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Speaking of body fluids …

I think we have the cat pee problem resolved. I hesitate to say that, because it means I'll soon find a cat pee event.

However, there are other fluids to contend with.

The seasons have shifted and nighttime temperatures are dropping into the 30 degree range. Last night Oz brought in all his houseplants, which have been living in the back yard since he moved them here last May. The cats were all "Woo! Salad bar!" and immediately started sampling all the plants. Jade plants are fun to play with, the tasty shamrocks are out of reach, and the tougher tropicals are excellent gnawing plants. The variegated ground cover-type plant? They just ate it up.

Shortly thereafter, they just barfed it up.

So now that the pee season has passed, it's barfing time. Oh, the glamour! My life is so exciting and I'm running out of paper towels.

Not a hiatus

Really, no. I haven't been writing for a few reasons:

1. Cat pee. The cats developed litter box issues and we've been spending a lot of time trying to figure out Why? Why, kitties, must you pee on the carpet? I was using the kitty-cam to surveille the targeted corner of the rug and catching cat pee action in actual pixels. Want to see? Want to hear more about it? No. Neither do I. What I really want is a day where I don't have to clean up any body wastes that aren't mine.

2. Physical therapy. I've been back at PT for the injuries from the accident. It's taking up a lot of time, and, while it seems to be helping, it's really painful. Who knew that the path to less pain involved so much pain?

3. Less caffeine. I noticed a correlation between my caffeine intake and my excessive worrying. I cut back on the coffee and chocolate. Now I'm worrying less and concentrating better on my work, but the stories, they just aren't there. My poor MS is languishing and I'm not moved to write little anecdotes about cleaning out the drains or the continuing saga of the stupid bridesmaid dress. It's something to think about. Getting my work done is good, but being a non-storytelling zombie? Not so good.

Deep-fried and crispy

I was just watching Good Morning Japan and a really appalling human interest segment.

Whale meat! Back in school lunches after twenty years!

Yay! Kids like deep-fried, crispy whale nuggets! They have to marinate it in lots of soy sauce and ginger to get the yucky smell out, and then into the industrial fryer it goes. Kids just love it.

Whale meat! Back in the supermarkets. You can get 100 grams of whale sashimi for just ¥ 500. Whale bacon is the most popular whale product. The consumers say, "I love it. It's so nostalgic."

Whale meat! Let's look at a seminar about new whale preparations. You can make nasty-looking whale dip and eat it with saltines.

I like whales and all, but not to eat. I think of them as sort of cousins. The kind of relative that you don't get to see much, but you don't want to chow down on either. (I just read an article about cannibals in Borneo.)

Mathematical shopping

We're walking along and across the street, we see the big, scrolling LED sign by the Walgreen's. It says, "We have Zeno."

I say, "Yeah, but do they have the paradox? Otherwise, what's the point?"

Oz says, "Well, we could go find out, except we can never get there."

Step away from the machine

I think I'm about done with my words for the day. Too bad they're in caption form. I finally posted all the pictures from our vacation that I'm going to post. My goodness, I had a lot of pictures of ponies doing what ponies do: eating grass and wandering out of focus. Here's a set of pictures from Chincoteague.

On Sunday we drove down to Williamsburg to walk around. I took pictures there too, of course, and here's a few of those too. As we walked through the colonial theme park area, we kept hearing this drumming sound. We sort of thought some historical reenactment was about to happen, then we spied the source. A little boy! And then another little boy! Masters of manipulation who convinced their parents to buy them little snare drums.

Also, Sparky is a helpful cat.

Okay, now I'm stepping away from the machine.

My turn

Now that my friend, the Princess, has taken her plunge, it's the bridesmaids' turn. The Princess has been a bridesmaid and seen enough weddings to know about the horror that is a bridesmaid's dress and she's setting things up so that we will have no complaints. Or at least very few. Or at least, any complaints we have will be our own fault, so there.

We get to pick our own dresses.

We don't have complete freedom of choice. She went dress shopping with a couple bridesmaids and they narrowed down the selection to one designer and one fabric and color. We can have any dress we want, as long as it's from this guy, red satin and floor length.

Now I have to find a dress shop in town which carries this designer and try on some dresses. I told Oz he might have to come along and take pictures of me in the dresses so I can see what I look like. That also gives me the option of consulting with the Princess (unless her schedule and mine will accommodate a day of shopping in the next two weeks—and we live a two-hour drive apart). He groaned and made horrified sounds, but, hey, it's not like he has to try on the dresses.

Or buy special underwear.

Special dresses call for special foundation garments. Today I about threw my back out trying to get into a longline bra. Six hours later, muscles are still in spasm, even after some massage, a hot shower, and whiskey. Yes, this garment is definitely not of the wireless variety: it's got wires, padding, pushup pads, lines of silicone rubber to help it stick to my skin and stay up … Pretty much everything, like four bras in one. It's very "Hello, I'm C___ and these are my boobs." Oz suggested I get it bronzed so I could be a superhero.

I could be Bridesmaidion, flying around the world to rescue bridesmaids from bad dresses.

A brief note

To the person who checks out mysteries (and other fiction) from the Richmond Public Library and marks grammatical errors:

Please stop.

Thank you.

Resting

[Note: My hosting service just moved to another server. The site may look and act a little odd for a couple days while the DNS updates.]

The joints in my hands are aching too much for me to write lots of words. I had to use my voice recognition software for my translation work today. Fortunately for me, the article was accommodating and didn't include any of the usual gremlins which foil the VR software, like equations or Greek letters. Even so, some of the VR errors were especially amusing. "Many difficulties" became "many difficult Uzbeks." Yes! Darn those Uzbeks. So difficult and they will totally mess up your network protocol.

Why not enjoy a picture from the kitty-cam?

They are just finishing up their dinner, chunks of meats in gravy. Monte walks off, licking his chops, while Sparky (aka Fat Bastard) sits by a bag of recycling and mentally prepares himself to go back for more.

Ghost road

I was driving over to Southside today and found myself driving on a ghost road. They're resurfacing Chippenham Parkway right now. It's a four lane divided highway now, but I can remember when this stretch, between the expressway and Hugenot, was a two lane road. The northbound side, which I was driving on, was the original road. The top layer of asphalt has been scraped off, preparatory to a new layer being spread on, and the surface of the old road is temporarily visible. You can still see the old lines, the double yellow line running down the center of the road. I am amazed by the staying power of paint.

Smile, you're on …

There's nothing like a little playing with cables and following directions to make one feel all engineery. Today I stopped glaring at the web cam and set it up. It was quite easy, though it took a lot longer than it should have for me figure out I had to upgrade the firmware in my elderly router. It seems they shipped these routers without functional UPnP (the bit that deals with how my internet connection has dynamic IP addressing) and the camera needs an IP address to work with the free web addressing provided by the manufacturer.

Once I got it going, it was … fun. I pointed it at the cats' dish and watched them eat. When I used the web based controls to pan the camera, the cats got very interested in the camera, which makes a little mechanical noise, and gave me comical close-ups of noses and whiskers. Kitty-cam is so cute! I emailed the camera's web address and password to Oz.

Then I had to get it working as a security device, that having been the point of this exercise. The camera has a motion detector and though it can't save images, and the free web address doesn't include any storage space, the camera can email or FTP the images to some other place. Now this is an excellent application for one of my Gmail addresses, because that 2.77 GB of glorious Google storage can hold over a quarter million of these little web cam images. When the motion sensor gets tripped, the camera starts emailing images until there's no more motion. The file name of each image is a date and time stamp. Getting the email capability set up was kind of fiddly, but it's working now. That Gmail account now has a few hundred shots of our legs and feet, and the cats walking around in the kitchen.

I'm figuring that I'll put the camera in a strategic and unobtrusive place and turn it on whenever we're out. If the burglar comes we'll catch him in pixels.

Later that afternoon the phone rang. When I picked up, Oz said, "Okay, now you walk into the kitchen."

I'm so accommodating.

"Okay, now I can see your feet."

I sat on the floor and bent my head down to peer directly into the lens.

"There you are! Oh! I can make the lens move. The kitchen floor is so shiny."

I went back into the office and, while the cats lingered in the kitchen, Oz fiddled with the pan and tilt until he got Monte Alban's attention to the tune of several close-ups of a big green eye.

"Hee! Hee!"

God, but we're easily amused around here.

Bright spots

I spent a good part of the day reading a book which was not very good, but which I wanted to finish. I guess I shouldn't call that a "good" part of the day, it's more like a "rather large portion" of the day, the only purpose of which was to avoid doing anything productive. Oh, and I accompanied Oz on his quest for a replacement head lamp.

Today deserved better than that.

I did run out this morning to take a few pictures while the light was good. I think I was successful. This beauty is going to be demolished to make way for a modern structure (via). Okay, beauty is in the eye of the beholder and the brick art deco structures are kind of odd looking, but in keeping with the city, all skylines aside. The parking lot to the left of the Liberty Press building was the original site of the Virginia General Assembly where the right to religious freedom was first established in this country. So the First Freedom people are knocking down the sort of historic building next door (Well, it's old. I'm sure something must have happened there.) to build their First Freedom Center. I guess they couldn't acquire the parking lot, which is probably a gold mine.