Storm season is back amongst us again, blowing through in a succession of muggy afternoons and dark-grey clouds. It's later than usual this year, having decided to wander in and get revved up only towards the end of spring. Several nights this week, Jeff has had to shut off the weather radio multiple times.

Enough of those odd little musings. Tonight's storms have done their damage and moved on, and we had nothing this time except a lot of wind and more rain. Even skittish Edmund slept through it, so it definitely was one of the weaker storms we've had this week.

I've been toying with the idea of giving myself a bit of a mini-vacation from posting here for a few days. I know that won't happen, though; the best way to guarantee that something entry-worthy will happen tomorrow is for me to definitively announce tonight that I want to take a few days off. So consider this an officially wishy-washy statement of saying something like this:"I really want to take a day or two off from this, really I do, I swear, but I know that by saying anything to you that I've totally jinxed things."

(Looking for the version that does popups based off of thumbnail images? Go to entry 870) for that script.)

Lynda posted a comment on my original popup-script post, giving me some excellent ideas for improving my existing popup script.

"We've got hot dogs available for fifty cents at the concession stand. Hot dogs, fifty cents, come and get them while they last. We've also got hot fresh pizza, a dollar a slice. Come and get it while it's fresh…"

Despite bricks, insulation, and drywall, we can hear the noises from the nearby softball field. If our house is quiet at the time, we can make out most of what's being said over the complex's public-address system. When we first moved in, our neighbor joked that it was difficult, some Saturday mornings, to keep from turning off his lawnmower and wandering over to the softball field, spare change in hand.

Ingredients:

1 Star Trek:TNG apéritif
2 fingers Oban
1 (each) chaser Buffy and Notting Hill

Result: one very amusing evening. Day Three of vacation for the worn-out engineer, in fact. By 9:30, Jeff was laughing at all of my jokes, not just the funny ones.We've gotten a little spoiled in the past few weeks; our exposure to TV commercials is fairly limited now that we have a TiVo to speed through them. Tonight we picked up on the tail end of Notting Hill, and had no buffer to zap through commercials.

So he (see Oban) and I (see mental tiredness from finishing new cat.net skin) watched commercials, and made fun of them with the best middle-of-the-evening gusto we could muster.

Until we got to the inexplicable commercial, that is. Seemingly unconnected images flashed by. It took us a few seconds before we both realized that every shot was zeroing in on the hindquarters of the people we were watching.

"What is this, a butt commercial?"

"No idea."

Soon: sneak out early, as the light creeps over the horizon, to steal away in a little silver car and chase the sun as it sprints its way across the sky.

Destination: I wouldn't call it unknown, but I'd also not call it common knowledge. We'll take our shorts and our ballcaps, and pack CDs for the CD player. We'll take our new copy of 'Settlers of Catan' and perhaps a book or two. We'll steal away, just for a few days. Jeff's going to catch up on his sleep. I'm going to work on my sunburn. (Ooop! Must not forget sunblock!)

"What is it with pet stores? I swear, don't any of them ever stay in business?" she asked as she began dialing another pet store (either the seventh or thirty-seventh she'd tried).

We all shrugged: Jess, Jeff, and I. Not a clue was to be had amongst the three of us. This question was so far out of our area of expertise that it wasn't even worth opening our mouths. Meanwhile, Sarah dialed yet another number. This time, she'd found a still-existing pet store with an employee that was available to speak with her."Hi. I was wondering if you have dwarf bunnies?"

At least I had a few days of warning that things might not be quite what I had imagined. A crawfish festival for charity with a five-dollar donation—surely, there wouldn't be a lot of publicity for this? After all, when I bought that John Mayer CD a couple of months ago, nobody had heard of him…although I'd gotten hints that his (small) fanbase was (extremely) devoted…

"Close your eyes and picture a watch hanging in the air, dangling right at the level of your eyes. As your eyes focus on the watch, it begins to move back and forth, the first small arcs growing longer and smoother. Your eyes track the movements and adjust to them, until it seems that it is not the watch that is moving, but instead the room rocking around the watch.

Ever wonder what people talk about while they're working on code? We're not nearly as mysterious as you might think. Generally we're bored, want lunch, wish our cats would stop pestering us, or really wish we could get something else done instead of what we're doing right now.

Every now and then, though, a conversation goes just a little off the deep end. Just keep in mind that Gareth owns omnipotent.net, the machine that domesticat.net (among many others) lives on.

In my next life, I'm going to be like Brad, who says, "I usually don't bother [doing pseudocode], or else I do extremely general pseudocode. I usually find it's not worth my effort." But, unfortunately, I've proven time and time again that I'm just not capable of carrying large amounts of logic in my head all at once—and keeping it all straight—so I've been going through the plans for Quarto, a page at a time, and creating pseudocode for them.

It explains my lack of (and lousy) entries over the past few days, and I fear will explain the lack of (and lousy) entries for the next week or so. I have to admit that it's hard to write comprehensible English when your brain is trying to think in these terms:

(random snip taken from the mockup for the add/edit entry page)

if (!$invalid_date), save entry. Set ($entry_saved) on completion..

Weekends at Brian and Suzan's are always interesting. Always. The conversations are the best part. After all, have you ever had this conversation over good barbecue before?

Brian, Suzan, and Jeff are currently curled up in the living room, watching Cowboy Bebop. Me, I'm sitting back here in the back of the house, tapping quietly on an unfamiliar keyboard. It's such a shame, really; I've tried my hardest to like anime and I just can't, so I'm hiding and writing while they watch TV.

In some strange, bizarre way, I actually like driving on the freeways of Atlanta. Spaghetti Junction. The Vehicle Accelerator. The Watermelon 400. I can now officially say that I've done 'em all.

Yearly appointment for feline rabies shots? Check.
Appointment for eye exam? Check.

Blatant avoidance of things that need doing? Check.So, for those of you playing the home game, here's an update…Quarto now stands at eighteen separate files. Well, twenty if you add in the one that I've got partially done and the one that I've not even touched yet. Let's call it 18.5/20…I think I've earned a little bit of generosity, no?

Okay. Maybe I haven't. But throw the myopic a bone, eh?

The other bits are starting to fall into place. Gareth (may his l33t coding skillz be praised) is working on a conversion script for my files. Brad has indicated willingness to contribute a second script assuming his (very reasonable) bribe price is met.

The rest is up to me.

Yet another HeatherRecipe™. I confess that this is one of only two ways that I can stand to eat Brussels sprouts. (The other way: scads of cheese sauce.) No matter how the sprouts are prepared, I can still taste the underlying bitterness, and it's a bit of a turn-off. Jeff, however, loves the taste of Brussels sprouts, and would probably greatly enjoy it if I made this recipe more often.

'armed with will and determination / and grace too' - tragically hip

Every one of you who started laughing at the thorough inappropriateness of that comment may now, quite simply, hush, because Ms. Domesticat has a whole bowlful of smack-fu for you. Well, that is, as long as the bowlful of smack-fu is applied with my right hand…See, here's [one of] my problem[s] with the world. Everybody else gets the good injuries. You know, the war stories. Sean's got good, manly rollerblading stories of doom. Kat and Kara have the equivalent in soccer stories. Most of my friends are like that.

In comparison, it's hard to thrust your fingers in your belt loops and say nonchalantly, "Yeah, you know how I've broken bones? The first time I was flying a kite, and the second time I fell out of bed…oh, shut up already."

If you only knew how close I came to adding yet another stupid mishap to those two tonight…

Well, after a thoroughly harrowing and frustrating day, I believe I am now prepared to offer some silly and thoroughly obvious conclusions about my day:

1. My finger is not broken.
2. Kitties on tranquilizers are funny.
3. I still hate eye exams.
4. Bifocal lenses are spendy.

So, let's skip all the boring stuff and go right to what you want to hear about. You know it, baby—more about the "I got up to get some ice cream and all I got was this jammed finger" story.

You know what's really bizarre? My left middle finger has swollen up enough so that it's actually larger around than my thumb. It's fascinating, in a bizarrely morbid sort of way. It's bruising around the joint a bit, and I have about 25% of normal range-of-motion. But you know what the weirdest thing of all is?

(Of course you don't; that's why you read domesticat. That, and because reading my words makes you feel so utterly normal.)

So, anyway. Enough boring retellings of my day. What weirdnesses did you encounter on your little blue planet today?

Hey, quit giving me that weird look. No matter how tiresome this entry is, it's far, far better than my recounting the fact that when I was picking out produce at the supermarket today, the muzak got switched over to the 'disco' feed. Nothing like picking out oranges and romaine lettuce to the disco beat of "Never Knew Love Like This Before."It's not that I live on my own little otherwise-uninhabited planet, see? It's just that this particular planet's silliness makes me want to hole up and write deadpan little love sonnets to it.

Think about it—what's our planet contributed to the galaxy? If a group of bored interstellar travellers were roaming around the galaxy, trying to figure out what planet to visit next, what would they come here to see? Go ahead, ask me:

"So why would bored interstellar travellers bother to come to Earth?"

So where the heck am I? Off the computer. Not much choice, really; my left hand is preventing it. While my finger was swollen up, I couldn't move it, and therefore couldn't use it. Simple enough proposition there. Now that the swelling is going down, I'm regaining flexibility in the finger, but I'm quickly learning that just because I can use it doesn't mean that I should use it.

After more than a few minutes of typing, I can feel each keypress radiating down through the soft tissue of my finger. This is—in my world at least—a glaringly obvious sign that I should Do Something Besides Typing.

The list of What I've Done To Compensate includes…

Hello, and welcome to the fifteenth edition of My Kitties Are Cuter Than Yours! I'm domesticat, and I'll be your host tonight. In this edition of the show we'll explore the general silliness that abounds when two thoroughly spoiled rotten felines (total combined weight: 29 pounds) have to be sedated in time for their yearly vet visit.

Common side effects of feline sedation:

• inability to jump from the floor to the couch
• inability to walk without falling over
• crossed eyes
• extreme lethargy
• complete limpness when picked up by favorite human
• inability to lie down gracefully ("thump!" was heard a lot)
• inability to meow properly ("meh?" and "sque….." were heard a lot)

Exhibit A: Before Sedation

"The books we love do ruthlessly disclose something about us, as do the books we do not. And despite everything above, I am not certain I want to know what exactly my inability to read some great writers says about me."
- Tom Bissell, 'I'd prefer not to,' an essay published for Salon.com

I honestly thought I was the only one.I found the list of what someone, somewhere, decided was the 'hundred greatest books of the twentieth century' and, like the dutiful child I am, set out to 'better myself.'

I am very, very tired of sending out variations on these emails. At least they're already written, and I don't have to try to write them from scratch each time. Option #1 is for the first-time offenders:

Dear [you]:

I've just received [number of] emails in quick succession that appear to be virus-generated emails from you. They look like emails generated by the Klez virus. The emails match viral patterns, include random images from my site, and are addressed to email addresses that are only available in the 'skin your website' tutorial that's available on my site (domesticat.net).

I checked your site, and you've recently posted that you plan on skinning your site, which probably means you've read the tutorial. The Klez virus (among others) scans files contained on your computer (including common web page extensions) and fires emails out to the email addresses it finds on the page.