The Kitten Takes Up Half the Bed
Woke up this morning on TheMan’s side of the bed because some TinyCat had spread out perpendicular across the bed with both sets of feet as far out as she could get them. For a 6ish pound cat she can take up a good 3 feet of bed when she goes long.
Fortunately she is easy to bundle back up to a reasonable 1 foot diameter cat ball, even if she isn’t particularly pleased with the idea. Tycho, on the other hand, sleeps in a proper cat ball…although he goes much more pudding cat than Tess so he’s harder to shift around.
The Hugo nominees are out (WOOO!) so expect some Hugo craziness to abound. So far, I’ve read 2 of the millionty entries and only one of them is a Novel (The 100,000 Kingdoms). The other is a non-related work (I…have no idea. I should look that up) so I expect I’ll be doing that category as well this year. Nominations are due at the end of July so hold on tight, it’s about to get bumpy!
This leads me to my recent reading, which was Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death?. I had my ILL minion go get me it because I don’t have enough books I haven’t read yet piled up on the floor; I need to borrow books from other libraries too! Yeah…I don’t know, I think this interlibrary loan thing is a sickness. Anyway, the library wanted it back today so I stayed up last night reading it. Then I started humming Olitunji tunes in my head, because the book is set in Africa (sorta) and Olitunji was an African drummer who recorded a bunch of kicking tunes. Tunes I had used for incidental music in a play I did sound for, which reminded me of another African based play I worked on in college which then reminded me that I still had the library book.
Yup. I wound up with a library book from a play that I did tech work on way back in the early 90s. How? I’m not quite sure but I know I didn’t check it out. Perhaps I borrowed it from the person who did, perhaps I was given it to hold on to (which I have, BTW so all you people out there who need someone to hold on to something, I’m your holder), maybe it just wound up in my bag for reasons unknown and now lost in time. The point is, I’m not sure I realized I had the book until several many years later when I wasn’t living near the U anymore. So I stuck it on my shelf and promptly forgot about it. Ten years later, I got a job with the U and of course immediately returned the book. Well…no, not really. By that time I had completely forgot I had the thing so it just moved from apartment to apartment where it continued to live filed neatly among my books.
This morning around 4am I woke up and thought, “Wait…I still have that library book, don’t I?” I didn’t even remember what it was called or who wrote it, but I knew is was smaller than a hard cover, bound in library binding and black. I was thought it might live toward the beginning of the alphabet as well, but that was not a sure thing. I scanned the books anyhow after my shower and lo! There in the Hs was Les Blancs. It’s 18 years, 4 months and 26 days overdue.
I e-mailed my Grad minion and explained the situation and asked if I should just drop it off or if I needed to actually hand it to someone. They don’t much care, they are just happy to have it back.
In other totally non-related news, I do believe I’m going to try and make jellybean cookies tonight. Will they be good? I do not know. Will the jellybeans do strange things in the dough or the oven? Quite possibly. Will it be an adventure in cooking? Most certainly.
2010: I still think it’s sort of a pain to walk in and out of a beaded curtain but wow did that curtain totally go with the decor.
2009: We ran out of drinks around the intermission and the snack pickings by the end of the show were very slim indeed.
2008: You can imagine that this did not go over well with Cranky McStupidHead. People were not RESPECTING his AUTHORITAY!!!
2007: JSFR: Kame Rice Crunch Crackers (unsalted)
2006: We pulled in 271 unique Smithee people last year but only 237 this year. Ninja slackering? Hmmm!
2005: You could spill a cup of coffee two floors away and it would somehow wind up on my desk today. Le sigh.
2004: I get to do something different today, I get to proctor a full exam. Whooo!
2003: Looks like today’s proctoring is a laptop exam. I would so fail one of those. I type about 30 words a minute.