And Carmen thinks she hasn't updated in forever...

I plead temporary (read: permanent) addiction to computer games as my excuse. Besides, anything terribly interesting that happens gets posted by Lee, since, well, living together. Such as the recent addition to our household of the conehead kind.

Well, It's not so much an addition to the household so much as an extension of the klutziest cat I've ever had. (Well, lived with, since he's Lee's cat...) Roscoe has gotten much more sedate with the addition of the satellite around his neck. Poor dude keeps scratching at it, which means he's not allowed to run around with it off for fear of tearing open his stitches. He's currently sleeping under my covers and making sleepy noises every time I go over and poke my hand under to make sure he hasn't suffocated or something.

Speaking of scratching and stitches, giving Roscoe his ear medication in the morning was something of a hassle yesterday. Five drops seems simple enough, until you take into account that the radar dish doesn't hinder head movements too much, which means there's nothing to grab onto to hold his head still. Combine his thrashing with awkward positions, and I accidentally hit his stitches and he decided he had enough of that and thrashed a panic attack that left my pants torn. Huzzah. Which meant I had to break out the emergency pants (read: tragic pale blue pants accidentally washed with bright red, never-been-washed shirt leaving said pants pink in certain (read: all) lights, complete with bloodstain looking spots from previous run-ins with strange liquids that had formerly just looked like dirt stains (which they were). They also have funny yellow speckles on one thigh. No idea where those came from.), since that evening was supposed to be laundry day for pants (as was all out of clean work pants). (The laundry plan didn't work out anyway, as Tuesday was the rescheduled date for dinner with aunt and grandfather, since previous date was washed out after got sick of waiting in rush hour traffic for life flight to clear out. Three hundred feet in an hour does not a happy driver make, so E. and I called off and went to IHOP instead. Very cold there.)

E. has gotten a Nintendo DS, along with a spiffy little game by the name of Puzzle Quest. It's basically the RPG version of Bejeweled, and am seriously contemplating buying a DS solely to play this game. (Along with Brain Age, which looks like fun, because I'm fond of smart-making games.)

Have gotten onto a strange reading fix of late- I'm currently bouncing between Jane Austen (because I am somehow a sucker for romances written in the nineteenth century, when everyone was genteel and never really touched, much less had sex) and Anne McCaffrey's older sci-fi novels. (Back when she was interesting and not writing a bajillion sequels. (And zomg, my internet spellchecker is trying to tell me that's written bazillion. Is bazillion seriously a number, or is it just a word used so freaking often it's made it into the slang dictionary?))
Am currently sulking about it all, since these books can only be found on the internet and in used book stores, and there's only two within decent driving distance (since the one on Beal closed, the liars- they're in the phone book, but I drive past there everyday and there's some crafty store there now) and I can only find one store and while they did have some McCaffrey, I've fixated on the Brainship books and the only one I've found is The City Who Fought. I used to own The Ship Who Sang, but I haven't seen it since E. was in middle school. (She probably loaned it to someone, the bitch.))

Furthering the off-track loaning comment, I've somehow become a lending library. I'm not certain whether to be proud (Whee, I'm a library! Bestest thing ever!) or annoyed (Mine! Rar!). So if anybody's in want of something, drop me a line and an updated mailing address. (I'm sure I have everybody's, but I also never delete old emails with addresses, which means I've got four different addresses for Stephen alone, one of which is in Florida and we all know when last he lived here.)

Along those lines, I'm transitioning over to a new email address (csc.elfhawk (at) gmail.com) since my yahoo address is again being bombarded by spam. (I kind of miss the 'enhance your dick' spams, since they were funny. Now I'm winning lotteries, vacation trips, and shopping sprees, if only I fill out this simple form...) So update thine address books. I will sooner or later get around to sending an email as well.

I need to get my scanner hooked back up. It's been sitting in the living room for over a month, and I've been having way too much fun with pens to not inflict it upon you. (Lee is awestruck by my trees. More struck than awe, to be true, but hey, any attention is good, right?)

Katharine --
[noun]:

A hermit living in the big city

'How will you be defined in the dictionary?' at QuizGalaxy.com

Bwee! So true.

Roscoe, btw, has a cold. Dry nose with bouts of runny nose, constant sneezing, watery eyes, sleeping for hours in comfy spots instead of sprawling on the floor like the hussy he really is. We debated using catnip as Nyquil for him, but decided his sense of smell is shot all to pieces and where's the fun in that? (He has an appointment with the vet for tomorrow, so quit making outraged 'I'm calling the ASPCA' noises. Geez.)

I think Roscoe and Ivory have switched bodies. Ivory is making strange squeaking noises to me as I sit here (her food and water bowl full, so that's not the problem) and dashing between my feet to attack a string Roscoe left under my desk. Roscoe, on the other hand, is silent and sitting on my bed, peaking out over a fold in my blanket to stare forlornly at me. Either he's pining for Liz (because he has been exiled from her room barring her presence as he's taken to peeing on her bed every chance he gets (and I read up on that, and I think Liz needs to stop feeding that stray to make him go away, because Roscoe doesn't like him, and the peeing could be his way of telling the other cat (even though the other cat never comes inside) that Liz is his and back off, buster)) or he's possibly ill. Or maybe he just sleeps when it rains.

Nodwick has a cute cat pictures page. How cool is that?

On the plus side, I have beaten my new graphics card into submission (ie, reread the install manual and messed with wires to conect it to the power supply (dude, wtf? There's even a tiny little fan on top of its chip.)) and have managed to get NWN2 running. Teh questing, it is so shiny. (My computer refuses to go into standby mode, so I have a feeling the card is kinda selfish concerning power. Just means I have to remember to start turning my computer off when I get away from it for more than an hour.)

Roscoe got stuck in my box of Cheerios. Or else he just really didn't want to leave the box when I tried pulling his head, paws, and shoulders out of it. I'm just glad the box was mostly empty, as I really didn't feel like figuring out if he managed to reach the Cheerios and got cat cooties all over. So instead, I just dumped what remained in the box into their food dish and threw empty box away. Came back ten minutes later for toast and found him chowing down on cheerios, making sure not to eat the cat food. Was rather amused.

Has been month of hell at work. We could do with another two mechanics and another front person if things keep going like this. We've had eleven Hustlers delivered in the span of about four working days. Those suckers take two hours to get off the truck, uncrate, assemble, and test drive, all told. (Hustlers, btw, are like, the Mustangs of riding lawn mowers. They are so cool. Even if they are named after a magazine you buy in a brown paper bag. Well, no, they're not, they're named after the verb, because they're fast for a mower, but people still look at you funny when you say you sold three Hustlers today and please stop bothering you because the paperwork gave you a migraine.)

We've only had ten working days and have already made twice our monthly minimum in sales. Can I take the rest of the month off?

Also, apparently it is Sears season for lawn mowers. We're getting three people a day (up from our three people a week last month) asking us to look at their piece of garbage because they hit a stump/have let it sit since September and fouled the carburetor because they're fucking morons who can't drain their gas/need a tune up and maybe those cable things too/need parts. Take it back to Sears, you cheap bastards. I don't care if you already went and they told you it'll take a week to ten days to deliver your fucking part and you need the part *now*. Did you not see the sign on the door that says No Craftsman Allowed Because We Don't Get Their Parts Because We Sell Quality Items Not Stuff Made in Taiwan? (Okay, it just says we don't service Craftsman, maybe I should make a big No Smoking sign and put a little Sears logo there instead of the cigarette? Would that make them less likely to come in and whine? Probably not.) We sell stuff like Snapper, who has a CEO with the balls to say 'thanks, but no thanks' when Wal-Mart made an offer to sell their stuff. (But only if they halved their prices, kthnxbai.)

I had fun organizing the paperwork in the office though.

For the past hour or so, I've been sitting here going "what's that smell?" I finally remember it's sandalwood, and oh my god, isn't there a not-quite-closed orange sandalwood aromatherapy massage sandy things in oil sitting on my dresser? So up I hop, to discover Roscoe's crash-landing sometime last night succeeded in knocking it over, leaving it to seep out during the night onto the papers the jar fell sideways onto. As I put my junk mail and old papers up there, there has been no huge loss in the paperwork department, besides that one sketch I did that I didn't like anyway. My dresser is also the 'haven't read yet' bookholder, as the bookshelf is full. (I need another bookshelf. Actually, I need a proper computer desk and not my mother's borrowed sewing table and turn its extra shelf space into book spots.) Also, recently read books go there when I'm too lazy to put them away. And now the back third of my much read and loved The Redemption of Althalus has been turned into scented soggy paper. *cries*

On the plus side, my room smells pretty. But I liked my book better.

I've got to groom my cat five million times a day to keep her from shedding everywhere. Though a good half of that groomed fur ends up on my shirt where she's sitting. So I'm sitting here, reading the LJ friends updates, grooming my cat, occasionally pulling the fur off the brush and setting it to the side so I can get enough of it to wad it up and throw it away.

Roscoe finds this grooming thing fascinating (mostly because he thinks the brush is a chew toy and just can't figure out what Ivory's thinking, letting it assault her like that without ever fighting back). So he's hopped up onto my stack of plastic boxes to watch, six inches away, paw sometimes reaching out to almost touch the brush until I twitch the wrong way and his paw vanishes. And then he notices the pile of fur. And then poof, pile of fur is gone and so is Roscoe and I'm trying to convince my cat to get off me so I can convince Liz's cat that eating Ivory's fur isn't a good idea, no matter whether it's attached to her or not. (He was licking her shoulder blades when I fed them earlier, but I think that's because he was trying to annoy her away from the food bowl because I had to give them the kinda moist stuff this morning because I forgot to buy Meow Mix last night, but got some on the way home today, and thus they were both trying to eat out of the bowl for a few seconds after I put the stuff in.) Because I'm going to be the one stuck cleaning his hairballs up.

Anyways. Wads of Ivory's fur have now been added to Roscoe's 'this is fun to chew on' list, in the mis-matched company of Liz's pens, shoe strings, and that funny slot where paper comes out of my printer. (Because, zomg, the thing makes noises! And his nose can almost fit! Zomg! (Which is probably a good translation of what he's thinking when he's gnawing on it, if overly literate.))

I know I have no sense of fashion, but that doesn't mean Roscoe's allowed to eat the buttons off my favorite plaid shirt. Or nest on my jeans. And let's not get started on Ivory and shoes.

Cat Haiku. Very cute. Full of truths about cats and why they act the way they do.