aceofkittens

The laptop has a virus (or thirty). I knew something was wrong last week when web surfing crawled to a painfully snail-like pace, my Wifi connection kept breaking, and FF started randomly opening up tabs to spam sites.

( Boring details )

YEAR IN REVIEW: 2011

Go to your Calendar and find the first (public) entry for each month of 2010. Post the first line of it in your journal, and that's your "Year In Review."

January: Well, once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more!
February: I am in a particularly foul mood as of late, for a number of reasons that I don't want to get into in a public entry, especially since — as always — I am keenly aware of the fact that this is the first entry for the month, and thus subject to the "End of Year First Lines Meme."
March: April may be the cruelest month, but February was kind of a bitch.
April: Between being sick and a host of other crap, I've once again fallen out of the habit of posting.
May: I've been hiding under a rock, which means I have abandoned LJ once again.
June: As I may have mentioned previously, every morning at 6:00 a.m., I am awakened by what I call "The Alarm Claw."
July: The new Old 97's record is out today and I can't wait to have it playing on an endless loop for the rest of the summer.
August: A week or so ago, a friend started a topic on Twitter: What if George R. R. Martin wrote YA / Children's books?
September: Well, so much for keeping up with LJ.
October: Here it is, suddenly a month or more later.
November: Happy World Vegan Day, everybody!
December: Earlier in the week, I overheard someone on the bus say, "Bye, TTYL!"

I'm so meta about this meme. I may have to stop doing it, because I'm always thinking about it at the beginning of each month or whenever I get around to posting that month. :)

Happy World Vegan Day, everybody! Start of World Vegan Month. Find out more!

Well, so much for keeping up with LJ. Don't worry, you haven't missed all that much.

This is an actual exchange I just had with my mom:

Mom: "I can't believe they named their child Stark."
Me: "You mean like Ned Stark?"
Mom: "No. S-T-A-R-K, like the bird that delivers babies."
Me: "That's a STORK. With an O."

I was immediately compelled to create the following:

( Muahah )
Thank you, I will be here all week.

As I may have mentioned previously, every morning at 6:00 a.m., I am awakened by what I call "The Alarm Claw." In addition to lovingly applying his claws to my face, Chip basically starts to do his best impression of a mountain goat by bouncing repeatedly onto my head. If I scrunch down to hide under the covers and Chip can't scoop me out, he goes over and starts to do the same thing to invisiblebf until the latter roars out something like, "Get up and feed the cats!" except with a few more expletives.

Meanwhile, Sprat just sits patiently and quietly nearby, supporting the wall in the way that he does. He has only tried to use The Alarm Claw on me once and it was more of an "Alarm-Purr." We like to pretend that Chip "deputized" Sprat to give it a shot, but Sprat just didn't pass muster. Maybe it's a very complicated game of "Good Cat, Bad Cat" that they're playing with me... I'm not sure. In any case, I'm not willing to give up my glorious nighttime kitty cuddles, not even for a good night's sleep. Besides, if we close the door, Chip claws at it relentlessly and makes piteous squeaking noises. Thus I live with The Alarm Claw as a fact of life.

So that's all well and good, except a few days ago, Chip decided that 6 was too late for breakfast and started applying The Alarm Claw at 5:00 a.m.! Perhaps this was revenge for the fact that we were gone for three days and my mom came and fed them at odd times (certainly never at 6:00 a.m.!). For the first two days, I alternated hiding under the covers, throwing Chip off the bed, and saying "NO" in firm voice, but all these pitiful attempts to get a few more minutes of sleep failed miserably. This morning, however, invisiblebf had had enough. After Chip jumped onto his face at 5:05 or so, he got up and ejected both cats from the room. Before closing the door, he cleverly placed two big pillows against it as a barrier to prevent Chip from scratching at it. Ah, blissful sleep...

It was 6:30 when we woke up next. "I guess I'll go ahead and feed them," I mumbled, stumbling to the door and opening it. The pillow barrier had held up beautifully and both cats were sitting to one side of it, gazing up at me with grave reproach. Also in front of the pillows: three dark lumps of poo on the floor. Nooooo! Well, at least I didn't step in it.

"I'm telling you," I said to invisiblebf, "Chip wore a satisfied look. Like: yeah, THAT's what I think about you and your pillows and closed doors and opposable thumbs." "Chip would never do that," invisiblebf replied, "It's my fault. I locked him away from his litter box and he didn't want to use Sprat's."

I was ready to stay grumpy, but then Chip jumped up on my pillow and put his paws around my neck and purred me back to sleep. All was forgiven.

Between being sick and a host of other crap, I've once again fallen out of the habit of posting. To bring myself back to the fold, here is a meme. I was tagged by thimble_kiss and now I have to tag a bunch of you.

People who have been tagged must write the answers on their blog and replace any question they dislike with a new, original question. Tag eight people. Don't refuse to do that. Don't tag who tagged you. Fantastic! I tag people who I know like to do memes: artemis_rich, bluesilverkdg, burningempires, curlicue, emmiepie, segerquist, spatterdash, and yoshio. Go to it! :) Chop chop.

( 17 Questions )

April may be the cruelest month, but February was kind of a bitch. So hopefully things will normalize soon and then I can procrastinate things like the Virtues meme just because I'm lazy, not because I'm dealing with stressful RL crap!

Again, this is a placeholder post because I'm always thinking about that "first line" meme.

So I've been too busy at the Russian Festival to post the meme or really do much online. Now my paid account expired and they stripped away all my user-pics. Last time, I had some extra "legacy" user-pics due to having been a paid member for X amount of time... maybe I am misremembering it, I don't know. The point is, ugh! I can't deal with this today. I have to be at the Festival in like 20 minutes!

I thought I would post a little update about Sprat! When I rescued Sprat on May 1, he weighed a whopping and rather unfortunate 23 lbs. Sprat's current weight is...

( The dramatic tension! )