A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

She let me pick her up yesterday and was very mellow about it, even purry. I was really surprised! And we play chase-each-other-around games sometimes.

OTOH I don't think she cleans herself very well and I have to wipe her butt for her sometimes. Frowny. Why do I end up with all the poopy cats?

She's here through the rest of this month. I don't think that her getting used to me will cause her to not flip out at seeing my mom again.

The drive back from Maine on Monday was uneventful, but for a nice discovery. I listened via iPod to the entirety of Hard 'N Phirm's Horses and Grasses, which I bought last year after falling in love with the video for their "Pi" song, but didn't really give a full listen to. I mean, it's a novelty album, and I haven't been in the mood to sit and listen to 40.3 minutes of yuk-yuk since the days when getting up early on Sunday for the Dr. Demento show was the high point of my week. But I'll make an exception for drive-time entertainment.

The album is a mix of nerdy-cool catchiness ("Pi", "The Carbon Cycle"), style-parodies of various non-nerdy American music genres (including "Rodeohead", a grand-ole-opryized medley of Radiohead lyrics), and at least three songs that spend 95 percent of their time setting up for the last-two-seconds punchline. (One song is entirely in Spanish and I'm too lazy to Google a translation but I bet it falls into this category.) The latter group's a little weak but the whole is actually a gem of a novelty album and I'm glad I finally listened to the whole thing.

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Tuesday evening I found myself playing board games with pheromone and company. I've actually been running into Ms. P somewhat often lately, but I have not seen much of (what I think of as) the "Elboids" social circle since, eh, around the time I moved into my current apt in 2003, really. It was nice to see some familiar faces and catch up, even a little.

I won a game of Target, taught Metro and the Icehouse game Pikemen to people, and got re-aquianted with Cities & Knights of Catan. I did pretty well at it and I like it OK, but I can now confirm like vanilla Settlers betterer.

(Hm, I wonder pheromone may be among the few all-around gamer's gamers I know, good at the whole field, a la temvald and Shmike...)

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Shadow's doing better. Last night classicaljunkie visited and Shadow became very happy, actually. She twirled around and was very social and talkative the whole time. I think she may like girls more'n dudes.

No guests tonight, though, and the cat's been curled up on my bed all evening, barely acknowledging me. At least she's not squirrelly and hostile like she was two nights ago. I guess she's done with that.

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Oh, also saw The Departed. Enjoyed it, for all its veering between thuggishness and cornballery. The sympathetic character was actually the worst psychologist I've ever seen (I think she was supposed to be at least pretty good at it), and I swear that at least one of the many splatterhappy scenes was a Monty Python homage, somehow.

The movie's been playing as a second-run feature at the Somerville Theater for weeks and it still filled the cinema on a Thursday night. I guess everyone likes to see Jack Nicholson riding the Red Line. But dude, you can't use a cell phone under Park Street. I mean, duh.

My dad is gonna be OK. While waiting to see the specialist again, he'd been put on a specific diet-n-exercise regimen, and his condition has improved. They say that he's in no danger of losing the leg now, and my parents have been cleared to go on vacation in Florida next month. They haven't been down south in years so they're very pleased with this.

I'll be taking care of Shadow while they're away. There was some weirdness with Ricky spontaneously wanting to take the cat up to Bangor instead, and he phoned me and asked if he could do that. I had to tell him repeatedly that it'd be a better thing to talk about it as a family during my Christmas visit. I think mom has since rewired him, though, to hear her tell it.