CritterKeeper

I went a couple of miles north to a veterinary specialist, and then had the rest of the afternoon free, so I thought I'd go just a little further north to a local Barnes & Noble, since the one closest to me closed a couple of months ago. This one had closed too. It's a branch for one of the local hospital chains now, according to the sign. So, I checked my GPS, and found that the closest B&N was now a fair bit further north yet. Decided I was already relatively close, and I wasn't sure if I'd be any closer any time soon, so I did go. I'm sad that there don't seem to be hardly any bookstores, other than one sad little Half Price Books, any closer than that. I made sure to buy some books. Hopefully this one will stay in business....

I was up north a few suburbs, and next to the bookstore I went there for was a rather nice Italian restaurant which I realized I had a gift card for rattling around in my back pocket. I got it from a different branch of the same chain, I forget why, at least as far south of me as this one was north. It had apparently been there amongst my other cards, waiting to be used, for at least five years, but they said it was still good. So, I treated myself to Chicken Marsala, which came with a side of spaghetti in olive oil, and a Double Chocolate Brownie for desert. The brownie comes with a separate dish with strawberries and vanilla bean ice cream. Unfortunately, some idiot decided that ice cream should have a balsamic vinaigrette topping, one of the most disgusting choices I've come across, but after the face I made when I tasted it, they got me a fresh ice cream without the salad dressing, which was pretty good. :-)

Well, after Monday morning having to skate from my car to the front door of the practice, it eventually melted because it had started raining. It rained steadily the rest of the day, and has been doing a fair bit of it today too. I only ventured forth to go with my boss to a Cardiology consultation about her brother's dog, where the cardiologist actually remembered that I'd been at a CE talk at the specialty center a month or so ago. I wish I had that sort of memory for names and faces! (Little doggie is doing well, did *not* have some of the bad stuff we were worried about, hooray!) The rain was just little sprinkles during the evening.

My sympathies. We'll be here, lending moral support if nothing else. I hope the house-hunting and the new job both go well, and that you do learn and grow. May it lead to bigger and better things, including your confidence!

This makes me sad. The big circuses were a whole way of life. Also, given that the animal rights groups put a lot of pressure on them to stop having elephant performers, and when they did so, they went out of business shortly after, it makes me wonder how the next business they put pressure on is going to react. If they really wanted to have influence in the long run, they should have all bought tickets and encouraged others to do so once the elephants were sent elsewhere. With this as an example, the next guys are going to choose to stay in business!

Hey, Pandora! It's not a name-based affinity, it's an affinity-based name! Have at it! ;-)

My sister spent most of her grad student days living in a house shared by several students. They each got a bedroom of their own, and they shared the living room, kitchen, porch, etc. Various kitchen utensils and such were shared, foodstuffs were labeled with name and date (which were usually respected), and when the TV in the living room broke my sister lent her little one until they'd pooled enough to get a new bigger one. "Starving student" rent levels but with a bit more living space and conveniences.

Yuck, no, we don't want to raise his LDL and lower his HDL cholesterol! I think it was helium, there's one way to find out -- Hey, Hack! Say something!

Three guesses about the ice, and the first two don't count....

So I guess this answers the question of whether they're still sharing a room.

Freezing rain. Hopefully it'll be warm enough to melt by the time I head to work....

Well, that's the trip I mentioned with my sister in May. We were looking at a four day Harry Potter package. We've been to Universal once several years ago, I think we were there one day for each park. This time it'll be two for each, possibly with a day or two elsewhere, too. The current trip, I'll be staying in town for four days after the conference is over, so I'm trying to find out where my sister *doesn't* want to go on the May trip. I expect I'll go to Disney's Star Wars stuff one day, Animal Kingdom one day, maybe Sea World or Busch Gardens, maybe something more off the beaten path. I may not go to Universal at all this trip, knowing I'll have four days there soon!

Hmm, Dan might have conveyed the putting-on-a-shirt thing better if the shirt had actually not been on completely in the panel. But then, Dan would never draw any of our friends anything less than fully dressed, now, would he? ;-)

Granted, everyone within ten miles changes age by a random number of years, up or down. You happen to go up by forty. I wish transfer between old and new iPads always went smoothly.

*looks up at the dimensional-hypertime rip* *watches a red fezz drop out* Huh. Who didn't see that coming?

Pill count: 11 to 12 1/2, one of them an OTC allergy pill. Four are big ol' horse pills. Plus chewable vitamin and, if I can at the right time, a couple of gummy melatonins. Re Bristol scale, the big ol' horse pills tend to have the opposite effect, sometime all the way up to the top. I haven't checked my weight in a while, so I don't know if it's up or down.

Whoops, poor phrasing on my part, I guess. I've been registered since November; the conference itself is in early February, and the Harry Potter thing is the last weekend in January, in just under two weeks. (Eep, that means my trip is in less than three!)

"Hard sauce"? Seriously? You recommend eating your dick with hard sauce? I love it! Ain't English grand?

If people actually like such distorted figures, that's fine, I just don't want to be promised a picture with a certain character, and then end up with a picture of a completely different figure.

Am I the only one who wants to see the actual characters we know and love, and not some distorted figure that doesn't look like them anymore?

I'm getting really tired of these mega-boobs. I do wish we could vote to keep things within the realm of physical possibility. Yes, I know, magic, but it still looks so *wrong*! If it weren't for that, I'd like this one more.

I guess I see the word in the modern/American sense, then. A company keeping trade secrets isn't a conspiracy; a company president authorizing illegally hacking into the competition's computers to steal their trade secrets is.

Didn't get the chance to post at the time, but we had very strange snow a day or two ago. It wasn't flakes, it wasn't little pellets, no. It was spicules of snow, little individual needles. I brushed my car windows clean, and could see these little slivers landing on the clean glass. I'm told that the Inuit language, like German, likes to turn a string of words into one long compound one, so the "hundred different words for snow" would translate as "fluffy snow good for snowballs" and "wet heavy snow" and "snow that's slush as soon as it hits the ground" and the like. I do wonder what their word is for "snow coming down in little individual needles". Perhaps something as simple as "needle snow"?

Someone's got to keep the tenor of the thread up, or we'll descend into bass humor.

Ferret owner forums are full of advice on how to deal with various things spilled into various keyboards. I've seen several photo series taken by people who use the top rack of their dishwasher on a low- or no-heat dry setting; the most important advice there seems to be taking a very clear photo of which keys go where, so any that fall off can be replaced properly. Consensus is, no matter how well you think you know your keyboard, you will get something in the wrong place if you try to do it by memory. As has been pointed out before, much of fandom is speculating on and extrapolating from the official canon of a work, to try to guess what might be coming or how events and characters might be interpreted. Speculation does need to be properly identified as such, yes. That's exactly what WMG and its Epileptic Trees are for. :-) Somewhere in a box in my spare room is a book titled It's A Conspiracy! which combined famous popular conspiracy theories (e.g. the mob killing JFK or Elvis still being alive) with a surprising array of genuine historical conspiracies, from selling bad meat to feed troops in the Spanish-American war to the plot to kill not only Lincoln but also his Vice President and the Secretary of State simultaneously. Generally, we know about the real conspiracies because someone screwed up or didn't keep quiet about them. Which makes you wonder how many we don't know about because they were successful.... That's a business, not a conspiracy. The word conspiracy implies keeping things a secret, and also that there is a reason to keep things secret, either that it involves wrong-doing (Watergate) or avoiding the notice of evil forces in power (underground railroad). A benign version would be a collaboration.