Update

OK, I’ve been lazing off entirely too long. Sorry

Kitten Update: We’ve had a changing of the guard, plus a gender reassignment. The whole kit ‘n kaboodle (of the fosters) went up to the shelter on Monday. The Gone with the Wind group got their shots and such; the Tiny Guys got weighed. And they all topped 2 pounds! So they stayed at the shelter and we offered to take some more back with the GWtW group. They offered us a choice between three litters. One larger litter, all healthy and social. One smaller litter called “semi-social”. And one small litter that were “absolutely feral”. We went for the middle group.

So we brought home, in addition to the GWtW group, two five week old babies. They were named Licorice (a black girl) and Peaches (an extremely orange tabby boy). They have been rechristened Marion and Winthrop. Both long-ish hair, both with unusually round heads. Very cute.

Semi-social evidently means that if you can catch them, they’ll let you hold them. We set them up the spare bathroom, since there is almost no place to hide in there. I bought some more of the Feliway pheromone and plugged the diffuser in there, and I think it’s been helping. Just now I went in there to pick them up to put them in the kitten room with the GWtW group, and Marion purred at me! And the last couple of days she’s meowed at me when I open the door. Winthrop is a bit more skittish, still, but he didn’t try to get away from me this evening. Progress! I’m hoping they’ll be far enough along that we can leave them with the other guys overnight. I think it helps the socialization process. OTOH, I can’t leave the Scooby Gang in there with them. They’ve decided the GWtW group is OK and possibly occasionally fun to play with, but the new guys need subduing or something. The big guys keep hissing at them and I don’t think that helps the socialization at all!

Gender Reassignment: DH was giving Melanie a tummy rub the other night and said, “Uh. I think this is a boy.” So I picked him up and looked, and sure enough! He and Rhett have the same equipment. So he is now Ashley. I changed out his pink collar for one in a brown and blue plaid, to help me remember to call him Ashley. I don’t think he much cares, but I do.

The other day I was sitting in here in the computer room when suddenly a TV commercial began beeping. Right over the voice over, it said, “Beep! Beep! Beep!” I hit the mute button on the TV, but it kept beeping. Oh, not the commercial. I was about to go hunt for the beeping when it stopped. OK. Then I heard, “If you would like to make a call...” OK, somebody managed to get a phone off the hook. One problem: the only phone with an actual hook is sitting by my elbow. All the others, all of them, are cordless and on the same system. I’m not sure any of the cats could turn them on like that. So I wandered down the hall, listening for the voice. It was coming from the living room. Oh. The base unit! They hadn’t knocked anything off, but someone, in running over the top of all the furniture, had stepped on the speakerphone button on the base unit. When I fixed it I looked around and saw Xander sitting and watching me calmly. I therefore figure the actual culprit was Willow, who was nowhere to be found. Yep. That’s what having a new kitten in the house is like. Lots of napping, punctuated with occasional chaos.

So at the end of last week my new PDA arrived. It took a couple of days to get my audiobooks stuff to begin working on it, but it’s all set up and ready now. I’ve always loaded the audiobooks onto the memory card. The old PDA has a 256mb card; it generally holds a couple of books. I’ve loaded three onto the 1gb card in the new one, and you can barely see the difference on the pie chart. I’m good with that. Even though I can really only listen to one book at a time.

I also got a card with several games on it. A pinball, not terribly interesting. (I like real pinball.) Something called Atum, which seems to be some sort of puzzle thing. Possibly meant for kids. A billiards game, which I like very much, indeed. Checkers, chess, and backgammon. None of them very interesting. I’ve got a better backgammon already. Shanghai, a solitaire mah jong. Not bad, but I’ve got a better one already. A casino program with blackjack, video poker, and slots. I’m already making (fake) money on that one. And my two favorites, the original Sim City (DianeSTown is going strong!) and Ricochet, which is a very nice version of Breakout, one of my favorite computer games. It makes me smile a lot!

One of the programs on the new PDA is (sort of) Word, Excel, and three similar programs. You can transfer files between the PDA and the desktop and can also edit files on the PDA. (I wouldn’t recommend attempting to do heavy editing, though.) I took a note file I’ve had on the old PDA and created a new one on for the new PDA. It lists authors whose books I want to buy or try. I’ve been editing the file in Word on my desktop. I’ve been using librarything and Amazon to get recommendations and to see what books might interest me, then I put them in the file, which I’ll transfer over to the PDA before my next bookstore raid. I’ve been working very hard on this for the last couple of days. Cause goodness knows I wouldn’t want to miss an OK book!(snort) I’ve been having a great time, though.

I haven’t been doing a lot of knitting, but I did pick up a couple of socks and work on them. And enjoyed them, so I need to get back to that. I signed up for some sort of contest for making socks over the summer. I don’t figure to win anything – I’m too slow and distractible. But some designers are donating sock designs and there’s one in particular I have my eyes on, so I signed up. The woman running the contest has a cat that looks a great deal like our Simba – named Simba! Only hers is a girl. We both found that funny. There was another pattern involved in a contest that I’d really like to have, but it sounds like a pretty serious contest, which is more pressure than I’m interested in. So I’ve emailed the designer and asked to be notified when the pattern is released. My head buzzed a bit with ideas for that pattern, which has an attached lace cuff. Lots of the socks in that pattern have different colors for the cuff. I like playing with colors.

I also need to wind up some yarn I bought to make a cat bed for the Scooby Gang. I’m going to attempt felting. I’ve never felted, not even by accident, so I’m not completely comfortable about it. But the yarn wasn’t expensive, so if the whole thing felts into a small wool ball, it won’t be a bit deal. The pattern comes from a newish book called Kitty Knits. (It’s the fourth picture in the first frame when you click the “for more images” button.) The pattern in the book uses green and blue yarn; I’m going with two different greens. And it includes a cute needled felted mouse, which I’m not feeling anywhere near brave enough to try! But I hope the Scooby Gang will enjoy the bed. I haven’t wound up the yarn yet as I’ve been having some back pain and the only place, really, where I can set up the swift and winder is the card table in the living room. There is no comfortable seating there. But I’m making a resolution to get on that tomorrow, while DH is out teaching windsurfing. I’ll have to figure out how to work his TV. The cable box is the same as mine, but the TV is different and it’s set up different, and it often refuses to work for me.

I was talking to someone today about that – DH and I are incompatible electronically. Neither of us finds the other’s cell phone easy to use, our PDAs are totally different, and we have almost completely different TV/DVR/cable set ups! The cable boxes are the same, but that’s it. And we’ve never been compatible on the computer. And I can’t figure his camera out and he doesn’t like mine. I presume that sometime in the future all these gadgets will be similar enough that this sort of problem won’t occur. In fact, they’ll probably all be the same gadget, possibly implanted in one’s brain at birth. Or something.