chessandlena.com

After many moons of entertainment, adventure, and mounting suck with the cloudbook, it mostly died. That is, it will boot up, run ubuntu, and let me log in, but only has a life of about 5-10 minutes before hanging. Not sure what exactly is going on; but subsequent attempts to install some alternate linuxes (or is the correct plural 'linuces'?) have hung as well. I'm not sure what exactly to do with it, but clearly it ain't getting the computing job done. The really rough part of all this is that the manufacturers, everex, stopped supporting the cloudbook completely sometime in 2008, and the company itself folded in mid-2009. Sic semper tyrannis, I suppose.

So my next-cube neighbor, Ben, and I have both been searching for possible laptops/netbooks/not sures for some time. We talked, hashed it out, etc, etc. For a long time. It's possible that Ben has an equally controlling Inner Cheap Bastard as mine. But... dell posted a pretty solid deal on the mini (buy computer X, get a mini for $150 more), we talked about it, talked some more... you get the picture.

Anyway, we now both have dell mini netbooks. I am typing this on it, in fact. Not too much crapware to uninstall, not too rough on the setup. The webcam ain't half bad, either. :)

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone. Lena and I are definitely looking forward to a few days off from the grind.

It's a sad time, though; my cousin, Posy, died this week. She was a beautiful woman with amazing artistic talent, and I'm sorry to say that I did not know her nearly as well as I'd have liked. I have one incredibly vivid memory of her: when we were stupid geeky kids playing Dungeons & Dragons all the time, she came down to our table in the basement holding a drawing-- I think it was colored pencil but it may have been pastels-- of a dragon curling round itself. What I remember most, though, is her face just then. I think she liked that her art made others happy much, much more than she liked others praising her art.

I took a picture of our rose bush beginning one last bloom in November a few days ago-- today I saw that it had finally fully opened. I think it opened for Posy.

And another bittersweet moment, I just hung a painting in our sun room. It was painted by my great-grandmother, and belonged to my mother; we got it from her things when she died in April of this year. It's a beautiful painting. I miss my mother.

As you may or may not know, we name our cars. Silly, artifically sentimental, and yet we ain't the only ones. Okay, maybe I take it a bit more seriously than most. But that said, my friends, the time has come, to bid a fond farewell and pay loving tribute to our friend, Yanki Stan.

This is Yanki Stan, a mystical green 1999 saturn named for a misheard lyric in a famous Russian song. We got him either in 2001 or 2002 (the debate over that continues). He got very good gas mileage, somewhere in the mid-thirties, and he could hold more baggage than would physically fit inside him (this is a special feature on saturns that year, they haven't included it since). He traveled several times to Canada, the Home Country, the Northern Redoubt, and the western frontier as well. It was in him that we packed our cat, Maya, into and drove her to the Home Country for one Christmas, and about 20 minutes into the drive, let her loose; she proceeded onto the back window ledge and watched all the cars passing by... I still remember how many people laughing at the cat in the saturn, a great trip. Yanki Stan was our longest-owned car, either 7 or 8 years. He's been steadily declining over the past year and a half, however, having fuel pump, transmission, brake cylinder, oil leak, and other problems. Only one speaker is currently working in his factory stereo system, and it takes over 5 seconds for him to start, if he decides to start. He's conked out on both Lena and I in the last 4 months, and we just couldn't justify putting any more money into him. Goodbye, Yanki Stan, you've been a rock amid the chaos and turmoil of our lives.

And now introducing our new Toyota Yaris. He's supposed to get great mileage, upper thirties at least. I knew I was sold on the car when we were test driving it, and I had to turn at the circular end of a cul-de-sac; though I allowed plenty of room, I did not crack the halfway point of the circle during the turn... I cracked a grin and said, "I already love the turning radius." This is the first brand-new car I've ever bought; same for Lena. But to be honest, it was such a bizarre time for used cars (post-cash-for-clunkers, used cars in our target set were almost as much as new), we decided it was time. I started thinking of names before we had even finalized the sale... Franco Yaris? Yaris Bueller? Yaris K Telemacher? Yaris N. Ford? Lena wasn't buying any of those, however, and immediately countered with something a little less immediately groanworthy: Chaika, Russian for seagull. It's probably the leading candidate so far.

Anyway, sorry to take up so much of your time. The car is dead... long live the car!

Today I uprooted three very young saplings and an absolutely gorgeous blooming sunflower.

It was done intentionally and with malice aforethought.

The location is why:

The tree in the background is the Colonel, a majestic cottonwood that drops a crap-ton of fluff, sticks, and cotton-pod hulls on our house every year. It occurred to Lena and I after seeing the sunflower that we hadn't really cleaned out the gutters yet this year. What's more, neither one of us could remember doing it last fall, either. Evidently there's some good nutrimenty stuff in there, if a sunflower can pop up out of nowhere like that.

Never before have I felt taunted by a flower.

So Wednesday morning I'm up early, getting ready for work, walking down the hallway. Maya is there, lying in the middle of the way. I step over her, careful to clear her tail. Except that she sees my foot hovering over her and panics, rolling and scuttling to a new location... right under where my foot is coming down. I catch this and react, moving my foot to the right to miss her again, and once again, she reacts exactly the wrong way... moving under my foot again.

Well. Now it's too late. I step on her. Face and chest are the impact zones, and she is not pleased. I try to pull back, but with the move to the right, my legs are already spread too wide for a simple foot lift... and now my foot is on her, actually sliding her toward the wall. She rowrs in protest, slashing and biting at my foot. Unable to stop my slide, I'm now mostly doing a full split... and I feel my right hamstring pop 3 times in rapid succession. And the pain hits, both in my foot and my hamstring. I fall, managing to not hit Maya, who finally frees herself and bolts.

Maya is fine, returning a bit spooked after a few minutes but no worse for the wear. I'm left thrashing on the ground, clutching at my thigh but unable to flex my leg to even look at my profusely bleeding foot. Eventually, I manage to get to my feet, hobble to the bathroom, wash out the cuts. There are a couple of scratches, one very deep, and a couple of bites, also one very deep. Oh great. Despite all common sense, I don't go to the doctor for a few days, until the foot is already quite infected. Dumbass.

Anyway, hopefully things are on the mend. Here's a poor-quality pic of the infected catbit foot. WARNING: contains image of oozing wounds and puffy, red, infected flesh, not to mention a foot that is already grossly misshapen to begin with.

Woke up this morning and sloughed my way to starbucks and into work to catch up on things... we're way behind, and with summer vacations pending, we're going to stay behind for a while. Coded and tested for four hours, finished a few things.

Hit Meijer near work for some medium grocerage... the Lima Road Meijer has better produce than Kroger and than most other Meijerseses, plus they have sparkling water for 65 cents (good way to curb my diet soda habit)... although they were out today. Harrumph. The only thing I actually go to Kroger for here is Huy Fong Sambal Oelek sauce, which is the only place I've found in town that sells it. Other places (including Meijer) sell the Sriracha sauce, but only Kroger sells the "gold label." Anyway. Medium-to-light shopping on sunday afternoons such as this can take a while, navigating the bumper-buggies and the slowness of other customers. I confess, I become somewhat of an asshole with maneuvering when the store is crowded... well, we'll call it "polite but deliberate and determined." I got out about 1 1/2 hours later. Sheesh.

And home where Lena and I are tearing up the junk room. Joy. The story of why the junk room is the junk room is long and sordid, and probably has been recounted somewhere in prior iterations of this blog, but as I've been too lazy to port the data into this drupal system, I'll give a brief synopsis now:

We got these two jokers when Lena and some friends went down to the south of Indiana to visit caves, and brought back a very starved and very pregnant cat (Afina)... whom we took to the emergency vet that night and who next day gave birth to seven, yes, seven kittens. We decided to raise them and give them away, but because we already had Maya, and because there was a clear desire on the part of Fina and Maya to murder each other a lot, we had to keep them separate... so for two months, the mama cat and her seven kittens were confined to our guest room. we kept the two and found homes for the rest. But after that two months, the room was not fit for anything. Ick. Just Ick. Thus, it became very messy storage.

And we never seemed to have money or time or desire to fix it up again. Now, we at least have the desire. So up comes the stained carpet. That's today's project. That and gawking at the newly-revealed cracks in the slab beneath our house. Joy.

PS: here are a few pictures of events in the junk room when it was not yet the junk room, but still the kittenery:

'nuff said.

So we go to a Baha'i conference in Chicago (well, Schaumburg, anyway). Friday night to Sunday evening. Stayed with Pat and Bud (yes, that's THREE-DAY JEOPARDY CHAMPION, BUD!), very good to see those guys... it had been a while. Hopefully it won't be so long again.

But on to the real substance of the post here-- the saga of the cat door (see posts [1] [2], and [3])

We had installed the door, but were keeping it propped open until the cats figured it out. I had started giving them lessons (consisting of me ramming them through the cat door into the garage and leaving them to figure out how to get back in) with limited success, and only occasionally. But that served its purpose-- they all knew, after a certain number of lessons, how to get back into the house from the garage; the problem was getting them to go into the garage from the house on their own.

We tried coaxing them with catnip through the door into the garage, but that idea we had to scrap fairly quickly. We didn't feel right not rewarding them for making the jump through, and as soon as a cat gets even a little catnip buzz, you can forget about knowledge retention. It's about as useful as playing memory games with a stoner after he's just had his morning wake-n-bake.

So Lena upped the drug-free lessons into much more frequent exercises, and made them much kinder (consisting of taking the cats periodically to the door, showing it to them, talking to them lovingly, demonstrating how to open it several times, and then ramming them through the cat door). We were still keeping the cat door open quite a bit, though. It began to seem that not only had the concept of the cat door failed, but that we had also inserted an extra required step in the process: now we had to push the cats through the door into the garage or they would just sit by the door and meow impatiently.

Enter this weekend, and ten-degree weather, and our uninsulated garage... and that damn open cat door.

I didn't like the idea of heating the entire neighborhood for the weekend. Lena didn't like the idea of a house full of cat pee. Ten degrees doesn't leave an awful lot of wiggle room, though. So we held classes several times toward the end of last week. Perhaps the most heart-wrenching moment of all on Friday was Maya sitting quietly, respectfully, by the cat door as we packed and loaded the car, then giving a plaintive but loud maiiiow that said, I have to go to the litter box-- where's my push? Grim prospects indeed.

But off we went, and closed the door remained. I was trying to get an over/under from Lena on the number of... uh... accidents... as we approached the house on Sunday night, but she wouldn't bite. She probably didn't want to tempt fate any more than we already had.

The end result? Better than expected. Only two visible occurrences of solid accidents in the house, and two of the litter boxes in the garage were used. I had my guesses as to who was responsible for what, but none of them were confirmed until late last night, when I saw Bear lunge through the door, into-- yes, into-- the garage on his own to go take a leak.

That's my boy. He gets it from my side, you know. We may not be good at much, but man, can we figure out how to use a bathroom.

This is awesome. I guess we'd have to call it a lolbama.

[swiped directly from threadbombing.com]

for you Obama fanboys and fangirls, here's a page of collected front pages from newspapers on the day after (click on the picture to go to the full page):