Good News, Bad News

So, today I found out I have to have a root canal. But, on the plus side, I also found a way to keep my shoes from coming untied all the time.

I Aten't Dead

Oh, dear, I've been neglecting this blog long enough that people have started to e-mail me and ask if I'm all right. I'm fine! I'm sorry for disappearing! I think two things have been happening this month that explain what I've been doing instead of blogging. First, I kind of went into this state where all I really wanted to do all day was lie on the sofa and shove words into my face. Sort of the book-lover's equivalent of hibernation, I think. So I mostly did that for a while, and then I had to scramble around doing all the responsible-adult things that piled up on me because I neglected them while I was book-hibernating. Which I'm still in the middle of. (Next up: dentist's appointment! Whee!)

I feel like I should have something else to say here, though, so I will offer up a random thought.

Random thought: I have heard that in some places there is a tradition/superstition that if you don't take down your Christmas decorations by January 6, the Devil will come and get you. I am strongly in favor of adopting this here in the US. Hell, I may almost be ready to start believing in the Devil myself if it will get people to take down their Christmas lights. Come on, guys! It's nearly February!

New Year's Currentlies

Current clothes: Green sweatpants. Gray sweatshirt with an Edward Gorey picture of a cat lounging on a pile of books and the words "books. cats. life is sweet." (Because, really, what more do you need? Not even capital letters!) White socks.

Current mood: Very good, happy and relaxed. I spent the entire morning in my pajamas, doing nothing but reading a good book until I finished it. Man, I need to do that more often. It's very good for my psychological health. (The shirt does not lie!)

Current music: Nothing much. Once again, most of my listening-to-things time is going to trying to keep up with a bunch of podcasts. Or at least not fall further behind. My podcast backlog hasn't remotely reached the out-of-control state that my book and DVD backlogs have, but it is constantly threatening to expand in that direction.

Current annoyance: I was totally prepared to say winter, and that I'm entirely ready for it to go away now. Except, uh... it kind of did? The temperature suddenly shot upwards today, with the result that there was a veritable waterfall of melting snow pouring off every roof in town.

Current thing: It's a new year! So I'm going to be more creative and more productive and healthier and just generally all-around better at living! Right?

Current desktop picture: Still this spoilery promo picture released before the Doctor Who season finale. I might leave it up for a while, I dunno. It is a pretty awesome picture.

Current book: I've just started in on a bit of local history with Elfego Baca in Life and Legend by Larry D. Ball.

Current song in head: Nothing at the moment. Although Brain Radio has been unusually suggestible lately, and I fully expect something new to set it off and get it playing something annoying at any moment.

Current refreshment: Mellow Moments tea, which is a really nice delicate blend of peppermint, spearmint, chamomile and, I dunno, some kind of spices and stuff.

Current DVD in player: Disc 5 of season 10 of Supernatural. About which I appear to have no opinions whatsoever. Well, OK, I definitely have opinions about it, both positive and negative, while I'm watching it. But the moment I turn the TV off, I entirely cease to care.

Current thought: Maybe next time I do this, I'll add in "current happy thing" or something to take the place of the "current worry" entry that I eliminated last time. (Which, I must say, was a very good idea.) Seems like it'd be a little redundant this time, though, as it'd just be feeling good and having the day off of work and getting some quality reading-in-the-PJs time in.

2015: The Year In Books And Other Stuff

Happy New Year to all! I hope 2016 is bright and happy for all of you, and brings you many good things.

2015 was, I suppose, a messy, turbulent year for the world at large (although I'm not sure if there are actually any years that aren't), but, looking back, it seems fairly sedate for me, personally. The big event of the year for me was having family visiting and doing the Balloon Fiesta and various trips around New Mexico, in October. Well, that and rain flooding in through my floor again during the summer. Looking back over the blog, I'm not sure I even talked about that here... It was extremely annoying, although fortunately not too difficult to fix: I just had to caulk up a crack in the concrete slab floor. Also on the subject of water being where it's not supposed to be, I think my roof might finally be fixed for good this time, so that's definitely a plus for the year. I also got a new oven, a new dryer, and a new couch and loveseat, so my house is overall a nicer place to be now than it was at the beginning of the year, even if it is continuing to age. Oh, and, yes, I am going to brag about winning that Doctor Who trivia contest forever.

I also read a lot of books, as always. My total for the year was 137 books. Interestingly, 2014's total was 138, and I have no idea how the heck I manage to be that consistent about it. I'm not consciously trying to be! You can see my whole year's worth of reading here.

As is traditional, I include here a list of my favorite books of the year, or at least the ones I gave the highest star ratings to on LibraryThing. It's a pretty good list this year, I think:

Fiction

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
Avatar: The Last Airbender: The Promise by Gene Luen Yang
Sweetland by Michael Crummey
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin
Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie
Tenth of December by George Saunders
We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
Putting on the Ritz by Joe Keenan

Non-fiction

What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions by Randall Munroe
Confessions of a Sociopath: A Life Spent Hiding in Plain Sight by M. E. Thomas
I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban by Malala Yousafzai
Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande
Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better by Clive Thomspon
The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession by David Grann
Size Matters Not: The Extraordinary Life and Career of Warwick Davis by Warwick Davis

A little of both

The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2012 edited by Dave Eggers


We're not going to talk about how many books I acquired in 2015, though. Not at all.

Was I Visited By Some Kind Of Evil Snow Genie?

Ye gods, just because I said the snow was pretty, that didn't mean I wanted all the snow forever. Seriously, it can stop now.

So, That Was Christmas

I hope everyone who celebrates it had a very, very merry Christmas, and that all of you are keeping well through the dark of the winter.

My Christmas was nothing terribly exciting, but there were lovely presents, much turkey was eaten, and much Doctor Who watched, all of which made it entirely my kind of holiday. We even came very close to having a white Christmas: when I got up this morning there was just a little snow on the ground, and the mountain had that pretty dusted-in-powdered-sugar look.

I only wish I didn't have to haul my butt into work so early this morning. It'd have been awfully nice to have had a four-day weekend like a normal person. Ah, well. Guess I gotta pay for all that turkey somehow.

Better Not Pout

I've gotten really bad about updating this blog again, haven't I? Well, let's see what's going on at the moment...

First, Christmas is coming! Although not fast enough for me. I always find this week before Christmas weirdly frustrating. All my presents are bought, all the presents from other people have arrived, everything is ready, and there's nothing to do but wait. And, meanwhile, so much of life is just on hold. I find myself thinking things like, "I want to buy Thing X, but I guess I'd better not, in case someone got it for me for Christmas." And, "I'll have to wait and make that appointment after the holidays." And, "I really need some new jeans and a new pair of shoes, but there's no way I'm braving the mall at this time of year. Better wait. And wait on everything else I need to do in the city, too, since I might as well get it all done in one trip." I'm looking forward to Christmas as much because it means I finally get to unpress the pause button on my life as because of all the nice Christmassy things that go with it. Ah, well. Maybe that's the difference between Christmas as an adult and Christmas as a kid?

Meanwhile, the big news where I live is that they're closing down the Smith's supermarket. This is a huge blow to the town. 66 people out of work -- a significant number in a town this size. And god only knows where most of them are going to go. We've already had enough businesses closing that the place is starting to look frighteningly ghost town-ish. The store isn't actually closing until January, but they're already not replacing their stock. I was in there a couple of weeks ago, and the depleted, denuded shelves made me feel like I'd suddenly stepped into some kind of zombie apocalypse scenario. Just in time for Christmas! Classy, Smith's. Classy. They've got a big banner out front now advertising stuff as much as 75% off. I've been a bit torn between going to to see what I can pick up cheap, and never wanting to set foot in there again because, god, is it depressing, and, also, fuck Smith's, I don't want to give them any more of my money. So far, that second impulse is winning.

December Currentlies

This time out, I'm finally following advice I gave myself ages ago and removing "current worry" from this monthly meme, because, really, the last thing I need is encouragement to dwell even more on the stupid crap I'm inclined to worry about. I am open to suggestions for what to replace it with.

Current clothes: Red sweatpants. Venture Bros. Guild of Calamitous Intent t-shirt. White socks.

Current mood: Kind of restless, in that way that never lets you quite settle down and be productive at anything.

Current music: Nothing at the moment. I'm working on catching up on podcasts again. So many podcasts.

Current annoyance: I may have spoken too soon when I said I was happy with the upgrade to Windows 10. In the week or so since I switched it over, my PC has completely hung up on me twice, which is not something it was inclined to do while running Windows 8.

Current thing: I'm not 100% sure how I felt about everything in the season finale, but in generally, I've been all flappy-hands excited about Doctor Who lately.

Current desktop picture: Speaking of, it's this promo picture for aforementioned season finale. Warning: spoilery. So very spoilery.

Current book: Explorer, book six in C. J. Cherryh's Foreigner series, which I am still making my way through, very slowly.

Current song in head: Nothing at the moment, which is a relief, considering some of the stuff that's gotten stuck in my skull recently.

Current refreshment: Mint tea.

Current DVD in player: Nothing in the player. I have season 10 of Supernatural from Netflix, but I can't seem to work up the enthusiasm to watch it, so I've started streaming season 4 of Bob's Burgers instead.

Current thought: I think my washer just stopped. Guess I better go put my laundry in the dryer. At least then I will have accomplished something useful today.

Like The Cybermen, I Have Been Upgraded.

I just upgraded my desktop PC to Windows 10. I hadn't actually intended to do that just yet, but I found out the hard way that when you click on "Upgrade Later," that doesn't mean, as I had assumed, "download the files and be ready to upgrade later, whenever I feel like telling you to," but rather, "you must now schedule your upgrade for sometime in the next few days, and then you will be irrevocably committed to it, bwahahaha!" Oh, well. Except for the fact that I was sure I'd scheduled it for 2 AM and it instead happened at 8 AM when I was actually trying to use the computer, it seems to have gone remarkably smoothly. And I no longer need those third-party apps I had installed on Windows 8 to bring the Start menu back and enable me to use the "modern GUI" apps in resizable windows.

All of which mostly just means that I'm still waiting nervously to find out which part of it I'm going to hate. But, hey, so far, so good!

I Hope It's A Good Book.

I just took this Do You Have A Book Hoarding Problem? quiz. It told me "SEEK HELP NOW. You are becoming a book."

Is that bad?

I Do Have To Wonder What The Questions Were.

Somebody just sent me a link to this Tweet showing Steven Moffat, Peter Capaldi, and Mark Gatiss losing a Doctor Who trivia contest at an Australian convention. Do you know what this means? (Other than that they are hilariously adorable losers?) It means that I am a better Who fan than the people who actually make the show! Yes! On account of how my team won a Doctor Who trivia contest, and theirs lost! That is clearly the only logical conclusion to draw. (Why, no, I'm not ever going to stop crowing about that accomplishment. You gotta take your victories where you can get them, I say.)

Three Things Make A Post

Because I haven't been updating much lately, and I should post something:

1. I spent this morning resealing the gutters on my house. Well, the ones in the front. The ones in the back of the house still need to be done, but I think I about reached the limit of how much of that job I'm willing to do in one day. Scraping off the old stuff is tedious, and the silicone sealant I bought turns out to be way worse to work with than the caulk I used in the bathroom, especially when you're holding the caulk gun upside-down and at odd angles. As a result, my gutters are now kind of a goopy, silicone-y mess. Sigh. Well, at least it's clear, so maybe it won't be too obvious? Honestly, I'm not sure I care much, as long as it's watertight. Man, I really hope it's watertight. Of course, I won't be able to test it until it dries.

This has been yet another installment of Ways It Sucks to Be an Adult. Hey, when you're a kid, if you have to do a big, annoying chore like that, at least you'll probably get a word of praise and maybe a little extra allowance. As an adult, all you get is the dull, practical outcome of not having leaking gutters, if you're lucky, and the responsibility of being the one to do it over, if you're not.

2. A not-good-news update on Nova-kitty: He's continuing to lose weight. The vet now thinks it is very likely due to heart problems. (I hadn't realized heart disease could cause weight loss, but it turns out it totally can. You learn something new every day.) He can't say for sure, though, because he doesn't have the equipment to do a proper echocardiogram, and I'd have to see a specialist for that. Which... At Nova's age, honestly, the stress of diagnosing and treating the problem might not be worth the small amount of extra time they might be able to buy him. For one thing, seeing a specialist would almost certainly mean a long, long car trip into the city -- probably more than one -- and he freaks out terribly just on the ten-minute ride to the local vet. Not long ago, he got so agitated about it, he peed all over himself in the carrier on the way. It's not a happy thing to do to the poor animal.

For right now, at least, we've switched him from the slightly-higher-calorie-than-his-previous-food cat food to special extra-high-calorie canned cat food, in hopes of curbing the weight loss some. The good news is, he loves the stuff, and can't seem to get enough of it. The bad news is, it's given him diarrhea. I'm really, really hoping that'll go away as he adjusts to the new stuff. Well, hey, at least it meant I didn't have to give him his laxative last night.

3. On a happier (and more science-y) note, I thought I'd link to this blog post celebrating NASA's Swift satellite observing its 1,000th gamma ray burst. This is relevant to my life because the VLBA is one of the "telescopes around the planet, which then (if they can) also observe the burst," as mentioned in the article. Most of the time, we're busy observing something else, but sometimes these things happen at just the right time for us to participate, and I'm always slightly tickled by the fact that I'm essentially being e-mailed by a satellite.

Time For This Again!

Current clothes: Dark gray sweatpants. T-shirt from White Sands National Monument. Not the new one I just got the last time I was there, but the older, more faded, somewhat more battered one, which has now been demoted in status to the kind of shirt I wear on weekends when I'm cleaning the house.

Current mood: Mostly okay, with a slight edge of frazzled annoyance. I don't want to be cleaning the house this weekend, you know.

Current music: The Best of Elvis Costello: The First Ten Years. Except there's something wrong with the CD, and the last two songs didn't rip properly.

Current annoyance: So many things. So many. And it seems like every time I responsible-adult one of them into submission, another, often even more annoying one pops up. Recent examples include some of the stucco suddenly falling off my house (or, more accurately, off the overhang that projects over my front door), and discovering as I went to put today's dinner into the crockpot that the onion I'd bought for the soup was rotten inside.

Current thing: Doing productive crap that needs to get done, when, really, I'd much rather just lie on the sofa and read all day.

Current desktop picture: You know what? I think last month, out of sheer habit and haste, I linked to the same wallpaper I've had for ages, when I'd actually just changed it! It's now this wallpaper featuring certain Doctor Who characters.

Current book: C. J. Cherryh's Defender, book 5 in her Foreigner series, which I am making my way through, slowly but surely.

Current song in head: "Paradise by the Dashboard Light" by Meat Loaf, because somebody requested it on the radio while I was in the car running errands the other day. The DJ didn't seem thrilled about it, but I have to admit, I have a weird fondness for Meat Loaf. His songs are so overwrought and emotionally overblown as to feel almost self-parodic in a way I can't help being amused by, and yet there does seem to be a core of something realistic and sincere to them. And sincere, awkwardly real emotion wrapped up in a ridiculously over-dramatic package seems to me like as good a representation of adolescence as there has ever been.

Current refreshment: I didn't have anything, but reading this, I realized I was thirsty, so I got up and got a diet Pepsi.

Current DVD in player: I just finished season one of The Wire, because that seemed like a giant gap in my quality-television viewing experience that needed to be addressed. And it is, indeed, an excellent show, but it suffers a bit from what I think of as "Game of Thrones Syndrome," which is to say it's got a million characters whose names I kept forgetting or, often, not even catching, and was reduced to making up nicknames for them in my head. (E.g.: Asshole #1 and Asshole #2, Surprisingly Competent Guy, Chubby Cheeks, The Chin, Lt. Where-Do-I-Know-That-Actor-From?, etc.) I did figure out most of them eventually, though. And I sort of have to admire this show's absolute commitment to its lack of a moral center. Every time I'd try to latch on to a character as someone I liked, or thought had integrity, they'd engage in some terrible act of police brutality or corruption, while characters I'd initially dismissed as criminal scum increasingly won my sympathy.

Current worry: I dunno, all the usual crap, really. Most immediately, I'm worried about a tooth that's bothering me. I need to find the time to make a dentist appointment.

Current thought: Well, I rambled a here a lot, and got distracted somewhere in the middle watching Meat Loaf, so this took me longer than I expected it to, but I think now I have to go back and finish up the damned housework. Sigh.

Wibbly-Wobbly Timey-Wimey Talk

Ten years ago today, I stumbled across some service on the internet that'd let you write letters to your future self and would then send them to you years later. So, I sent some, partly because I was bored and partly because it was the closest I could get to time travel. I've gotten, I think, three of them since then, with the most recent one showing up in my inbox today. While I remember doing this, the e-mails always startle me when they come, because somehow I do not understand the passage of time and can never manage to believe it has actually been that long.

I went back and looked at the blog entry I made the day I sent them. It says, "I just sent some e-mails to the me of the future. I bet she doesn't answer them, though. The jerk." Which... Hey! Screw you, past self! I am damned well going to answer this one, right here, right now!

Thus:

Hello, 2015!

Hello, 2005!

This is the Betty of 2005, after a somewhat longer lapse this time. It's getting iffier whether the e-mail address on this thing will still be valid, though it won't surprise me terribly if it is. Heck, I wouldn't put it past you to remember this letter and keep the address just so you'd get it. Did you?

You know, I don't think it has honestly ever even occurred to me to change the Gmail address this was sent to. I think what I was thinking here is that maybe Gmail wouldn't even be around in ten years' time. Ha! Google is our eternal overlord, Past Me, and Gmail ain't going nowhere.

Anyway... how's the future?

A lot like the past, to be honest. Your life certainly hasn't changed very much. You're boring and predictable, Past Self. You're going to have to fully accept that one day. I'll try to let you know when it happens.

Do we have flying cars and robot housekeepers yet? (We've only managed electric-hyrbid cars and robot vacuum cleaners now, in case you don't remember.)

Well, I guess we've got some fully electric cars, and maybe slightly better robot vacuums? Neither of which I own. I do have a pretty bitchin' smartphone, though.

It's a beautiful fall day here in 2005, though I'm stuck at work without even anything much to do.

Whereas I have today off, but I've got a lot of crap to do. And yet, I am taking the time to answer your e-mail, Past Self, even though I have lots of other unanswered e-mails in my inbox. So who you callin' a jerk, jerk?

I am in pretty good health, though I occasionally suffer from bouts of mild hypochondria. Apparently once you hit your 30s, you start worrying about the ol' body falling apart. I hope yours hasn't.

It honestly startled me to realize that particular "Oh, noes, my body may fall apart at any moment!" thing goes back quite that far, although now that I think about it, I guess I do remember feeling that once I passed 30. Well, Past Self, despite some medical adventures, the ol' corporeal form is still quite functional, but the effects of entropy are becoming increasingly noticeable, and that annoying "mild hypochondria" is going to find more things to feed on. I'm trying to let this be a reminder to myself to enjoy that functionality while I've still got it.

And I have a cute 'lil seven-week-old kitten, who, if he's still around, will qualify for senior citizenship by the time you read this. If he is, give him a cuddle for me.

He's ten! That's not really quite feline senior citizen status yet. But, geez, you should see him now, Past Me. He's huuuuuuuuuuuuuge! And not at all grateful for all that work you put into him, but I will cuddle him for you, anyway.

I hope there's some good TV in the future.

Yes. Yes, there is. Oh, Past Self. Your priorities are... well, not going to change any, really.

With any luck, maybe Doctor Who is currently in the middle of another 25-year run.

It does very much look that way! Even if the ratings, from what I've heard, have dropped a bit this year. But, oh, man, the things that little Whovian you has ahead of her! If I told you what some of them were, you'd look at me like I was nuts. But it's going to be a fun ride! Mostly.

See ya in another ten!

I am honestly nervous about that letter. I think I wrote it with some sense of it being completely impossible to predict what my life would be like that far out, and I more than half suspect that nothing much will have actually changed. Although I'm not at all sure why that feels like a bad thing.

Love,
you

Back atcha, Past Self. Take care of yourself for me.

Stuff And Things

I feel like I should really talk about things other than Doctor Who here once in a while. Like an update on what's going on in my own life. It's just that the answer is "not much." Well, let's see what I've got:

Had kind of a bad night last night, due to some... let's say "gastric distress." I woke up about 3 AM, threw up, and immediately felt a lot better, so it was almost certainly something I ate. But, man, it's a bad thing not to feel well when you've been reading about nasty diseases. (I'm most of the way through David Quammen's Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic.) One headache or abdominal twinge, and some completely irrational part of your brain wants to diagnose yourself with Marburg. (Marburg is, of course, a much cooler thing to diagnose yourself with than Ebola, because fewer people have heard of it.)

It looks like the city finally fixed the leaking fire hydrant in my front yard, after at least five phone calls, and it worsening to the point that it was threatening to turn the rest of the street into muddy swampland and not just my yard. Yay.

After years of taking a small amount of hormone for my mildly underactive thyroid, the latest doctor in the local clinic's revolving stable of doctors is insisting I should have an ultrasound done of it. "What do you think that's likely to tell us?" I asked. "Probably nothing," she said. OK, then, doc. At least we'll have another pretty picture of my insides!

I've given up trying to weigh Nova at home. To say that he is uncooperative is putting it mildly. I think I'm going to take him back to the vet in a couple of weeks and let them re-weigh him. He tends to go very still and quiet when he's there, possibly under the belief that veterinarians hunt by seeing movement.

I just checked the weather report to see if we can finally declare the rainy season over, thus removing my excuse for not going out and re-sealing my gutters. (Hey, I don't want to take the chance that it might rain before the caulk dries!) It looks like the answer to that might be "no," but in the course of checking I also discovered that it's supposed to get down below freezing on Thursday. Nooooo! I am not ready for winter! I mean, I don't want to be caulking the gutters out in the cold, do I?

Yeah, that's probably about it for now. Whee, what an exciting life I lead!

The Rest Is...

Happy Halloween! I'm about to head off to a Halloween party soon. Having zero time or energy to devote to coming up with a costume, I decided to go with the lazy Doctor Who fan's solution:




All the points to you if you get the reference!

(But, man, I had not realized quite how difficult it is to take a picture of one's own arm.)

Clearly This Is Just What I Needed For My Stress

(Seriously, what does it say about me that I actually did sort of feel more relaxed after watching that?)

Skinny Kitty Update

Just got Nova back from the vet after having him checked out for his weight loss (as mentioned last time in the currently meme), and... they basically couldn't find anything wrong with him. His thyroid levels were good (which reminds me, I'm overdue to have mine checked). His creatinine levels and white cell counts were outside normal range, but only the eensy-weensiest smidge, so the vet thinks that's probably noise rather than signal, meaning his kidneys are probably fine and he probably doesn't have an infection. They also x-rayed him and didn't see any tumors. Which doesn't necessarily mean there aren't any cleverly hidden ones, but, OK, he probably doesn't have cancer, either. The vet thinks mostly likely it's a gastrointestinal problem, and he's not getting full value out of his food. So they just gave him a vitamin B shot and switched him over to a higher-calorie food. I'm going to keep an eye on his weight -- I actually own a pet scale I originally bought to monitor the fat cat -- and take him back in in a few weeks if he keeps losing weight.

So, for the moment... No news is good news, I guess?

No, I Didn't Forget.

It's much later in the month than usual, thanks to all that vacationy stuff, but, no, I didn't forget the usual state-of-me "currently" meme.

Current clothes: Red sweatpants. Doctor Who t-shirt. White socks.

Current mood: Still kind of tired. Still a bit overwhelmed by the to-do list.

Current music: Nothing at the moment. I'm working on catching up on all the podcasts I didn't listen to while I was traipsing around New Mexico.

Current annoyance: The way taking a break makes you feel so behind on everything once it's over.

Current thing: Books, Doctor Who, the usual. (Man, this is making for a very boring iteration of this meme, isn't it? Sorry about that. Maybe I should have waited until I was more capable of coherent thought.)

Current desktop picture: Still this one.

Current book: I'm almost finished with Firestarter by Stephen King. Apparently I've decided that Stephen King is my default vacation reading now.

Current song in head: Given my current book, what else could it possibly be?

Current refreshment: Nothing, but I'm hungry. I should maybe go and eat one of those zillion snacks my mother brought with her and then left here.

Current DVD in player: Once again: nothing. I'm busy catching up on all the stuff that's accumulated on my DVR in the past couple of weeks. (Note to self: never take vacation at the start of the TV season again.)

Current worry: Nova kitty. He's lost quite a bit of weight over the last several months, so I took him into the vet today to have him checked out. They're going to do some blood tests to check his thyroid and his kidneys, but they wanted him to be fasting overnight to do it, so I'm going to have to take him back in in the morning. He seems mostly OK, otherwise, so here's hoping there's nothing too awful wrong with him, but I am a bit worried.

Current thought: Man, I am hungry. Which is not helped by the fact that I have a pot roast cooking in the crock pot, and it's starting to smell really, really good.

What I Did On My Vacation

Well, the houseguests I mentioned in my last post here, what seems like forever ago, have now departed back to their homes. It was fun showing them around New Mexico, but, man, I now feel kind of exhausted. I blame the lingering effects of getting up at 3 AM, not once but twice, to make it up to the Balloon Fiesta before dawn. It was very cool to finally go, though. Despite having lived in NM for 25 years, this is the first time I've attended. Well, unless you count that one time in college when we drove up, stood outside the fence, and watched the balloons overhead, but didn't actually go into the park because we were too broke even to want to pay the minimal entrance fee. I will say, though, that while I might just possibly be persuaded to get up in the middle of the night and do it again sometime, I am never, ever going on opening day again. The balloons were great. The crowds were nightmarish. Fortunately, Thursday was much better, and well worth it, even if the Thursday night Glowdeo was cancelled due to winds.

We also, among other places, drove down to Carlsbad Caverns and White Sands. White Sands was a little disappointing this time, I fear, as it was very cloudy, and I hadn't realized just how much a lack of sunlight changes the landscape from blinding otherworldly whiteness to, well, big piles of light-colored sand. Carlsbad, on the other hand, astonishes me every time I go there. This time I was thinking, y'know, maybe I've seen it often enough, maybe it's going to start losing some of its appeal with familiarity. But, nope. It's still just as awe-inspiring the fourth or fifth time, or whatever it is for me now. I suspect I could visit it every day and never get tired of it.