Temporary Digs

So we made it to NYC.

I don't have a real apartment yet; I'm just subletting a place for about two weeks.  It doesn't have furniture, which is kind of interesting.  Turns out that the building I'm in is an official historic landmark, because Duke Ellington used to live here.  There's a plaque on the front of the building and everything, although you can't really make out the words in this picture.

Barry's going to be really jealous.  He loves jazz, and he's a particular fan of Duke Ellington; but he stayed behind in the Southern Domicile.

Mimsy and Khamsin are NYC natives, so they're pretty happy to be back.  Khamsin really wants me to take the kittens to Central Park.  When he and Mimsy were still living in the museum, Khamsin used to peek out the window and the park and fantasise about sneaking out late at night and scampering around without anyone being the wiser, but he could never figure out how to handle the locks, so it didn't happen.

The very first thing we did once we had moved everything into my temporary room was open all the boxes.  Much as they all like each other, we figured they'd probably had enough of each other in close quarters for a while.  They were pretty eager to get out of there and explore the new place.  Here they are emerging from their boxes.

The box captains immediately held a meeting to confer about how the trip had gone.  

Consensus appears to be that everything went about as well as could be expected.  The kittens were rather fractious; Beppe yipped the whole time; Zebulon was apparently convinced that they were travelling through a wormhole and gave a long discourse about how the physics worked; Plouie kept forgetting that they were travelling in boxes and freaking out all over again; Magick and Murchison had a confusing conversation that no one else in their box could follow and which was presumably in code.  Pretty much business as usual.

Meanwhile, everyone else was exploring.  The kittens, Beppe, and a bunch of others immediately ran all over the living room.

You can just make out Hrithik preparing to climb up on the radiator back there; it was the highest point he could see.  He's currently settled on the shelf in my closet.  Cami and the polar bears were really interested in the Internet cables.  Rusty and Navarre took advantage of the newfound space and adult distraction to start whaling on each other again.

Not everyone went quite so far afield.  Gilly, of course, immediately laid claim to the air mattress that AM left in here for me.  That's an iPod he's got there; he was quite adamant that there was no room for it on the bed. 

At first, Gilly was convinced that I'd made his dream come true, and given him his own mattress; he was crushed when I explained that it was meant to be mine.  Then he was newly encouraged to see how empty the place is - surely, he said, now is the time to invest in dozens of mattresses - and disappointed when I told him that this place isn't really ours and that the actual tenants would probably be kind of freaked if they came and found we'd flooded it with mattresses.  He tried to convince me to agree to flood our eventual place with mattresses, but I fobbed him off with a story about how NYC has really tough mattress regulations.  Please do not tell him that I made this up.

Zebulon and Nicodemus checked out the view from my bedroom; it's a pretty nice one, although you can't see much of it in this picture.

Nicky is so excited to be here.  Like, he's beside himself.  He's always wanted to see NYC, and this is like his dream come true.  Apparently the whole way over he was pestering Seleucus about whether or not they make 'I <3 NYC' shirts in goat sizes.  Seleucus, who has never been to NYC and really doesn't care much about it (or any city that isn't in Bactria), told him rather shortly that they don't, but Nicky was apparently undeterred because he asked me the same question.  And he keeps announcing 'I AM SO HAPPY!!!!!!' like out of the blue.

Not everyone took advantage of the chance to explore.  When the box captains were meeting, Jasper realised, upon saying that Sleepyhead had slept the whole time (such a surprise...), that he hadn't seen Sleepyhead leave the box, and sure enough, he was still asleep in there, curled up with the electronic equipment.  Jasper tried to get him to come out and eventually gave up.

You wouldn't think electronics would be so cuddly.  I fell asleep trying to cuddle my laptop once, and it left a dent in my forehead.

Plouie was pretty excited about the whole thing.  He was hopping around and making squee noises and stuff.  But what had him excited wasn't quite what you'd think.  Check it out:

He comes all the way to a new apartment in a new city, and what interests him is my vegetable steamer.  I'm like, 'Plouie, seriously, it's the same one we had in the old apartment,' but it didn't get through.  After this picture was taken, he started flippering through the rest of the box of equally familiar items.  I wonder whether he'll ever notice the rest of the place at all.

You'll notice that the Mini Republic is nowhere in evidence.  That's because they're having a slightly different adventure.  A bigger one, in fact.  They're all staying a luxury hotel for a month or so, and should have great stories to tell when we're reunited.  Gyork is really excited.  He's from NYC too, like Mimsy and Khamsin, and he's looking forward to showing everyone his favourite places: The Gempire State Building, the Statue of Gliberty, the Gbronx...  He wants me to take everyone to see the Gnicks play once basketball season starts, and the Gyankees of course.  The temporary place is actually quite near Yankee Stadium, as it happens, although I doubt I'll make it there.

Anyway, so we made it here, although we won't be in this specific "here" for very long.  Further updates will follow, although I no longer have access to a camera (the camera we use is AJD's), so there might not be many photos for a while.

The Wild Republic Hits the World Wide Web

Quixley, as previously mentioned, was sent here to force the local chapter into the computer age.  He spent the first month or so of his tenure just fixing up the machines themselves, which were old and slow and riddled with spyware.  After he managed to get everything in place, he started giving the others tutorials.  Some of them were a bit hesitant, and Leprosy still grumbles about everything, but his efforts are starting to see results.  Consequently, Quixley's job is much more laid-back these days.  I thought I should share with you a few of these results.

First of all, Parsley has developed a massive crush on Sandra Day Okapi, one of the justices on the Zoo-preme Court.  Parsley caught on to the whole web-browsing concept pretty easily, and it occurred to him to look up how Day Okapi was doing on the court.  He's never met her, but he has a lot of species pride, and she is his people's hero.  She's also apparently pretty hot, if okapis are your type.

He's taken to doing a lot of soulful pining in front of the computer like this, gazing on the image of his goddess.  At least it's not porn?

Gilly, unfortunately but unsurprisingly, has discovered online shopping.  Here he is at his favourite site.

Since we have remained staunch in our refusal to give him a credit card, Gilly can't do more than look, but he looks a lot.  He even has a wishlist.  He also has a really irritating habit of leaving the site up when he's ended his browsing session; we assume this is a new tactic intended to guilt us into giving him what he wants.

The website that has been the biggest hit around here is LiveJournal, despite LJ's recent issues.  Every last member of the local chapter, including all of the foreigners, has opened an LJ account, friending all of the others.  Here, for instance, you can see Omri writing in his journal; the text reads, 'Hey everyone, my next dancing bear show will be on Wednesday night.  I'm playing the dancing bear!'

This is kind of cool, but also logistically problematic, because there's only one computer between them all (except for Murchison and Magick, who have iPhones).  So someone is always on LJ, and there's always a queue of others waiting for their turn at LJ.  Here is the queue behind Omri while he was taking his turn:

You see the problem, right?  Someone posts something, and then everyone else wants to check their friends-list so that they can read it and leave comments, not to mention posting something of their own; but there's only the one computer, so they're always in the queue, and then sometimes someone spoils the folk still in the queue on what was posted and those who haven't had a chance to read it yet get angry.  It's kind of unfortunate.  Meanwhile, Gilly and Sir Theo are annoyed because they have less time to play Dominion now that everyone else wants computer time.

The juveniles have things a bit better, because they have periods of time when they can be on the computer while the adults are still working - although they do still have to contend with each other.

But this means that the adults boot them off when they're done working, so their computer time is restricted in other ways.  The kittens have complained to Jasper about this, but he hasn't been very sympathetic.

Facebook has been much less successful around here.  About half of the animals have joined it.  They seem to find it overly complicated or something.  Here's Quixley giving Humphrey and Seleucus a Facebook tutorial; Quixley said afterwards that no matter how many times he went over how to "like" things and Facebook walls, they didn't seem to catch on.

Over all, Quixley's done a good job of introducing computers to the local chapter of the Republic.  He's been less successful lobbying for a bigger budget, even with Alfredo's support.  Quixley thinks they need at least five machines, preferably ten, but the bureaucracy won't give him more money for this unless he can show that the computers are being used primarily for work, which he can't, because with only one computer, no single individual can get significant work done.

My Little Gilly Monster

Gilly and I have this rather silly game we like to play with each other.  It consists of him pretending to eat me, and it goes something like this: we'll be hanging out, often cuddling a bit, and then he kind of starts gnawing on me a little bit.  He likes gnawing on me, for some reason, although he doesn't eat me very much.  Red pandas aren't that carnivorous - they eat mostly bamboo - but they do eat birds and insects and small mammals.  I'm not, from Gilly's perspective, a very small mammal, and part of the game is that I have to remind him of this.

When I remind him that he's probably not supposed to eat me, he puts on this dramatic display of innocence - Gilly does a very good dramatic display of innocence - and then I scratch behind his ears and call him my little Gilly-monster, and then he nibbles me a little in good monster fashion and then the game is over.  There's also a shorter variation we play sometimes, if I refer to him as my little Gilly-monster without him first attempting to eat me.

...I never said it was a particularly thrilling game, but we rather enjoy it.  Especially him, because he's not the one getting eaten.

A Creative Project

The Mini Republic doesn't get much face time on this blog.  This is because they don't interact in the same way as the Wild Republic; they mostly stay remain in fixed positions on my various bookcases.  They get moved around from time to time, so they're not always in precisely the same place, but you don't find them in interesting configurations the way you do with their larger counterparts.

This doesn't mean that the Mini Republic is boring; they're just interesting in a different way, primarily by way of having amusing conversations.  

Not long ago, Henri and Winslow came up with what they are sure is a creative project that cannot fail.  They want to film a pilot for a television show featuring a pair of best friends who go around the world having wacky adventures and fighting crime.  The friends, naturally, will be played by Henri and Winslow themselves, and the gimmick is that they roam through the world with Henri riding on Winslow's back as Winslow swims through the ocean.

This is incredibly cute.

I'm not as certain as they are that this is a concept that Cannot Fail, but it's cute enough that I want to see them succeed.

Since Henri and Winslow announced their grand plan, various other animals have got interested in similar ideas.  Gilly isn't interested in fame, but thinks swimming through the ocean on the back of an aquatic mammal sounds like a capital plan; sometimes Humphrey indulges him a ride.

You cannot resist requests from someone with Gilly's little face.

Barry, being something of an attention slut, wants to steal the idea, and he keeps trying to talk Humphrey into getting in on this first.  Humphrey is not particularly good-natured about this, so sometimes Barry sort of leaps on his back and starts talking about how famous they'll become, to Humphrey's annoyance.  (It's hard to move when you have an elephant on your back.)  We've taken a few pictures of this, but they tend to look a bit obscene, so for Humphrey's sake I'll only show you the least offensive.

It's lacking a certain something, I don't know.  The formula is the same - large land mammal standing on sea mammal - and yet...

It's a Very Tempting Tail

We can now add Gilly's tail to the list of things that fascinate Plouie.

This is an understandable fascination: Gilly does, in fact, have a singularly first-rate tail.  The real surprise here is that it took Plouie six months to notice.

Gilly's Secret Life

A few months back, I mentioned that Sir Theo had started playing online Dominion, using AJD's username.  Yesterday we discovered that he's not the only member of the menagerie to have been sucked into the Dominion community.

That's right: Gilly and the Izit are playing it too.  AJD caught them checking out their rankings.  Turns out that the Izit isn't very high-ranked, but Gilly is ranked 30: the higher the number, the higher the rank.  We're not that surprised that Gilly's good at this; he did, after all, practically cut his teeth at a house party with lots of gamers and then at a puzzle hunt.

 

Possibly we should have already known that they've become involved - AJD says he's seen the Izit and Gilly in the isotrobby before (presumably when he was playing at work), but he didn't realise they were our Gilly and Izit.

Dissertation!

I submitted my dissertation today, and I printed an extra copy for myself and had it bound.  It was long enough, and the paper I'd used was nice enough, that it had to be bound in two volumes.  It's so pretty.  OMG.

Here I am showing it to Twilby.  Twilby is almost as delighted with it as I am.  He was very helpful while I was writing it, and he guarded the two copies all last night while I was asleep, because I was terrified something would happen to it.

(I'm showing him the Old English sentences in the section on the Germanic group genitive.)

Gilly was a bit more excited about the box.  When I brought the printouts home last night, he was initially confused, because he thought the box was my dissertation; now he understands.  He's quite happy that the box isn't the dissertation, actually, because it means I'm willing to let him play with it.  See, he's lashing his tail.

He says we shouldn't take his excitement at having a box as a sign that he's abandoned his dream of having a banquet hall full of mattresses lovingly draped in Oriental rugs, but he's satisfied for the moment.

Gilly the Mattress King

While the north room mattress was cleared for Izit-Football, Gilly insisted we take his picture on it.  This is part of his ongoing campaign to convince us to buy him more mattresses.   He is firmly of the opinion that he needs a mattress of this size all for himself, and that all of the other creatures we have around have the same requirements.

Gilly and Hrithik like to watch Jeopardy! with us.  (Some day I should explain about their various Jeopardy!-related eccentricities, but that's really a separate post.)  This is how we discovered that Gilly is unusually susceptible to commercials - and this is the source of his obsession with mattresses.  He's not interested in commercials for, like, coffee or whatever, but he was immediately fascinated by the commercials put out by this local discount furniture store called the "Dump!"

The Dump! has lots of commercials about its dramatically discounted couches and tables and things.  It used to be that a lot of these commercials were about mattresses, although I think they've since abandoned the mattress line.  Gilly's not interested in furniture full stop, but he's obsessed with mattresses, and also Oriental rugs, and also banquet halls, although the latter aren't sold at the Dump!, of course.  Not only is he obsessed with mattresses, but he's obsessed with Discounted Quality Mattresses, and fancies himself a bit of a connoisseur.

Ever since seeing the Dump! commercials, he's been after us to get more mattresses for everyone.  Failing that, he wants us to get him his own credit card so that he can buy his own.  We have this vision of giving Gilly a credit card and then coming home the next day to find the entire house jammed full of Oriental-rug-draped mattresses filling every available inch of floor space and Gilly sitting gleefully in the middle of one of them, negotiating the price on a rented banquet hall.

We have no intention of giving him a credit card, of course, but he seems pretty sure that he'll wear us down eventually, if he's persistent enough.

Now, let me draw your attention to just how little space Gilly takes up on AJD's mattress.

If everyone were to have a mattress of this size, no one would get to cuddle anymore.  This has been pointed out to him, but he kind of glosses over that part, in his zeal to have each of us in possession of our own mattress.  (Plus an Oriental rug.)  The thing is, though, Gilly adores cuddling; he doesn't have any obvious personal space issues besides his mattress obsession.  We really do think he hasn't quite thought this scheme through.

The Wild Republic Salutes the Philadelphia Flyers

One of the other things ASD and I did while he was here was go to two hockey games.  (We took Stal to the first one, actually, by virtue of necessity.)  The Flyers lost them both, the first in sudden death shootout and the second because their stupid captain hit a guy in the head with his stick three minutes before the end of the game , so the Bruins scored on the power play and we didn't have a chance to tie it again.

Anyway, so part of the fun of going to a Flyers game is that you get to wear all your hideous Flyers garb, because our colours are orange and black.  For some reason ASD and I only ever end up rooting for teams that wear orange and black; not sure what that's about.  So, since ASD is a good sport about these things, here we are in our hideous Flyers paraphernalia with the three orange-and-black denizens of the Wild Republic:

Gilly fell off my shoulder almost as soon as AJD took the picture, which is why my head is at that angle.

Photographic Support for a Previous Post

In my most recent post, I mentioned that there have been some eccentric happenings in my room lately: Gilly is reading Beppe the first volume of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series (Beppe really likes the parts about wolves), and Sleepyhead mysteriously ended up on one of my bookshelves.  I can now offer photographic evidence.

Here you get the sort of panoramic view, loosely speaking.  (You can see bits of Humphrey, Lady Faraday, and Seal in the foreground.) 

I'm still not quite sure how Sleepyhead got up there, but I have vague suspicions which centre on Sir Tristan.

Here's a closer view of Gilly and Beppe:

Beppe's still in my room; the others (except Sleepyhead and Seal) have returned to the north room.  He can get away with this because he's the youngest here.  The other young ones are here for an education, but he's really here because he's Alfredo's son, although the plan is that he'll be educated here once he's old enough.  He picks up a little here and there (it would be hard to avoid), but he's not formally a student yet, apart from his singing lessons.  So he's not missing anything by being in here, and the others get a chance to breathe.  Beppe is sort of hyperactive, being a puppy and all.  Alfredo is going to want him back soon, though.

A Spectrum of Pandicity

We introduced Gilly to Hrithik tonight, which had two positive consequences: Hrithik got over being angry with me over relocating him, and they really hit it off.  They have a lot in common: both tree-dwellers, both game lovers, and both possessed of awesome ringed tails.  Their bond was forever sealed when Gilly joined us to watch Jeopardy!  He spent his formative days at the MIT Mystery Hunt, so he likes that sort of thing.

Red pandas also have some things in common with foxes: shape, colour, tailness, that sort of thing.  So, in a manner of speaking, there are only two degrees of separation between ring-tailed lemurs and foxes, and if you put the three of them together, you get a spectrum.  

I shall now produce the proof: here are, from left to right, Hrithik, Gilly, and the Fox.

Here's an aerial view, so you can see their tails:

We finally broke down and told Gilly that Sleepyhead is also a panda; this confused him utterly, because clearly, he says, Sleepyhead is a bear.  He was satisfied only when we agreed to refer to Sleepyhead as a panda bear rather than simply as a panda.  For all that, they get along pretty well.

Here's Sleepyhead on his own; it's not his best angle or a very good picture, but it gives you an idea of his habitual affect.

Here's a better one:

Note that Gilly's tail is in both pictures.  Gilly has quite a lot of tail, so these things happen.

Welcome, Gilly

AJD and Barry have returned from a successful MIT Mystery Hunt with the red panda sent in my direction in tow.  He got to hang out at the Hunt too, and apparently enjoyed it a great deal.

Here he is again, with AJD.

His name is Gilbert, because his mother was a big Gilbert and Sullivan fan, but he's usually called Gilly.  You can't see it in this picture, but he has an absolutely first-rate long fluffy tail.  I'm very enamoured of his tail.

In retrospect, it must have kismet that led us together.  The Wild Republic line has red pandas, and twice or thrice I've been this close to getting one, but there were always others too, and the red panda kept being the one who didn't make the cut.  Gilly is a much better red panda specimen than the one the WP makes.  Not that theirs is bad, but it's just not as quality as Gilly by a long shot.

Gilly is probably going to get along well with Tibby; they have a similar sort of bright-eyed inquisitive earnestness. (Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, in Gilly's case, but not in Tibby's.)  Possibly he'll also get along well with Hrithik, as two fellow tree-dwelling creatures with impressive long ringed tails, so long as they don't decide to be jealous of each other instead.  Gilly's not the jealous sort, though - and maybe Hrithik will start speaking to me again if I give him a friend.

We've already introduced Gilly to Sleepyhead, which was... entertainingly confusing.  Gilly was told there was another panda, and he was absolutely delighted - sort of dashing around being adorable and looking all over for the other panda.  Unsuccessfully.  We shook Sleepyhead awake and set them face to face.  Gilly completely failed to recognise Sleepyhead as a panda; Sleepyhead, upon hearing "that's not a panda", concluded he was probably dreaming, put his head on Gilly's back, and went back to sleep, to which Gilly reacted with "Oooh, cuddly," not that he said so out loud. So in essence, they're getting along swimmingly, but still have yet to recognise each other as fellow pandas.

I Know Some Really Super-Awesome People

I know some really amazingly wonderful people.

Not long ago, KH presented her LJ friends-list with a link to this insanely cute video of two baby red pandas in a box.  (Watch it.  It is the cutest thing ever.)  The video made me wish our local Wild Republic chapter had a red panda in it.  I even found one online.  But I'd just acquired a bunch of new animals, and I knew perfectly well that I should wait awhile before thinking about expanding them again.  I got my LJ friends-list to counsel me to be strong and resist temptation, and they did, and I did.

Fast forward to the second awesome house party I went to over New Year's, which is where AJD is at the moment.  He emailed me this morning to say that EHC had found me a red panda!  She had meant to give it to me before I left the party, but it had been misplaced.

Here's AJD with the red panda.  They make a very charming couple, don't they?

The red panda will make his debut with Barry Gaylord when AJD gets home in a couple of weeks.

Thank you, EHC.  I was not expecting that, and it was so lovely of you that I don't know what to say.