Archive for February 2014
Spectacular Sight
Yesterday afternoon, Cyndie arrived home from her travels, and in short order amazing things were happening with our horses. After surviving all of Delilah’s exhilarated energy when she walked in the door, Cyndie said hello to the cats and then it was time to check on the horses.
We made an on-the-spot decision to take the horses, one at a time, for a little walk outside the paddocks. It wasn’t anything significant, just a walk for a short distance on the driveway. She offered the first opportunity to Legacy, but when he played hard to get, Hunter won the honor. Of course, that did get Legacy’s attention and he was more than cooperative about the chance to go second.
As always, the horses that are left behind put on quite a show of anxiety about a member of the herd being outside the fence, calling out with a neigh and running along the fence line. I think the horse that is out on the walk likes the attention coming from the rest of them. Cyndie said they were loving the freedom.
After Legacy’s walk, Cayenne stepped up to the halter Cyndie was offering. It was tricky getting her out through the gate alone, as both Legacy and Hunter suddenly showed extreme interest in getting back outside along with her, and they weren’t listening to commands of opposition. Cyndie succeeded in managing the three horses and one gate, and got it closed with Cayenne alone with us on the outside.
Cayenne was so attentive and present with Cyndie that we decided to reward her with a stroll farther up the driveway than we had gone with Hunter and Legacy. That really got the other three riled up and they burst out of the paddock through the gate we leave open to the big field. They haven’t been out in the big field much lately, because the snow has gotten pretty deep out there. The new incentive of their drive to follow us on the walk overrode any previous hesitations they had about the snow, and suddenly we were watching the mystical sight of 3 energized Arabian horses running together, almost in synchronization, at top speed uphill through the deep, undisturbed snow. It was electrifying.
It was a most spectacular and rewarding thing to witness. They really put on a majestic display of their power and beauty for us. I had never seen these horses work that hard before.
When Cyndie brought Cayenne back inside the paddock, the other horses were again crowding the gate area. As Cyndie was wrestling to get the halter off over Cayenne’s ears, it appeared that Legacy nipped at Cayenne, an unfair gesture as she was in a somewhat defenseless position at that point. Cyndie appreciated Cayenne’s discipline to maintain composure in the situation, granting Cyndie priority and allowing her to safely complete the removal of the harness.
As we set out their afternoon feed, Legacy came up for his, still breathing hard after the exciting run in the snowy field. I think Cyndie’s return probably made quite an impression on them yesterday.
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Different Cat
When we first saw Mozyr at the feline adoption center, he was demonstrating some amazing athleticism and intelligence in his play. He also gave me the impression he had good confidence in himself. That all seemed to change when we got him home. His preferred spot for a long while was as far under our bed as he could get, up against the wall. Meanwhile, Pequenita, who is half his size, proved to be as bold as he was shy.
For all I know, she contributed to his apparent loss of confidence. There was a brief spell when she seemed to take control of him, banishing him from the bedroom altogether. At the same time, he would bully her off the food, so it seemed like there was an exchange of the dominance roles going on.
He was skittish about receiving affection, and resisted being picked up. He behaved very shy around visiting family and friends. I found myself referring to him as being a chicken, and had begun to think he was just going to be a distant cat that tolerates people as a necessary evil in order to get fed morning and night and have his litter box cleaned.
After a long period of these behavior patterns, he surprised me with a change, suddenly deciding to show up in the bathroom during my evening routines. He would often jump up beside the sink to check out what I was up to, and several times he even laid down right in the sink I was trying to use. He seemed to be indicating that I was his choice for a buddy, but it stayed entirely on his terms. If I tried to pick him up, or give him attention at a time of my choosing, I got rebuffed.
That all went away these last few months, when he seemed to get out of sorts around the time we had company, and then throughout a couple of his recent illnesses. He gave us a scare last Wednesday, when he appeared to be really sick. A quick online search turned up several instances where his symptoms were listed as having potential to be serious, but also could be something simple that a cat can get over in a day. We are lucky that it appears to have been the latter.
We made it very clear that we were trying to help him, and he seemed to respond overnight. He continues to seem better everyday and not only is more like his old self, he is that and beyond. He is a changed cat, as if this illness did something to him. I’ve never had him sit in my lap before.
Yesterday, as I was reading on our couch (and Delilah was outside in her kennel), Mozyr showed up –that in itself being a rare occurrence lately– and proceeded to lay on the book in my lap –an unprecedented occurrence! These last two days, he has met my gestures of attention with greater acceptance than he has ever shown before. I pulled the book out from under him and continued to read. He laid in my lap so long that I decided I should get a picture.
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Never assume your pets won’t change their behavior toward you, especially if you base that assumption simply on how they have behaved with you for the year prior.
Change happens.
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Hunter’s Run
I finally got around to uploading the video Cyndie shot of Hunter playing with the exercise ball out in the snowy field. If you recall, I tried to capture a video of Legacy playing with the ball a while back, and all I got was Dezirea walking up and putting her nose in front of my camera. That got Legacy’s attention and he walked away from the ball toward me.
Fast forward to mid-January, Cyndie and Elysa went out into the big field with the ball in hopes of getting the horses to play with it. At first, there was a lot of standing around the ball, watching it lay there, or being more interested in Cyndie and her camera. Then, with very little warning, Hunter gives it a push with his nose and then takes off running with it, as if he knew precisely what we had in mind.
It was a joy to behold, and quite a surprise to us. It seemed even more remarkable after the fact, because when he stopped, that was it. None of the other horses showed any interest in getting involved, and Hunter just did his one run and was done with it.
The scene returned to the four horses standing around the ball, watching it lay.
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Alone Again
It has happened enough that you’d think I would be used to it by now, but it’s different for me since we added horses. Cyndie is traveling out of town for work for a few days and I am alone again to tend to the animals. As if being responsible for the horses wasn’t enough, one of our cats, Mozyr, is showing new signs of some kind of illness. Before Cyndie left yesterday, she cleaned up some of his messes and then we went down and pulled the blankets off the horses. It is going to be above zero around here for a while!
It took some coaxing, but Legacy eventually allowed me to aggressively scratch his neck and shoulders after we removed his blanket. Cyndie warmed him up to the idea when she began massaging his aura about a foot away from his body. Shortly after letting me into his space to scratch him, he took an obvious step in and turned to provide me better access. A definite invitation.
I wandered back down to see the horses after they had eaten their evening feed, to take some pictures of them without blankets on. The girls were hanging out by the hay and the boys were both uphill from them.
Cayenne & Dezirea
Legacy
Hunter
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At bedtime, when I came out of the bathroom after brushing my teeth, I spotted Mozyr using the litter box we brought upstairs for him. That’s progress! After that, he wandered into the bathroom for a drink of water from the dish we keep there. Next, he took a few bites from the dry food, and then the canned food that I had put out at dinner time. These are all good signs. The night before, he appeared to have shut down completely, and then yesterday morning he seemed worse, and was messing himself and lying in it.
We probably would have rushed to the vet if Cyndie wasn’t headed out of town. I suppose I talked her out of it when I pointed out that we won’t spend money on treatments if there is something drastically wrong with him, so we may as well wait a day to see if he can shake it on his own. He is under close observation by me, and so far, things seem to be headed in the right direction.
Since I am alone, I’m hoping that’s the only direction things go for the next few days.
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Playing SparkBall
If you own an iPad / an iPhone 4 or 5 / or an iPod Touch running iOS 7.0 or later, you are in luck to download the latest game craze before everyone you know is already playing it! That is because SparkBall was just released yesterday by Orbosphere Development Studio and is now available for free as an Apple iTunes App Store download.
Our son, Julian, is at it again, and this time he has created a downloadable game. SparkBall is so simple that anyone can play it immediately. It is a fantastic exercise in eye-hand coordination and reaction time on a touch screen that becomes fiendishly hard to quit. If you have addictive tendencies, watch out for this one!
All you have to do is tap the bouncing balls to remove them from the screen. The trick is in figuring out how far ahead of the ball you should tap to avoid missing it as it goes by. That is not simple to do because the speed of the balls is changing as a result of impacts with other balls. It creates an eternal urge to try again. If at first you don’t succeed…
I was lucky enough to secure a brief interview with the developer yesterday evening by email. I figured I better be quick to contact him before he gets buffered by agents and lawyers managing his affairs. I found the man who works under the moniker of “Orbosphere” to be refreshingly candid…
Was there anything in particular that inspired you to create SparkBall? And/or are there any arcade style games you are especially fond of? (This may seem a bit technical, but) I believe the inspiration began when Apple released the SpriteKit framework within iOS7– since I was already familiar with iOS development, the release of SpriteKit brought me the closest opportunity to get into game development that I’ve had yet, at least from a programming perspective. There were already several 3rd party frameworks for making games on iOS, but something about one being “baked in” with Apple made it seem more quickly attainable for me.
Initially, SparkBall was meant to be a different type of game, with a different set of rules. The tap-to-remove element was originally just me getting comfortable writing some code with SpriteKit, just a test really. But it was quickly apparent that it was kinda fun to try to tap the ball as it bounced across the screen. So I set out to make that a type of “game mode” for SparkBall, which became version 1. Perhaps I will still add different game modes in the future.
Did you create the music and the game sounds?
No, Jaywalker did. (So, yes.) Still not sure where to make the distinctions between which elements belong to which “brand name”… because I could also say yes, orbosphere did it. But then where do I draw the line? Genre doesn’t exclude something from the Jaywalker brand. It is the same in the end.
I was working on the song prior to SparkBall, or at least independently of it, originally. Eventually I didn’t really know what to do with the song (or how to finish writing it) and it just kind of clicked– put it in the game. Let it just loop. It will make it matter less that I didn’t know how to finish writing it. Video game audio composition would certainly be an interesting area to explore further for that very reason.
How long of a song is it before it loops? It does loop, doesn’t it?
03:16. It should restart at the end… I can’t guarantee that it loops perfectly in time, but it may be close.
Since you have a job as an iOS developer, was it like working two jobs while you were creating SparkBall?
No, not really. I certainly worked on it at my leisure– sometimes a couple nights in a row when my brain was hooked on certain problems, sometimes I’d let a week or maybe two go by. And I enjoyed the development– I’ll explain it to non-developers that in the right setting* development can be like playing with Legos, only, the bricks are inside your head, as well as the computer’s.
*Right Setting might indicate lack of a project manager hovering over your shoulder, looming critical deadlines and such.
Did you get addicted to playing it when it was far enough along to do so?
Pretty quickly, as I said earlier the tap-to-remove element wasn’t the initial plan. Once it was noticed how fun that was, I was hooked.
Do you like to pop bubble wrap?
Of course. You know there’s an app for that? (And I don’t mean SparkBall.)
Yes, I know there is an app for that, but it isn’t nearly as fun as the increasing intensity of more and more balls to be dispatched on each successive level that SparkBall offers.
Thanks, Julian, and congratulations on a wonderful accomplishment and treat of a game that you have created for everyone to enjoy. I hope it goes viral!
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Walking Partner
The best thing I can do for my back is go for a walk, so as soon as I got home from work yesterday, I headed out with Delilah for a little stroll around the property. She is very entertaining to walk with this time of year. The snow is deep enough that she struggles mightily to make progress through areas of undisturbed accumulation, quickly resorting to leaping like a deer to pounce over, instead of plowing through it.
She is happy to follow the trails left by the deer, or where someone has previously walked, sprinting to get way ahead of me, and then turning to see if I’m still coming. She shows intense interest in the scents lingering in the footprints left by the deer, and spends protracted moments in olfactory detection. If I somehow manage to catch up and pass her, she bolts to close the gap and then leaps into the deep snow for several pounces to get around me before reclaiming the trail.
We came upon the pine tree that we picked up off the ground a few times last spring, and discovered it is showing signs of not having survived. It is one of several that aren’t looking so good, and has me thinking we should be planning to do some tree planting come spring so that we add more than we lose every year. We are already behind, because a similar pine on the front side of the house died last winter and had to be cut down.
While I was taking pictures of the tree, Delilah got in some small-game hunting beneath the snow.
She didn’t come up with anything except a face full of snow, which I attempted to capture before she shook it all off. I didn’t get much cooperation from her in terms of posing for photographs, but I think this does it justice.
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I was lucky that the deep snow tired her out enough that she reached her fill of being outside at about the same time I was reaching my tolerance limit for walking. On this day, the deep snow and my ailing back ended up balancing our walking partnership perfectly.
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Boom
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years ago
when it was
another time
when we didn’t know
how things would go
how they’d turn out
in the end
our innocence
mixed with happenstance
as we danced
toward a final hour
our hearts went boom
as we crossed those rooms
and held their hands
in ours
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Relative Something 