Sleep, Rain, Keywords and Kittens

Today started off quite slowly, and has managed to stay that way so far. I woke to the sound of rain against the windows of the bedroom. Checking the time, I was amazed to find it was 12:30 in the afternoon. I had a fair amount of sleep to catch up on, but I don’t know the last time I slept in one solid block like that. I have to admit, it felt nice, although I did feel a little guilty about not setting my alarm so I could have gotten to see the nice Mr. H&R Block man today. The taxes have got to get done, but I’m now thinking of doing them Tuesday night, after work. The Socialist has an evening class Tuesdays, so it’s a good night to get chores done.

The snow has significantly melted since the rain came, though there’s still a fair amount around. The amount remaining right now is about the amount we receive for any standard snowfall around here. Other times I’d think the accumulation at this point looked fairly impressive. This morning, I was mostly impressed with how much snow had vanished.

The parking lot is one large, wide but shallow river. Our parking area is on a pretty nice slope, so all the water coming off the snow piles and from the rain flows straight down into the next building’s parking area. This is fine by me. Let them worry about hip boots and rubber dingies to get around in. All I have to worry about is navigating past their parking are without getting my engine wet. OK, I exagerate a tad, but I will be glad of the slope tonight, if we go below freezing. They’ll get the ice build-up, while we should have a pretty good surface on our parking area to drive on. Following is a totally inadequate picture of the water runn-off in our parking area:

I continue to get weird (and I do mean weird) search engine hits. A sample of the key words that led to my diary in the past 24 hours includes:

The “purple tube unicorn” hits seem to have vanished, but “turtle tanks” simply won’t go away. I’ve had a few hits on my “Amazing Mr. Ripley” entry before, but I keys such as Superman’s personal email and eggplant parmesan + pregnant defy any particular logic. I do think it was kind of neat that someone found me under “veterinary blogs”, though I sincerely doubt I was what they were looking for. I’m waiting for my first “Liver Transplant” hits to arrive.

Speaking of the longed for yet dreaded liver transplant, I spoke to the Elder Sister this afternoon, just to make sure she was aware I was coming closer to the top of the list. Tried to get the Younger Sister as well, but each time I called the phone was either busy or no one answered.

I’m thinking about asking The Socialist to make entries to my diary for me while I’m hospitalized. With luck, he’ll be able to keep everyone apprised of how well I’m doing when the Big Event finally arrives. If he’s interested, I’ll have to give him the key to the front door here, and show him the general layout. He’s going to be quite busy himself during that period though, so I don’t know that he’ll really want to take it on. If not, I might ask one of my DD/real life friends to help out with that. I’m still playing with ideas on the best way to handle this.

Kitten, on the other hand, has been busy playing with a plastic bag I gave her. Never, by the way, give your puppy or kitten plastic bags to play with if you aren’t going to supervise them. Like children, they can get caught up in the bag and suffocate if left unattended. Granted, there are moments when suffocating The Kitten sounds pretty good, but I suspect I’d regret it in the long run.

Here, Kitten rediscovers the joys of Cat in the Bag.

Once in the bag, she is reluctant to leave it for any reason. She’ll reach towards something she wants (in this case, a fuzzy mouse that is just out of the field of the camera). She won’t actually leave the bag to go fetch it though.

How can anything so adorable be such a tornado when my back is turned?