honeymoon over? also, Invisible Catfish

This morning Chita wanted me to wake up at 10 to 6. This would have annoyed me a great deal more if I didn’t have an alarm set reminding myself to get up at 10 after 6 to finish a column for this week’s paper.
I got up (after ignoring her for 20 minutes so she didn’t think it was her idea), much to her delight, and gave her kisses and cuddles and played with her a bit. I had breakfast, which I don’t usually, and gave her a little bit of milk from my cereal bowl—a special treat. I wandered around the house and indulged her delight when I peeked at her around doors.
Then, procrastinating on the article, I did all the dishes and cleaned the kitchen and started the dishwasher. (Am I good or what? I need more writing gigs so I can get my house cleaned more often.)
In the midst of this, at 7 am she decided Z should be awake, and went and peed on him.( wtf??! )

Ugh. Anyway.
Z’s interview went well yesterday; we’ll see how that goes.
I did finish my article so there will be something, not a restaurant review! in the upcoming issue.
We need to go grocery shopping.
More, we need to get back to work on painting. It’s now been the better part of a week since we did any work, and the time we can have the windows open is dwindling!
Also IKEA has mattresses on sale at the moment and I want to go get one before they go off sale. I have until September 9th. We should probably just do this. Ack, this weekend’s a holiday, though. The border will be insane… Oh well. We’ll think of something.

One more weird thing. While the living room is being painted, poor Plecosaurus is living in a bright orange Home Depot bucket in the basement. With no filter, argh. We need to get his tank sorted out. But anyway—plecos are pretty hardy. While cleaning Chita’s litterbox this morning (thanks for the reminder), I remembered to feed him. I went over and… there was nothing in the bucket!
In alarm, I shook the bucket slightly. I immediately felt Pleco scrape the side as he rocketed off around the bucket in his usual panic. But I saw nothing.

He had already gone pale in there, as plecostomus catfish have limited camouflage ability. But now he has turned himself completely orange!
I will try to get a picture when we move him back to his normal tank. I want to see him orange! At the moment I haven’t a hope, as he’s entirely invisible. But I know he’s in there—first off, he can’t have gotten out, and second off, I felt him scraping around.
Weird. Eerie. (I did feed him. And I’ll make sure the food gets eaten. Invisible catfish!)

nguh.

I am, for some reason, unfocused today.
I've been doing well at work all week, being productive and getting things done and so on and so forth. And yet, when my job satisfaction is at its highest, I am oddly bedeviled by an intense and renewed desire to have some time off, to stay home, to spend my days cleaning the house, putting my life in order, performing mundane tasks around the house, and of course writing. I have such vivid desires I actually doodled myself a schedule of how to fill my days if I were unemployed. I do not know what it is. I know I could have any job in the world at the moment and I would still be beseiged by these daydreams and dissatisfaction. I just don't want to be working, at the moment-- not outside my house. I really don't understand it. I don't want to be lazy-- I don't want to sleep, or waste time. I don't have any daydreams of lying around doing nothing. No. I want to work, but I just don't want to work for someone else. At least, not in their place. I just want to be at home.
Weird.

Also I really want to be writing. I've been writing more than since I started this job, lately-- nothing worth noting, by my standards of ridiculousness, but a few words a day and a lot of coherent thoughts.

Somewhat related, it suddenly struck me, just this week, what's wrong with that Vikings_Novel I could never quite finish. What is it?

The characters are all Norsemen, right? Vikings. Norse. Norwegians.
I know Norwegians.
Norwegians aren't that nice.
I got all these freakishly good-natured Vikings, all friendly and weirdly concerned for the heroine's well-being, and just, nice.
Norwegians aren't nice. I know Norwegians.
I love Norwegians.
But they're not going to kiss your boo-boos and make them better. Not if they just met you. Man you gotta know them for like a year* before they're gonna be anything other than formally polite with you. They will carefully abide by the unwritten and subtle laws of hospitality and all, and do everything that's right and polite and good, but they're not going to make a judgment on whether you're a person worth befriending or not for a good year or so. And once they've made the decision, it still ain't exactly instantaneous.
You might call them "reserved".
I think they're awesome and think maybe I'm secretly Norwegian myself, a little bit. It just makes sense.
But they're not going to fall in love with somebody at first sight either.

Man now I got to fix my whole book. The hero is this "Norwegian" dude who's totally, like, Texan or something. No way. The book is not going to work. Unless I change every mention of "Viking" to "cowboy".
Hm, that might be easier...

And in other news, Z is IMing me from work to say that he thinks he's coming down with something. He's even sending me :(s, which is no good. Man now I gotta make soup and batten down the hatches, cuz I'll probably get sick too. Bleagh.

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*Note: this is probably an exaggeration.