One of the adventures of having a cat is the chance to oberve a small furry creature and speculate about the details of its rich inner life. Our orange fluff-ball Abby is a perfect example. In the six months or so that she's lived with Catherine and I, we've discovered a fascinating variety of things that freak the hell out of her. I present them here, in no particular order:

1. Closed Doors

   This one is pretty standard. A closed door is a slap in the whiskered face, an assault on the all-important principle that cats rightly deserve the use of any soft or fluffy thing. By closing doors, obviously, we are depriving Abby of precious sniffable, battable, and lay-on-able items. She will bump her face against the door and give us peevish looks for hours.

2. Outside

   Abby is all about pawing at the kitchen door when she's stuck inside. After all, there's obviously a fascinating world of smells and string and meat outside to conquer. She is, after all, an old-school farm cat. The other day we felt bad for her and opened the door and let her out. Then closed the door. Over the course of the next eight to ten seconds, the increasing levels of terror were visible. She dropped to a low hunker on our porch. Meowled piteously. And then -- in the yard next door -- dogs started barking. That was it. Full-on panic and existential angst. After laughing, I opened the door and she shot inside. She spend the next few hours huddled under the bed, battling her inner demons.

3. Vacuum Cleaners

   A peek inside Abby's mind: "Doobeedoo, I'm just sniffing the houseplants and rolling around on the floor, don't mind me, I'm ju--OH SWEET JESUS VACUUM IT'S GOING TO KILL ME MUST RUN, YOU'VE TRAINED FOR THIS DON'T FORGET THE ESCAPE ROUTE--" Rinse, repeat. Maybe her parents were killed by a runaway hoover? There's gotta be something to explain this.

4. My Mother-In-Law

   This is especially baffling, considering the fact that Catherine's mother raised Abby and took care of her for years. Within months of moving from the farm to our apartment, though, Abby demonstrated her goldfish-like emotional memory. Now, when my Mother-in-law arrives to visit, Abby freezes, stares, and bolts. Cue a long afternoon of hiding under the bed!

5. Sitting On My Head

   Cats like sitting on things, right? They like sitting on warm things especially, yes? You'd think that wearing a cat as a fashionable hat would work fine, but no. Not at all. I have learned my lesson.

6. The Doorbell

   It's not a particular offensive or scary doorbell, you know? It's not like we have audio of growling pit bulls, or a Kid606 song playing. Just a run of the mill 'Ding-Dong!' But oh, my. Someone rings that bell and it is immediate red alert panic murderer in the house teleport under the bed and hide for six hours time. Someday, she's going to have to get over this. Her food bowl is in the kitchen, and she might need to get to it while the doorbell is still lurking.

7. Supplies Running Low

   A peek inside Abby's mind: "Dum-de-dum... I'm just eating my kibble... Munch munch mu... er..." Pause now for a furtive look. "Uh... Uhoh. I'm out of food now. I wonder if they know. Hey... Guys? GUYS? I'm out of food, you know." Another pause. "Guys? No, seriously, what if I'm hungry again in an hour? GUYS? OH MY GOD THEY'RE UPSTAIRS AND THEY CAN'T HEAR ME WE'RE ALL GOING TO STARVE SWEET JESUS I'M TOO PRETTY TO DIE--" Rinse. Repeat.

8. The Basement

   This seems to be a cross between Outside, and Closed Doors. Whenever we open the basement door, Abby trots over and stares cautiously down the stairs. It's a steep staircase, to be sure, but that hasn't bothered her before. Here, though, she just staaaares intensely. Reaches a paw out to touch the first step... then darts back. Rinse, repeat. She really, truly, desperately wants to go into the basement but it wigs her out. I think she need another cat to dare her.

9. Accidentally Wrapping Herself Up In A Few Meters Of Yarn

   I guess this one goes without saying, but it never fails to amuse me. She'll dive in and attack a pile of yarn, roll around in it, and get tangled up. She stands, walks away, and realizes that OH MY GOD IT'S FIGHTING BACK. And so begins the epic battle...

10. Ceiling Lights

    I guess I'm partially to blame for this one. One day, I decided Abby needed a change of pace. So I picked her up and held her high above my head and carried her around the house, giving her a flying tour. She seemed to think this was pretty cool, peering all over and studying her surroundings with kitty-fascination. "Everything looks so tiny!" and stuff like that. Things she had only ever glimpsed from afar were suddenly within sniffing distance! Unfortunately, that included a large ceiling lamp. As she passed it, she batted at it. It swung away, and that cruel mistress Physics swung it right back. Into Abby's nose. The scratches and scars on my arms and shoulders healed up nicely, but to this day Abby can't walk into a room without staring, paranoid, at the ceiling light. She knows it's going to jump her. She just knows.

What is it about meeting someone's eyes in the office hallway that's so frought with danger? I was thinking about this today as I reflexively reached for my cell phone when I saw someone walking down the hall towards me. He was doing the same thing. As he passed me, he put it back into his pocket.

It's a sort of mutually understood pretense in an office -- someone's coming towards you and you pat your pocket suddenly, as if looking for a cell phone or a PDA you forgot about. You whip out the appliance of your choice and begin pounding buttons quickly, as if an emergency has just come up, and -- oh, hi there, person passing me, can't talk now, sorry! Terribly busy! They're doing the same thing, of course.

Funny, that.

...And a happy new year. The holidays have been crazy, but Catherine and I are settling in to enjoy a relaxing conclusion. Among other varied and sundry gifts, I received a USB adapter for my old Edmund Scientific microscope. It's been a decade or so since I pulled it out, and I eagerly hooked it up, focusing on a torn off bit of wrapping paper. Man... at 150x magnification, little halftoned dots of Santa-Clause look weeeeeird.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

In happier news, I got some nice shots of the band at Jason's show on Saturday night. Josh in particular was quite photogenic.

This one's all over the place; I won't even pretend there's a coherent theme to tie these bits and pieces together. In the world of politics, Christopher Albritton writes that the Iraqi Constitution situation might not be as grim as initial reports indicate.

so far it's not bad. There seems to be no role for the Shi'ite hawza, women are mentioned in almost every clause that guarantees rights, the court system is independent and liberal. Islam is the official religion and “a main source of legislation,” but religious minorities are guaranteed freedom of worship. However, no law may contradict the principles of Islam, democracy or the rights and freedoms mentioned in the constitution, which sets up an immediate contradiction when you get to the rights of women.

Pat Robertson pissed off almost everyone by calling on the US to assassinate Venezuela's president Hugo Chavez. Media Matters has the video clip of the statements in question. "...I don't think any oil shipments will stop," he said. "...It's a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives do the job and then get it over with." What Chavez needs to do is ditch that oil and get his hands on some diamonds. Then he could count on Robertson's support. It worked for Seko.

My long-neglected personal site Predicate.org has received a drupal-flavored facelift, and a small crowd of compatriots are posting there now. It's fun to see it get off the ground; hopefully some of the other interesting folks I know will filter over there and poke around. I've debuted a couple of interesting drupal hacks on it, including comment threads with inline image uploading, previously impossible with the stock Drupal install. The patches might make it into the next official version of the Drupal core, which is quite gratifying. Whee!

When I write, I'm free. How cliche is that? I'm sure that I said that for the first time when I was twelve, or something like that. It feels strangely immature to admit it again, but it's still true. On any given day I'm carrying around so many ideas, so many potential projects, so many paths to take... Writing is a way of pulling one of those threads out of the tangle and stretching it out, working out the knots, making it something real and true and good.

Well... sometimes good. I look back at the stuff I've written over the years and nine times out of ten, I can only cringe. I'm a child of genre, the offspring of pulp, and while I'll always enjoy the chliche'd stuff like oldschool scifi and cyberpunk and noiry mystery, I'm aware of my surroundings enough to know that those are not respectable branches of the literary family tree. Why should it matter to me? I don't know. I married an english lit major -- but even she is grudgingly acknowledging that science fiction deserves to stay (perhaps at the back of the bus, but still...)

I pause and return to the phrase that started this assignment: "When I write, I..."

I feel relief. LIke an itch being scratched, pressure released, a thirst quenched. I gotta do what I gotta do, and all that stuff. Years ago, at a writers' conference, the speaker asked all of us why we wrote. It was a Christian conference, so most of the answers revolved around having a gift from God or wanting to reach the world with the Gospel or something like that. I raised my hand and, when called upon, said simply: "If you don't keep writing, eventually you spontaneously combust."

I still think it's true. I'm not willing to take the chance.

So, in a fit of lunchtime curiosity, I picked up a book that I haven't opened in a few years -- Discovering the Writer Within by Bruce Ballenger. It's an interesting one, and it has forty daily exercises. It's been a while since I've held myself to any sort of schedule or deadline with my writing, so it should be fun. Later this afternoon, I'll post the first entry -- the entire series will be flagged with the '40days' tag.

After the wedding, Catherine moved into my (our!) apartment and we set about reshuffling the layout and decor to suit a married couple and their foofy cat. Part of the reshuffling has involved moving both of our computers to a second bedroom and establishing a makeshift "work/writing/gaming room."

This is fine and good and working out well until we find a house to move into once the lease runs out. The only hitch is, well... the goldfinch.

There is, you see, a tiny yellow bird that flies, every day, to the window in our workroom. He clings to the screen and pecks desperately at the glass, ratta-tatta-tatta style, like a tiny confused woodpecker. Or... glasspecker? Something like that. Every morning, every afternoon -- he's there, desperately tapping out his SOS to the universe. [[Abby]], our fluffy orange cat, has been adjusting well to apartment life and has now taken to sitting beneath the windowsill, staring intently up at the goldfinch's usual spot. When he arrives (tappatappatappa!) she stares -- really, really stares -- and mouths idly, drooling perhaps, or fantasizing about broiled or roasted goldfinch. The bird, obvlivious, taps on.

One of these days, I think I'm going to find Abby with a glass cutter and a bottle of catsup.

UPDATE: Catherine has decided to name the goldfinch Henry. I approve.

After we arrived home from our honeymoon, Catherine and I have been playing our way through Prince of Persia. It is, beyond a shadow of a doubt, one of the best games I've ever played in my life. Beautiful and fluid and fanciful and fun, with enough narrative woven into it that things matter, without turning into a FMV dog and pony show. The perspective character -- a cocky prince with his eye on fame and fortune -- is flawed but likable, a Persian Indiana Jones with l33t ninja skillz. The mechanics of the gameplay -- controlling time itself as you jump and slash and leap your way through swashbuckling Arabian Nights stuff -- was inspired. The idea that the entire game was a story told to a curious listener? Cherry on top.

It's a work of art, this game. To the development team that created it, I salute you. There's a fascinating story behind the game's creation, tracing its way back to the old Broderbund-powered days of sidescrolling platform adventures. And there are also a number of amusing webcomics honoring the game. Sadly, the jaunty adventurer of the first game was replaced by a "darker" hero in the sequel, intended to be a "more mature" game. Sigh. Even Penny Arcade mocked the scantily-clad-time-empress goofiness of PoP2.

As I sit and reflect on the fact that I have the coolest, most awesomest wife in the world (based in small part on her ability to best numerous undead warriors in acrobatic, time-distorting combat), I hear that Prince of Persia 3 is chugging toward release. Apparently there is a lighter, happier prince -- but there's a dark prince trying to take over his body. Or something. I've seen the video clips, and it looks appropriately thrilling, but the pure charm of the original will be difficult to recapture. I'm hoping.

Life's going good these days. Last night after work, Catherine and I had Steve, Jason, and Steph over for hanging-out and pizza and assorted catching-up. It was fun stuff, though we were thwarted in our attempts to watch a movie when Comcast's On-Demand service went down. There was a startled moment of "Did I forget to pay my bill?" followed by, "Wait, everything else is working..."

Couldn't sleep afterwords, so I spent some time tinker-tinker-tinkering on the One Hundred Words site while Catherine watched a Campion mystery. The site is finally migrated over to Drupal, with the comic browsing interface in a rough but usable state. As it evolves, I'll probably be posting mre. Someday, Jason and I will have new content as well. Heh.

Riding into work on my bike this morning, I realized with a start that the breaks didn't work. Apparently something had jostled around and one of the cables had unseated, and the brake handles were flapping loosely when I squeezed them. Not good, sirs. Not good at all. Some close examination after I coasted to a stop revealed the problem, and I tinkered with the cable anchors until I could fit everything back together. I feel strangely cool, having fixed the problem with my bike. I didn't even have to Google!