Author: Laura Highcove

Copper’s healing

Laura Highcove

So I didn’t put up pictures of Copper in the previous post cause I didn’t want anyone to worry. But now that she’s out of her collar and pretty much finished healing, I figured I can show a before and after picture.

Copper got half of her left ear burned off. Since cartilage doesn’t heal, it simply fell off. She had the deepest burns on her back just above her shoulder and on her front right leg.

And except for the first surgery which was mostly to remove the burnt hair and clean up the wounds a bit, everything healed basically on its own. Of course she’s young, and the vet said her growth was probably stunted quite a bit, but she seems to have come through this just fine.

I would like to thank Companion Animal Clinic, who made this whole process really painless and pretty cheap. Especially Dr. McCormick who took care of her, kept us in the loop, and even came in on his day off when her stitches came loose.

New NaNo

Laura Highcove

So I had a lot of trouble with NaNoWriMo this year. Partially because I started raiding again. I ended up not writing any on those weekends and then catching up on the weekends. It got rather annoying, and more than once I wanted to just give up and not bother with it anymore. However, I did not give up and actually finished early thanks to a desire to play Skyward Sword on the Monday after Thanksgiving. But I kept going and managed to get my 50k words. And I am very glad that I did it. This year was “The Colors Of” my rovas story.

Cataclysm Averted

Laura Highcove

Even though I swore it already happened. I mean they named the stupid expansion after it. But no, I guess Deathwing didn’t bother to get it right the first time. This time there was a whole lot of black…/cough…I mean I have no idea what happens if Deathwing gets off that cast because we certainly never let it happen. Ever. >.> Don’t judge me.

Anyway, normal mode was easy, as is it’s wont. There was stompy man, and tennis man, and ooze man, and “put me to sleep” man, and airship man, and Deathwing’s back, and then Deathwing. Nothing all that clever, but except for “put me to sleep man” none of the fights were absolutely horrible.

Anyway, two screenshots. One of my rad achievement and all of the quotes that I had saved up. And the second our actual killshot. Next week we start heroic mode. I hear it’s hard. Like bleeding from your eyes hard. I can’t wait.

Harvest Moon: A Tale of Two Towns

Laura Highcove

So new Harvest Moon game. After Bazzar, which I put down mid summer and never picked back up again. This one is called Tale of Two Towns, and oddly enough there are two towns. You pick whether you want to live in the farming Japanese style town of Konohana or the animal raising Eurepean style town of Bluebell. I started in Bluebell and moved over to Konohana in the summer. I will be moving back to Bluebell in Spring 2.

Bluebell Pluses:
Townsfolk (I like them better)
Focus on animals (Like animals)
Lots of flowers (So happy I can plant flowers again)
The man I want to marry lives here (Yay Cam)
Beehives (Intrigued by keeping bees)

Bluebell Minuses:
The mayor isn’t as good looking as Konohana’s mayor
Make money slower with animals (Though money still comes really fast in this game.)

Konohana Pluses:
Cute bachelor who likes horses
Make money faster with crops

Konohana Minuses:
Townsfolk (Just don’t like them as much…maybe cause so many are old.)
I’m getting disillusioned by growing crops (More on this below)

So as you can tell I just like Bluebell better in general. And end game I will likely max out my Bluebell farm.

Game Pluses:
The horse and carriage that carries all of your inventory around is just handy and cool.
They kept the dogs and cats that turn your animals in and out, which is really nice once you get them trained up.
There are “request” boards which are like quests for townsfolk. You bring them items and they give you stuff and money, which helps with the general monotony of HM games between festivals.
In addition there is a cooking festival every week which has a rather long cut-scene, but also helps with monotony.
There are “furrows” that allow you to water multiple crops in one shot, even with the lowest level watering can.
You can get an umbrella, which doesn’t do anything, but is totally cool.

Game Minuses:
The furrows are rather hard to pull off. Like really hard. And when you mess up you don’t only have to start over, but first you have to hammer what you already did back down. This has seriously pissed me off on many occasions. (When you upgrade the hoe this problem goes away.)
The higher level requests (everything above the lowest level) ask for items it is impossible for me to get at this part of the game, so it kinda just makes you feel bad.
The shops not only have more than one day a week that they’re closed, but close at 5pm, AND if it rains all day they’re also closed. Not only that, but they have a random assortment of a limited amount of items per day, so it’s possible to not be able to get a something you need for a rather long period of time. I didn’t see tea tree seeds through winter or spring of my first to second year.

Silly Kitty, that’s not a Copper Pipe

Laura Highcove

So Monday night we had a bit of a oil fire. Nothing serious, we had watched a Mythbusters recently about how oil fires and water are a nono, so it was smothered with a lid instead. Anyway, I came home for lunch and walked in the door and smelled burnt. I figured it was leftover lingerings of the night before since I had been out of the house and was now just coming back I smelled it more intensely. I was about to wash my hands when Matthew comes up from downstairs and tells me in his rather rare (when he’s not mad at me or someone else) serious voice, to ‘come downstairs, now’. So down we go to the basement and he tells me “She’s stuck in there.” My first thought is, “Oh, the cat managed to run downstairs when he had the door open…but where would she be stuck that has him all grr?”

But oddly enough he pointed to the furnace and handed me a knife. Apparently our hopper of an orange kitten had pulled up a vent cover in the great room, traveled down the tubing, and managed to get herself right on top of the furnace. When it turned itself on in an attempt to keep us warm, Matthew had begun smelling the burnt smell I smelled on coming home, which was apparently not lingerings, but burnt cat hair.

In any case I hopped right up and with superior vertical advantage sliced through the duct tape between the metal pipes and out popped an orange head, which I immediately grabbed and yanked out. Copper had a large black mass of burnt fur on the back of her neck just behind her head and as we took her upstairs to go immediately to the vet I noticed that one of her ears had shrunk around the edge and sort of curled in on itself.

She is spending the night with the vets who commented on how lucky she was that we got her out of there before too much damage appeared to have been done (though apparently with animals burns work a bit differently.) and that she was very sore, on painkillers, and not yet eating or drinking (though they are giving her fluids under the skin). The vet did seem fairly confidant that we’d be able to take her home and care for her here as long as she begins eating again. I’ll find out later this morning.

I’m not a Kid Anymore

Laura Highcove

I think too much.

I went out and in some wandering found a playground I’d never seen before. I climbed onto the swings and began swinging back and forth. I closed my eyes and tried to just feel the wind rush past me as I went higher and higher, but I was unable to not think about how the swings were creaking and there was a possibility that the support poles could come loose and the swing set could fall. Or the chain was old and could break, spilling me out onto the ground. Or that the chain was entirely not comfortable to hold onto, or that the swing itself crushed the sides of my hips.

When I was a kid, none of this stuff ever occurred to me. I was too busy having fun.

Selective Breeding

Laura Highcove

While thinking about the foals that we have this year and the new ones on the way, I sometimes think about how humans have taken horses and bred them in a certain way in order to ‘better’ them. In most cases they want the resulting foals to, each generation, be considered more beautiful (set to breed standards) as well as more talented than their parents. And of course, over the years since the different horse breeds were created, we have successfully improved the look and talent of horses.

So sometimes I think about what the human race would be like if we’d done the same thing with ourselves. A horse with two parents who are talented jumpers will likely be a talented jumper. The same way that a child who has two musically gifted parents will likely follow in their footsteps, but in most cases this is just chance in humans. But what if, for the last hundred or so years (since humans have a much longer ‘generation’ than horses) we had taken talented musicians to breed better musicians, or people with high IQs to breed people with high IQs, or even just people with good eyesight, or people who were tall?

We, as a species, stumble around, creating children out of whatever random paring comes up, either through marriage or not. Just think about how amazing our race could be if we actually improved ourselves each generation with the purpose and planning that goes into creating World Champion horses.

The Website

Laura Highcove

As important as my writing is to me, my style of writing really doesn’t fit so much with it being posted. I’m more of a nanowrimo type writer, even in the other 11 months. (Basically, write, write, write, write, write, write, and don’t edit.) So while many of my stories are getting to the place where they *could* be almost finished, that’s only in getting the main story hammered out and not that anything (or much of anything) should be read by normal people.

So I want to change my website back to having my actual blog on the front page and have the website have my colors, and not a specific story that has, truthfully, fallen by the wayside. As I seem to continue “discovering” about myself, it’s just too difficult to remain focused on one project or hobby for very long. And since I’m back to websites, it’s time for me to fix this baby up before I move on to something else.

New Kittah!

Laura Highcove

So yeah, the one female cat at the barn where I work had kittens last winter. Both were female, and both stuck around, and none of them ever get fixed. So this spring both had kittens and my husband and I decided that it would be nice for Nickel to have a playmate. Sometimes he just gets really clingy, and we assume it’s because he is feeling neglected, so a new kitty might help that!
So we brought Copper home when she was eight or nine weeks old. (Though she’s tiny.) Nickel’s first reaction was to hiss and growl at her whenever he smelled or saw her. Luckily he’s too much of a coward to actually attack her. And with some supervised play time they have gotten used to each other and now chase each other around, playing.

So this is Copper and this is Nickel’s reaction.