I love my cats. I love my cats.
For the first time ever today, my darling fluffy kitty Dorian Mome Rath Abomination Gray---whom I love so well and for whom I just paid hundreds of dollars for the continued privilege of keeping within my dwelling place---took it upon himself to knock the big kitchen trash can over and strew the contents across my newly cleaned kitchen floor and part of the living room.
Fun!
There was some chicken pot pie debris in there, but this cat is the least interested in human food (or anything that doesn't go CRUNCH CRUNCH when he eats it) of any of the cats we've had. You could leave a whole roast chicken on the floor and he would come up and sniff it curiously and then walk away.
Iwasted spent a considerable portion of today emailing back and forth with the apartment office. The office manager was out sick yesterday. I don't know if she tried to call, as we recently changed our number and it turns out I hadn't given her the new one yet, so that one might be on me. I gave the new phone number in my email. One of her reply emails described the process as a "walkthrough", which suggests to me that 1) it won't be too intrusive but 2) it will involve looking at the entire apartment.
(Either that or she's going to show me how to get 100% completion in Smash Bros. Brawl)
We're going to do it some time next week now. I've just got to keep the place in good order. (*Glares at Dorian*) In the meantime, I guess I can stop worrying. Tomorrow I won't have to clean (*Glares at Dorian*) or be on the lookout for official visitors or anything like that. Hooray! (*Glares at... no, wait. Never mind.)
In other news, we went out and got some floorplans and brochures from other apartments we're looking at, and will probably be looking at them within the next month. We're going to be moving out of Omaha itself and into one of the smaller adjoining communities, which will save a bit on rent. It seems as though this neighborhood has seen a sharp increase in crime recently, so it will be good to get away from that. We're looking at the area around Shadow Lake, which has some newer developments and also sounds like a place where you can go fishing with ninjas.
Actually, the main appeal for me is that it would put me within easy walking distance of anything and everything I might need. I've got a rather large and well-equipped grocery store handy here, but the Shadow Lake shopping district has a book store, a computer store, an office supply store, etc. It will be much easier for me to do that certificate/degree thing I mentioned or other mail-order things (like autograph plates) if I have all that nearby.
I've been asked to remind everybody that there in fact is a fan-compiled Tales of MU wiki hosted on my webspace. It's not terribly complete or in-depth on a lot of subjects because it hasn't got a lot of attention... it was more active before, but then it was offline for a bit and I think people forgot about it or, like Pope Lizbet, didn't realize it was back online. It is.
It's also been mentioned to me by several readers that they enjoy it when I'm more active on the forum, in the comments, on Livejournal, in my blog, on Twitter, etc. So I'm working on that stuff. I've also had people ask me for my IM information... I'm a little more conflicted about that, because I don't use IMs a lot and I'd rather not have a hundred people messaging me on the identities I do occasionally use. I might make a new identity for public interactions, though... or maybe make a less obvious one for private/personal use and publicly release the one I do have now. I don't know. I'll think about it. I'm not saying no.
Email is always appreciated... it's alexandra at this domain, if you don't know. I generally respond to every reader email I get. There was a bunch that arrived in the past few months at a time when I was being heavily besieged by spam and hadn't got my filters worked out yet, so if you didn't get a reply that's probably why. People who have emailed me more recently tend to get a response the same day. I'm also approving forum memberships on a same day basis, though there were a couple in a row a short while back that looked like they might have been spammers (combination of random-looking letters and numbers, free email addresses, not much else to go on) that I haven't approved yet. I figured if they're humans and they're determined to join, they'll let me know. If you have registered and haven't been approved, I probably was doing a batch and missed you somehow. Again, just let me know.
I got more email than comments on my political digression the other day. Some people asked me to do that more often because they enjoyed reading it. Other people asked me to keep it off my blog because they don't. To try to make both groups happy, I'm making a separate venue for me to comment on politics and news items: http://www.nevermindthepunditry.com. I won't be posting in it regularly... just when something's caught my eye and I've got free time. The paint is still wet on the URL, so it might not resolve for everybody today. There's nothing there right now, though. Just an empty Wordpress blog. Actually, I think I'm going to copy my post about the shoe-throwing over just so it's got something.
Warning: there may be downtime ahead some weekend. Dreamhost's reliability seems to have improved remarkably in the past year (I moved my stories off but kept my blog here so I could get word out in case of outage) and they're enabling MySQL query caching which should make it a lot easier for their servers to handle my load, while Nearly Free Speech has not quite lived up to their claimed capabilities and blames their inability to handle my traffic on plugins which I disabled the first time there was an issue. My Dreamhost stuff has been down/unavailable a lot less often than the NFS sites. I think I'm moving back.
I'm not even going to think about messing with that stuff until my living situation is settled, though. Just giving a heads-up.
Fun!
There was some chicken pot pie debris in there, but this cat is the least interested in human food (or anything that doesn't go CRUNCH CRUNCH when he eats it) of any of the cats we've had. You could leave a whole roast chicken on the floor and he would come up and sniff it curiously and then walk away.
I
(Either that or she's going to show me how to get 100% completion in Smash Bros. Brawl)
We're going to do it some time next week now. I've just got to keep the place in good order. (*Glares at Dorian*) In the meantime, I guess I can stop worrying. Tomorrow I won't have to clean (*Glares at Dorian*) or be on the lookout for official visitors or anything like that. Hooray! (*Glares at... no, wait. Never mind.)
In other news, we went out and got some floorplans and brochures from other apartments we're looking at, and will probably be looking at them within the next month. We're going to be moving out of Omaha itself and into one of the smaller adjoining communities, which will save a bit on rent. It seems as though this neighborhood has seen a sharp increase in crime recently, so it will be good to get away from that. We're looking at the area around Shadow Lake, which has some newer developments and also sounds like a place where you can go fishing with ninjas.
Actually, the main appeal for me is that it would put me within easy walking distance of anything and everything I might need. I've got a rather large and well-equipped grocery store handy here, but the Shadow Lake shopping district has a book store, a computer store, an office supply store, etc. It will be much easier for me to do that certificate/degree thing I mentioned or other mail-order things (like autograph plates) if I have all that nearby.
I've been asked to remind everybody that there in fact is a fan-compiled Tales of MU wiki hosted on my webspace. It's not terribly complete or in-depth on a lot of subjects because it hasn't got a lot of attention... it was more active before, but then it was offline for a bit and I think people forgot about it or, like Pope Lizbet, didn't realize it was back online. It is.
It's also been mentioned to me by several readers that they enjoy it when I'm more active on the forum, in the comments, on Livejournal, in my blog, on Twitter, etc. So I'm working on that stuff. I've also had people ask me for my IM information... I'm a little more conflicted about that, because I don't use IMs a lot and I'd rather not have a hundred people messaging me on the identities I do occasionally use. I might make a new identity for public interactions, though... or maybe make a less obvious one for private/personal use and publicly release the one I do have now. I don't know. I'll think about it. I'm not saying no.
Email is always appreciated... it's alexandra at this domain, if you don't know. I generally respond to every reader email I get. There was a bunch that arrived in the past few months at a time when I was being heavily besieged by spam and hadn't got my filters worked out yet, so if you didn't get a reply that's probably why. People who have emailed me more recently tend to get a response the same day. I'm also approving forum memberships on a same day basis, though there were a couple in a row a short while back that looked like they might have been spammers (combination of random-looking letters and numbers, free email addresses, not much else to go on) that I haven't approved yet. I figured if they're humans and they're determined to join, they'll let me know. If you have registered and haven't been approved, I probably was doing a batch and missed you somehow. Again, just let me know.
I got more email than comments on my political digression the other day. Some people asked me to do that more often because they enjoyed reading it. Other people asked me to keep it off my blog because they don't. To try to make both groups happy, I'm making a separate venue for me to comment on politics and news items: http://www.nevermindthepunditry.com. I won't be posting in it regularly... just when something's caught my eye and I've got free time. The paint is still wet on the URL, so it might not resolve for everybody today. There's nothing there right now, though. Just an empty Wordpress blog. Actually, I think I'm going to copy my post about the shoe-throwing over just so it's got something.
Warning: there may be downtime ahead some weekend. Dreamhost's reliability seems to have improved remarkably in the past year (I moved my stories off but kept my blog here so I could get word out in case of outage) and they're enabling MySQL query caching which should make it a lot easier for their servers to handle my load, while Nearly Free Speech has not quite lived up to their claimed capabilities and blames their inability to handle my traffic on plugins which I disabled the first time there was an issue. My Dreamhost stuff has been down/unavailable a lot less often than the NFS sites. I think I'm moving back.
I'm not even going to think about messing with that stuff until my living situation is settled, though. Just giving a heads-up.