Occasional kvetch

The Woman wanted to know why I sleep so much during the day, sometimes up to seven hours, breaking only for lunch, and usually on her bed or the easy chair in the living room.

It's because I have a night job.

The other night, about 9 PM, when the Woman went into the bathroom to shower, she turned on the light, which, she says, is the only reason she didn't trip over me.

People have such poor night vision.

I was lying on the rug, staring at the base of the sink. However, since it was getting crowded, I moved to the small space between the radiator and the sink base. Not nearly as comfortable, but private.

The Woman left the door ajar, in case I wanted to leave when the room got steamy.

Not a chance.

At 11 PM the man headed towards the bathroom to take his shower. Fortunately, I didn't have to stay for another steaming, since I had the mouse in my mouth and could take it downstairs.

They told me I was a good girl, which they realized I couldn't acknowledge, since the mouse was still alive.

They decided to just leave me alone.

"You go down first in the morning," the Woman said, and left a note for the Boy, who was already asleep, warning him to watch his step if he went downstairs during the night.

The Man came downstairs this morning to feed me. After breakfast, I brought him the dead mouse.

"Good girl!" he said.

Actually, it was only part of the mouse: no head. They figure I may have decapitated the mouse giving the killing bite, and the Man said maybe I ate the head. The Woman pointed out that I have never been known to eat a mouse, even when I first came to the house as a half-grown, half-starved kitten.

She has been watching her step and carefully examining every chair before sitting down. She has told the Man to vacuum around the dining room.

So where is the mouse's head? I'll never tell!

( My portrait (for ninety days) )

Got the battery powered radio from Daughter's room. Found 6 D batteries. No news about blackout. Put bass spkrs back, tripping over cat. Posting by phone.

The predicted thunderstorm arrived. It's pretty much gone now, but so the electricity on the whole block... &, soon after, the next block too.

I've been using Google documents to be able to track and log my work. It's fairly nifty, though changing text styles after typing or pasting can be rather confusing.

They keep announcing new features. Having had a planned network outage at the office yesterday, I was just following their links for the new "work offline" feature. The link leads you right off to their offline help page, which begins like this:

Offline

• Overview

  • Security precautions while working offline
• Offline error indicators
• Finding your offline settings
• What is Google Docs Offline?
• Finding your version of Google Gears
• How does offline work?
• Enabling Google Docs offline
• Syncing docs for the first time
• Working offline
• How to tell when you're working offline
• Saving changes while working offline

What's wrong with this picture?...

A friend who lives in West Philadelphia writes:

I'm intending to volunteer at the upcoming Philadelphia Folk Festival and am trying to arrange a ride.  Know anyone who might be going?  I'm also trying to go up to the festival grounds this Sunday for volunteer orientation, so either one would be great.

Anybody?

30 minutes from now, 10:56 EDT (Monday 0256 GMT)

Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.

1. Reply to this post and I'll assign you a letter.
2. List 5 songs you like that start with that letter.
3. Post them to your journal with these instructions.

I've done this meme before, but I still like it, and so when it came around again I put up my hand and browngirl assigned me "A! Aleph and Alpha also count. :D"

•     An die Freude, Schiller's Ode to Joy, as in Beethoven's 9th Symphony
•     As Time Goes By, from "Casablanca" ("You must remember this...")
•     À la Claire Fontaine
•     Acts of Creation, by Cat Faber
•     Altariello Nainië Lóriendessë, Galadriel's lament in Lórien, better known by its last word, Namárië [edit: to Tolkien's own tune, as used by Donald Swann on his LP "The Road Goes Ever On"]
  

   

dunkelpig sent me this. But as I was just coming upstairs at the time, she read it aloud to me as well. I like it.

The New York Times
July 13, 2008
Everybody’s Business
Lessons in Love, by Way of Economics
By BEN STEIN

AS my fine professor of economics at Columbia, C. Lowell Harriss (who just celebrated his 96th birthday) used to tell us, economics is the study of the allocation of scarce goods and services. What could be scarcer or more precious than love? It is rare, hard to come by and often fragile.

My primary life study has been about love. Second comes economics, so here, in the form of a few rules, is a little amalgam of the two fields: the economics of love. (I last wrote about this subject 20 years or so ago, and it’s time to update it.)

•In general, and with rare exceptions, the returns in love situations are roughly proportional to the amount of time and devotion invested. The amount of love you get from an investment in love is correlated, if only roughly, to the amount of yourself you invest in the relationship.

If you invest caring, patience and unselfishness, you get those things back. (This assumes, of course, that you are having a relationship with someone who loves you, and not a one-sided love affair with someone who isn’t interested.)

( the rest of it )

Needless to say, I'm sticking with my winner. :-)

From davidkevin's LiveJournal:

I just came back from 7-Eleven via my neighborhood firehouse. Y'all might think of doing the same.

I went to the 7-Eleven because it happens to be across the street from the firehouse, but you could go to any grocery or convenience store nearby. I dropped about 26 bucks on one of every flavor of Gatorade in the store and took them across the street to give to the firefighters.

[click on his name for the complete entry]

To quote myself:

Here's to those ...
...  whose charge is all our good
That the common weal may thrive

Air hostess picks up chocolate bar, wins space trip

PARIS (Reuters) - A French air hostess will become one of Europe's pioneer space tourists after picking a chocolate wrapper out of the rubbish and finding a winning number in a competition to fly to the upper reaches of the earth's atmosphere.

Mathilde Epron, 32, said she had bought a Kit Kat chocolate bar at her local supermarket but initially threw the wrapper in the bin, telling herself that "it's only others who win."

Two hours later, thinking back to the competition, she decided to try her luck and fished the wrapper out of the bin, only to find a code marked inside.

[click headline for story]


Lucky gal!

mdlbear said it in his two latest posts, here and here.

We just (an hour or so ago) got  back from Maggiano's, a very nice Italian restaurant in Center City. Some of you may know it from sf cons, since it's right across Filbert St. from the Marriott, opposite what jslove calls "Peanutbrittlehenge". The tab came to $78 for the two of us, which is a lot more than we usually spend on meals out, but this was a kind of special event: her doll club was testing the place out for their Christmas banquet. And she wanted to go.

It was a family style meal. Two appetizers, two pasta dishes, two main courses, two desserts, all served family style. Let's see...

• stuffed mushrooms; artichoke spread on crusty bread
• chicken spinach manicotti; spaghetti marinara
• chicken piccata; salmon
• huge chocolate cake; profiteroles

Seconds encouraged. OMG! Oof. And leftovers to take home; we took salmon and desserts

See the subject line.

Oh, and tonight, by schedule, I weigh myself.

dunkelpig writes:

So I'm dozing, and dreaming I am driving and about to make a right turn. I  glance one way, glance the other, and am about ready to turn, when I feel a hard  bump on my left side.

I wake up totally startled and disoriented - have I really been driving while asleep? - only to hear a "meow" in my ear.

My heartbeat has slowed down. But I'm still looking for the dent in my left side.

I bought Jhegaala but I didn't want to start it till I was done with Wizards at War. Of the latter: Wow! and Wower! (But now I have to go fill in the gaps between A Wizard Abroad and this one.)

Of the former: I'm having fun, up to Ch. 4 or so, making a lot of notes for Cracks and Shards. Also a(n apparent) typo or two. And dunkelpig agrees that while I don't need a Hungarian dictionary, if we find a decent cheap one I can buy it.

Science, faith, and everyday miracles

Andrew Silow-Carroll
NJJN Editor-in-Chief

For the 20 years we've known each other, my friend Elli and I have built a friendship on the opposite roles we like to play. He lives in Israel; I'm in galut [Diaspora]. He's the mystic; I'm the rationalist. He finds deep, even divine, significance in the seeming coincidences Jung called "synchronicities." I quote John Allen Paulos and tell him "a tendency to drastically underestimate the frequency of coincidence is a prime characteristic of innumerates" - the mathematical equivalent of illiterates.

A few weeks back he forwarded me a news item about the huge enrollments of full-time learners in Israeli yeshivot [yeshivas]. "If we can't bring the moshiach [messiah] after 19 million hours of learning....," he wrote in the subject line. True to my role, I sniped back, "Maybe if those 120,000 students applied their learning skills to science, or medicine, or alternative energy, they'd help create a world that wouldn't need moshiach, or would at least be worthy of him/her."

Neither of us is as doctrinaire as I make us sound. And I know from experience the intellectual and spiritual power of learning Torah. But I worry that a religious education can be an obstacle to a full appreciation of the human intellect, and its ability to bust through the limitations of the known to reveal the unknown. If Einstein doubts that God plays dice with the cosmos, I doubt that God would implant in us a brain of such subtlety and power, only to say, this much truth, and no further.

[click headline for article]

I subscribe to 10 Minutes of Torah, a service of Hebrew College that provides five sets of weekly mailings. The Friday series "is designed to present a diversity of editorial viewpoints from Jewish papers." This is the last three paragraphs of today's mailing, the editorial from yesterday's New Jersey Jewish News.

Not mine, but crankyinfrance's. She chews on things, like wires. She destroyed cif's laptop power supply that way a year ago. She eats threads, and tries to eat rubber bands. Feh.

in kai's blog, linked by permission

Brothel offers customers gas rebate

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A Nevada brothel is trying to stimulate business by offering free gasoline.

Clients of the Shady Lady Ranch will get a $50 gas voucher if they fork out $300 -- worth about one hour's worth of services -- at the brothel in Beatty, Nevada, 130 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

Owner James Davis said he already has had to order another $1,000 set of gas vouchers because the first $1,000 were spent in one week.

"It's rocking along. We're doing quite well. June and July historically are not big months," said Davis, who is co-owner of the brothel along with his wife Bobbi, in a telephone interview.

[click on headline for story]

‘How Many of You Expect to Die?’

By Jane Gross

Not long ago Dr. Joanne Lynn, a geriatrician who pulls no punches in her frequent critiques of America’s sorry system of end-of-life care, looked out from the dais of a Washington, D.C., ballroom at a sea of middle-aged faces: health policymakers, legislative staff, advocates for the aged and for family caregivers — an audience of experts.

“How many of you expect to die?” she asked.

The audience fell silent, laughed nervously and only then, looking one to the other, slowly raised their hands.

“Would you prefer to be old when it happens?” she then asked.

This time the response was swift and sure, given the alternative.

Then Dr. Lynn, who describes herself as an “old person in training,” offered three options to the room. Who would choose cancer as the way to go? Just a few. Chronic heart failure, or emphysema? A few more.

“So all the rest of you are up for frailty and dementia?” Dr. Lynn asked.
( the rest of the article, with graphs )

[click headline for story -- may be subscribers-only]

(thanks to tgif007)