Rules

I just got in from using the leafblower in the backyard. Bob had raked and picked up leaves several times this fall, but there were still a lot up against the fence, and since things are starting to come up, I figured I'd better get rid of them. We're supposed to have a big thunderstorm tonight, and I didn't think it would be nice to run the leafblower on Easter Sunday, so I decided to do it tonight.

Bob saw me struggling with it (I hadn't used it since the Fall, and it's kind of awkward and hard to remember how to put it all together), and came out with the rake and raked up a couple of bags of leaves while I vacuumed. Then he got out the ladder cleaned out the gutter, and we came in to wait for the storm. He's going to fry fish tonight--he went fishing yesterday and came home with a bag of fillets. He always cleans it before he comes home--that was one of our rules when we got married: he can bring home all the fish he wants, but I don't clean it, or cook it.

We don't have a lot of rules. Don't go to bed mad is a big one. I'm supposed to never run out of toilet paper, lightbulbs, trash bags or . . . there's something else, I think, but I can't remember now what it is.

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Security blanket

I read in some knitting blog or other the other day how the writer always took her knitting with her to work, but she never knit on it at all, it was just her security blanket, so to speak. I wondered at the time whether the "I never knit on it at all at work" thing was the kind of thing we write to cover ourselves when we do non-work things at work (not that I ever do, of course!), but she was probably being honest.

I take my knitting to work, too, and almost never knit while I'm there, so the "security blanket" thing really hit home. That's exactly what it is for me. It's also my talisman against boredom. That's why I used to carry a book with me at all times--I've kind of gotten away from that, although I never go anywhere to eat by myself without one, or anywhere that I might have to wait. But back to the knitting--I will occasionally knit a couple of rows on my lunch time, but usually what I end up doing is reading blogs or answering email or something while I eat my lunch at my desk. So it's obviously kind of dumb to carry it back and forth, and I've been trying not to do it. So I didn't bring it yesterday, and I felt very light and free just carrying my purse into work yesterday morning.

But then Bob called around noon and said that we were expecting the mother of all thunderstorms in the afternoon, with possibly baseball-sized hail and tornadoes, and my first thought was, damn, what if we get stuck here and have to hole up for awhile or go to the basement--I didn't bring my knitting!

Nothing happened, though. By mid-afternoon, the weather forecasters were saying that the storm would hit in the evening, so Bob asked me to come right home and then follow him over to the mall, where he wanted to park his van in the covered parking area in anticipation of the hail (only one car fits in our garage, and while I suppose we could put his in it, and leave mine outside since I have full coverage insurance, I still don't want to risk getting it damaged), then I could bring him home. I got home quickly, and when I came into the house, he was ready to go. I grabbed my knitting, though. When he looked at me oddly, I said it was just in case the storm hit while we were out and I ended up having to sit it out in the parking lot. At least I would have something to do.

But that storm failed to materialize, too. Around 9:00 they took the storm out of the forecast, so we drove over and retrieved his car. I didn't take my knitting this time.

And honestly, the thing about not carrying a book with me anymore? I may not have an actual book with me at all times, but I always have my Palm Pilot, loaded up with a couple of ebooks and several short stories. So I'm set.

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Levitation

When I went up to the bedroom to get dressed to go to work this morning, Dinah was working in my drawer again. I so wished that I had had the camera with me--the wide-eyed guilty look was just priceless! I kind of wanted to see her finish what she was going, though, so I didn't yell at her, and I stopped and watched. She was standing on top of my dresser, reaching into my underwear drawer, pulling out underwear and flinging it everywhere. There was a pile of underwear on the floor, and several individual items hanging off the corners of the drawer.

She worked, and worked, and worked, and when she had enough of it out, she squeezed herself into the drawer and disappeared down the back of the dresser behind the drawer into the drawer beneath. Which explains why the bottom of that drawer was broken. Bob told me I was overloading the drawers, and while I admited that was probably true, that particular one wasn't. However, I hadn't taken into account the eleven pound cat.

Bob was taking a shower, and I went in and made him open the door and look at what she was doing, and he admitted that he had left the drawer open an inch or so to see what she would do--he must have left it slightly open the other morning, too, after he had put the laundry away. He said he watched her notice that the drawer was open, and jump straight up from the floor to the top of the dresser--about a five foor vertical leap. Then she pushed the drawer open and started digging things out and throwing them to the floor.

Once she accomplished her goal of clearing out enough space to get into the drawer, I was curious to see how she was going to get out. I stood there for a few minutes, and pretty soon, she stuck her head out, looked around, and popped out. In this case, I suppose the end result wasn't as exciting as she had hoped.

I didn't accomplish much this weekend, but I did go to Kohl's and try on about a hundred pairs of jeans. Or maybe it was about ten, but it seemed like a hundred. I bought one pair of jeans, and one pair of capris, and I'll probably go back and get another pair of jeans. They're lighter denim than I'm used to, but consequently they're more comfortable, and I could use some lighter ones for summer anyway.

I don't know why jeans are so difficult. I have absolutely no idea what size to even try on anymore. These are smaller than the last ones I bought, but larger than the ones before that, and they all still fit. Of course, they're all different brands. And once I find a brand/size that fits perfectly, of course they stop making them. Which is why I'd probably better go back and get one more pair before they're discontinued.

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The Einstein of cats

When I went up to go to bed last night, I saw that the top drawer of my dresser was pulled out about half-way, and there was underwear strewn all over the floor, plus, there was underwear on top of the dresser. It looked like someone had been looking for something, pulling things out of the drawer and just throwing them and letting them lay where they landed. I would have thought that I'd been robbed, but I'm pretty sure it was Dinah.

I went into the office and got Bob and told him that I wanted to show him something, just in case it was something that he had done for some reason. He said that he had done some of my laundry, and had put some things in that drawer, but that he knew he had closed the drawer, and he certainly didn't leave everything the way I found it. I should have taken a picture. It was pretty impressive.

Yesterday when I was in the bathroom getting ready for work, Dinah had been working industriously to open up the cabinet under the sink. She worked and worked and worked, and when she didn't have any luck on the larger cabinet doors, she moved over and tried one of the smaller ones for awhile. She wasn't successful, but I have no doubt that one morning we'll walk in and find q-tips and nail polish and all matter of things scattered across the bathroom floor.

We'd seen her working on my dresser before, but she had never before been successful in opening a drawer. I wonder if it was a one-time thing, or if she'll start doing it all the time. My guess is that now that she mastered it, she'll move on to something else.

Another thing she does is she'll go into the bathroom and pull my towel off the towel rack so she can lie on it. But she doesn't just pull it down, she has to pull it down just so, so that it falls around, and over, her. In order to accomplish this, she stands on her back legs and insinuates herself into the towel between the folds. Sometimes she doesn't get it right the first time--if she gets into the towel between the front and the back, it doesn't work right, it just falls in a heap.

If she starts to pull it and it isn't right, she realizes it and stops, comes down, and then goes back up again in the right place. She very carefully pulls at it until it starts to fall, then she crouches down on the floor and lets it billow down around her, then she curls up inside.

Pyewacket has tried it, too. She's seen Dinah doing it, and she tries to emulate her, but she doesn't really understand the mechanics of it. She can pull a towel down, but she just does it by brute force, then looks surprised when it doesn't do what it does when Dinah pulls it down.

Bob says Pyewacket is sweet, but not very bright. Dinah, on the other hand, is the Einstein of cats.

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Robots

Last night I watched Robots. I was excited when it first came out, because it looked so wonderful, but I never went to the theater to see it. It's really hard for me to make myself go see animated films--it seems like kind of a waste of time to me. I remember making Bob go see The Nightmare Before Christmas with me, but I think that's probably the last one I saw in a theater.

I wanted to buy it on DVD, but just couldn't spend $20 on it, but Amazon finally put it on sale for $9.97, so I went ahead and ordered it last week, and sat down with Dinah to watch it on the laptop last night (she snuggles in under my arm and watches whatever is on the screen--I thought she would probably enjoy it because of the bright colors and the movement, and whether she did or not, I don't know, but she stuck there with me through the whole thing).

I really enjoyed it. It's so beautiful--sort of a combination of futuristic and vintage--a slightly decaying, degraded future, maybe. The story starts out with a young robot family--the father is, literally, a dishwasher--"making" a baby. Making it with a box of parts and a screwdriver. The little robot grows up, and, as times are tough, has to make do with hand-me-down parts. When he reaches young adulthood, he decides to go out into the world and make his fortune as an inventor, meets up with some sweet down-at-the-heels characters and some evil ones as well. I wasn't really as interested in the story as in the look of it, but I thought the story wasn't bad. Sort of simplistic, I guess. The selling point for me was just being able to watch the wonderful colors and animation.

When Bob bought me the eMac, he also bought me a .Mac account. It seemed like an unnecessary extravagance, but I really did enjoy it -- I didn't use the email address, but I used the backup capability, and I enjoyed being able to sync my Safari bookmarks between my computer at home and the one at the office.

It expired about a year ago, and I just felt like I could justify the expense, so I didn't renew it. It just seemed unnecessary, but I really did miss it . . .

We've gotten very at work lately, though, and I'm having a lot of meetings. I haven't missed anything due to not having it recorded, but I decided that it would be well worth it just to go ahead and renew the account. That way I could synchronize my calendars at work and at home, put files on my iDisk that I can access both at home and at work, and get some sort of organization going. In a perfect world, maybe I would go home and not think about work, but I at least need to know what I'm going to be doing the next day.

There's also an online backup utility, and while I'm pretty good about doing backups monthly, a little overkill in that area wouldn't be a bad idea.

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