Whoo. Okay, crunch time at work is over, for me. My co-workers have another two weeks of ripping their hair out (so if you pray or light candles or whatever, point that in their direction please, because my brain is fried to a crispy golden brown, so I can only imagine what state they’ll be in by August 1st), but I am technically free. Free to do all the stuff I put off because I was up to my ears in work. Yay! Probably.

Dr. Horrible Act III: wha-? Ow! Whoa. I feel so very many things at the same time, I can’t… waaugh.

Kittens. Two left, nine weeks old, driving me crazy. I mean, they are adorable and funny and entertaining - oh, and? Remember we were giving Jermaine icky wet cat food because she wouldn’t eat and wasn’t growing? Well, it worked a treat, she was noticeably friskier within days, and now she’s the same size as her sister. On Monday DrBob went off to Poland, and I decided to wean her from the icky stuff onto regular crunchies, so we cut back from 3x/day to once a day, and then down to none, and she was fine. Then DrBob came home, and she was all over him with the mewing and the cute, and he melted and gave her the icky stuff before he even had a chance to sit down and take his shoes off. She has got him so trained. Heh.

Today was the day they were supposed to go to their new home. Unfortunately, their new home changed her mind, fiddle-dee-dee, and didn’t even bother to tell us until today. So here we are in the lurch. Okay, I’m glad I didn’t hand tiny innocent kittens over to someone so irresponsible, but I kinda thought I’d be getting my house back this weekend. And I turned other people down who wanted them, AND held onto them for an extra week for her convenience, and now this. So VERY annoyed.

Any other news? Probably. When I remember what it is, I’ll let you know.

Song du jour of the day: It’s The End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine), by REM.

LOVED Act II of Dr. Horrible, so did Ignatz. The Sniglet, well, I think maybe seven is a tad too young for “the hammer is my penis.” But this is awesome! The whole internet-musical about a low-rent villain protagonist and hero antagonist is awe! some! Drink!*

*You should drink whenever I say “awesome.” I ripped this off from Will Write For Wine. I think it is an excellent idea, not because I want to say awesome less, but because I think you should drink more. You’re welcome!

News: DrBob is safe home from Poland. He had a good time. Yay. Also, even though he is about to be the administrative head of a Spanish Department in a highly-regarded and high-ranking university, other academics still frequently mistake him for a student, even when his tattoos aren’t showing. I think this is hilarious.

Song du jour of the day: Neil and Felicia’s duet at the beginning of Act II. Total song virus, and a fantastic look at two very different aspects of being in love.

SO this morning I bounded out of bed, caroling “IT’S TUESDAY!” and scaring the cats, hustled the kids out the door (I’m pretty sure I let them get dressed first) and sat down to watch Act One of Doctor Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, all scampery and excited, and…

not available outside the U.S.

PANTS! Great big, steaming, mile-high piles of PANTS! Also, Daaarrrrgh! Okay so I hustled over to Whedonesque and read the comments, and sure enough, somebody in Australia had a workaround. So I downloaded Hotspot Shield so that I could see it, which was probably all kinds of illegal, as if I care, the Entertainment Industry(tm) and its lawsuits can BITE ME, the scum-sucking, profit-whoring ass-maggots… oops, um, alert! This post is Not Safe For Kids!

But I digress.

It was all stoppy, which was annoying, and I only got to see it without the stops on the seventh or eighth run-through (what? Oh like you didn’t watch it at least that many times), but it is oh so many kinds of awesome I can’t even tell you. Well I don’t have to, because it’s Joss! Whedon! Also Neil Patrick Harris and Nathan Fillion and I am now a strong proponent of polygamy so I can marry them all that is how much I love love love them. Yes, I already have a husband, but he’s in Poland. By the time he gets back it’ll be too late, muahahaha.

After a few hours they managed to get it viewable to Evil Foreign Probably Terrorists Because If They Were Decent Folks They’d Live In God Bless America Dammit, and the international fans were so excited they came whooshing in and crashed the site. Understandable, really. So now I get the problem-loading-page page, but I actually left Act One up all day (so I could watch it two, three, seventeen times) so I can still see it any time I want HA! But I can’t shut that tab or shut down my computer or close my eyes ever again because I might not be able to get it back.

Song du jour of the day: Letter from Bad Horse.

So Michael and Marlon went to their new home on Friday, and we’re down to Jackie and Jermaine. Jermaine has us all trained to feed her icky wet cat food now, and she’s growing well and showing some energy. We’d like her to switch to crunchies, but we suspect she’s too much of a mini-diva to lower herself like that. Well, next weekend it’ll be someone else’s problem.

They are darling dears, but I am ready to go back to having our original two cats. The cat pee smell is driving me crazy. I would very much have liked to spend this weekend scrubbing the entire house with bleach, but I couldn’t - there’s too much work on my to-do list, and besides, as long as the kittens are here they’ll just re-pee everything I clean, so there’s not much point. Also, it’s raining and raining, and our dryer is broken, so the cat-pee laundry is mounting. Bleah.

Tomorrow I get up at 6 a.m. to take MrHusband to the airport. Conference in Poland, five days. I feel myself falling back into that mindset, where I lose track of the long view because my mind is full of little things that need to get done in the next few days. Well. The things will get done. The kittens will move out, the house will get clean*, we will go to Utrecht for a lovely vacation in August. I just need to be patient.

*I am seriously considering removing the baseboards so I can scrub underneath them. I may need someone to talk me down.

Song du jour of the day: Feist, We’re All in the Dance, h/t to Laume for that one.

P.S. Interview with Joss Whedon here.

…singing is the universal language, along with being on fire.

Today it was Lilu’s turn to get fixed, so she wasn’t allowed to have food all day, so I had to lock her in my office. But the kittens needed the litter box downstairs, so she used… a corner. For her diarrhea. Ew. Wash hands wash hands wash hands.

At 3 we took her down to the vet. He said to come back in an hour, so since we had time to kill, we went to check out the new car wash. It’s cool, there’s this water-wand thing, and you put your token in the machine and push all these buttons to get different substances blasted at your car at different pressures. DrBob handled the water-wand aspect of things (because when I tried it I nearly blasted myself across the lot). I put coins in the machine and pushed buttons. We got a little damp. End fun interlude.

Lilu’s a tough customer, apparently, and needed two hits of kitty sedative before she passed out. Well, one wasn’t enough, but two was maybe too much. Because where Fufu managed to stagger out of the basket and pee on the carpet after her operation, Lilu slept right through that, and so was sleeping in… ickiness… which I didn’t notice until she woke up, cross-eyed. I got her out of that (wash hands wash hands wash hands) and transferred her onto a towel, where she promptly threw up (wash hands wash hands wash hands). I moved her off the towel onto a throw-rug and went downstairs to get some Windex and paper towels, and she siezed the opportunity to stagger around my office and fall over and leave cat-butt-shaped ick-prints, oh, pretty much everywhere. O-kay, time to mop. Wash hands wash hands wash hands.

Right. That done, the paper towels aren’t doing enough to get the ick off Lilu. She needs a shower. The menfolk, noses-down in a game of Carcassonne, decline to help. Fine, I do it myself. Dry cat with towel. Wash hands again. She’s still stinky, and now, so am I.

Peace reigns for almost half an hour, and then I hear a whooshing sound and some shouting-husband sounds. I race downstairs to see him clutching the now-faucetless pipe on the stone sink on the patio, and he shouts “turn it off at the main valve!” Ummm, yeah… that is one of those things you do when you buy a house, isn’t it, you find out where all that stuff is. I know it was on my to-do list at some point. Okay, basement. Hey, some pipes! Two things that could be the main valve. I turn both. The wrong way. Then the right way, then the wrong way again. Argh. Sodden husband squelches downstairs, figures everything out. The patio is now a wading pool. Curious children race around tracking water through the house. Sedated cat staggers out the door, followed by frisky kittens. Argh.

Ho-kay. Get towel, wipe up water tracked all over house. Retrieve cats. Clean kitchen, because it’s there, and because I’m embarrassed at how badly I did with the whole main-valve thing. Need shower. Need sleep. Need a nice, uneventful day tomorrow, please.

Song du jour of the day: Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go, by Wham!

I’m a really bad housewife. I’m basically a helpless clean-freak - I will never, ever get this place as clean as I want it (you should be able to perform surgery on any surface in my house, dammit), so I usually don’t try. Well, I do try, but then I spend half an hour making sure all the spoons in the silverware drawer face the right way because if they don’t my eye will twitch FOREVER. Yes, I did do that today. (Hey, at least I wasn’t ironing dish towels - that’s for next weekend.) No, it doesn’t help to shut the drawer because I WILL STILL KNOW. Because of my focus problems, it’s hard to find the motivation to get started, so a lot doesn’t get done.

So. For the last few weeks there have been hundreds of titles to process for my job, and a book and two articles to proofread for Mr. Husband, and very, very much time in front of the computer and when I did have time to take a break, I got to use my two free minutes to clean out a litter-box, yay. But today I reached a stopping point: all the texts and titles were proofread and processed, and the next ones aren’t ready for me yet, so I had a whole day to be Just A Housewife. And it was blissful. I got so much stuff done - okay the house isn’t much cleaner, but I bought fresh food and fed it to my family, and the cats are de-fleaed and have appointments to get fixed (Lilu) and microchipped (both) and I ran about a hundred errands and it was great. I picked the Sniglet up from school. I sat still and listened to my husband when he wanted to tell me something. I found time to blog. I wrote emails too, and didn’t forget someone’s birthday.

I’ve always said that I was lucky that we could afford for me to stay home with the boys, but the fact is, I wasn’t always feeling it. I mean, I feel lucky that I can do this, but I’m not sure it’s really what I want to do. Today, though, I’m learning to appreciate it. Huh. Wonder how long that’ll last…

Now I think I’ll go spend some time with my husband, instead of collapsing exhausted into bed with the grim knowledge that I have to get up in five hours and slog some more. What a concept.

Song du jour of the day: Brandy Alexander, by Feist.

Ignatz woke up this morning with gum on his face. Old gum, from yesterday. I didn’t ask why he waited until this morning to try to remove it (attention parents: peanut butter works) - after thirteen years, you realize just how much you don’t really need to know. Ick.

He had a tae kwon do tournament today, and came home with a new green belt and a second-place trophy. Yay!

It’s my dad’s birthday today. He’d be 61, which is just so hard to imagine. For me he will always be frozen at 45. Sigh.

It’s also Christine’s birthday, and she had a big party. We went over, made awkward conversation for half an hour, and then came home. It was a good party, and they are nice people, but we don’t do all that well around lots and lots of strangers. Ooo! But her two-year-old granddaughter wanted to give me a good-night kiss, and she didn’t want to kiss DrBob. Ha. I win.

Tito left us today. His new owner - a school friend of Ignatz’s - came and fetched him, and Ignatz went along to help him settle in. He seems to be okay, and the others haven’t asked us where he went, so I guess everybody’s coping, but I kind of miss him and his speckly belly. This also makes me realize I’ve been really lax with the kitten pictures and updates.

Jermaine. Well, the others have been growing fast, eating solid food etc, and she has been more and more mommy-focused - well, no, she has stayed mommy-focused while the others grew up. That fall she suffered wasn’t the beginning of this, but it probably didn’t help. She’s fearful, and clingy, and doesn’t purr, and we noticed today that she is significantly smaller than her siblings, and started asking eachother, “have you ever seen her eat solid food?” “no, have you?” So we gave her the icky soft canned kitten food someone gave us as a baby gift, even though we generally don’t believe in the stinky wet mooshy stuff, and she actually ate it, so maybe now she’ll get better. We’ve reserved the rest of the baby cat food for her use (we were given one can per kitten). Anyway, late milestone: Germaine had her first solid food today! We think!

The others are just fine, jumping and climbing and chasing their tails (and each other’s tails). They’re seven weeks old, and just so cute, I keep running through the same thought-cycle: aww, I don’t want them to go… hello, moving? With seven cats? okay, bye now! aww… etc. They will be happy in their new homes, but we will still be sad to see them go.

But no, in case you’re wondering, we won’t do this again. We can’t keep Lilu inside - well, we don’t want to - and I doubt we’d be able to place a litter of kittens born in the fall. It’s generally understood here that spring-born cats are healthier than fall-born cats, a superstition I scoffed at until this year. But Lilu’s a spring cat, and Fufu’s a fall cat, and really, everything that happens happens to Fufu. I mean, we don’t know her background, and she might be more susceptible to illness, but even stuff that should be equally risky for both cats - fleas, worms, that big hole in her arm that had her limping for days - it all happens to Fufu. Weird.

Anyway, that’s the news here, pretty much. I finished proofing DrBob’s manuscript today, so now it’s back to spiffing data for my job. See, you’re not missing anything interesting.

Song du jour of the day: It Hurts, by Lena Philipsson.

No kitten pics at the weekend. Only houseguests on saturday, work work work today, and being sick, sick, sick through it all. This cold did have the miraculous property of condensing nine days of suffering into three days, but they were three very intense days. And I finally crawled out of my hacking, sniffling, working cave this evening, just in time to watch Germany lose to Spain. Tomorrow I will note that second place is not bad. Tomorrow I will understand that Spain simply played better than Germany, and you could have seen that the teams in the C-D groups were a lot tougher than the A-B teams, and so predicted that the best team from C and D would be the better team, would have worked harder and deserved that win more. Tomorrow I will remember that I really liked the Spanish team.

But tonight, all I can say is we lost. Dangit, dangit, dangit.

Song du jour of the day: my usual sports anthem. Love Stinks. By the J. Geils Band.

Kitten pics, um, soon? Maybe this weekend. Kitten news: Lilu is still trying to get them up to the Sniglet’s room. I take them up to visit every once in awhile, but they can’t stay there. He is wholly incapable of getting or keeping his room clean, and I prefer not to add a litter box, water dish, and kitten food to the mess.

But still she tries. They are too big to carry, so she chirps at them and they follow, reluctantly, and they are still much too small to manage the stairs but for her, they try. The stairs, as I said, are slats without risers, so they could easily fall through and down to the next flight. They usually make it up or down two stairs, realize they’re in trouble, and mew for help. So tonight at dinner I heard the kitten-in-distress mew and bolted for the stairs, and just as I reached them, Jermaine smacked onto the step in front of me. A straight-down fall of oh, nine or ten feet I’d say. It made a shockingly loud sound. I picked her up and she clawed me, desperate and panicked, so I put her on the couch where she trembled violently for about five minutes. Poor thing. I spoke very firmly to Lilu about this. Jermaine seems to be okay, but I can’t let that happen again, so my office door needs to be closed when I’m not in it, and we’ll just have to let Lilu in and out.

Ack.

Song du jour of the day: um, is there anything called What the HELL Were You Thinking, You Stupid Cat? There should be.

In the States, it’s about advertising money. Advertisers want their outrageously expensive ads to reach the widest possible audience, so they focus on prime time. At 9pm EST, people on the west coast are thinking about starting dinner, and if an event has to go out live, that 5-9pm range is probably the most lucrative time to show it. When I saw the Seahawks in Denver, I overheard some people talking about how the TV networks demand that the games start late, like 6pm, which in Denver in December, is really, really cold. The players would rather play when it’s warmer (and light) out, but they’re not consulted. So much is about money, and the money doesn’t care about children’s bedtimes or freezing athletes.

Here, I’m pretty sure it’s also about advertising money, but I don’t see the logic. We’re on the early side of Europe: there are four time zones from England to Russia. The Russians have a serious shot at winning the whole thing, and their poor fans back home will be tuning in at 10:45, while the English, who didn’t even qualify (but will watch it anyway, because come on), get to see it at 7:45. How is this reasonable? Next Monday morning, a lot of people are going to be calling in sick with soccer hangovers, and you read it here first: if Germany makes it to the final, I’m letting my kids stay up for the whole thing. I won’t be the only one.

Speaking of Russia, the song du jour of the day is Song#1 by Serebro. I do love songs written in English by people whose first language it isn’t. I mean, really. “Kick the flow?” What does that even mean?