Nisi

Last week was made more stressful than necessary by, mostly, myself. One of these days tapping into stress as my energy source is going to make me pay...BIG TIME. At least I am very honestly about where the blame lies.

Georgia was adopted this weekend, her new family came to the adoption fair and picked her up at 10am and Hippo came home all by himself. Poor Hippo. He was obviously lonely and spent a fair among of time crying outside of my door in the morning. Having one cat might be good for when you're socializing the said cat, because then it forces the cat to interact with you. Having one cat when the said cat is already used to having another friend around is...sad. I feel bad for him and so spent considerable time yesterday cuddling him and will need to spend at least an equal amount of time to de-cat-fur my outfit come next laundry day.

I miss Georgia, but she has a permanent home now and it's, heavens help us, kitten season. FFO needs all the help it can get in the upcoming months. We're probably going to end up with another cat fairly soon. I wonder what the next cat'd be like. I've looked through some of the "Adopted" cats that're listed under FFO. There is, apparently, a cat named Dante, and another one named Gatsby, which amused me no end. Just imagine shouting the name "Dante" to get a cat to come home.

I was lazy this weekend and Annie was not. She cleaned the kitchen, the bathroom, as well as vacuumed the living room and the corridors. I felt bad but, of course, am immensely happy that the corridor is no longer crunchy (Georgia's messy with her litter).

More stuff later. Meanwhile, Golden Compass thing stolen from Lucy's blog:

Parilia celebramus

Today's Rome's birthday. 2670 years or something along those lines. The reason I knew this was mostly due to Dr. Rundin, who'd canceled the Latin quiz and fed us cake (yesterday) in honor of the date.

It was a rather good day, all things considered.

Kate and I went for a walk after dinner, and in an invigorating discussion that followed it was decided that I am to make a list of all the "weird" things she does and then ask someone (who doesn't know her) whether or not a person who does these type of things would be considered "weird."

So far the list includes:

-picking up random sticks from the side of the road and attempting to sweep the road with it
-proposing vanilla cake as the key to world peace
- discussing the author of The Stranger with respect to radiation
- pointing out that doors are a poor, oppressed lot who daily get abused by people and appointing herself as "the Door Remedy."
-eating random plant parts that she'd plucked from the side of the road
- waving a piece of boiled potato through the air to make patterns with the steam that trailed behind it

Keep this up for a week and then I'll poll the jury.

April's showers

The insanity of the weather continues. If I'm lucky, it'll rain while I'm IN a class and not while I'm on my way to one. Here's to a lot of finger-crossing!

I've been getting a lot of "I thought I had it bad but you have it worse" this week and while it's nice to get the sympathy, it's also possibly the least comforting statement that could be heard with week 2 of Midterms coming up. I kept feeling like I SHOULDN'T be whining because, afterall, I did sign up for all of my classes myself and I did know, more or less, what they all entailed. Should never quite made it all the way though, of course, even if my most loyal confidents are the cats. See, it all works out: they don't care how whiny I get so long as I feed them, pet them, and change their litter boxes on time, and I don't mind that they don't care because they still look at me when I talk and Georgia even meows back sometimes.

Sometimes, it's good to pretend.

Hey, at least the rain means a temporary break from the allergies. All hail special dipolar liquid that falls from the sky.

Hippo's (see, I eventually managed to make the name transitions) first adoption fair's this weekend, so once again I will be hauling two kitties come early Saturday morning (hopefully getting them in the carrier wouldn't be TOO difficult). I predict that there would be much crying along the way but-- c'est la vie.

It's Friday! ("Mon dieu," as Nick's fond of saying.)

On a random note: anyone think I should start updating this thing regularly again? (As in once every other day or so.)

Week 2

Still busy. Not many people have showed up at work so as a result I worked 3 hours overtime this week. Saturday promised to be busy too since I'll be volunteering at the Feral Feline Organization booth with Annie from 9 to 12:30, then at the Botanical Conservatory from 2 to 4.

I feel slightly insane.

Then again, it is, most likely, not just me. I had just asked Annie, "Latinae loqueris?" And after she confirmed that I just said "You speak Latin?" she made this odd sound and banged her head again the kitchen wall--upon which she discovered a crack which turned out to be a cat hair and we wondered how the cat hair got stuck on the wall at Annie's height...and Annie was ...giggling hysterically. I asked if she was alright but of course, as might be expected, that prompted more giggling and then as I went to my room and she, hers, she asked "You're wondering about me, aren't you?" and commented that she can "feel me wondering from all the way down the hall."

So maybe not so insane, if this's what we're measuring by.

Quiz tomorrow. Then Picnic Day!

Still ticking

The harvesting (i.e. more work-intense) period of my job has begun and for some reason less people are showing up per week. There are something like a hundred plants that have to be prepped and analyzed this week. I was the only student there today so...five hours involving lots of plant and a wet dog. The dog belongs to Mike, the other post-doc who's involved in this lab, and I think it accidentally got watered on as Mike was going around watering the plants. So yes, wet dog. Jennifer (the post-doc who hired me) brought cupcakes that she made for Easter, that had crunchy frosting. She told me about how her father told her that you can make powdered sugar from regular sugar by sticking it in the blender for 10+ minutes and she only did 4 so the frosting was crunchy. I shared the story of my endeavor at chocolate cake in September (my that's a while ago), which also involved crunchy frosting.

Sugar boost was nice though.

Let it be known for the records that I actually went around in a jacket, indoors, for one entire day without Kate giving me the Look and telling me to take it off. Though to be honest, I think the fact that I was gone half of the morning and locked in my room half of the afternoon helped. Nevertheless, it was a first.

Annie wants to foster a rabbit. Any further plans will be put on hold until she gets back from Italy.

Sarcasm in Latin is amusing.

Offical first week chaos

This entire week seems to be centered around me being home and not being home at unexpected hours. Hopefully some semblance to order will be established by next week. Dr. Rundin tried to recruit me for upper division Latin which, given my schedule, probably will not work out. Annie ran over a snake while on her bike, looking for the Goat Barn the other day. Hippo (will try to consistently call him that now that he's going to be going to the adoption fairs) and Georgia are terrified of Lucy, who is still, apparently an Extremely Intimidating Rabbit.

We swung a tennis-ball-on-a-string in a circle in physics.