Gareth: Heh. You will use the holiday skin and like it.

Amy: Can I quote you on that when I post the entry about all this?

For those of you who used your best StrongBad "Holy crap!" voice when you showed up here, relax. 'cat.net hasn't been taken over by aliens yet. There will be no alien takeover until December; until then we're free to make merry and taunt the cats.

Consider this oddity spotted recently on CNN, under the headline Male enlargement ads prompt spam rage:

"He said his firm does not send spam but blamed a rival firm which he said routes much of their unsolicited bulk e-mail through Russia and eastern Europe. Mackay said such firms gave a bad name to the penis enhancement business."

Now let's go back and reread that last sentence again, and see if anyone else in the class has the same reaction I did when I read it:

When I awoke from my nap the clock said 10:12; the room, dark. Almost automatically, my awareness drifted down to my legs and found him: there, snuggled close. Not interested in being cuddled or petted, but in nearness, in gathering warmth. I swirled fingertips down his back, and his muscles quivered and rippled in response, his spots and orange splotches shivering with the touch and then settling back down to their normal spaces.

"We've got this black-hole policy. Things that get said at the compound stay there."

"Funny," I said, "because we've got something just like that here."

With that said, Chris visited, but so much of what we talked about falls so squarely into the realm of "no one else's business" that I hardly know what can be said about the time he spent here except to acknowledge that it happened.

Plane tickets present a definitive endpoint for talking; the mental equivalent of a sign over your friend's head announcing how many hours remain before it's time to pack up yet again and fly back into your regularly scheduled lives.

Flip the clock to 'wake' and it says 9:05. My watch currently says 12:59; it'd be in my best interests to make good on my weeks-old threat to get at least some sleep before attempting to roll directly from my bed to the car.