I need a cat-patcher, stat. I hadn't thought Jyn's buggy jump module was too serious a glitch: yes, I laugh at her a lot because she still hasn't worked out how to go through the bathroom window into the courtyard, but I figure she'll learn when she wants to leave the house desperately enough. And she has in the last month or so acquired the skills ( Read more... )

There has been a void in the house since losing Hobbit: apart from the way I miss him, Pandora has become more needy and demanding as an Only Cat. So the plan was always to acquire a second cat, and in the inscrutable way of the Cosmic Wossnames, that void has been filled. In ginger and white, even. Danielle has been feeding three feral cats at her ( Read more... )

It's a bit tricky to do a Year In Review for a year which featured the collapse of the South African tertiary education system, America deliberately electing Jabba the Hutt and Britain trying to saw its own leg off in an effort to detach from the mainland. One's personal milestones and experiences seem somewhat irrelevant. On the other hand, Jabba ( Read more... )

My gosh-darned microwave oven is making weird noises. Not, may I add, the kind of weird popping noises you often get from (just as a random example, nothing at all to do with my non-best-practice) reheating rice uncovered. Nope, this is, somewhat alarmingly, a weird noise it makes to itself quietly in the corner of the kitchen when there's nothing ( Read more... )

I am slightly saddened that the Great Year Of Subject Line Bowie Mourning is still in force, as really this post should be entitled "Into each life some rain must fall". On the upside, the actual subject line I chose does come from possibly my favorite track on Blackstar, "Girl Loves Me", which is bouncy and catchy and written in a sort of frangled ( Read more... )

My ridiculous body is officially ridiculous. I mean, seriously. It's not normal for the human form to damage itself or randomly disintegrate quite as readily as mine appears to, or to make mountains out of arbitrary medical mole-hills quite so dramatically. My current context looks something like this:


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It's now officially registration season, in that I have now gone through the ceremonial annual benediction of an incensed parent shouting down the phone at me because their offspring is unhappy with an answer I gave her. Ten minutes. Continuous anger. Refused to let me get a word in edgeways to explain or otherwise. Reduced me, as is traditional, ( Read more... )

Ah, orientation. Today I needed to be in four places at once, all of which were malfunctioning.

1. Departmental information talks. Classroom facilities had not unlocked the audio-visual equipment boxes. When phoned, they arrived and unlocked half of the audiovisual boxes. They came back and unlocked the other half after I'd phoned them again, while ( Read more... )

The cosmic wossnames have an entirely dubious sense of humour. Not really because they gave me the crisis on top of two days of unrelenting sinus headache, although that was a bit cruel, but rather because their contribution to The Soundtrack Of My Life was so beastly appropriate. I've been trying to deal, over the last 24 hours, with a student who ( Read more... )

I'm on leave from tomorrow until Wednesday for purposes of house removals, so today was my last drive into work from Chez Evil Landlord, a curiously nostalgic process rendered particularly apposite by its entirely schizoid mix of elements. The usual weird Thursday traffic patterns meant I made it to campus blissfully quickly, in 10 minutes with ( Read more... )