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.

Well I’ve finally got my MP3 head unit installed in my new (to me) car. As I write this I realize that I haven’t told my car story here, but in brief around the beginning of 2003 my mid-eighties Mercedes which served me wonderfully for about a year was replace by a ’98 Chevy Lumina, which is currently on the road to being cool. One of the biggest problems with the Lumina has been that the after-market head unit was hooked up badly and would reset everything every time the car was turned off. This had the unexpected side effect of helping me learn the beginnings of several CDs very well, but never making it to the end. One of the interesting results of this is I was able to time how long it took me to get places very well because the clock would start at 1:00 whenever I turned the car on.

Anyway this was a problem that should have been quickly resolved, since I have a nice Aiwa MP3 head unit from the Benz, but I never seemed to find a weekend when my Dad was home and we both had time during daylight hours to hook everything up. Well today was that day, and we (mostly him) got it hooked up beautifully. I seem to have lost most of my MP3 mix CDs though, so I might have to burn some new ones. I think I’m going to do an artist-based approach, so for example I can have one CD labeled “Brad Mehldau” that will have all of his CDs condensed into one. Fair use is a beautiful thing. Anyway this is the first step to really making this car “mine”. Actually the second, since while my Dad was working on the stereo I was using a razor to take off some stickers from the previous owner. So my car no longer indicates I’m an Aggie fan, say “Worldwide Panic,” “You’re a naughty girl go to my room,” “I don’t mind being stared at,” or “Texas Department of Safety.” What a combination! I left the Cat in the Hat sticker. I miss my old stickers though.

How terrible.

There has been a lot of talk about referrer spamming in blogspace, and while browsing a PHP network query tool I stumbled across this, which looks terrible. What’s even worse is there is some genuinely neat looks scripts on their site, some things that I’ve been meaning to write myself, and it looks like I’m going to have to because I couldn’t support any that sells a product like ReferBomb.

This script will get up to 1000 Google search results for the search term of your choice (we’ve provided a few suggested default search terms), then automatically fetch all of the resulting web pages. What does this do for you? Think “public web stats” or think “blogs who reciprocate referring links!”

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.

I’m happy to see we have a beautiful new site designed by the wonderful Christine with the header picture by Elaine. Elaine takes great photos and you should check out the ones on her site, also the last time I was at Kaveh Kanes they had a couple of hers on display.

I just had a kinda-cool idea for the site: what if the top image rotated with different pictures that the author felt characterized Houston. For a perfect example of what I mean see Typographica, which has different headers rotate that link to the font and the designer of the header image. It occurred to me when I was looking at the site and thinking “What a nice picture of downtown” and then I noticed the street and the lamps and I started thinking of where Elaine was when she took that picture. My mind wandered to the cool pictures Christine posted the other day and how it was a totally different view of downtown. My mind continued to wander (it does that a lot) to how when people think of Houston, they tend to think of either the Rodeo or the postcard view of downtown, when in fact there is so much more than that. Anyway, just an idea.

This is crazy: I swear just minutes ago I had my books, my three Ethics books and Arabian Nights for Human Situation. Yet when I just opened my backpack they aren’t there, even while my laptop, palm, camera, and various other electronics are. I may have left the Ethics books in my car, but I had Arabian Nights for class this morning, and I haven’t been that many places since then.