Right now I’m sitting on the floor, and the cat is in my chair. Is there something wrong with this situation? Sadly, no. For those of you unacquainted with my cat, she is a delightful creature who is at once an ideal companion, playmate, and friend. She came to our house through my neighbor of three doors down, Brooke. I was at their house a lot, practicing lacrosse with Brooke’s older brother and generally just hanging. They had Helsa at the time, when her name was still “Mittens” and Brooke would attempt to dress her up in doll’s clothes. She wasn’t in any way malicious, I just think she was a little too proactive owner for Mittens’ taste. The cat was chiefly outdoors, and spent a lot of time around my house for whatever reason, and my Mom took a liking to her and started putting water and such on the porch. Eventually I ended up having to carry her back to Brooke’s house, and she would squirm the whole time and vocalize her objections.

After no more than a week or two of this, Brooke’s mom, whose name escapes me, brought Helsa over to our house and said we should keep her. Everyone was ecstatic except for my sister, who is convinced Helsa has a grudge against her. The first thing we did was give her a name better suited to her personality and came up with Helsa Poppins. (You get points if you know what that means.) She seemed to be in all places at once, and befriended every member of the family, except my aforementioned sister, who coincidently had her own cat at the time, Lolli, who could safely be described as anti-social. Helsa had never been a skinny cat, and her weight grew in her new home, which I attribute to the way she would play the members of the household against each other feeding her, much the way a child might go from parent to parent until their wants were completely satisfied.

Fast-forward to 2003: Helsa has consistently ranked in my favorite females list for many years now, and our relationship has grown comfortable. She doesn’t care for saxophone practicing, I could do without the shedding, but there’s an understanding. This year especially it seems that she had grown very close to my Mother, and they had become close companions, spending the majority of every day within five feet of each other. The time I see her the most, however, is when I’m sick. Sometimes it’s even an early warning, where Helsa will begin sleeping in my bed and I’ll come down within a day. It’s one of the sweetest things I can imagine, because when I’m really ill she literally never leaves my side.

About two weeks ago, Helsa began to lose weight. This struck everyone, and after several days it became apparent that she wasn’t eating like she used to. Within the next week, she stopped eating almost entirely. Every possible combination of cat food, cat treat, baby food, fish, chicken has been tried, with at best meager results. For lack of a better term, she seems uninterested in food. She has eaten several times, but thrown up shortly afterward; liquids seem best. Now she is acting lethargic, not really moving much, but her mobility does not seem impaired in any way, just her motivation. The past three days, she has been spending almost all her time in my room. I want to be able to give her the kind of support she has given me so many times, but I just don’t know what to do.

Update: She just at an entire meal of—get this—cat food, and is starting to act normally again. Thank you all for your concerns.

Did I miss the memo about Froogle? It looks like a very cool way to find good prices on things. It’ll have to work quite hard to beat PriceWatch or TechBargains, both which I highly recommend checking out before you buy any computer equipment.

If you see an art magazine called “Consortium” pick up a copy because I wrote a short review for this first issue. I haven’t seen it yet myself, but the launch party is tonight so hopefully I’ll get a good look at it then. I’m very excited!

The font was Perpetua, and it is now the more playful “Chronicles of a Hero” from BlamBot. Now I am tempted to go back to the tasty serif Apollo, which as reviewed by Jon Coltz has me salivating. In fact all of the fonts he reviews are outstanding. I must visit there more often.

It has been a while, but it seems like my laptop has finally been fixed. Of course, they took just long enough to mess my schedule up, and get totally used to this laptop. The good news is that the old laptop should have all my stuff on it, and it will be nice to get back to the 1600×1200 screen, but I will miss the built-in Wi-Fi on this one. Now it’s time to do the dance of transferring all my stuff over. Since my email is all in IMAP that usually isn’t a problem, but somehow I always seem to accumulate tons of junk all over the hard drive that is important for whatever reason.

I have a really funny story about the Best Buy people fixing it: My mom calls them up today to see if it’s ready, well the guy says they got the pesky power button problem working, but now there’s something else wrong with it. He wasn’t able to log in to my account (good) but he tried to guess the password anyway (Umm, why?). Apparently when he pressed the keys, it would type a different letter than he was pressing. When he pressed “a” or “m” it was fine, but every other letter was wrong.

Sound familiar? As everyone who has ever used my laptop knows, this isn’t a bug, it’s a feature . I switched to a Dvorak keyboard layout two years ago and I haven’t looked back since. In addition to allowing me to type faster and more comfortably, it also has (as demonstrated above) a security benefit. (Unless of course you know the secret combination to switch between Dvorak and QWERTY.)

I hope everyone had as nice as a holiday as I did. It feels good to be back though.

Don’t you hate it when you’re working on a really nice post through the web interface and you lose it? Bah humbug!

I hope everyone is having a wonderful holiday. 🙂

. . . as I head out into the massive throngs tomorrow (today) to do Christmas shopping. I’ve made the list; I’ve checked it twice. If I had any sense this would have been done weeks, if not months ago, but this should be an adventure. If you want to join in for the time of your life, give me a call :). Or not: apparently my phone has been giving “Ciruit busy” messages to people all day. Hopefully T-Mobile will resolve all that by tomorrow.

My laptop has 512MB of memory. The W3C should encourage WYSIWYG editor makers to output valid XHTML. MB RSS XML.

I just took my last final and turned in my last papers. I’m golden until January :). Now it’s time to party like it’s 1999!

My mother would be proud.

While I am a fan of Dante, I think he may have missed something in his portrayal of the netherworlds, and I just want to assure the guy who went out of his way to splash me with his car as I was waiting to cross the street that there is a special level of hell reserved for people like that. Geez.

I’ve been using the new Cross Ion pen for a few months now, and it has worked wonderfully. I think my favorite thing about it is the small size it goes to, which is easy on my pockets. That’s also why I think I’d like a Tungsten T. But apparently I just ran an entire load of clothes through the washer and dryer with this pen, unknowingly of course. I saw the pen first thing when I opened the dryer, and even though some of my favorite shirts were in there for some reason the first thing I did was see if the pen still worked! Even better yet, it did. On to the clothes: as far as I can tell there are no ink stains on anything! I’ll do a closer examination in the morning but things look good.