people I read

 The season has turned, darkness now comes early. This city might have trouble differentiating spring and summer, but it's great at suddenly turning autumn.

Our cat has lost six collars in six months. The last one lasted five days. We walked to the pet store on Sunday, put the collar on Monday and by Friday he returned a little moist and collar-free. He was then banned until my order of six collars arrived by mail, shaving chunks of our sanity in the process because we're boring people and our cat is easily bored. There are two theories as to where these missing collars wound up. The first says there's a small mound of cat collars waiting up on some errant roof or tree branch in a two-house radius (the cat's approximate range) just out of our sight. I've given up trying to put name tags on the collars, so we might never get them back. Also, because someone loves giant, fluffy cats, Moggie needs special ordered XL collars to fit his precious, just-over-standard-size neck. The second theory, mostly mine, hinges on my cat's most doggie-like trait, that is his enthusiastic approach to life using his entire body. When he gets from Point A to Point B, he ignores everything in front of him and anything else that falls to the side. Pill bottles? Don't care. Letters? Don't care. Random boxes of food? Eh. It's not really any better when he comes to a stop. I've saved my tea from his tail more times than I can count. It doesn't bother him one bit if his tail gets wet. I've seen him deliberately sit in standing water. His people exist for him to dead fall upon at his convenience. Frankly, if it's neither sturdy enough nor large enough, it doesn't matter in his space. Watching him amble about helps me understand the world a bit from Seth's perspective. 

And so, I reckon his collars are actually caught on branches inside the monstrous jasmine wall that grows between my porch and the house next door, which features a cat tunnel (made over generations by neighbourhood cats) on the bottom and which my cat traverses over every day to torment someone else's cat. I keep staring at the monstrosity of gravity-defying jasmine and weedy ivy hoping to spot a bell or metal hardware to poke out. When I first moved in, I tried to pull out that ivy, but it's taken over the yard. There's a wooden trellis under the greenery, which when last visible was splintered and in dire shape, repaired in patches and seriously standing only because vines have grown so thickly it's become its own scaffolding. I continue to be impressed by its will to live. I suppose one of these days, I'll drag over a ladder and poke in more detail. 

As always, my enemy to productivity is my decadent cat-based lifestyle. Very well-loved and decadent, the creature in question is curled in a curlicue of cat against me while I type, absorbing stress and motivation from my person like a sponge. We finished story-mode Final Fantasy Tactics. Now basically grinding the "learned every skill" achievement and odd monster drops I have yet to see in end-game. I do recommend the FF Tactics remake, which was literally remade because they lost the source code. It has amazing voice acting in the new incarnation, the story is great, very heretical, and though relatively short compared to Tactics Ogre, it's compact and complete on its own. Tactics Ogre could make almost any game look short though, so take that as you may.