Cav's Place

Finally managed to get myself to start reading Time of Contempt this week and have to say there were moments when I was enjoying it too much to continue, if that makes any sense. Too busy grinning and thinking that this or that scene or line were so great to focus properly anymore, so had to keep taking short breaks for probably the best reason possible when it comes to books. Admittedly, the very long chapters are rather troublesome, especially for someone as rusty as I am when it comes to reading, but there are exactly seven of them, so that makes it easy to say I’ll read it in exactly one week.
In addition, after finally managing to finish The Lost Vikings at the start of last week and spending a couple of days poking through King of Dragon Pass a little more, I got back to Return to Krondor, quickly finished chapter two… And then I got stuck in chapter three, ending up in exactly the sort of situation that makes me abandon games. My brain somehow decided to pretty much take a break, so I made an extremely poor use of a great situation and now I won’t be going anywhere until I’ll get the same things, or of course better ones, which seems extremely unlikely, considering the multiple random checks involved.

As for bad news, my body definitely seems to have had enough of all the stress and lack of sleep, because it’s acting up in several ways at once. In fact, that’s probably the better scenario, the worse one being that something more serious is wrong and is causing the other issues I’m noticing. I’ll have to see what I can do about it, but at the moment this is definitely causing even more stress and lack of sleep, so it’s quite a vicious circle even if that’s the only cause.

Last but definitely not least, yesterday morning, as I was walking to a store where you’d better go early if you want to still find something good that’s on sale, I took note of a cat sitting in the middle of this street nearby and a guy with a backpack leaning down to pet it. Since it’s a one-way street with speed bumps, generally little traffic and largely unusable sidewalks mostly taken up by parked cars, neither the person nor the cat were in any way unusual, since everyone walks directly on the road and only moves aside when a car passes, but I definitely remembered the moment when, less than an hour later, I was walking back and saw that same cat lying dead, in the same spot, in a pool of blood.
Unlike the one I saw killed on that same street back in 2009, this one definitely was not flattened, so I have to assume that it was struck hard enough, but then I find it difficult to believe that a car would drive fast enough for that so my mind keeps going back to that guy, especially since the cat was in the same spot. It also keeps going back to the rumors that another cat from this area was killed by having its head bashed in with a rock, and to the lost cat posters I’ve been seeing on and around that street for the past several months.
In other words, I’m wondering whether it was simply a coincidence or that guy killed the cat, and possibly not only that one. I obviously don’t want to accuse, not even just in my own mind, a person who likes animals and simply stopped for a moment to pet a cute cat that walked in his path, but I can’t not ask myself this question… And once I do that, I also can’t not ask myself whether I could have saved the cat by leaning down to pet it as well while he was there, or perhaps even by simply stopping to look for a longer moment instead of just smiling and walking quickly past that spot.