Thank you for all of the wishes. Ironically (or typically), Lori and I spent our anniversary apart -- she is in Joshua Tree for a class she teaches and I was presenting at a conference in San Jose.

DH and I will be celebrating our third on the 23rd. Us doppelkats have to stick together.

WORD! doppelkats UNITE!

Beverly, I love sharing a celebratory day with you too!

My sleeping schedule has been totally fucked up since I got sick.

Anyway, I thought I was the king of the gratuitous mentioning of penguins, but I gotta give props to my man Roger Ebert - check out the first two paragraphs of his review of Constantine :

No, "Constantine" is not part of a trilogy including "Troy" and "Alexander." It's not about the emperor at all, but about a man who can see the world behind the world, and is waging war against the scavengers of the damned. There was a nice documentary about emperor penguins, however, at Sundance this year. The males sit on the eggs all winter long in like 60 degrees below zero.

Keanu Reeves plays Constantine as a chain-smoking, depressed demon-hunter who lives above a bowling alley in Los Angeles. Since he was a child, he has been able to see that not all who walk among us are human. Some are penguins. Sorry about that. Some are half-angels and half-devils.

[link]

Hee. Penguins are comedy gold.

I am also wrongly awake. I should be sleeping now because I have to travel in the morning, but I am awake, because I was lying in bed and I was hit in the muse with a drabble. So I had to come post it. But now I am wide awake. Bet you any money I don't fall asleep until, like, four.

I think I just saw Colin on my teevee. It's very surreal.

Lifetime? Did he catch the bad guy?

I'm about to head toward bed, but before I go I have a mystery for the hivemind. Maybe someone will have a brilliant idea by the time I'm awake and online again:

Our microwave, which is far from old (I think we got it in 2002), just died. DH put in a bag of popcorn, punched in the appropriate programming, and hit start. At that point, it just died. It didn't come on, and the clock/cook time screen went dead. We've checked the outlet, and it's not the problem.

So. Fixable, or time to go to Target and hope there's a President's Day sale on microwaves?

Wow. It is pouring down rain. Luckily, LA loves me enough that it let up a bit so that I could walk to my apartment in only a light rain, instead of a remarkable downpour. So I got to continue to use my pretty pink umbrella, but I wasn't in immediate danger of just being washed away. On the other hand, the downpour made for sidewalk flooding that was a good five inches deep in places, with a strong current, and my feet (up to mid-shin) were totally icily frozen by the time I got to my apartment, and could change out of my socks, shoes, and pants. Exciting stuff. No, really.

It's raining here, too. By morning, it will be a frozen mix, just in time for me to hit the road. And then the forecast calls for rain all week, plus freezing rain and snow just in time for me to come back. So should be fun!

But we need the moisture, so I should stop bitching.

The sheer volume of rain really was impressive. My windshield wipers couldn't keep up, and Alibelle got to experience the interesting thing my car does when it hydroplanes.

Soooo much rain. But I don't think we need the moisture, do we? It's been raining like crazy for forever. However, I don't mind it. I just think the majority of it should limit itself to the hours between 12 am and 6 am, as it would be the most comfortable for me.

I'm looking at your cd, Lee. It's taunting me.

And now I think I'm going to go to sleep, since I'm suddenly very tired. Which is understandable, when you realize I've been awake a whole eleven hours.

I know, it's nuts. We've been getting rain for days. I don't know what to do with that. Surely there's some big barrel we can keep it in, for when we're all summer-droughty?

Yeah, I should sleep, too. Wonder if I will?

Oh! Last night I had this funny meta-dream. I dreamt that I was in a classroom, taking a class, and I thought to myself, "No wonder why I always dream I'm in class -- I always am in class." And then I woke up this morning and realized that, no, I am not ever in class, and I still need to wonder why I always dream I'm in class. I think my subconscious is trying to justify itself.

Maybe I'll go to sleep now and try to see if I can turn the lights on and off so I can lucid dream. Not that I ever could, but Chris in Northern Exposure did, so it must be possible.