I like the name Pippin for a cat, but I'd be afraid he'd turn out to be insipidly emo and indecisive with a tendency to break out in song.

Cafe Cacao, Beth? I have eaten dinner there and it was great. If you have a sudden need for a brunch companion, do let me know.

This weekend I'm sitting around playing with my new Macbook, and maybe updating my website. Doing laundry. Trying not to stress about the fact that my house has lost 40% of its equity in the last year.

Zeek-ser

Or Xerxes?

we are meeting my sister at 9, Consuela -- join us

Aww, thanks, Beth, but I don't wanna impose on your family thing. But I bet you'll like it: it's a nice space and the food is good.

Sarameg, first off, the kitten is too, too cute. Second, he's the exact same kind of cat as Jossey! It's killing me looking at the baby pictures since I swear your cat and my cat are identical, and I don't have many of Jossey's baby pictures since I borrowed a friend's camera to take a bunch, and she never sent me the pictures.

Fair warning: Jossey is totally bonkers insane. With rabid tendencies, a big heart, a compulsion to sleep/stand/sit/lean on my shins, and a deep fascination with my hair (which he bites off, often while I'm sleeping, but usually when I'm fresh from the shower. This is a tedious habit).

Jossey was hard to name too. First off because I thought he was a girl (he was only 3 weeks when I rescued him, it was tough to tell), but for same reason names like "Daisy" just didn't seem to fit. (I desperately wanted to name a kitten Buttercup, but so far Buttercup hasn't come into my life yet.) And Jossey was too tiny for flea medicine, so I had to take him to get a flea bath, and the super nice people who took care of that for me were explaining what I needed to do: "He needs Pedialyte because he's super dehydrated. And keep feeding him from the bottle for the next few weeks. He can use this comb to get rid of whatever's left in his fur..." And I was like, "He?" And they laughed, and were like, "yeah, he." And so I went directly to the grocery store from the groomer's, and I was trying really hard to come up with boy kitten names, and I walked straight into Joss Whedon. And then we did the little dance in the aisles where we were trying to get around each other, and then we both burst into laughter. And so I was still giggling as I finally found the Pedialyte, and I was like...um, duh! Awesome name for a cat!

So the moral of the story is that sometimes you literally run smack into the perfect name for your kitten.

And the lesson to be learned is that sometimes you should rethink naming your cat after the vampire guy, since my other kitten, April, ended up living with a mysterious bloody neck wound for the next two years. Sadly, not joking.

I am frequently stupid and wasn't sure if it was my imagination but now I have threadsucked and confirmed that I am not entirely crazy (Yay!) so: has anyone heard from tommyrot in the past couple of weeks? Or is he on vacation and I missed that? Because usually he posts links to the the stuff I would post except he did it first, and lately he hasn't, and it's weird.

OK, last suggestions - Enkidu, the wild heroes companion. Picaro. (Many of the earliest novels were Picaro tales about entertaining rogues. ) And if I those don't work, I'm out of suggestions (other than herekitty).

Huh. You're right, Strega, I haven't seen him lately. Hope all is well in the land of tommyrot.

What are people doing this weekend?

You guys. You guys! I'm totally going on vacation! Because...wait for it...I finished my grant app! And! I also did laundry and dishes. I am feeling wildly accomplished.

I know I didn't have to have it done this week. But I got it done, and now I can go on vacation completely clear and caught up. And furthermore, the work that I had to do for the app catches me up on all my normal grind stuff, so I'm back current with all of that, too, like whoa.

So! Off to Flagstaff and free timeshare! Actually, it'll probably be pay timeshare, because they always try to sell us stuff even though we're ridiculously below their income thresholds. But they give us free stuff for our time, so bonus!

The SO is totally like that about the spontaneity thing. I was asking him what he wanted to do on our vacation (admittedly the middle of it is eaten up by the video shoot and concert stuff) but he equivocated. I think he wants to lie very still on the bed for the whole time.

Anyway, it'll be fun regardless. And we need the break. The summer was good, but not restful.

Enjoy Flagstaff! It's a gorgeous little town. Is it still even little?

There was a great bookstore/music store there when I occasionally haunted the area.

I remember picking up some book in French there and painfully trying to translate it while we drove down to Sedona. My French was seriously awful even at the time.