And because Girl2 likes him even better in color ...
Thursday, March 01, 2012
Thursday, August 04, 2011
Exceedingly Remiss
Facts:
- Girl2 has gone out on some soul-searching international walkabout for 4 weeks, leaving me no one to IM with at work.
- Hateful.
- Promised postcards from girl2 have not yet arrived at my house.
- Also hateful.
- The last postcard we received from anyone was about 6 months ago
- Said postcard was sent by a grown man who showed up at our house last year (near but not on Halloween) wearing a Boy Scout uniform and a sash emblazoned with the questionable statement "Good with Knots".
Saturday, April 02, 2011
My Cat Blog
Okay, Girl2, the gauntlet has been thrown. Do you really want your good name to be associated with a cat-centric microblog vanity project that's slathered with a thick layer of crudely drawn cartoons?
Do you want this to become the kind of blog that's found using the search terms "ketchup raptor" and "cat brain xray"?
Okay then. Time to take the reins and get this ship back on course.
But please - avoid mixed metaphors if you can - that's really my purview.
Do you want this to become the kind of blog that's found using the search terms "ketchup raptor" and "cat brain xray"?
Okay then. Time to take the reins and get this ship back on course.
But please - avoid mixed metaphors if you can - that's really my purview.
Friday, April 01, 2011
The Meowginot Line
So after my last post, I was trying to figure out what a cat world war would look like. This came up mostly because I was waiting for pizza to be delivered and was trying to keep my mind off of the fact that I was 100% ravenous. Also, my cat had stolen a roll of toilet paper from the bathroom and shredded it in the hallway, so it was moderately topical.
I wrote the post the way I typically do - by first sending an email to myself describing the topic and then replying to myself.
> On Mar 30, 2011, at 7:39 PM, girl1 wrote:
>> Cat world war!
> On Mar 30, 2011, at 7:41 PM, girl1 wrote:
>> "I've got nine lives, b**ches!"
>> with cat shooting up a bunker with WWII era gun - tommy gun?
>> I think only bank robbers use tommy guns. And can you even shoot up a bunker?
>> Clearly I know nothing about war. Will have to google.
> On Mar 30, 2011, at 7:43 PM, girl1 wrote:
>> Rename a bunch of WWII battles with "meow" or "fur" or "purr" in them.
>> Meowginot Line? Hm - not a battle, but that's all I can think of right now.
And so on. It just gets weirder and more tasteless from there. But what's weirder and more tasteless than brainstorming with yourself over email about cartoon cats going nuclear? Please note: I'm not actually looking for an answer to that question.
What it all comes down to is this: it's harder than you might think to draw a cat fighting a war. AND come up with a tagline for the picture that doesn't include too many multisyllabic words. AND make the end result even moderately amusing. God, it's hard having a hobby blog.
The good news was that the pizza arrived here so late, they gave it to us for free.
I wrote the post the way I typically do - by first sending an email to myself describing the topic and then replying to myself.
> On Mar 30, 2011, at 7:39 PM, girl1 wrote:
>> Cat world war!
> On Mar 30, 2011, at 7:41 PM, girl1 wrote:
>> "I've got nine lives, b**ches!"
>> with cat shooting up a bunker with WWII era gun - tommy gun?
>> I think only bank robbers use tommy guns. And can you even shoot up a bunker?
>> Clearly I know nothing about war. Will have to google.
> On Mar 30, 2011, at 7:43 PM, girl1 wrote:
>> Rename a bunch of WWII battles with "meow" or "fur" or "purr" in them.
>> Meowginot Line? Hm - not a battle, but that's all I can think of right now.
And so on. It just gets weirder and more tasteless from there. But what's weirder and more tasteless than brainstorming with yourself over email about cartoon cats going nuclear? Please note: I'm not actually looking for an answer to that question.
What it all comes down to is this: it's harder than you might think to draw a cat fighting a war. AND come up with a tagline for the picture that doesn't include too many multisyllabic words. AND make the end result even moderately amusing. God, it's hard having a hobby blog.
The good news was that the pizza arrived here so late, they gave it to us for free.
Monday, March 28, 2011
Cuttin' Up
My husband vehemently disagrees with me on this, but I think my old apartment was pretty awesome. I mean, it had a dishwasher, which, in my mind, erases all of the cons.
Fact: Washing dishes by hand is the leading cause of dishpan hands - an unbearably horrific condition.
Fact: Washing dishes by hand requires the foul act of touching dirty dishes.
Before I had a dishwasher, I addressed these concerns by wearing rubber gloves to wash dishes and/or leaving them to pile in the sink as long as I could stand, but I still found dishwashing a hateful and tedious chore that should be outsourced to machines at any opportunity.
Granted, my tiny apartment had a few problems:
All that worked out great for the next few years that I lived there. The couch got nice and comfortably worn-in to the point where I was nearly afraid to sit on it.
When I finally decided to move out, I knew the couch couldn't come with me. After all, it looked like it had been through several world wars that had been fought by cats. I wasn't sure how the h*ll I was going to get it out of the apartment, but I knew I wasn't paying to have it disassembled again. I tried to sell it on craigslist, which didn't fail to find me several buyers willing to drive 50 miles for a $2 ottoman and scream at me on the phone when I sold it to the first person to arrive at my apartment, but there were exactly 0 takers for the couch. So I did what I always do and procrastinated until the weekend I had to move out to figure out what to do.
By the time the weekend rolled around, a decision - however undesirable - was magically made for me (procrastination has yet to fail me on that count). My only remaining option was to disassemble the couch myself, which I knew I could handle, because I had a toolkit and a fiance. In addition to a tape measure and a few nails, the toolkit contained two tools that I thought were totally up to the job.
With that, I formulated a plan that was equal parts desperation, overconfidence, and complete lack of experience with woodworking. That weekend, my fiance and I would take apart the couch ourselves, reducing it to pieces small enough to get out of the apartment and leave on the curb for bulk trash pickup. For reasons that still remain unclear to me, my fiance actually agreed to this plan. And that's probably why he's now my husband.
Anyway, we first tried picking up the couch, which weighed approximately 3 tons, and made one last-ditch effort to force it out the door. Fail.
So we started on the destruction, feeling a little like Dexter. Initially, I found the process very thrilling.
My first instinct was to saw off the legs, a simple step that I thought might enable us to get the rest of it out the door. So I gleefully began to saw. And sawed. And sawed. And sawed. After about five minutes, I laid on the floor, completely exhausted. I had managed only to put a small scratch in the leg, which seemed to be made of some kind of advanced hardwood-diamond composite material.
Moving to plan B, we decided to try and knock/rip the thing apart using our bare hands (and possibly the hammer), Pumphrey Brothers-style. That sounded awesome. Then we tried it. Unfortunately, not only were we not martial arts experts, but all the pieces of the frame were held together by industrial-strength staples and nails spaced about an inch apart and coated with a thick layer of wood glue. Also, when struck against the couch frame more than once or twice, the head of the hammer would fly off.
At this point, I started to weep and beat my fists helplessly on the couch, visualizing my security deposit slipping away as the couch sat there mocking me, wobbling on its damaged legs. My fiance, always more level-headed than I am, wisely ignored my meltdown and continued to hit the couch legs over and over with the hammer until they came off. I, meanwhile, ripped uselessly at the fabric covering the frame, mainly exposing hundreds of sharp industrial staples.
A day later, we had the legs off and decided to make another run at the door. Since I had stripped most of the material off the frame, I had rendered it nearly impossible to carry comfortably. However, our final round of destruction did the trick, and we were able to force the carcass of the devil-couch out of the apartment (deeply denting the closet door in the process), get it into the elevator, and carry it down to the street. I may have had severe lacerations across my hands and arms, but I hadn't felt this good and free in a while.
When we came back up, I took one final look around the apartment and made sure to slam the door on the way out.
Fact: Washing dishes by hand is the leading cause of dishpan hands - an unbearably horrific condition.
Fact: Washing dishes by hand requires the foul act of touching dirty dishes.
Before I had a dishwasher, I addressed these concerns by wearing rubber gloves to wash dishes and/or leaving them to pile in the sink as long as I could stand, but I still found dishwashing a hateful and tedious chore that should be outsourced to machines at any opportunity.
Granted, my tiny apartment had a few problems:
- Plush, powder blue carpet covered the bedroom and hallway floors.
- The counter around the bathroom sink was made of a problematic fiberboard material that warped when it encountered water (good choice for a bathroom).
- I lived next door to a shut-in who periodically came out of his apartment to yell at me for various imagined infractions - usually "slamming the door". To be fair, his hair appeared to have been constructed out of an animal pelt, which would make me angry at the world too.
- It was the only city apartment I've ever been in that had unfinished wood floors. I thought it gave the living room a cozy cabin-in-the woods / barn-like ambiance, though others referred to it as "gross" and "difficult to clean".
- The floorplan was strange and inconvenient (see below).
Entering the apartment, you found yourself in a dark, narrow, windowless hall with those same unfinished wood floors, directly facing a closet. The closet door opened outward, while the apartment door opened inward, meaning that the two doors, if opened at the same time, would stick together. Overall, this made it a pretty inconvenient set-up for moving large items into the apartment. Fortunately, when I arrived in town from grad school, I had almost no furniture so didn't notice the problem until about a month later when I bought a small couch and the delivery men were unable to fit it through the front door/entryway. After about an hour of trying to wedge it through the door, they angrily gave up and made me pay approximately the value of the couch for a "breakdown service." A man from West Virginia came in, disassembled the couch and then put it back together inside my apartment.
All that worked out great for the next few years that I lived there. The couch got nice and comfortably worn-in to the point where I was nearly afraid to sit on it.
When I finally decided to move out, I knew the couch couldn't come with me. After all, it looked like it had been through several world wars that had been fought by cats. I wasn't sure how the h*ll I was going to get it out of the apartment, but I knew I wasn't paying to have it disassembled again. I tried to sell it on craigslist, which didn't fail to find me several buyers willing to drive 50 miles for a $2 ottoman and scream at me on the phone when I sold it to the first person to arrive at my apartment, but there were exactly 0 takers for the couch. So I did what I always do and procrastinated until the weekend I had to move out to figure out what to do.
By the time the weekend rolled around, a decision - however undesirable - was magically made for me (procrastination has yet to fail me on that count). My only remaining option was to disassemble the couch myself, which I knew I could handle, because I had a toolkit and a fiance. In addition to a tape measure and a few nails, the toolkit contained two tools that I thought were totally up to the job.
With that, I formulated a plan that was equal parts desperation, overconfidence, and complete lack of experience with woodworking. That weekend, my fiance and I would take apart the couch ourselves, reducing it to pieces small enough to get out of the apartment and leave on the curb for bulk trash pickup. For reasons that still remain unclear to me, my fiance actually agreed to this plan. And that's probably why he's now my husband.
Anyway, we first tried picking up the couch, which weighed approximately 3 tons, and made one last-ditch effort to force it out the door. Fail.
So we started on the destruction, feeling a little like Dexter. Initially, I found the process very thrilling.
My first instinct was to saw off the legs, a simple step that I thought might enable us to get the rest of it out the door. So I gleefully began to saw. And sawed. And sawed. And sawed. After about five minutes, I laid on the floor, completely exhausted. I had managed only to put a small scratch in the leg, which seemed to be made of some kind of advanced hardwood-diamond composite material.
Moving to plan B, we decided to try and knock/rip the thing apart using our bare hands (and possibly the hammer), Pumphrey Brothers-style. That sounded awesome. Then we tried it. Unfortunately, not only were we not martial arts experts, but all the pieces of the frame were held together by industrial-strength staples and nails spaced about an inch apart and coated with a thick layer of wood glue. Also, when struck against the couch frame more than once or twice, the head of the hammer would fly off.
At this point, I started to weep and beat my fists helplessly on the couch, visualizing my security deposit slipping away as the couch sat there mocking me, wobbling on its damaged legs. My fiance, always more level-headed than I am, wisely ignored my meltdown and continued to hit the couch legs over and over with the hammer until they came off. I, meanwhile, ripped uselessly at the fabric covering the frame, mainly exposing hundreds of sharp industrial staples.
A day later, we had the legs off and decided to make another run at the door. Since I had stripped most of the material off the frame, I had rendered it nearly impossible to carry comfortably. However, our final round of destruction did the trick, and we were able to force the carcass of the devil-couch out of the apartment (deeply denting the closet door in the process), get it into the elevator, and carry it down to the street. I may have had severe lacerations across my hands and arms, but I hadn't felt this good and free in a while.
When we came back up, I took one final look around the apartment and made sure to slam the door on the way out.
Sunday, March 27, 2011
Attention Surplus Lethargy Disorder
Okay, so I totally missed the joy of Alternative Universe Month, as I've been living in the alternative universe of Too Much Work.
If there's an opposite of ADHD I definitely have it. Especially when I get busy, I can fixate my attention on only a very limited set of things (even when they're not interesting or fun or rewarding) and I block out everything else. I guess that would either be called "OCD" or "normal" or "narcissistic jerk", depending on your perspective. So when I get busy with a project at work, life falls by the wayside, which becomes unfortunate for things like blog updates and laundry.
Alas.
Anyway, lest this blog be confiscated by the authorities for reasons of severe neglect, I'd better start posting again. Which, coincidentally, works out because I just took a few days off, and I'm TOTALLY WORKING ON A POST RIGHT NOW!
If there's an opposite of ADHD I definitely have it. Especially when I get busy, I can fixate my attention on only a very limited set of things (even when they're not interesting or fun or rewarding) and I block out everything else. I guess that would either be called "OCD" or "normal" or "narcissistic jerk", depending on your perspective. So when I get busy with a project at work, life falls by the wayside, which becomes unfortunate for things like blog updates and laundry.
Alas.
Anyway, lest this blog be confiscated by the authorities for reasons of severe neglect, I'd better start posting again. Which, coincidentally, works out because I just took a few days off, and I'm TOTALLY WORKING ON A POST RIGHT NOW!
Tuesday, February 01, 2011
AlternaWorld: THE RULES
Inspired by a viewing of Fringe and some dude throwing the idea out there, I've decided that February is Parallel Universe Month. And what better way to celebrate Parallel Universe Month than to dust off that most beloved of all novella formats: the choose-your-own adventure!
SO. Here's how it will work (sorry - this isn't choose-your-own rules):
1. I'll describe the situation, adding a bunch of pictures to illustrate events, the mood, and protagonists more clearly (see below for an example):
2. At the end of the set-up, I'll provide several options for actions that could occur next. For example:
3. Leave a comment at the end of the post telling me which path you would prefer to continue down
4. I will provide the next installment at a time and place of my choosing - possibly months later, if history is any indication
Note: In the long and storied history of this blog, girl2 and I have received a grand total of SIX COMMENTS, so as you might imagine, this whole scenario is going to present a gigantic and possibly unresolvable number of vote-tallying conflicts and challenges.
SO. Here's how it will work (sorry - this isn't choose-your-own rules):
1. I'll describe the situation, adding a bunch of pictures to illustrate events, the mood, and protagonists more clearly (see below for an example):
2. At the end of the set-up, I'll provide several options for actions that could occur next. For example:
4. I will provide the next installment at a time and place of my choosing - possibly months later, if history is any indication
Note: In the long and storied history of this blog, girl2 and I have received a grand total of SIX COMMENTS, so as you might imagine, this whole scenario is going to present a gigantic and possibly unresolvable number of vote-tallying conflicts and challenges.
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