My brain seems to be filled with completely random thoughts today, so you get to listen to me babble.

I’m not entirely happy about placing Dog Lady in the writing section of my website, but she’s there now, and I suppose that’s where she will stay. The other articles in that rather thin section of my website are more like reflections on my childhood than musings on the activities going on around me right now. But since Dog Lady herself will be a memory to me very soon - and seeing as, strangely enough, two of the four essays that are in the writing section right now have something to do with dogs - I thought maybe it wasn’t such a stretch to put the essay there. Maybe a year from now I’ll go back and change all the verbs in Dog Lady to the past tense, and then it will seem to fit more.

It’s hard to put things into categories and cupboards and pigeonholes.

On a completely unrelated note: what’s up with Corelli’s Mandolin? I glanced through the log files for this website earlier (yes, Big Sister is watching you - but not very carefully, so don’t feel self-conscious), and I lost track of the number of people who apparently typed “Corelli’s Mandolin” into a search engine, got to my site, and read through what I had to say about the book. Why the sudden interest in Corelli’s Mandolin? I just find it odd - not that people are interested, but that so many people are interested at one time.

Speaking of log files, I also find it interesting - and cool - that many people get to my site by typing “intelligent people” into search engines. However, I find it kind of disturbing that people also get to my site by typing things like “woman+sex+with+cat” (and just typing that sentence here will probably get me some more hits…). I can kind of understand why my site would pop up if you typed that into a search engine: the cheesy little description of the site that I had to write for search engines was, “A me-zine by a young American woman living in Europe. Literate, intelligent, cat-less, and fantastically wordy.” So you have “woman” and you have “cat” - it’s not such a leap. But I certainly don’t like to think about the type of people who are looking for descriptions of women having sex with cats. Creepy.

Whoever they are, they must be horribly disappointed when they get to my innocent little site.

And speaking of cats, I’ve always meant to expand upon the cat-lessness of my site, but I’ve never gotten around to it. I seem to be an anomaly in the private-websites-by-women world in that I don’t - and won’t - own a cat of any sort. I liked cats when I was about 8 years old, but I grew out of that phase and became a certified “dog person” (which may explain all the dog stuff going on in the writing section). But really, whether I am a cat person or a dog person is completely irrelevant because I’m allergic to both dogs and cats, so you will never see cute little pictures of any fuzzy cuddly pets on this website. Maybe if I get some goldfish someday I’ll make a picture gallery for them on my site. But don’t hold your breath.

Stream of consciousness: I had goldfish when I was really little. I named them “Money” and “Penny”. Was I a budding investment banker or was I a James Bond fan before I ever saw a single James Bond movie?

When I was about 13 I started begging my parents for a dog (this was before I knew I was allergic to them). My dream dog was a Siberian husky, but a golden retriever or a soft-coated wheaten terrier would have done nicely as well. I wanted to name the dog Abernathy (after a talking dog in a Terry Brooks book). I thought that Grendel would have been a good name too (after the monster in Beowulf), but I also thought Hamlet or Macbeth would have been nice, or maybe something unpronounceable and Welsh. My mother kept reminding me that I had to imagine myself standing in the middle of the neighborhood calling the dog’s name. Did I really want to be yelling, “Hamlet! Here, Hamlet!”? Did I really want to be stumbling over some weird Welsh name when I just wanted the dog to sit down? No, I did not. Anyway, it was all for naught; we never got a dog (for which I and my asthmatic lungs are now thankful).

We did wind up getting a crazy, fat blue parakeet. We named him Fritz. We all adored him even though he wouldn’t talk, couldn’t fly, refused to sit on your finger, and would bite you if you tried to pet him. Not terribly charming, but somehow endearing. I think I should make a picture gallery for Fritz. It would suit the site somehow. It could even have sound samples. My little brother once made a tape loop of himself saying “Hello! Pretty boy! Hello! Pretty boy!” over and over and over again. He put the tape player in front of Fritz’s cage and let it run in a futile attempt to teach Fritz to talk. Fritz did eventually seem to learn two different whistles (the come-hither whistle and the wolf whistle), but a human word never passed his…beak. Anyway, the tape might make for nice background noise as one peruses Fritz’s picture gallery.

I’ll leave you now with the undoubtedly unbearable anticipation of the future panoply of Parakeet Pics. Keep on the lookout for this exciting new development right here at WordRidden-dot-com.