November. Just as I've celebrated the putting-away of shorts and other warm-weather clothing, along comes a day with a high of seventy-eight. The sweaters will have to live one more day in the back of the closet.

Stage one: amputating Aggressive Floral Wallpaper™ from the wall. (For complete understanding of my hatred and loathing, see the entry from two days ago.)

Every now and then, this town catches me by surprise.

The first six months I lived here, I hated it and wanted to go 'home' - home, of course, being the quiet swaddle of friends and familiarity that was my collegiate life in Arkansas. But, with everyone graduated and moved away, 'home,' as I remembered it, no longer existed.

Without my friends, Conway was nothing but a collection of streets that connected a series of dormitories.

Let's not kid ourselves: dragon*con's annual Dawn contest is a brilliant excuse for some red-headed T&A for several thousand sex-starved male geeks.

For the rest of us, it's a chance to stand around for an evening, shake our heads in shock/derision/disbelief, and snap lots of photos for the folks back home who really haven't the foggiest idea of the enormity of what they're missing.

Sometimes things can be boiled down into a few photos:

So. I have to ask. Is it possible to get any more comfortable than what's shown in this photo, or has Tenzing managed to reach some kind of pathetic, heretofore-never-seen natural limit here?

This level of relaxation takes effort

You know it's impressive when even the seasoned, hardened cat tender walks in the room, rolls her eyes, and says, "You're awful, Tenzing. You should be ashamed of yourself."