I just took my cat for a walk because she is going COMPLETELY batshit crazy. She used to be a real outdoor cat... gone for a week at a time sometimes, but miraculously, despite all Montana's cat-eating predators and our house's proximity to a relatively busy highway, she always came back. Amazingly her brother, Rocky, did too, and he survived long enough to die of natural causes a few years ago, but Deeders has slogged on persistently without him. Now, although she is in relatively good physical condition considering her 16 years, she's a lot slower and less springy than she used to be and has certainly lost all interest in her long hunting excursions.
But we still let her outside for 15 minutes at a time, because she will sit there and meow at the door until we let her out, and then a few minutes later she will sit and meow at the door until we let her in. So this time I went outside with her and walked around the yard with her a little bit. She did her cat thing, eating grass and sniffing bushes and listening when birds chirped. When she was younger and sprightlier, she would stealthily follow my dad or I around the neighborhood when we walked our dog. This, I presume, is because her biggest threats were from neighborhood dogs and cats that didn't necessarily want to show aggression (or show up at all) around our 180-lb Great Pyrenees with an instinct to protect his "flock" (in this case, me, my brother, and the two cats). I don't think cats are particularly intelligent but Deeders was at least smart enough to figure out that she could roam the 'hood a little more safely if she followed us. Anyway, I figured maybe she would get out a little further into the yard if I was there to lead her around. I think I will try to do this on a daily basis from now on, if for no other reason than to
feel like I am doing something to make my aging and senile cat a happier critter.
I'm also doing it because, while our cats had always been sworn enemies of the neighborhood magpies, Deeders has finally gotten on enough in years that we are actually concerned for her safety if they show up. I suspect the magpies won't want to get too close if I'm around.
Life has been pretty uneventful, for which I'm grateful. After living four years always being worried about the next thing to do the next day, and the thing to do the day after that, it's pretty refreshing to go to sleep every night knowing that I essentially have no important obligations to fulfill the next day. At home, I've been wandering the recesses of the internet, bicycling, playing Fallout, reading, and helping out with cooking. At the cabin, we go four-wheeling, boating, wandering around with the dog, and enjoying the weather from the deck. Well, I suppose it hasn't been all fun and games. With my mom's reunion coming up, I got put in charge of designing and ordering the reunion t-shirt, helping bake lefse, banana bread, and other freezable food items, and doing a lot of touch-up stuff at the cabin like helping dad finish the trim and painting in the garage. For the most part, I think my mom is freaking out unnecessarily about this reunion, except that I know the only people more perfectionist and demanding than she is are her sister and her sister's husband. I don't think she is too concerned about pleasing any of the other various family members, but she is clearly going out of her way to make sure that Aunt Deedee and Uncle Sal are well accommodated. And Sal can definitely be a pain-in-the-ass. He's a great guy, but he's an appellate judge on the New York state supreme court, he was a U.S. attorney under Reagan, and he's even had a movie made about one of his more dramatic cases, and he's got his New York Italian attitude to match his accomplishments. He's definitely quite opinionated on a huge range of subjects and he doesn't normally bother being particularly tactful about it. My mom still has a sort of love-hate relationship with the guy, because she lived with him and her sister in Buffalo right after she got out of college and had to deal with him for a long time. Though, in fairness, he and his Italian immigrant mom are the primary reason that she knows how to cook food that doesn't consist of jell-o and preserved fish, like Norwegians make.
Anyway, I'm off to try to find stuff about the Italian Renaissance. Maybe I will even stoop so low as to watching The Agony and the Ecstacy, ie the movie in which Professor Higgins is the Pope and Charlton Heston is Michelangelo. I've always liked Renaissance history, and pre-Modern European history in general, but I am especially stoked because the second Assassin's Creed game will be set in Renaissance Italy in the 15th century. I'm actually quite relieved that it is, because with the ending of the first game there was no way of knowing if the gameplay in the sequel would follow modern-day protagonist Desmond Miles, if it would continue with Third Crusade-era assassin Altair bin Al-Ahad, or if it would focus on a completely new characterin a different era. Because of the prominent appearance of some sort of Japanese prophecy towards the end of the first game, there was a lot of speculation that the sequel would take place in Japan... and frankly... I was terrified of that prospect, not because I dislike Japan, but because ninja videogames are a dime a dozen. And frankly, ninjas have become a huge cultural cliche, especially given that the black-clad, star-throwing ninjas of popular mythology never
really existed. And even if the game developers didn't label their stealthy assassin character as a ninja, it would be hard to prevent it from happening naturally if you set the thing in Japan.
One of the things that I liked about Assassin's Creed was that it worked so hard to vividly and convincingly portray a setting which has been featured in virtually no videogames, which is crusades-era Palestine. And I'm fairly confident in saying that Renaissance Europe has
never been faithfully recreated in any mainstream videogame setting, so it will be fun to be able to explore the great architecture and colorful carnivales of Venice and Florence, and the rolling countryside of Tuscany as brand-spanking-new yet startlingly familiar-looking assassin Ezio Auditore da Firenze. It's not been confirmed but I hold out hope that Rome will be available to explore as well. You can check out the cinematic (ie non game graphics) trailer
here. I think the trailer is visually stunning, and the music is great and sounds historically accurate, even if the trailer isn't quite as dramatically interesting as the trailer for AC was. The only real problem I have with the trailer is that the mask shatters when it falls off... which is silly because real Venetian carnivale masks are made of papier mache, not ceramics.
So. Yeah. That's all.