I stated to Brad that there's something inherently satisfying about coming out of a multiple-day binge of code-fu with a successful result. In this case, 'success' means that the cats are annoyed, the spouse hasn't talked to me much in a few days, and I forgot to brush my hair this morning, but I've accomplished so much code work that I find myself pleased nevertheless.

Please note that this code has been updated. See this entry for the updated version.

I almost hate to lapse back into standard recipe-making, but this is a recipe that really should be documented somewhere. Heather made this soup for us quite a few times—it was standard, comforting fare for each of us when we were sick. I had it more than once when I was so sick a year ago.

Ever have a friend that you always invite over to gatherings and dinners, partly for the company and partly because you know they'll bring that one particular dish you've really become partial to?

I only participate in ye olde Friday Five when the questions interest me. Today's questions were very interesting indeed:

1. You've just won a complete collection of movies starring one actor—what actor would you pick?
   This is a totally unfair question. Am I allowed to pick John Cusack because I think he's hot? But that would mean I'd be forced to watch Serendipity (which I've avoided) and America's Sweethearts (which I saw once, and that was enough). I guess I could say the same for Andy Garcia, too….lousy back catalogue….just mute the sound, watch, and drool. Colin Firth's yummy too, but he's got some serious crap in his back catalogue that I don't think I'd care to watch. Kevin Spacey? Too obvious…

   Hmm. Kenneth Branagh, on the strength of those modern-day Shakespeare renditions? Perhaps.

Andrew and Joy tried to explain her to me, but I've managed to forget everything about her (including her name) except for two things: the way she looks, and one of her pet peeves. "She has this thing," Andrew said with a laugh, "about butt-warmth. It just grosses her out."

Butt-warmth? What in the world? I assumed it was one of those terms that, while thoroughly confusing on first listen, made perfect and complete sense once it had been explained.

I was right: 'butt-warmth' is the perfect word to describe what her pet peeve was. If forced to define, it would be something like this:

butt-warmth, (noun): The noticeable rise in ambient temperature left behind after a person sits in a chair for a period of time, and then leaves the chair vacant for the next person.

I get asked sometimes about the kind of people I meet when I travel. Mostly because I always seem to come back with stories of the people that I didn't intend to meet, but somehow managed to bump into, anyway.

When I travel alone, I ask a lot of questions. Telling perfect strangers that you're a writer is almost tantamount to asking them for the story of their life; stand there quietly, perhaps with a pen and a piece of paper, and the world opens up to you. The next thing you know, you're sitting on a park bench with someone who formerly looked like everyone else (but who now is suddenly very interesting), and they're telling you the story of their life, their loves, and why they live where they live.

It's fascinating, and it's very, very addicting.While in Illinois, I took two day trips to Springfield. The first I devoted mostly to Lincoln-related sightseeing.

Native, lifelong southerners don't quite know what to make of snow. Snow is, of course, that mystical white stuff that seems to fall in fourteen-foot clumps onto remote places like Buffalo, New York, and the upper peninsula of Michigan. This would be a problem, except that it's a demonstrable fact that nobody (the Abominable Snowman excepted) actually lives in the UP of Michigan.

As for the eighteen people living in Buffalo, New York: you're out of luck. Have fun digging; we'll see you in August. Say hi to the polar bears on your way out, willya?Snow is inconsistent with southerners' natural states of being. We react to it like pampered house cats—when thrown outside amidst the mess, we stand there, shell-shocked, for a few minutes, and then begin twitching our hands uncontrollably to try to shake the cold stuff off. (If you've ever seen a house cat thrown outside in the snow for the first time, you know exactly what motion I'm trying to describe.)

I've added one last feature for you, my five readers: a PDA-friendly version of domesticat.net. I apologize that the entire site isn't set up with PDA goodness, but I decided to make some sacrifices in the name of common sense. Your link is here; it's using a special, PDA-friendly skin of cat.net. The front page is very, very different from the standard cat.net entry page: it's a list, by title, of the five most recent cat.net entries. I figure that if you're devoted enough to download this stuff onto a PDA, you know what you're looking for.

I will not make a declarative post.
I will not make a declarative post.
I will not….

….well, there went my resolve…I generally try to steer myself away from telling straightforward tales of the everyday on domesticat. I'm not certain why, exactly, I have such a desire to avoid a simple retelling, but I think it's because I like to think that I'm able to take a few minutes out of each and every day to lift myself out of the immediacy of the moment.

To see the bigger picture.

Tonight, I haven't managed it. It was one of those nights that I tried to help a friend resurrect a site with problems, but didn't manage my usual magic. For the second night in a row, my attempt to make a tasty dinner fell flat. I didn't get as much coding done as I wanted, nor as much housework.

Just…flat. I think maybe I've exceeded my code-and-domesticat-fu for the day.

Tenzing was the first to throw caution to the wind and creep in.

I followed behind him a moment or two later, flashlight clenched firmly in hand, and then I started howling with laughter. "Jeff! Come see! Tenzing's scoping out the computer room, and you should see the bottle-brush tail he's got!"It took Jeff a few moments to make his way to the computer room, where I shone the flashlight on Tenzing's still-puffy tail. He was crouched down, still wary, still suspicious, but his curiosity had once again gotten the better of him.

The past two days have been an interesting experience for me. Normally, I am very much a loner when it comes to the creation of websites; my modus operandi is to hole up in on overly-warm computer room with part of a bottle of wine, some music to yowl with, photoshop, and a text editor. Many hours later, either plunging blood sugar or an overwhelming need for sleep will drive me from my computer chair for sleep or sustenance.Once succor is obtained, I take a short brain break, then return for more.

The phone rang, and a very familiar number flashed up.

"Hi, dear."

"Well, I got questioned and released again, so I'm sitting around. Is there anything downtown you want me to take care of while I'm here?"

"Can't think of anything. You could call Sean at work and drop by to see him, though."

"I might just do that."Poor Jeff; he's been called for jury duty this week and can't seem to get seated on a jury, no matter how hard or honestly he tries. He's part of a jury pool of about a hundred people that have been borrowed from their workplaces for the duration of this week. Their purpose: to sit (bored) in a room, waiting for the winds of fate to force a case to trial so that a group of them can file in to a courtroom, be solemnly oathed and sworn, and then questioned momentarily before being summarily punted back to the jury pool for another go at the next available trial.

Perhaps I loaned it to Kat? Perhaps I've placed it in some not-so-obvious place? Perhaps I'm overlooking it in my desperate attempt to find it?

Where is my copy of Excession?It's all Andy's fault, you see. He pointed me to Iain Banks' Culture series well over a year ago, saying, "Find these books and read them. You'll have difficulty getting them in the States, and the British trade paperback versions are much better, but do what you must."

Summer came and went, and autumn glided in, soft and quiet like sunset. The leaves on the oaks turned neon yellow and cherry red, and then began to float down and away. Given the timing this year, it was almost as though the trees were made of American flags instead of bare twigs and branches; the more leaves fell, the more I noticed the flags.

Everywhere. I had come to take it for granted that I only saw the flags of my country by the courthouse and the nearby middle school. Every time I ventured out this fall, there were more of them, the previously-ignored symbol suddenly a commodity.

It was the bumper sticker to have. Flag ties, tie pins, earrings, shirts. What was it about eagles and the phrase "United We Stand" that made me feel alienated instead of united?

So it's a rainy, quiet Saturday afternoon (the kind that makes you want to spend your day indoors, reading or coding) and I've brought my latest little project (hello, boredelf!) up as far as I can without getting Gareth to change some file privs for me.

I eventually wandered out to the mailbox, to see if anything interesting had arrived with today's fresh infusion of junk mail. That's one thing that can be said about Netflix: I check the mail more regularly now than I did a month or so ago. Sure enough, there was a DVD from them, waiting patiently for me to claim it.It was Insomnia, a movie that's been on my 'see-it' list for quite some time now.

I had a lot of roommates during my collegiate years, and to be honest, I didn't care for most of them. Monica stands out as the only one I've kept in touch with; we were friends before we became roommates, and despite my worst (best?) shenanigans, we managed to stay friends afterward.

I emailed her this past week to tell her that one of her collegiate games has stuck with me; that I've infected others with it, and it shows no sign of stopping.At some point, just about every person who attends an American college and lives on-campus discovers one beautiful, innate truth: it's really fun to mess with the heads of your drunken college friends. It takes almost no mental effort on your part, and the rewards are so great that it's sometimes even worth staying sober at the parties, just so you can be the one to tell the stories about all your friends the next day.

I said I wouldn't write tonight. I kept my promise; by the time this will be posted, it will be morning. That's fair, is it not? (In some fashion?)

I generally don't write here when I'm troubled or upset. Partly because these moods pass, partly because I am ruled by those moods more than I care to admit, and partly because my natural reaction to 'the blues' is to retreat down deep into myself. Down, past verbose explanations and even sillier tears, to my little mental hiding place where no people, no words, can touch me.

What you can't see is that I'm writing this in the dark. I have the mini-blinds open, and outside, I can see the rain sluicing off of our roof and running into the garden. Farther away, I can't see the rain, but I can see the shimmering effect it has on the reflection from the neighbor's streetlight. It's raining hard enough that I can hear it over Jeff's computer; in the master bedroom it is, probably, quite loud indeed.

You've read the site, you might've even met the woman, now you can take the test to figure out how well you know me. I put in a few easy ones, but I also put in a few that aren't exactly obvious unless you really know me well.

Have fun, or something.

In a vain attempt to make myself look organized, I thought I'd undertake a three-day cleaning project in my kitchen. Day One would involve the reorganization of my spice collection and the cleaning of the stove and surrounding areas. Day Two would involve the cleaning of the rest of the counters.

(Implied: that I'd clean up, tidy, and put away the various messes that were ON said counters.)Day Three would be the tackling of the kitchen table.

Over the past couple of years, I've really begun to hate commercial radio. Here's why. In honor of my spouse's engineering trade, let's do some numbers.

Courtesy of Heather:

1. What cologne or perfume do you wear?
   Chanel No. 5. It's my one indulgence.
2. What cologne or perfume do you like best on the opposite sex?
   Actually, I prefer nothing at all. Since I'm pretty sensitive to smells, I prefer people to smell like…people. There's a difference between smelling like yourself and, well, smelling. I think you get it.
3. What one smell can you not stomach?
   Skunks.
4. What smell do you like that others might consider weird?
   I love the smell of bookstores. They have this wonderful paper/dust/age smell that's wonderful. Such a powerful thing, memory…
5. How do you plan to spend your weekend?
   

This code has been updated. See this entry for the newest version.

In its current form, Greymatter (which I use on domesticat.net) cannot file entries into categories, because there is no such variable. The most common workaround is to post under different author names.

The phrase "Wouldn't it be nice if…" gets me in a lot of trouble.

It starts nibbling at you around track 5: he's building up to something here, but you can't figure out what it is. It doesn't focus until halfway through track 6 of CD 1; probably because you're busy and not really paying much attention to the sonic hints he's giving.

The results from the 'friend quiz' test have been an almost endless source of amusement for me. I originally posted about the test last Wednesday; I left the entry on the main page for a few days so the more infrequent cat.net readers would get a chance to take it.

Andy and Geof both scored 90, and it got worse from there. I've had great fun ribbing Jeff about missing a question that even he admits he knows the answer to. As he put it, "I just didn't read all the answers…"So, without further blathering, the answers to last week's quiz:

Who nicknamed me 'domesticat'?
a. Andrew
b. Monica
c. Brad
d. Jeff
e. Danno

The about page for this site would've helped a few of you…

If I return to school, what will I study?
a. Classical Literature
b. Philosophy
c. Creative Writing
d. German
e. French

"Five?" he said, somewhat incredulously. "You have five designs sitting on your computer right now? Why don't you actually finish one of them?"

Not a bad idea, that. Therefore, I present skin number fourteen, "ironworks." It's definitely for CSS-capable browsers. If you're interested, wander over to the skins page and take a look.

Who knows, maybe I'll finish the other four unfinished designs, too. Post comments if you run into any problems, or (better yet) can confirm happiness in browsers aside from IE6 and Mozilla.

Can be made into butterscotch or chocolate peanut clusters. I like both. Recipe courtesy of Jeff's mother.Butterscotch or chocolate peanut clusters

½ cup Peter Pan smooth or creamy peanut butter*
1 cup semi-sweet chocolate or butterscotch pieces
1 cup salted peanuts, whole

Funny, I've never made this one; I just stole the recipe from Jeff's mother back at Thanksgiving. It's been sitting in my inbox ever since, begging to be posted. I've adored pecan pie ever since the first time my grandfather took me down to the pecan orchard to gather pecans that my grandmother turned into a pie that very same day.

Some foods just get better as you get older.Pecan pie

3 eggs, beaten
½ cup sugar
1 cup dark corn syrup
¼ tsp salt
1 tsp vanilla
¼ cup melted butter
1 cup pecans
unbaked pie shell

We were too young to rent this particular movie, but we looked old for our age, and we knew that if we just didn't giggle or make spectacles of ourselves, we'd be fine.

It helped that we had Kerri's mother's movie-rental card, which would allow us to rent anything in the store. We had wandered around the store, browsing the stacks of movies for rent. We didn't have anything in particular we wanted to see, but it was Saturday, and we wanted to watch something.For some reason, approximately 90% of all movie titles start with the letters R, S, or T, and that's where we spent hmost of our browsing time. We'd hold up movies to each other, soliciting opinions, but they'd all be struck down for one reason or another.

We spotted it then, hidden in plain view; a simple, black box. Kerri looked at me quizzically and said words that were such incredible understatements that I'm surprised the world didn't cave in on us right then and there:

I've known, and I haven't told you.

Not because I don't want to, but maybe because I haven't known how. Maybe because saying it makes it true, makes it real, turns it from something I've just read and kept to myself into something that is actually happening.

I've known for the past day or so that my father needed to go to the hospital for a biopsy. Where it was to be performed, my mother didn't say. Not knowing where, exactly, the biopsy was needed, bothered me.

I just got another email from my mother. Dad's going to have a PET scan, and then they're going to do biopsies on his lungs, his liver, and his pancreas. Russell—Mom's cousin, and Mom and Dad's GP—has told Mom that he thinks it is some kind of inflammation, although he does not know what.

Cancer is also a possibility.

I hate even saying it. The only thing uglier than the word is the condition itself.

As Mom said, if that's what it is, we'll talk about it when the time comes.

Phone call from my mother: it's confirmed. My father has pancreatic cancer. The biopsy this afternoon will determine how bad it is, and whether or not it has spread.

Plan B begins now.

Today's Friday Five questions are about scars and injuries…

1. Have you ever had braces? Any other teeth trauma?
Heck yeah. My front teeth crossed, and my back teeth were worse, so I got braces in an attempt to give me a bit more normal of a smile (not to mention correcting a problem I had with a slipped disc in my jaw). They took enamel off of my molars, but I do like my smile a lot better now.

2. Ever broken any bones?
My right wrist, twice. The first time by falling while flying a kite on a wet day. The second time was before my senior year of high school—I fell out of a lofted bed. I'll tell that story sometime.

3. Ever had stitches?
Thankfully, no.

4. What are the stories behind some of your [physical] scars?
I have a one-inch scar on my chin from where I fell down in the bathtub when I was four. Oh, and I have tons of chickenpox scars. Boring, eh?