Big Plans

Today was supposed to be crazy busy, what with office, acquiring a new car, cat vet appointment,* discovering Dad’s Shocking Secret Past,*** shelving at another branch, etc.. But I woke up with a cold—and no ordinary cold. This is the kind of cold where for a while there I was sneezing explosively every five minutes and it hurt to talk. Not a good time to visit a public library, although I’ll bet you a nickel that’s where I picked up this cold in the first place.

So I only managed to make it through a few of those before the day turned into this kind of day for me:



Presumably it was also that kind of day for Fern the Blanket Shark there, who got a veterinary reprieve.

Anyway, I hope this cold does not last long. I have Plans this week. Big Plans! Exciting Plans! Plans involving showing you our new car, and also Plans involving my quest to become less useless! Having a cold will definitely ruin those Plans, so if it could run its course fast, I’d be verily pleased.


*Somehow in the last few months, our cats have become old. I realize that they’re 13, but just lately they have started acting old: slow, sleeping more even than usual, croaky old cat voices that end in that “fff” noise they make by blowing air through their lips, spastic tails,** creaky limbs (Charlie is having trouble with her back legs), and a propensity to sit in dirt. I had no idea dirt-sitting was a feature of all old cats; I thought it was peculiar to our Horrible Undead Cat.

**Actually spastic, not the colloquial usage—they have these little spasms sometimes, where they kind of flicker up for a moment before settling.

***The Big Shocking Secret is: He was married to someone for five years before he met Mom. We are still not sure how to react to this news—mostly because he broke it to us in the same tone as someone who is revealing that he killed twenty people and buried them on a construction site, whereas we just figured a thing like a previous marriage is just one of those things that never came up. I think he was expecting a lot more TV-soap-opera-style chaos and fireworks than what he got, which was: “Huh. That explains a lot, actually. Pass the soy sauce.”

And Now For Something Completely Different

ME: I remember these Super Mario 64 levels being a lot bigger.

MY BROTHER: Harder, too. Remember the hours of frustrated attempts to get a single star? And oh god the 100-coin challenges.

ME: You know what’s really sad? This means that while we could never be assed to practice things like martial arts or our respective musical instruments or such skills, we actually practiced video games like FIENDS.

MY BROTHER: You’re right!

ME: Figures the one thing we’d become virtuosos at is the most useless talent ever.

MY BROTHER: If only viola had been half as motivating.


Also, forgot to link to this before, in case you haven’t seen it: You are hereby invited to write fanfic about John Scalzi as an orc and Wil Wheaton in his infamously ugly sweater riding a unicorn pegasus kitten in front of a volcano. If you’re like me, though, you can’t possibly do it* because every time you click the link you see the illustration and then you fall down laughing.


*Even though I suddenly want to write self-insert, because really who doesn’t want to hang out with John Scalzi and Wil Wheaton?