I WANT TO EAT A NUT OF LAERMA!

QUICK UPDATE...

I don't know what the hell happened, but Google seems to be placing my blog much higher than it did before for all sorts of subjects. Like, for example, if you remember when I wrote about the time I suspected that Rushmore's Sara Tanaka found this blog doing a vanity search for herself (not that I'm saying there's anything wrong with "vanity searches"... I do it for myself once a month or so) based on a single mention of her on this pafe from back in 2003, this blog showed up in the 400s somewhere, but, when I did the same search a few minutes ago, I'm now at #27 (though part of the higher search ranking would be because of that entry I wrote that I just linked to). Hits to this blog have been spiking the past couple of days, and there's no discernable trend with the search terms, I've just been getting more hits on random subjects than I ever remember getting before.

As for the cat... nope. Still nothing. I went to Blockbuster last night, and rented Ghost in the Shell: Stand-Alone Complex volume 3 and Van Helsing (which a lot of people in the RottenTomatoes.com forum hated, but they have a tendency to look down upon "popcorn movies" in general, and I liked both of Stephen Sommers' Mummy films and Chris in Massachusetts liked it, so I thought I'd give it a whirl). On the way back home, I decided to try walking around unfamilar streets in the neighbourhood roughly parallel to the main road. I didn't have a map, but I had my GPS device so I wouldn't get too lost. It's not one of those fancy, more recent ones, with the built in maps and such, but it shows the distance and direction to the selected waypoint (my house), so it sufficed. Didn't see much of anything, though, I heard this weird screeching noise that I suspect was one of those grey owls my mother was talking about the other day. Then, once I got within two tenths of a mile or so within my house, I recognized the streets I was on and I decided, since Late Night with Conan O'Brien was a rerun anyway, I might as well walk around my whole "block", since I'm still skeptical that Ember would have crossed the street. It's just, because of the way the streets around my house are arranged, my "block" kind of snakes around a bit and is the best part of a kilometer long, unbroken by cross streets, giving her a million places to hide. The complete circuit around my block is well over a mile long, which I could probably walk at normal speed in about 15 to 20 minutes, but, since I was stopping every few feet to see if I could see my cat, it took me a full hour. And it's still very disorienting for me because, while the houses immediately surrounding my own are typical suburban bungalows, meaning, if I look in most directions other than north, where there is a medium-rise apartment building, I can still pretend I'm in a place like Pincourt. However, once you get about halfway down my road, the bungalows give way to duplexes and low-rise apartment buildings, and the other end of my block has a school and a high traffic road complete with traffic lights and it feels like I'm in one of Montreal's inner suburbs, like Lachine or Montreal West, and it's pretty bloody disorienting even for me, so I can't imagine how strange it is for a cat. Maybe I'll try searching with my half-Labrador dog, Sam, since he's pretty good at finding hidden cats.

I did watch a bit of Stephen Harper's keynote address at the Conservative Party convention in Montreal, but I think I'd have to watch it again, or read a full transcript, to offer anything intelligent. Perhaps the speech would have been energizing to me if my life hadn't changed so much over the past year, but I'm still very disoriented after moving, even after three months, and find it difficult to maintain the level of interest in such things that I once did. I hope the interest comes back, but I think it will take time.

Anyway, I'm off to the anime club.

posted by Steve Brandon @ 8:07 PM