Yes, it’s time to take one of our cats to the vet again. Selene is chewing on one of her back paws until it hurts her; I expect it’s allergy-itching. For the moment I have some anti-itch salve for pets—all-natural stuff—I’m putting on it (she hates the smell, but it does seem to help), but I don’t want to use it too much. With our luck, after all, she’d end up allergic to it.

In this way, she and I are surprisingly alike. My husband and I often joke about it, it’s so eerie. She and I both tend to have allergic reactions to inconvenient things like medications and topical preparations, and we both become easily sensitized to things over time. We also both have asthma.

Unfortunately it’s a bad week to have to take her to the vet, as my husband has some long work hours coming up. I think we can manage some morning toward the end of the week, however. Now we just have to convince her not to chew on her foot in the meantime.

I mentioned recently that our KitchenAid stand mixer died (*sob*). Well, thankfully it was still under the extended warranty we’d gotten for it (just!), and KA has awesome customer service. Without any questions (other than what was wrong with it) they sent us a new one and had us send them the old one in the same box (at their expense). The new one’s a slightly newer model, so of course I’ll have to review it eventually. (*happy sigh*) We even had a chance to make cookies with it when we went to a friend’s on Saturday. We’ve been told our cookies may well be the best chocolate chip cookies in the world, but we have to give due credit to Shirley, the delightful food scientist who created the master recipe and all the tips we use.

We also finally had time to do some gardening this weekend. We weeded the little plot under our bay window, mulched it with pretty dark pine bark nuggets, and put in some silly-looking cockscomb annuals—furry-looking neon things in orange, red, fuschia, and gold. I think they appealed to the kid in me. I’m looking forward to being able to afford a good composter again one of these years, as well as everything I need for some good old-fashioned edible gardening (tomatoes, peppers, squash, kitchen herbs, strawberries…).

Anyway, too much to do today, too little time. I’m sure I’ll write about something interesting again in a day or two.

I’m discovering just how much work it is to change over your email address after having the same one for… umm, 7 years? 10 years? Something like that. Especially since I’m not nearly as good as I should be about keeping up with my email.
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I hate Windows.

I really do. I’ve used it before on regular PCs, and I don’t understand how so many people can take its rate of bugs, rate of crashes and vulnerability to viruses and the like as “normal” and “okay.” I’ve used a powerbook for five years now. No viruses (just using the standard included firewall, normal security settings on mail and firefox); I never had to buy a separate security program. Only rare, occasional crashes. I can leave it up for literally weeks without turning it off and it won’t die during that time.

Technorati Tags: Mac OS X, BootCamp

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Here’s the status on the books I’m currently reading:

• Writer’s Market 2007 Deluxe Edition: Mostly read; also need to evaluate the online service

• The Oldways Table (essays and recipes): About half-read; done making recipes
• College Cooking: Read; half-done making recipes
• Super Natural Cooking: Almost done reading; need to make recipes

I also have more that I haven’t started on yet.

Technorati Tags: book reviews, books, Amazon.com, reviewing, reviews

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Really, I’ll be making some blog posts and writing reviews again soon. It’s just freezing here again since our heat went out yesterday (again). It’s been a long week, so I haven’t gotten much done.

Technorati Tags: cats

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Just to recap, our fun with our oil company started this summer when our A/C went out. We were planning to “fire” them after our current contract for oil runs out this year anyway (three strikes is definitely plenty), but today we found a fourth strike.
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Ah, Valentine’s Day. We never plan anything momentous; we sometimes try to do something nice, like some special chocolates or a nice dinner, but that’s about it. Otherwise we try to avoid the stress of worrying about it. Yesterday… yesterday was interesting.

Technorati Tags: Valentine’s Day

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Sorry for the lack of output this week. I’ve been off-and-on feeling cruddy, which makes it all too easy to let myself get sucked into falling asleep or playing with the Warcraft expansion. I’m reading my next review book (The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Getting Published), and next week hopefully I’ll put together a handful of new shirt designs–certainly we have plenty lined up!

The following obituary is reprinted from the Beckett Funeral Home website. It’s the obituary for my aunt’s husband. Sadly I never got to meet him, as they were only married for a few years when he was struck by brain cancer. Many of the following, quite amazing, details are things we never knew about him, because he was a modest man who didn’t brag of his accomplishments. Most of what I knew was that he made my aunt happy, and really, that’s all that was important. I might not have met him, but for that reason I’ll miss him.
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Vacation starts tomorrow for me and goes through next week, so don’t expect to hear much from me around here.
I gather cafepress has been on the receiving end of a bunch of DoS attacks this week, so also don’t be surprised if you have trouble getting to gamers’ heaven or caffeinated chicanery. It sucks that someone would screw over every single person running a shop there or trying to shop for last-minute gifts there, but there are always asses in the world happy to ruin someone’s day.

Have a merry holiday-of-your-choice, folks! Best wishes to everyone!