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Saturday, November 9, 2002

God, housecleaning is a vile, vile task. What I want in my Happy World of the Future:

--wireless connectivity for all electronic devices. I want to never again throw my back out while hunched over trying to vacuum up wads of cat hair that have entangled themselves in the the omnipresent electric-cord spaghetti that forms the chief decorative motif here at chez Kat.

--non-shedding cats. Hah. In default of which, I'd settle at least for non-barfing cats. Or at the very least, a cat who doesn't barf on my bed. Please. This is not so much to ask.

--casters on all furniture. Over one-fourth of all US households currently consist of single people living alone. What are we supposed to do, dragoon our friends every time we need to vacuum behind the sofa?

--refrigerators that are twice as wide and half as deep as current models. My god, the stuff that goes on in the nether regions of the lower shelves, out of eyeshot.

--death to open storage. Two walls of my tiny kitchen are filled with built-in open shelving. I really have no desire to spend my Saturdays dusting twenty-seven spice jars, fourteen assorted bottles of condiments, and arrays of miscellaneous cookware, but there's no real alternative short of taping Saran Wrap over the openings. (Don't think I haven't thought of it.)

--toothpaste which not only forestalls dental disintegration, but also is compounded so as not to adhere to the bathroom mirror, when splattered, with cement-like tenacity.

I dream, I dream, yeah. But I'm serious about that non-barfing cat thing.

~~~

In other news, my computer is possessed by Callum Keith Rennie.

OK, but seriously, this is weird. A while back I downloaded a nice CKR photograph (this one, to be precise), and enlarged it (it scales up nicely) and used it as my wallpaper. And after awhile, lovely as it was, I decided I wanted to rotate to something different, and did so.

But ever since-- every time my computer powers up or powers down, the CKR photograph fills the monitor, for perhaps five seconds, before it vanishes and is replaced by the wallpaper du jour (or, of course, by blank screen, in the powering-down situation). I have no idea why it's doing this. I don't seem to have that image selected in any of my settings. I'm not unhappy about this, just vaguely creeped.

Posted @ 05:31 PM CST [Link]12 comments

Friday, November 8, 2002

Have been rather remote lately, with the calcified and ossified brain. Also guilty, about being behind on everything, and the guilt/avoidance/guilt cycle is a mighty and fearsome thing. When I don't post here for a while, I start feeling too guilty to even come here so I can use the links to check other people's blogs/LJs--just the sight of the page makes me twitch with shame and inadequacy--which is, of course, a particularly lunatic form of sympathetic magic, or something. It's like how my office always has, off on one side of the desk, the Pile of Bad Mana, which is made up of paper relating to stuff I really should do something about at some point, but which I've procrastinated for so long that even looking at or touching it feels impossibly difficult.

But enough about my tedious neuroses. I will say that one thing I've found immensely cheering lately is Mimi Smartypants' blog, which is linked on the (lower) sidebar; I cannot now remember where I came across her, but she is most wonderfully whack. She also, in her 11/4 entry, provided me with the link to the perfect holiday gift idea -- possum-fur nipple warmers. Wheee!

I also realize, in nosing around various blogs, that many interesting conversations have whipped past and vanished over the horizon, and I am not swift enough to catch up with them, so blooey. I was tempted to do the "Ten Themes/Kinks/Tropes That Recur in My Writing," except I couldn't come up with ten. There's weather and climate, which almost always show up and are usually over-described, just as they are here; there's alcohol--most of my characters drink a lot, which makes writing Fraser a bit irritating; there's last-time sex, the sex you have when you know things are basically hopeless, which is a great kink of mine; and the nape of the neck does recur with some frequency as an erotic locus. Other than that, I'm stumped. But the exercise made me recall an e-mail that Mairead/Aristide once posted somewhere saying that she'd discovered to her surprise that she apparently has a chair kink--that chairs keep recurring in her stories, for no apparent reason--and recalling that made me smile, so. Nice to have occasion to smile, as well as to reread her stories and realize that yeah, she has a point there.

Posted @ 07:46 AM CST [Link]6 comments