Honestly, Cat, the squirrel doesn't want to play...

Aha. Yes, I'm back. Sorry to be away for so long but what with being invited to 60 weddings occurring between May 17th and May 20th, I've been a little busy.

Well...okay, that was a lie. I wasn't invited to any of the same-sex weddings. I didn't even crash them. In fact, if you ask Rany, I was "too damn pissy" to go watch as history was being made for me and others like me. And that is true. I was upset, mainly because it is legal for gays to get married in MA now and I still can't get married legally because my beloved is not a US citizen. If we got married, it would screw with her status here and we can't have that. So we're looking for a nice place to go for memorial day weekend so we can have a little committment ceremony of our own. On our anniversary.

*many many days later*

Ah so, I haven't been keeping up as well as I should with this thing. So here goes. Watch very carefully as more than a month speeds by...

My last day at work was May 26th (my job is only 42-weeks-a-year). I miss working at the Brown & Brew and I miss taking two buses every day. I don't miss filing. I will *never* miss filing.

May 27th was my brother's anniversary.

May 29th was my anniversary. And my friend Allison's birthday which I just NOW remembered. Fuck. Damn. Hell. Crap-a-doodi! (mental note: email the girl ASAP and grovel. Grovel muchly.)

Rany and I did not go out of town for our anniversary nor did we have a ceremony or anything. We had no money, once again, and I was panicking about the rent.

Early June was about sleeping in. LOL. I don't think I was meant to work before 10am. Rany is sure I was never meant to do manual labor at all and tells me that I have the feet of Royalty that were never meant to touch the ground. She swears that one day she will have so much money that she will hire four well-oiled men in loin cloths and leather strapping to carry me around on a litter made of gold. To which I said, "Will there be pillows, so that I may nap as I am carried from place to place?" Rany looked askance at me. Apparently I was supposed to be more impressed by the oily men than I actually was. LOL.

Buster, the amazing cat-dog, has firmly identified himself as an indoor/outdoor cat--which means he spends an inordinate time wandering the neighborhood only to return and sleep in our bed. It does not mean, however, that he is wash and wear. Him and water--no, no.

He has also been terrorizing the local fauna. One day he cornered a squirrel on our screened porch. Another day, while Rany and I were simply enjoying a nice day on the porch-couch, he alighted the stairs with a bird in his mouth. The bird was still alive, though roundly disturbed, and Rany and I shooed the cat indoors and corralled the poor birdie out the door with snow shovels.

Recently we realized that the cat has both times attempted to leave the woodland sacrifices not at our door, but at our upstairs neighbors' door. He has been trying--unsuccessfully, poor dear--to seduce our upstairs neighbors! For which he has been given the name Cat-Whore.

In fact, Buster has many names and many personalities to go with them.

Pretty Baby

Used exclusively for his cuter-than-cute modes (generally when he is sleeping) or for the times that he reaches up for our shoulders, wanting to be picked up like a toddler and carried around the house, purring like a jackhammer. Also used for the "Mommy's Home Dance", a ritual shared by Rany and Buster alone.

Prince Djibouti

For when he is lord of all he surveys. When he is Prince Djibouti, we are but his humble subjects expected to cater to his every whim. We bow and scrape before him and he deigns to allow us to continue breathing. He is vocal with his displeasure but not violent, for he knows where and when we sleep and holds this over us silently but expertly.

Fuzzy Sack of Cat Meat

This moniker is reserved for when he is at his most odd or irritating. For those special times where he walks into a room simply to yell at us for whatever slight, real or imagined, he may have suffered at our hands. For the times that he inexplicably rolls right off the bed and then shoots daggers at us like it's OUR fault he's so clumsy. For those times that he insists the only comfortable plact to sit in the WHOLE WORLD is right on our chest, covering our left ear and eye and making the watching of Cold Case terribly inconvenient. For when he decides that your singing voice is less than he expected and howls you down when you try to sing.

OWWW! GETOFFGETOFFGETOFF!! YOU RATFUCK BASTARD!!

Reserved for those times that his displeasure with us (read: usually Erin, aka "The Chew Toy") turns to violent means of expression. He has a pattented "Rapid Repeat" bite/scratch combination that leaves one the bearer of multiple bleeding wounds after only nanoseconds. The infractions that can induce this particular response are waking him when he is not in a good mood, removing the sheets from the bed for ANY reason, and/or moving your hand away from him slowly and non-threateningly.

Perv Kitty

Used exclusively for those times--uncommon as they may be--when Buster becomes enamored with my right foot as it lies beneath the blankets when I am sleeping. In his romantic haze, he mounts my foot, bites the blanket over my toes to keep me restrained, and then cat-humps me. It is MOST disturbing behavior and only Rany can get him to stop (she is the Alpha in our household. I rank somewhere below the food dish on the scale of importance.)

Anyway, we love him and that's all that matters. ;)

Mid-June has arrived and I am steadily looking for summer work and now near to panicking. Though I have some options to make lots of money, they currently involve being put through sleep deprivation experiments at a local hospital. Hooray for medical research!! You too can spend a week in a hospital not sleeping and pay your rent! LOL

So now we are mostly caught up!

I promise not to be away so long now.

Here's to cats and their willing slaves...

210 minutes more...

The main computer program that I use at work was hit with the SASSER worm yesterday and, as a result, they had to shut the server down at noon today to "quell the infection". They will be sending an email out to let us know when we can get back into the system and that sums up why I am here now. I am hoping that I can get back in before too long because I do have some work to do but then I have the hardest time concentrating on this job, so part of me hopes the server crashes for the day.

I'd love to be on the porch-couch right about now. From my little prison cell window I can see that the sun is shining and a breeze is blowing and I would love to be dozing happliy on the porch-couch in our little screened in porch. Maybe the amazing cat/dog would nap with me.

...

Yeah, and maybe the laundry fairy will fluff and fold my laundry while I sleep tonight, too.

There's always so much to do to keep up with being an adult, you know? Laundry, bills, cleaning, washing dishes, cooking, work, writing, art. And we don't even have kids yet! And only one medium-sized cat!

I plan to go home tonight and take care of my chores fairly quickly (there's not much left to do on the laundry and the checkbook should only take a few minutes) and then I will play some more Diablo II: Lord of Destruction (while the rest of the US watches that damned series finale for Friends. Why don't they just call it what it is? The Whitest Show on Earth).

I am working on a Barbarian character now. His name is Havok Bloodborn and I hope to take out Diablo with him. He is very lucky in the getting of rare items so far and for that I am grateful. He killed Blood Raven with little difficulty but nearly bit it while fighting some boss bitch in The Cave. I have got to get his cold resistances up.

That means I now have at least one of each type of character:

Imhotep, the Necromancer
Havok Bloodborn, the Barbarian
Immaculade, the Assassin
Snow Raven, the Assassin
Gabrielle, the Amazon
Gar, the Druid
Kahlan, the Sorceress
Seftiri Amahit, the Sorceress
Sethan RedHorse, the Paladin

My highest level character, Immaculade, can't even make it through the doorway of Diablo's lair yet. What a disappointment. The rest are either too new or still stuck in Kurast trying to kill the council members. I don't know where I have gone wrong. Who knew that raising a baseball team of demon killers would be so hard? If only I could get them all together as a team to fight the Prime Evils, well then I might have a chance. If they didn't try to kill each other first.

I can see it now...

"Gar, you rat fuck! What on earth made you unleash a TORNADO??" Kahlan, Sorceress of the Sisterhood of the Extra Hold Sprayable Gel, leaned her 44-106 cold damage, +3 to Frost Nova Sharp Pointy Stick against a boulder and did her level best to get her hair out of her eyes.

Gar, the Druid, shook his head derisively but refrained from saying anything. Most of the rest of the party assumed that was because of the dead +3 to all Elementals wolfhead he was wearing and not because he was necessarily a man of few words. After all, how intimidating can a demon fighter sound if his voice is muffled by a dead animal head?

Gabrielle snorted at Kahlan. "That's why we Amazons wear our hair up in ponytails, Kahlan," she sneered as she pulled out three arrows from her quiver. She inspected them briefly before notching them in her Socketed Longbow of Life Suckage.

"And why we Assassins keep our hair short," agreed Immaculade, the Team Leader. She fiddled with her +85 Poison Damage Lee Press-On Nails and hoped that Hratli would be able to work his magic again to repair the chip in the one on her index finger. It was the third time in as many outings that it had suffered a break and she was looking forward to killing Baal if only to save the money she spent on magical manicures.

"Perhaps if you invested in some sort of helm," ventured Sethan earnestly, "you would be saved the trouble of untangling your hair and subsequently you would no longer need to curse at Gar. Or any of the rest of us, for that matter. You risk your mortal soul when you do that, you know."

"Oh go fuck yourself with your Holy Sword of Sweetness and Light or whatever you call it, you goody-two-boots Paladin peckerfest! Who asked you anyway?" Kahlan's hair was so tangled she wondered if she were going to have to go about using her Sharp Pointy Stick as a tapping cane instead of a weapon. "I'm never going to get this untangled!" she whined. "And then where will you be? It was me who froze those asshole council members long enough for you to chop them up, remember?"

"Do shut up, Kahlan," lisped Imhotep shortly. "Or I shall sick Globin on you."

Kahlan laughed. "That dirty little blood golem? He's only a level 13! I could shatter him like a fairy ice sculpture and laugh while he melted in the grass."

"You stand still, Ice Lady," grunted Havok Bloodborn, the Barbarian. "Me fix everything."

Before Kahlan could protest, there was a strange ripping, shredding sound and then the sorceress could see. What she saw first was a cloud of her own hair lying at her feet.

"AAAAAAAUGH! You moron!! You great, pea-brained Barbarian FOOL!!! What have you done to my beautiful hair???" She grabbed Havok's +100% Physical Damage Slash and Bash Double Headed Axe and looked into the blade as if it were a mirror.

"For the love of all that's GOOD and FUCKING HOLY!" she shouted as she saw what he had done. "You've RUINED me!!!"

The effect was rather...depressing. Using a smaller hand axe, Havok had sheared off most of Kahlan's damaged, tangled hair, leaving her with a shortened haircut on the top and sides of her head while the back remained long and luxurious.

Gabrielle raised one arched eyebrow. "Oh, I don't know, Kahlan. You'll be mighty popular at the annual Amazon Cunning Linguist Dance and Orgy with that look. Do you have some +35 Butchiness Flannel Body Armor or something? That would just make the look."

"Either that or a pair of Sturdy Hiking Boots of the Dyke," added Immaculade. "Tell me, Kahlan, do you own a Lab named Sappho by any chance?"

-----

See? They'd kill each other before they could even get to Baal.

Sigh.

Guess I'll just keep plugging along with my group of unruly only children.

Anyway, here's to five socketed shields and to finding unique items in every act...