"Oh, God, not THIS guy again."

Our local deity, being uncharacteristically busy with the lives of the other billions of people on this planet, chose to overlook the fact that, even under the best of circumstances, I cannot stand tech #89.

"Best," of course, not being the day after a series of days where you've had to continually reboot the cable modem so that you can test your code. Nor is "best" the day that your quest to buy groceries turns into a multiple-grocery-store chase, just to find the [damned] Gruyère cheese for tonight's dinner, immediately followed by racing back to ensure you were home for the 1p.m.-5p.m. window that the cable guys always demand.Therefore, in the global view of things, I suppose it wasn't any big deal to send tech number eighty-nine to our house.

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Since I've been doing little but coding lately, I thought I'd offer up a photo that has absolutely nothing to do with coding and everything to do with what really matters in this house—the cats. After all, you can't have 'domesticat' without the 'cat.' (Those perverse ones among you who sat up and said, "But you can't have 'domesticat' without an 'omesti'! Where's the picture of the omesti?"—you are not tall enough to ride this ride. Go away; you're bothering me.) Read the rest »

Sorry about not providing the next installment of 'Without Prior Notice' tonight. We ended up getting an unexpected invitation to visit a friend's house, and…how to say it?

Readers, you so got ditched. I know, I know, the suspense has been killing you. I'm sorry to suck all the oxygen out of your reading existence today, but I'm horrible and need to be smacked. So why sit here and write out a different post? Well, because I've discovered another sufferer of the Just Don't Get It Syndrome (affectionately abbreviated to JDGI Syndrome).

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(Part 1 may be found here.) It's taken for granted that nobody living in Huntsville is actually from Huntsville (Kat being our resident exception). There is no single 'Huntsville accent,' just a variously-lilting amalgamation of the various Southern accents of the engineers who have found their way to this town. But the lack of a specific accent does not imply a lack of commonality in the way the locals speak; go far enough away from standard 'Southern' and the questions begin to pop up:

As some random Southerner has undoubtedly said in some overblown novel, "Ah don' thank they's from 'roun heah."

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We sat next to each other on Kat and Sean's slipcovered sofa, in the living room that, over the past week, had begun to exhibit definite signs of habitation by its new owners. We were spread somewhere between the fullness of dinner and the cheerful obnoxiousness that was an evening of gaming with the wondergeeks. He flashed a grin at me and said, "You realize that as of next year, we'll have known each other for over half of our lives?"

I tried to count back without using my fingers, failed, and said, "Has it really been that long?"

"It was the summer of 1990 when we met," he confirmed. Yes, indeed—summer of 1990—before our birthdays, so we would have been square in the midst of the gawky year of 13.

Writers shouldn't be allowed to use phrases like "In the meantime, everything changed," regardless of the amount of truth such a statement might contain. It's too easy of a way to skip over the formative events between then and now, sacrificing story for speed.

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Tonight I understood that things were Really Going To Work. As in, were Really Going To Work, in the cosmic, hit-over-the-head fashion that's completely impossible to ignore in the way that things like the success of internal-combustion engines are hard to ignore. True, everyone but me has known that things were Really Going To Work for a good deal of time (and have been waiting on me to see the obvious) but about an hour ago, I finally got it:

me:	my. god. this. is. really. going. to.

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Funny—it doesn't look much different around here, but oh, at last, at last I get to say the words I've been dying and itching and wishing and dreaming of saying for a long, long time now:

Welcome to domesticat.net, powered by Quarto.There is a lot left to be done. A few of my entries were categorized through the usernames I originally used to post them, but those were less than a hundred of the ~640 posts I have archived on this site.

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There's not much between Huntsville and Birmingham, except somewhere near an hour and a half of scenery that can be compressed into approximately three minutes of equally unexciting viewing:

"Hmm."
"Look. Trees."
"More trees."
"Is there anything else to see?"
"More trees, I think."
"Are we there yet?"
"Given that we left five minutes ago, and it takes nearly an hour and a half to get there, I think that highly unlikely."

It's a pity, really; Alabama seems to be missing some of the out-and-out oddness that is the freeway scenery in Arkansas. Anyone who has driven I-30 has encountered one of the most famous (and enduring) billboards in central Arkansas:

Enormous capital letters, the billboard equivalent of a shout:

"WARNING! PREPARE TO MEET GOD!"

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On vacation. I've got post-dated entries set to appear while I'm gone, so it won't seem like I've gone much of anywhere. Standard daily entries (and a lot of photos) will appear when I return to posting.

Just about every story told by anyone who has ever worked retail in this side of the galaxy begins with the phrase, "There was this guy…"

With it comes the unspoken understanding: Don't be that guy.

Given the way this universe works, it seems highly likely that "that guy" doesn't actually exist. Instead, what we're likely to be dealing with is a highly invasive microorganism which jumps to host to host, infecting them with a strange kind of temporary insanity that compels them to go to the nearest grocery store.

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