Still waiting to hear anything about my call to jury duty. You may remember I noticed I hadn’t heard from them by the time I was supposed to, so I called and was informed they were still working on the batch containing my juror number. I would hear from them likely in a few days, they said. It’s been more than a few days.

I’m not calling again. I have done my part. I answered all their weird questions, and then, being even more responsible than most people, called them with my juror number when I didn’t hear anything about being on hold, or getting a court assignment or being relieved from duty. The ball is in their court, so to speak. They have all my contact information, including my phone number, so I’m just going to forget about it until I hear from them.

Lin says I probably won’t get called up at all. I didn’t know it, but he got a jury duty letter a few years ago and did the online impaneling. He made an excellent point I hadn’t thought about. Before they even get around to assigning the people who did it online, they will be filling the ranks with those folks who either were dumb enough to show up in person or didn’t have internet connections. Lin got a letter about a month later telling him he was relieved of duty.

I wouldn’t have minded doing jury duty, but … you know … I’d really rather not. It ranks pretty high in the social anxiety list of things I would prefer to avoid. Really.

Nothing much else to report around here. I spent most of the day catching up on sleep and the rest of the day being useless. We finished off the last of the birthday feast for dinner tonight. My mom got the OS X Tiger Missing Manual I suggested she buy. Lin’s birthday present hasn’t arrived yet, but the flea goo has left Australia and should be here next week. I went WAY over on my cell phone minutes last month (oops). See, nothing terribly interesting going on at all.

Oh wait! I just remembered that Lin told me his family is having a reunion in Southern Illinois sometime in September! It looks like we will be going, or at least we really want to. Here’s hoping the budget, job, and life in general works in our favor. It’d be great to see his family again and to get out of the state for something resembling a vacation. That would be so nice.

I guess I will look over the shopping list one more time to make sure it’s complete, and then off to bed for me. Or to the couch, depending on whether or not I can get to sleep. I’m still tired, so I am hoping when I lay down, sleep comes quickly. I want to find something fun to do this weekend with Lin … sort of a late birthday celebration … and I still need to go get him a gift (and the cats’ fancy food). And the lawn, thanks to all the rain, needs to be mowed and trimmed. Looks like it’s going to be a non-lazy weekend for us!

I’m sure the vast majority of people out there who read, watch or listen to any news at all have heard about the guy with drug-resistant TB who traveled the world before panicking about his health, because that story has been just about everywhere today. My first thought when I heard it on the news earlier was “Who the hell doesn’t immediately start caring more about their health and a little less about their wedding and honeymoon when informed they have any kind of TB?” Then I read this story, and the first sentence raised a red flag so large it blinded me.

The honeymooner quarantined with a dangerous strain of tuberculosis was identified Thursday as a 31-year-old personal injury lawyer whose new father-in-law is a CDC microbiologist specializing in the spread of TB.

There are some coincidences that just can’t be coincidental. What are the odds that this guy’s new father-in-law just happens to be a researcher for the CDC? And then what are the odds his specialization is in the spread of TB? It just leaves one of those “there’s more to this story we will never know” tastes in my mouth. Just a bit too coincidental.

Here … gaze upon the birthday feast from last night and think good food thoughts.

Small plate: Garden salad.
Small bowl: Shrimp Scampi with Artichoke Hearts
Large plate: Twice-baked Potatoes with Sour Cream and Mozzarella and a large slice of broiled cow.

Yes, we ate at the table. This meant the confinement of the furry brats to the bedroom. They do, after all, own the kitchen table and there’s no keeping them off of it. Also ignore my Dallas Cowboy’s glass. I realize it isn’t the height of sophistication, but it’s my favorite glass, dammit.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is alerting livestock and fish/shrimp feed manufacturers about a voluntary recall of products used in feed production because several have been found to contain melamine and related compounds.

The feed ingredients were made by Tembec BTLSR Inc. of Toledo, Ohio and Uniscope, Inc. of Johnstown, Colo.

Tembec, a contract manufacturer for Uniscope, makes AquaBond and Aqua-Tec II, which it distributes for Uniscope. Uniscope makes Xtra-Bond using ingredients supplied by Tembec. All of the products are binding agents that are used to make pelleted feed for cattle, sheep, and goats, or fish and shrimp.

The companies have confirmed that Tembec added melamine as part of the formulation of the products to improve the binding properties of pelleted feed. Melamine is not approved as an additive for animal or fish/shrimp feed.

What? You thought the melamine in animal feed situation was over? Silly you! This time it was American companies using melamine and “a urea formaldehyde resin-type ingredient” as binding agents and not some place in China. This is why I have pretty much stopped trusting any company anywhere to do something I can do myself or to buy products to create the things I eat that don’t contain things they shouldn’t. It’s going to take a lot of hard work and some time and money to get to the point where I am 100% responsible for the production of all food prepared and eaten in my home, and I may never fully achieve that, but it’s a goal I am shooting for. In the meantime, I plan to stay informed and be aware and careful.

For example, Lin and I eat a lot of talapia (fish). It was supposed to be farm-raised and mercury-free, the safest and best fish to eat. I’m not especially fond of it, but it’s inexpensive and was a presumably safe choice. We never questioned where it was being farm-raised. Silly us! Yesterday at HEB, I noticed country of origin stickers on the price placards in the fresh fish department. Talapia … product of China. I spoke with the head fish-monger. The talapia at HEB has always been from China. To be honest, I almost threw up right there in the store.

There have been times when I would make talapia in the same manner I had made it before, but it tasted “different” somehow. Not rotting fish bad, but off somehow. We always chalked it up to having been in my freezer for a week, or having been an older or especially “gamey” tasting fish. Or, in retrospect, maybe it was a sick fish stuffed full of antibiotics, or a fish raised in polluted waters. No way of telling is there, seeing as so few of our imports are checked and so much of our seafood comes from elsewhere. So I passed on the talapia and will continue to do so.

Additionally, those shrimp I bought today? They were tasty, but they weren’t Black Tiger Shrimp as adverstised. I knew that when I bought them, but I really wanted some jumbo shrimp to cut down on prep time for dinner. Actually, one of them was a Black Tiger Shrimp … one of the 16 I bought. The others were regular white shrimp from who knows where. I am in a distinct position to know the difference. I started my life in a small Texas Gulf Coast shrimping village and have spent a good part of my life living on the coast. I have eaten a lot of Texas Gulf Coast shrimp … mostly bait shrimp either left over from a fishing trip or bought due to being cheaper than the ones in the store. Just so happens, bait shrimp on the Texas coast are Black Tiger Shrimp. Same shrimp as in the stores with a much higher price tag attached. Oh sure, bait shrimp are probably not at all approved or inspected for human consumption, but they are the same shrimp from the same source … only fresher, especially if you buy them when they are still alive and kicking. So even reading the “labels” on things isn’t a guarantee you are getting what you pay for, unless you know how to identify exactly what it is you want to buy. I would imagine your average consumer doesn’t know all that much about shrimp identification.

I’d complain to the store about the shrimp issue, but why bother really? Instead, I just won’t buy any seafood at all at HEB. When the urge to have seafood becomes so strong I simply must have some, I will drive my butt down to the local seafood market and grill them extensively about the origin and safety of all products before purchasing. If they can’t or won’t answer my questions, or if they are put off by me even asking questions, then I guess we live without seafood or eat it only on the rarest of days when our seafood addiction can’t be ignored. Though I have to tell you, right now, I simply don’t want to eat any seafood at all anymore.

I know not everyone can start eating things grown and produced locally and eating what’s in season at the moment. I don’t even know if we can successfully pull that off. I hope we can, and I hope that at least people become more aware of what they are putting into their bodies and can and do make as many choices as they can to eat as fresh, healthy and local as possible. Maybe if I can manage to pull this off I can tell others how to do it too as simply and inexpensively as possible. Here’s hoping.

I’ve been babbling all night. I couldn’t sleep even though I am super tired. Insomnia sucks. I’ll probably be passing out from fatigue very shortly, so you’ll get some piece and quiet from my ranting for a while. Grocery shopping today? Not at all likely. Besides, we have a ton of leftovers from last night’s birthday dinner (I made American-size portions and we have European-sized stomachs), and Lin brought home pizza from his office birthday party. We have food and beverages, so we can make it another day.

Am I correct that when viewing posts while logged into Livejournal the time stamps show when the post was posted in relation to your local time zone? For example, if I make a post at 1 am my time, someone logged in one time zone over would see it posted an hour earlier or later depending on their relation to standard world time? It seems to me that must be true, otherwise the Friend’s Pages would be all out of actual chronological order. You’d miss the posts of a friend living two time zones over if you read your Friend’s Page in your own two hour earlier time zone.

The reason I ask is as I was closing the browser window containing Livejournal’s response, I noticed it’s time stamp. It’s a little strange to me that the time stamp says it was posted 45 minutes after midnight, but it isn’t in chronological order on my Friend’s Page … stuck there between posts at 2:49 am and 4:08 am. And I can assure you that between midnight and 1 am, I was still refreshing both the Metafilter conversation and the front page of Livejournal with amazing regularity. That response wasn’t posted at 12:47 am my time or on anyone’s time in the USA. Just not possible. Makes it seem like it was back-dated (or back-timed actually) to make it appear, in the historical down-the-road sense and to people who hadn’t even noticed the brouhaha, that they responded much more quickly than they actually did. Though after midnight, a full day or so after the mess started, is still just a little too late in my book.

Let’s see … C-Net story breaks at 3:47 PDT and pretty early in the day. Then Anil Dash speaks out at Metafilter at 12:59 am and 1:00 am my time saying they would be responding “soon”. But somehow, the response was posted before Anil Dash ever commented at Metafilter, and just didn’t happen to appear on the LJ front page or my Friend’s Page until sometime around 3 am (my time - central)? You see the inconsistency, don’t you? I could probably flesh out the time line a little more, if I felt like bothering. I simply wanted to point it out, because that time stamp in the wrong chronological order on my Friend’s Page stands out like a sore thumb.

Just something I noticed. I notice inconsistencies in plot lines. I am a born continuity editor.

Livejournal finally responds with “Well we really screwed this one up”. No … really?!

It contains, as I predicted, profuse apologies for yet again handling things poorly, attempts to make some amends, and also contains some telling information about the way things will be around LJ in the future.

Another issue we needed to deal with was journals that used a thin veneer of fictional or academic interest in events and storylines that include child rape, pedophilia, and similar themes in order to actually promote these activities. While there are stories, essays, and discussions that include discussion of these issues in an effort to understand and prevent them, others use a pretext to promote these activities. It’s often very hard to tell the difference. As such, we have suspended reported journals that do not clearly and substantially object to these activities while at the same time portraying them.

This reads to me as though they will be more than willing to restore the accounts of support groups, survivors groups, and any journals having “perfectly valid discussions about literature, law or culture.” This would, I would think, leave the creative types, the writers of fanfic, slash and other such things, out in the cold, or at least it certainly leaves the door wide open for easy removal. The last time I checked, writing about Harry Potter having sex with someone wasn’t illegal. Heck, it isn’t even possible, seeing as Harry Potter doesn’t actually exist. But by the definition of what are acceptable ways to discuss topics such as pedophilia, incest, rape, and other illegal matters that is provided in Livejournal’s response, these sites are guilty of promoting actual illegal behavior just by existing. At least that’s the way I read it.

I am not into any of these subjects, either in the real form or the fictional one, but … writing about illegal things isn’t, in itself, illegal unless you are deliberately inciting people to go out and act on it. If it was, we wouldn’t have the vast entertainment industry we have today. How many murders, rapes, and other violent criminal acts have you witnessed in books, movies or on the TV in your lifetime? I wish I had kept count. I am certain the number is astronomical.

And then this:

We recently received a complaint from outside the community about a number of journals. When we receive such complaints it is our obligation to look into them but it is our standards not theirs that we use to make decisions about the complaints. The source of this complaint was not the source of the problem we created.

Soooo … they got the complaint from this really freaky group who threatened to start contacting advertisers and apparently did so earlier in May, but the decision to do this massive purge of accounts to weed out what I would imagine to be the very few possessed by humans actual meaning harm to someone in the real world was all their idea. I’ll admit the whiney complaints of a group of Dominionists (link to informative article) likely didn’t inspire them to turn off their collective brains and pull yet one more fiasco of a business decision out of their asses. The gruff response of outraged advertisers, on the other hand, would be the most likely source of action.

Next up from Livejournal? Probably a little more apologizing, groveling and begging of forgiveness … and then “Look, a shiny new thing!” Mark my words, by the end of June, there will be at least the mention of the next Can’t Live Without Livejournal Feature.

Orb: My mission is to save the world.

Lin: Then I guess I’m saving the cheerleader.

Lin and I do our best talking in the truck on our way somewhere. The longer the drive, the better the talking. That quote is the tail-end of a conversation we were having Monday about Life Purposes. Not the metaphysical, religious, god-given destiny sort of purpose or mission, but rather that one thing you most want to do with your life … the thing that would allow you to look back from your deathbed and feel a sense of completion and accomplishment. That one thing to be your legacy, that thing you would always be known for as long as people are interested in knowing about you. Though I suppose the argument could be made this idea, this one thing you want most to accomplish, could be planted there by god or some other universal consciousness is a completely valid one. I wouldn’t disagree. It very well could be a god-given destiny. Though you’d think if god was handing out the life missions, there would be a whole lot more success and grand achievements.

Am I making any sense? No? Then let me continue. I’m sure I can become even more incomprehensible.

Many people have things they see as their grand dream or life purpose. Many people don’t, and they wake up each day, go to work, and come home to their family with no thought of it … and they are probably the happiest of the lot of us. The rest of is want to be actors and singers and computer programmers and artists and doctors and activists and so on. We go out and we try to succeed and make this become reality. Many of us fail. Doesn’t everyone know at least one person who won’t let go of the fact they really wanted to be or do something and they failed? The problem is these people usually don’t replace the failed mission with a new one. Some of them go on to join the ranks of the blissfully uncaring. Some of them stop time at that point and cry about it until they die. Some eventually wake up and go out to find a new reason to be alive.

I took the “cry about it until they die” route first … that very first time the thing I most wanted to be and do was, quite bluntly, taken from me in a storm of betrayal and jealousy. Had I been older, I might have bounced back, pressed on anyway, and achieved some measure of success. But I was young, and when you are young, your depth of wisdom and resources are slim, and so you wallow. Eventually, I gave myself a new mission in life. There have been many of them really. Some I have failed at because I actually couldn’t do it physically, mentally or spiritually. Just wasn’t in me. Some I have failed at because I just didn’t try hard enough, but I tend to lump those times into the classification of having changed my mind … realizing it just wasn’t the path I wanted to be on. It’s OK to make mistakes. The options have to be explored, or you may never find that one thing you want to be or do, even if you are frantically searching for it.

I don’t know when it happened, but somewhere along the line, I decided I wanted to save the world. Yes, the whole world and everyone on it. Not in the “go to heaven” free card sort of saving, but rather the “everyone living in peace and harmony with enough of everything so no one is miserable” sort of way. I have somehow managed to avoid developing a Messiah Complex, but that’s likely because I know I will fail to achieve this lofty goal. Doesn’t stop me from wanting to save the world, and it wouldn’t stop me from trying, if I could see a way for one petite female in the middle of Texas to actually accomplish it. Failure, though, is a given, I think.

I can’t think of anything else to say. Seems an odd place to leave off on what I think is an odd post. There really was something I wanted to say, and I don’t think I have said it. Whatever it was, it’s gone now.

From the horse’s mouth to your ears … or from Metafilter actually, where there is a nice discussion going on … behind the cut is commentary from Anil Dash of Six Apart fame. It’s rich, and falls into the formula I determined was standard operating procedure for SA. I thought I should pass it along, seeing as there has been no official word at LJ about any of this yet. I’m sure they are frantically typing right now.

Also, I went ahead and signed up at Greatest Journal, mostly to make sure if I need it to keep up with people, I had my username. You can find Orbie right here.

I’m hoping I’ll be able to get my WP to LJ cross-posting plugin to work over there, but it’s not a priority at the moment.
Continue Reading »

Wow. You have got to love internet drama! I should write this stuff down. It would be a best seller.

I would very much like to link to a bunch of things and have a good rant about the whole Six Apart situation, because I have tons of tabs open with things to rant about, but my body and brain are now in post-feast mode. I simply haven’t the brain-power to deal with it right now. But oh, is it interesting to read.

As far as I know it:

Six Apart got reports from this totally weird and slightly disturbing group that fights pedophilia on the internet. I have the feeling some pressure was applied in the form of threatened advertising dollars. Six Apart went into Standard Operating Mode, freaked out, and cast the broadest net and painted with the widest brush possible some 500 or so Livejournals as promoting illegal activities and suspended them without warning … which, incidently, LJ says on its own web site isn’t the way that system is supposed to work. Meanwhile, the LJ natives are really getting restless. I’m pissed off too, and I’d be letting you know it, if I wasn’t stuffed to the gills on rich foods.

Now they are attempting, with undoubtedly the assistance of a small gaggle of lawyers, what to do next and how to deal with a very large and very angry community, many of them paying and long-time customers. The longer they wait, the worse it gets. Blah. Blah. Seen it before. Eventually, they will make a statement, send out an apology, beg forgiveness, and bring out some cool new LJ features to distract everyone … and then go on doing whatever they want to do. I mean, everyone is reading LJ News right now, let’s not waste the eyeballs! Give ‘em a new toy! And a few angry people will leave, there will be quiet rumblings for a while, and then no one will remember. They’ll be too busy playing with the new toy.

Don’t make me say “I told you so” again. I have seen this particular company behave in just that way more than a handful of times and not only at Livejournal. Just trust me.

Anyway … I don’t know how long I have been sitting here trying to put together these words in some form resembling coherence. Maybe Six Apart has talked to someone other then the press or a few select LJ users. I doubt it. I have to go poke my man and see if he needs anything, and then it’s time to take the trash out, provided I can lift my butt out of this chair, of course.

In between cooking tasks while I wait for the oven to heat up, so here’s a news story that explains the latest Six Apart/Livejournal stupidity.

The only thing you really need to know?

“Our decision here was not based on pure legal issues. It was based on what community we want to build and what we think is appropriate within that community and what’s not.”
–Barak Berkowitz, chairman and CEO, Six Apart

I guess they are shooting for a perfect little homophobic, racist and “moral” community, which isn’t the one they bought into. Like I said before, Six Apart is only good at one thing … the destruction of communities and the loyalty of their users.

And this is also an excellent quote worthy of passing on as well:

For its part, LiveJournal’s abuse staff has defended pulling the plug on the communities by saying: “Material which can be interpreted as expressing interest in, soliciting or encouraging illegal activity places LiveJournal at considerable legal risk.” That led one user, “femmequixotic,” to reply: “I list ‘gay marriage’ among my interests–that is illegal in my state. With this wording my journal could be deleted, without warning, for the fact that I support equal rights of marriage for all.”

Back to the kitchen for me! Just wanted to pass that on.

Thanks for the news story link, Jen. I haven’t even read any news today at all, which explains why I am in a good mood.

I never like saying “I told you so” even when I am completely justified in doing so, but sometimes I do have to say it. I told you so.

I told you that as soon as I heard Six Apart was buying Livejournal, no good would come of it, and I was right, wasn’t I?

Let’s see, there was the We Will Never Have Ads - Oh Look Ads fiasco. There was the Breastfeeding Is Offensive fiasco. Oh there have been other fiascos along the way, but these would be biggest ones I can recall at the moment. I wish I could remember some of the others, because I do remember they did a few other things that pissed me (and a lot of other people) off other than these two. I don’t have time to sort through my archives at the moment to remind myself though.

In short, Six Apart, who pride themselves on being one of the top dogs in blogging software, do only one thing really well: They piss off users and destroy established communities as soon as they get their hands on them. How do they do this? By doing utterly stupid shit and not being open and communicative about it.

Now there’s the Pedophile Witchhunt. No time to go into it in depth or dig up the links I was reading about it earlier, but here it is in a nutshell:

Apparently an outside group complained to Livejournal and to Six Apart’s advertisers about pedophilia, incest, and rape (and possibly a few other things) on LJ. This led to LJ suspending and deleting accounts and communities based solely on what key words they had listed in their interests. Now you may be thinking “Good, anyone who is interested in those things is a wanker!” You’d be correct, except it appears they aren’t bothering to check if these people area wankers or not. Many of the suspended journals are fanfic, slash, general fiction, and roleplaying games and RPG character journals. You know, people who write about things or play RPG games and choose to play evil characters. A few have even been support groups for the crimes they so want to protect “the children” from. So as with almost every witchhunt throughout history, many innocent people are getting caught in the cross-fire.

Not that Livejournal or Six Apart has communicated anything at all publicly or directly about what is happening, because they seem to be taking their normal and preferred route of pissing everyone off for a day or two before making an announcement and apologizing, so all I can tell you is that people who have had accounts suspended are essentially being told that just having the words rape, incest, and so on in their interest list is promoting an illegal activity, and thus will not be tolerated. Naturally, this is in direct opposition to my own experience concerning their levels of tolerance. I once reported a journal, because the guy was REALLY creepy, talked about having sex with kids all the time, and after a brief online interaction with him, I felt concerned he wasn’t making the stuff up (he said it was all true and never claimed to be writing fictional stories). The response I got was that they couldn’t prove he was actually doing anything and that just writing about an illegal activity wasn’t illegal or against the TOS. It seems they have changed their tune, haven’t they?

As I have come to expect, another PR blunder from Six Apart. Doesn’t effect me, so far as I know. I’m pretty sure I don’t have any illegal activities listed in my interests. But today it’s sex-related subjects, and next week? Drugs? Who knows. I wasn’t at all thrilled about Six Apart acquiring Livejournal, and I have agonized about keeping a paid account there every time it has come up due. No more agonizing. I won’t be paying them anything. And now I can stop wanting a permanent account too. Cool, more saved up money for home repairs.

Lin’s home, so the dinner celebration is about to begin. More on this later when maybe some of the dust has settled and hopefully Six Apart has made some kind of announcement about what the hell they are doing this time around. All I can really say is … I told you so, and I am not at all surprised.

Oh, in closing, one of the communities suspended was a group that was reading and discussing the book Lolita. Yeah. As well as some Japanese Gothic Lolita groups. Yeah. Broad brush they are painting with, isn’t it?

I didn’t do the usual massive shopping trip. I only bought the things I needed for tonight. I’ll go back tomorrow. The store was a MADHOUSE! The craziest I have seen it in a while. It’s usually not that packed on Wednesdays. Oh well. I didn’t have the energy to deal with a whole cart of groceries today anyway.

Tonight we shall be dining on a birthday feast of grand proportions! I splurged on some t-bone steaks and extra jumbo shrimp. With that there will be twice-baked potatoes, a garden salad, and Oreo cake. I also found the perfect birthday card.

Now I need to do the dishes and clean up the kitchen so I can make a righteous mess of it for dinner. Hopefully I will have enough time to take a shower and make myself all pretty too.

And no, I will not tell you how old Lin is today. If I did, he’d lock me in The Box Room and feed me slices of bologna under the door for the rest of my life. Let’s just say he’s older than I am and leave it at that, shall we?

Today is Lin’s birthday. I have to go grocery shopping. The cats will have to continue eating the Purina kibble and being flatulent, because I do not have the time or energy to put together a birthday celebration (and buy groceries) and go to the feed store all in the same day.

I don’t have a present for Lin. I simply don’t know what to get him, even though I have been asking what he’d like, sneakily, for months now. I was going to buy him a new Playstation game, which is why I was trying to get him to leave Best Buy without using the rewards certificates to buy one. My thought was I’d go back after seeing which one he wanted, and then he could use the certificates for something else. Yeah, well, he did what he always does right around gift giving occasions. He bought everything he wanted as gifts. I hate that! He’s just impossible to give a gift to, because unlike me, he buys something as soon as he wants it without ever once mentioning that he wants it. So I have no idea.

Actually, I do have an idea, but I don’t want to mention it here, and I don’t know if I can find what I want anyway. I guess I’ll do what I always do and get a cake, some beer, a few party decorations, a card, and make a totally fabulous meal for dinner. Yes, I am thinking of splurging in the meat department today.

And I am going to have to squeeze in a nap somewhere. I slept like crap last night. Why? There was something alive in the den, and it wasn’t cat or human. It wasn’t so much that I was worried about what it was, but the cats would not leave the den and come to bed, and since the living-thing-noise was coming from the top of the highest shelving unit, I was concerned the monsters would try to get to it and wreck holy havoc doing so. So I kept getting up every time the sound levels from the den indicated there was a bit too much cat activity for my comfort.

Have I since discovered what it was that was making a strange scratching, crawling, ocassionally loud noise on the top of the highest shelving unit in the den? Why yes, and I wish I would have investigated further last night. I might have gotten some sleep. But you see … it was dark, and I am a weenie, so I left the investigating until Lin was awake and in the room too.

It was a damn “click beetle” or whatever their real name is. You know the ones that pop their heads up and down when they get agitated making a loud snick sound? Yeah. The cats had been chasing one around the house last night (which was hilarious), and I saw Ronin catch it and carry it off. I guess it got away from him once he reached the den and ended up in the box my cell phone came in where it merrily kept trying to get out and kept getting agitated … thus the occasional loud noise. A bug, amplified by a thin cardboard and plastic box. Argh!

After using a mirror and standing on a chair to determine that whatever it was wasn’t large enough to kill me, I pulled the box down, and there was the scary living thing that tormented me (and the cats) all night. I set the box on the kitchen floor where the cats were having a grand time alternately trying to get it out of the box and freaking out when it popped and jumped. Lin granted the poor bug a pardon though and made me take it outside to dump in the garden. It was disturbing his birthday morning to watch me sitting on the kitchen stool watching the cats trying to kill a bug, I guess.

Funny thing is I put the now empty box back on the kitchen floor, and some thirty minutes later, the bratty cats are still trying to find the bug in it. Geniuses they are not.

Ugh. I better get started on my day or go back to bed first and then rush around this afternoon. What to do, what to do?! It’s still two or so hours before the traffic simmers down to reasonable, so I think I’ll go ahead and take my nap now … now that they big bad scary “click beetle” isn’t terrorizing me anymore.

Lin came home from work just as I was starting dinner. He looked in the pot and asked what we were having. “It looks like gruel,” he said. I replied … “No. It’s creative leftover usage.”

When I made the Chicken and Eggplant Parmesan recently, I froze half of it. Well, the cooked eggplant didn’t take to freezing too well and was way too mushy. What to do? Make a stew and serve it on a bed of spicy cheese noodles. He wasn’t calling it gruel after he tasted it!

The cats needed more flea goo, so I did some on line research about getting it on line rather than going to the vet’s office. Her prices on Revolution could cause a revolution! After spending some time the last few days looking for the best prices, places that don’t require me to get the vet to send the a prescription, and have good reputations, I finally ordered from VetShopOnline. It’s a sad, sad fact that I was able to get a six month supply of flea goo shipped (free) from Australia for a whopping $25 less than at the vet right here in town. I think I’ll have to tell my mom to get hers there too. Her vet has some whopping high prices on Revolution too, and he always wants her to bring the dog in for a checkup first, no matter if she’s scheduled for one a few months from when she runs out or not, and insists on running all manner of tests too … so the bill, just to get flea goo for a 5 pound dog ends up running into the hundreds of dollars. I have no idea if our cat vet would have wanted me to bring them in first or not, because I didn’t even bother calling. Why tempt fate? They’ll go in when it’s time for their next shots in a few months.

Lin thought maybe I should take them in for a checkup and to get the flea goo, and I can understand where he’s coming from. Fuzza didn’t get to the vet as often as we would have liked, because we just couldn’t afford it. It wouldn’t have mattered much in the end anyway, as he still would have gotten cancer and died. I know I have the feeling that I would like to take the kitties in just to “be sure” too, but it would really be a waste of money. I asked Lin if the kitties had given him any reason to believe there was something wrong with them, other than the fact they are totally insane, and he said they hadn’t. They really are quite fit and healthy (though totally mental). In the eight months they have been living with us, there’s been one incident of Oreo inspired diarrhea, which taught us to keep Oreos far, far away from Ronin, and a grand total of two vomiting episodes, both caused by eating their food too quickly and gulping a ton of water, which hasn’t been a problem since we switched foods. I’d say for your average cats, that’s a pretty good track record.

Tomorrow, I have got to go get the Wellness Core at the feed store! I had planned to go ahead and feed them the Purina this week, since we had it, but the level of gases emanating from both cats’ rear ends is almost unbearable, and they are constantly hungry, which means whining and over-feeding and the return of some pudge. They aren’t totally thrilled with the Purina anyway, which makes me happy. I’m glad they like the better stuff.

Since I made another mostly pointless post about cats, my punishment is, of course, to post another cat photo. It’s only fair to post one of Ronin, since I posted one of Myu earlier anyway.

That’s his new favorite thing. I have no idea where he found it, but he’s been carrying it around and sleeping with it for the past week. He doesn’t play with it. He just wants it near him all the time. I did tell you these cats are mental! And the towel? It’s the old bath towel I keep in the kitchen for when I need to quickly deal with a large spill (say, a large mug of water after Ronin attacks it). He keeps pulling it down, dragging it over by my stool, and curling up on it. I guess it’s now his towel.