Certain, especially awesome public libraries have live-in cats.
I suspect from the lack of spine labels, that this is a privately-owned and operated library monorail lolcat.
It are my birfday
halp
cat on face… typing this from beneath the fur….halp!!!!
Major league baseball as Cat show
Below, an actual conversation from IRC at work.
At last, my theories on Major League Baseball are made public! All may bask in my brilliant observations. I do but ask for a small percentage of the profits when you sell your season tickets on Craigslist…
erica: professional baseball = pedigreed cat show
* BigPapi whispers at erica: “this is the wrong channel for that kind of talk”
erica: just startin’ shit.
BigPapi: as you wish
sam: punk erica for being ignorant
BigPapi: insult erica
chowBOT: • chowBOT pimp slaps erica
erica: Professional baseball players are overbred and out of context, like cats at a cat show. Their talent has been refined to such a degree that they are no longer human representatives of a geographic area and are instead caricatures, transported from city-to-city and sold to the highest bidder. You might as well be watching showcats with squooshed faces and pink ribbons.
harmony: showcats are funny
chowBOT: BUILD ERROR: illegal redefinition of const “professional baseball” from value GREATEST_SPORT_EVER. Please RTFM.
sam: erica, your statement is so devoid of any understanding of baseball as to be rendered meaningless on its own. Therefore it requires no rebuttal
erica: heh. you said buttal.
Recent goings-on, presented in rhyming couplets
1. An identity crisis might ensue,
Skipping the SLA meeting for a workshop on XHTML2.
*Sorry SLA. You’re great and all, but semantic, accessible, device-independent webpages whoop your ass.
2. A morning dogwalk at six.
Instead of eating the cat, he just licks.
* Dogfriend Odin has been staying with us. He thinks the cat is veeeery innnnteresting.
3. While lining the attic with insulation,
Five thousand spiders in formation.
* Bravely, I battled on.
4. Attempting to recall possessive case,
I call the hotel in Spain. Hablas Ingles?
* I apparently suffer from Fear Of Spanish. Que Oy.
Good morning cat
This morning I was getting ready for work and my partner said casually, “boy, that stuffed mouse you got Owl (the cat) sure is realistic”.
All of Owl’s toys are neon green or red.
This was not a toy.
Owl was very proud of himself.
He ran down the stairs and waited for me to throw it.
Owl got extra breakfast and petting.
I got to dispose of the mouse.
Hey! Look! More Snow!
Hey! Look! More Snow!
I’ve been back at work for a while, but have been too exhausted from my vacation to write about everything. Here’s a little recap. But first, this:
Cell phone use was apparently a problem at some point here in the library. I can’t imagine why, since the giant slabs of asbestos prevent anything resembling decent reception. Anyway, the main stairway has been designated a “Cell Phone Zone” where, supposedly, students and staff are to stand enjoying echo-y conversations amplified and overheard by six floors of potential eavesdroppers. Today on the way upstairs I noticed a bit of graffiti above the cell phone zone sign. In grand geeky college tradition, someone has designated the stairway the “Self-Hone Zone.”
Which would be great, of course. There should be more of this. The library could establish a whole suite of self-improvement locations. Meditation rooms built off of the lunchroom, consciousness-raising areas outside of circulation, friendly councilors scattered throughout the stacks. The self-hone zone is only a beginning.
Right. Anyway. So over the break, I drove the eight hours to Flint, spent a restless night in my drafty old high school bedroom surrounded by the ham radio equipment and computer magazines that have taken my place, then flew down to Austin, TX for xmas with my boyfriend’s parents, who are majorly sweet. I met him on his layover in the Detroit airport and we flew down together. Apparently the flu had struck him in the airport shuttle, and by the time we met up, he was a tired, feverish pile of carry-on bags. Christmas was spent in the Austin Emergency clinic, waiting for an antibiotic prescription.
I was felled a few hours later, and most of my stay in lovely lovely warm not-snowy-at-all-Austin was spent in a darkened room drinking tea and comparing thermometer readings. We did make it to San Antonio on our last day, and ate at a famous Mexican restaurant where the entrees consisted almost entirely of lard. At the San Antonio zoo, I met the Giant Anteater and spent almost an hour hanging around outside his habitat, which was probably the most ant-free spot in Texas, watching him sniff around with his giant ant-sniffing nose. He came up and sniffed me a couple of times, which pretty much made my week.
After Austin, I flew back to Michigan and hung out with my parents for a while. My friend Erin was in town from San Francisco, and not wanting to get hit in the crossfire of a Flinttown New Years Eve, we hopped in my car and drove to downtown Chicago, where we were much safer. I spent two solid days at the Lincoln Park Zoo, which you may think is a bit excessive, but I do not. On both days, I was pecked by an ostrich. Or rather, the glass that I was standing in front of was pecked by an ostrich. The ostrich would walk by, see us standing there watching him, come over and peck the glass in an irritated way, then walk off. This happened several times. After awhile I realized that the ostrich, having a rather short bird-memory, probably thought that each time it pecked at us was the first. He was trapped in an endless loop of “La de da, here I am, walking, HEY! Get out of here! HA! Take That! La de da…”
Hey, for any of you designers out there, the American Ostrich Association (AOA) really needs a new website.
Anyway, after Chicago, Erin and I drove back to the Crater that is Flint, spent some more family time, and I drove home.
New Year’s resolutions include:
Getting to work earlier. Which, of course, means leaving work earlier. It was getting pretty depressing leaving at six and six thirty. I’ve started coming in at 7:30 with the secretaries, and I think I’m getting more work done in the quiet.
Gym getting-to. This too has been quite successful. My friend Kim and I have a pact. We go every day at lunch rain or shine. We’ve had to miss two days due to dangerously cold windchill (-25F! Come to Ithaca!), but other than that we’ve been faithful. I’ve felt really great doing this. It’s like having recess in the middle of the day. And it is much more memorable than curling up with a book in the lunchroom.
More cooking, less of the conveniently located Indian restaurant. Say no more. Mmm, saag paneer…