InterroLoop: Day 8 – OnaZ

Whenever I stopped for fuel I purposefully cleaned my half of the windshield which after seven days looked like an arthropod version of some horror film but today’s rain ended the developing insect fluid Jackson Pollack.  I should really take daily pictures.

I had met Zane/OnaZ before but I was glad to see him again.

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Rarely do tonemapped portraits turn out, this did... almost.

He shares his apartment with his girlfriend who happens to be a team-mate’s older sister, a fact I reiterated possibly two dozen times during my time there.  She’s a veterinary medicine student and we were both delighted to find that the scale used to rate the consistency of animal feces is the same as the Bristol scale for humans with a 1 being buckshot and a 7 being a chocolate cannon.  Zane was in no way delighted by this, in fact, quite the opposite, a trend that would recur as I discovered intersections between animal science and my experience in the wilds of the human colon.

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Jessica

The two have two cats, each which is “special”.  The first, Yardstick, has three feet and I think sometimes sprays parts of the wall with urine.  His one backfoot now tilts to the center making it look like the leg’s spring-loaded or artificial.

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I kept calling her tripod.

The other cat, Cotton, is 17 and is starting to show it.  She no longer cleans herself which causes her fur to mat a bit so that when she moves her tail it looks neatly segmented as static, oil, and cohesion lumps the fur into rows.  Additionally, she’s got eye problems.  You don’t know non-fear until you’ve been stared at by a cross-eyed cat.

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In her seat of power

Neither cat is particularly agile due to age or injury and used a number of intermediary jumps to make it from the floor to the back of the couch.  The air mattress I slept on plus my presence on the love seat blocked their ascent reducing them to having to be picked up.  Cotton showed a certain tenacity with half-hearted attempts jump on the couch but I think she even knew her efforts were more for show.  Otherwise the evening drifted away nicely in a cloud of learning about how to identify lameness is horses to how expensive surgical practice animals are.