{{{{{vw}}}}}

Calli, all best thoughts and wishes to your mom. It sounds like she is going to kick this disease's ass.

And yay for Jen going on her fabulous date! I'm hungry for more details, but I know sometimes you just want to keep the really good stuff to yourself for a while and roll around in it.

Finally, can I get a little kitty-ma? My housemate went by our apartment today (she was gone all weekend, and left me in charge of the cats), but she'd forgotten her keys, so she couldn't get in. But while she was standing in the driveway, she noticed that there was no screen on the open window in the bathroom. Yikes! And I think I had that window open nearly all weekend long, because the weather was so gorgeous. The window is covered by a curtain, and all the other windows have screens on them, so I didn't notice the missing screen and didn't think to check.

Now I'm worried that one (or more) of the cats will have gone missing by the time I get home tonight. To put it mildly, this would not be good. They are very much indoor cats, and we live on a busy street in a not-particularly-residential area. Not to mention, my housemate is about the cat-ladiest person I know, and would be hit extremely hard by the loss of one of her cats. I'm somewhat comforted by the thought that none of them escaped over the weekend, when the window was wide open. Still, I'm fretting, and it's at least an hour and a half until I can get home to check on them. wah.

cat~ma to you Kate!

One of my cats scared me to death Saturday night when he burst out of my backdoor and out of the building's backdoor.

The building door was open because my upstairs neighbor was moving and when I couldn't find him in the basement I thought for sure he was lost outside.

Luckily, after convincing me that he was long gone, he finally crept out of whatever hiding place he found and followed the sound of the cat food rattling in his dish back upstairs to my apartment.

Last one, I swear. At least for today.

Awww, so cute.

It's that time of year, when the boss sees the rate hike from the insurance company and tries to think of ways to avoid paying so much. This hobby horse is self-insurance. That's right, the company pays for everything. He's been sending out emails asking about what people actually pay.

My brain's gone into "he'll see the idiocy of this, vis a vis, Hubby and me, and he'll just pay the damned money." I've asked him what self-insurance would do to issues of pre-existing conditions and such, and he hasn't even considered it. Pay the money, John!

I'd rant about how health care needs to be changed in this country, but I don't have time luckily for everybody else.

I just made a really embarassing decimated-by-cuteness noise when I clicked on the puppy link.

OK, details about my date:

His name is Aaron. He works in IT to pay the bills but he's an actor with a degree in classical voice performance. He sang for me and it gave me goosebumps. We met when I answered his personal ad on OKCupid--I'll get over being embarassed about that eventually, I swear.. His ad really appealed to me because he said things about trying to live more compassionately and thinking that a person's purpose is to learn as much as possible all the time. We emailed a bunch and talked on the phone for a while and decided to meet up last night.

It was so nice. We were instantly comfortable with each other and the conversation flowed so easily; I love experiencing that intuitive sense of ease with someone. It made the whole evening relaxing and revealing and fun. We talked for hours, about politics and Shakespeare and art and the creation of myth and on and on and on.

It didn't hurt that he's *adorable*. And there were smoochies at the end. And we're going out again this weekend. I'm pretty stoked.

Oh that is wonderful to read Jen!

Woo! Yay Jen! Go you, with the... new thing to take up all your available time... Sigh.

Will he want to go dancing?

Kidding. Go Jen!

Erika has a new tag. Did you read the interview? You didn't say anything, and I thought you'd like it.