Currently, It's Time For Some Currentlies

Current clothes: Dark blue sweatpants, maroon t-shirt that says, "I know just enough to be dangerous." (Which is true, but I'm still feeling pretty good about the way I managed to fix a problem earlier where my PC and my TiVo were refusing to talk to each other.) White socks. Cthulhu slippers.

Current mood: Today, I've been in one of those bizarre states that I sometimes wonder if only I am capable of: a weird, fluctuating combination of relaxed and frazzled. Sort of a "Yay, I'm off today! I can do anything I want to!" plus a "Gaah, where did today go? I have gotten nothing done!" I did just vacuum, though, which always makes me feel better. It's like an easy, sure-fire way of making myself feel like I've accomplished something.

Current music: Leonard Cohen's Old Ideas.

Current annoyance: Oh, there are so many of them. Which one to pick? How about the fact that my allergies have started acting up again? Stupid sinuses.

Current thing: Cooking! More specifically, crock pot cooking. I realized, finally, that part of the reason why I hate to cook is that when it's dinnertime, I don't want to have to jump through annoying food-preparation hoops. I just want to eat. It's actually a lot more fun if I do it when it's not actually mealtime. Hence: crock pot! I even went out and got a crock pot recipe book, and have made several reasonably successful new meals. Last week, I made a Cuban-style curried turkey thing that looked like a gloopy mess, but tasted amazing. As in, oh-my-god-I-can't-believe-I-actually-cooked-this-food amazing. Today, I just made good, old-fashioned pot roast, although I'm feeling kind of annoyed with myself because I forgot to put in onions.

Current desktop picture: A photo my aunt took from the top of a Hawaiian volcano. Probably Haleakala.

Current book: I'm re-reading Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. For some reason.

Current song in head: Brain Radio has been crazy noisy lately. Right now, it seems to be playing "In the Car" by Barenaked Ladies. I have no idea why.

Current DVD in player: Nothing in the living room at the moment, because I'm trying to get caught up on weeks worth of Tivo'd stuff. The last thing in there was season 3 of Merlin. Which is a show that ranges from a fluffy bit of brain candy that I like better than I feel I should to actually pretty decent television. In front of the treadmill, I've been watching season 1 of The Twilight Zone. And, wow, but that is just classic, classic stuff. Even better than I remember it being, most of it. How the hell it manages to hold up so well after fifty-plus years, when everything it does has become so over-familiar in the meantime, I don't know, but it does.

Current refreshment: Diet A&W root beer. I normally dislike diet sodas, but something in the root beer does a good job of hiding that nasty chemical taste from the aspartame.

Current worry: Again, there are many. But the kitten is really trying hard to dominate here. Her eyes are actually looking a lot better, which is great. But then for a while she decided to stop eating much of anything. It wasn't a case of not eating because she was feeling sick, though. She was in no way feeling sick. At one point, the only way I could get her to eat anything was to scatter some Kitten Chow on the floor so she could bat each individual piece of kibble around with her paws and hunt it for a while before eating it. That's not being sick. That's deliberately trying to drive me crazy. Finally, after enough days for it to start to get scary, she seems to be back to eating just fine again. What a relief! Except now she's out of the antibiotics she's supposed to be taking. The vets gave me a small amount of liquid in a big bottle and warned me that sometimes it coats the sides and won't come out, so I could come back for more if I needed it. A couple of days ago, it looked like there was several days worth, coating or no coating. Today, I tried to get some out, and there was nothing but dried stuff crusted onto the sides. And, of course, the vet's office is closed for the weekend, and I can't get any more until Monday. Yeah, going off a course of antibiotics for two days right in the middle is a great idea. New worry: that I am currently breeding resistant bacterial super-bugs inside my kitten.

Current thought: I want a vacation. I want to put all the damned cats into suspended animation and go lie on a beach somewhere and do nothing but read for a week, while people bring me drinks with umbrellas in them.

But It's March!

Holy crap, it's snowing! And here we were just having lovely already-trying-to-be-spring weather this week! Stop teasing me, nature! Don't tell me winter is over and then yell, "Just kidding!" and put it back again!

Oh, well. At least the killer winds we were having this morning have died down. Meaning my internet is now mostly staying up. Mostly.

Two Great Tastes

It seems Farscape's Ben Browder is going to be making a guest appearance on Doctor Who next season. Clearly somebody in this universe loves me!

Cat Update #703

So, Newt's test results did finally come back, but let's just say they were not exactly conclusive. On the upside, she probably doesn't have kitty chlamydia. But it could still be herpes. Or maybe something bacterial. Or an even an auto-immune disease. (That's right, House fans! It could be lupus!) Her ear is looking good now, at least, but she still has pretty bad conjunctivitis. And so we continue working our way through the veterinary pharmacopeia, hoping to hit on something that will work. Right now, she's got yet again still more different antibiotics. She's also got some corticosteroid eye ointment that might make things better and might make things worse. Ladies and gentlemen, place your bets!

At least there was some good news: Happiness' thyroid levels were just fine, meaning the dosage she's on right now is working great. Even though a couple of times she's missed a pill, because I thought she'd swallowed it only to find it on the floor a day later. Nova's limp is looking a lot better, too, so that's something.

Still... cats.

It's Meeeee!

I meant to post some of these sooner, but I've been busy. Plus, my internet was down for two days. Fun times!

Anyway, some more pictures from my aunt. The one thing lacking from my previous posts on my Hawaii trip, I think, was pictures with me in them. So here's a few, just to document the fact that, yes, I really was there:

SuperNova Is Not Able To Leap Tall Buildings In A Single Bound

Nova was still limping -- the shot really didn't seem to do much for him -- so I took him back into the vet today. Where they did another exam, took some x-rays, and decided that he probably really does just have a pulled muscle. And maybe he keeps kind of re-injuring it, since it hasn't stopped him jumping up on things. There was discussion of maybe confining him to a small space with nothing to jump on, but it was eventually decided that I could just take away the giant cat tree, because that's the only really high place he gets onto. Well, that and my computer desk, but he only does that when I'm home, so theoretically I can discourage it. Of course, even as I type this, he launched himself up here again, so maybe that's a little problematic. But hopefully it's not quite as bad as climbing all the way up near the ceiling.

And they still don't have all Newt's test results. Apparently they had to be sent to two different labs, one after the other, so it's taking a while.

Sigh. Cats.

Zippity Doo Dah!

I just got a couple of discs in the mail from my aunt with a whole bunch of photos from our Hawaii trip, including the ones taken of me riding the zipline. Of course, I couldn't not share them! So...

Here I am all excited and ready to go! Or possibly all finished and happy to have had the experience. One or the other:



Mid-flight:



And coming in for a landing:



Man, that was fun.

She sent me a lot of other pictures she took, too, some of which are just gorgeous. I'll probably share some more later. I wouldn't want to overwhelm you with all the awesomeness at once.

Sunshine On My Shoulders

Man, I started today off in an irritable mood. But it is utterly impossible to sustain any level of grumpiness in weather like this. Just stepping outside is like an instant hit of happiness.

More like this, please!