Mock Turtle Soup

Hey, I just got picked as a runner-up in the...

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 21:16:42 -0600

Hey, I just got picked as a runner-up in the SugarSync Story Contest. Score. My prize was 30 gigs of free space on SugarSync. It's actually way more useful to me than the grand prize, a Dell netbook, since I have two perfectly good laptops and a UMPC already. Y'all know the story already 'cause I blogged about it a month or so ago, but here it is for posterity anyway. (They posted the grand prize entries, but I don't know if they're going to post the runners-up.)

"I transcribe college classes and other events in realtime for Deaf and hard of hearing clients. Whatever anyone says goes up on the screen, a second after they've said it, at speeds up to 225 words per minute, so my clients are never left out of the conversation. I use a steno machine, a laptop with a wide screen, and a UMPC with a touch screen, all connected via Bluetooth. Sometimes I let my client read off the big screen of the laptop while I work off the UMPC. Sometimes my client wants to move around the room, so I give them the UMPC to carry, while I stay in one place and read off the laptop. I also do some freelance transcription work, and this setup gives me a lot of flexibility. One time I actually transcribed an entire interview while waiting in line for NYC's famous Shake Shack (a burger joint with legendary line lengths), using my UMPC mounted to my steno machine with the tripod jacked way up so I could write while standing. SugarSync lets me keep my 114,000-word steno dictionary and all my other client-specific dictionaries active and updated on both my computers, so I can be prepared to switch from one or the other at a moment's notice. It's so much better than transferring them laboriously by hand using a thumb drive or uploading and then downloading each dictionary through my email account. I hardly even notice the transfer, but the files are always where I need them."
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And in continuing ultra-gayness (Hey, it's the...

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 12:30:32 -0600

And in continuing ultra-gayness (Hey, it's the last day of June. I'm doing what I can.):

Yma Sumac sings The Queen of The Night

It's too bad the sound quality isn't better, 'cause this rocks my damn socks.

Via Parterre. (Who else?)
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I'm back! Oh, it was wonderful...

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 11:02:32 -0600

I'm back! Oh, it was wonderful. I'm not sure if I'll actually be able to dredge up all the necessary words to blog about it or not, but man, that was one great weekend. Meanwhile, 110 Queer Tangos. K. and I definitely want to learn to tango, and there's apparently a free lesson at a queer milonga every Tuesday, so we're gonna try to make it out there at some point during the summer.
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Yep, it's that time again...

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 10:52:44 -0600

Yep, it's that time again. Joe My God mentioned it yesterday, and while I've posted it, what, twice before already, this time is better, 'cause it's in French with subtitles, rather than either the not-quite-as-good English version or the French unsubtitled version.

Also, this weekend is Pride, which we won't be able to attend, because we're leaving tomorrow for our belated honeymoon in Montreal! (We're taking the train up and staying here until Monday. So excited!) That makes reposting the song with bilingual subtitles all the more appropriate, I think. Yes, it's a sad song, but a beautiful one. It rings true, and at the same time, it makes me grateful for how far we've come since it was written. Also for the sensitivity and artistry of Charles Aznavour, a straight man who nevertheless had the guts to write and perform this song back in 1973. I salute him and all our compatriots and allies -- queer and het, cis and trans, butch and nelly, and everything in between.
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The theater captioning company I work for has an...

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 16:18:06 -0600

The theater captioning company I work for has an opening for a captioner. They're not looking for stenographers; it's done with a laptop, specialized software, and a big LED sign. If any of you are interested, contact my gmail address, username: askeladden, and I can fill you in on any questions you may have.
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Okay, so Audiosurf, as I've recently rediscovered,...

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 17:00:25 -0600

Okay, so Audiosurf, as I've recently rediscovered, is seriously fun. I downloaded it when it first came out, but my old computer was too old to play it without jerking, so I sort of forgot about it. Then, the other day, I got an email saying, "Your record on the Decemberist's 'Oh, Valencia' has just been beaten", and I was like, "Hey, I remember that game. I was incredibly excited by it, and then it turned out to be slow and annoying. I wonder if it's any better on my new computer." It is. It's freaking great. Now I have to keep myself from playing it for hours on end. I just did The Dance of the Furies on Mono Ninja Elite and I'm still tingling.
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Trust not a man who's rich in flax.

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 14:33:49 -0600

Trust not a man who's rich in flax.
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And to celebrate new mp3 player, new headphones,...

Sat, 20 Jun 2009 19:25:38 -0600

And to celebrate new mp3 player, new headphones, and new blog rollover, something I haven't done in a while: Guess the lyrics! I looked through one of my old ones, of songs picked at random, and even I couldn't guess most of 'em. So I'm restricting this to lines from songs I can actually sing along with, the first ones to come up from a shuffled sampling of likely songs. I figure it'll be pretty easy.

~~1. You were the father of modern medicine.~~ Is This What You Wanted, Leonard Cohen

~~2. This I know from nothing.~~ Lobachevsky, Tom Lehrer (Guessed by Neil)

~~3. I see centipedes and snakes.~~ All For Me Grog, Traditional (Guessed by Libby)

~~4. It kind of hovered before my vision.~~ Indier Than Thou, MC Frontalot (Guessed by Remi)

~~5. Lead, gold, tin, iron, platinum, zinc.~~ Chemical Calisthenics, Blackalicious (Guessed by Martin)

~~6. Alack-a-day! Oh, woe! Oy vey!~~ The Ballad of Chicken Soup, Carole King (Guessed by Odious)

~~7. Take me to your daddy's farm.~~
Back in the USSR, The Beatles (Guessed by Martin)

~~8. Ne'er once had he murdered, nor looted, nor plundered, nor burned.~~ The Ballad of Richard III, Gwydion Pendderwen (Guessed by Neil)
~~9. And so begins the final drama.~~ The Internationale, Billy Bragg

~~10. Look for me with the sun-bright sparrow.~~ Yankee Bayonet, The Decemberists (Guessed by Remi)

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I don't know if any of you guys remember, but back...

Sat, 20 Jun 2009 17:32:26 -0600

I don't know if any of you guys remember, but back around 2002 I became obsessed with the idea of listening to music while swimming. The only waterproof mp3 players on the market back then were something like $200. Instead, I bought a $15 waterproof pouch off eBay and a $35 flash player -- I don't remember the capacity, but it could only hold about 9 songs -- that was so old it could only connect to my computer via parallel port. These, combined with ordinary earbuds, made for frustrating listening. The earbuds would become waterlogged almost instantly and I could hardly hear anything. It was all absurd-looking, and I'd have to strap it to my middle like some sort of horrible yellow fanny pack. I used the thing maybe half a dozen times but eventually gave it up.

Yesterday, I was at J&R Music World (man, I love that store) buying headphones for transcription. The cheap ones I'd been using were terrible, especially when transcribing on the train or in noisy coffee shops, with staticky audio and improperly amplified respondents. I got some Sennheister HD 280s for $70, which was fantastic. Combined with JackAMP, they've already radically reduced the amount of aggravation I get from my job. This is good. But while I was there, I noticed that they were selling a refurbished 1 gigabyte waterproof Dolphin. For $15.

Fifteen dollars!

I showered with it this morning. It was kickass.
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Dinner tonight: ...

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 22:12:59 -0600

Dinner tonight:

Artichokes with Melted Butter
Mushroom Ravioli in White Wine and Goat Cheese Sauce
Avocado, Tomato, Cucumber, and Basil Salad
Honey Ice Cream with Raspberries and Chocorooms
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Ramen ramen ramen ramen...

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 11:05:37 -0600

Ramen ramen ramen ramen
Ramen ramen ramen ramen
Ramen ramen ramen ramen
Mar-mite! Mar-mite!
Ramen ramen ramen ramen
Ramen ramen ramen ramen
Ramen ramen ramen ramen
Mar-mite! Mar-mite!
Ramen ramen ramen ramen
Ramen ramen ramen ramen
Ramen ramen ramen ramen
Toast! Toast! Toast! Toast!
Toast...
Toast...
It's Marmite on toast...
Ramen ramen ramen ramen
Ramen ramen ramen ramen...
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I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed and scattered...

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 01:20:46 -0600

I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed and scattered. Now that I've attained one of my major goals for the year, I figure I'm supposed to look at what I've been doing and accelerate it; harder, faster, stronger, all that noise. But instead I feel like my wheels are spinning, and I'm not sure how I should direct my energy. I kept up my Four Things habit tracker from January through May, but after taking the CCP, I lost motivation and dropped it. Here's the log:

Four was a good number, but the trouble is that I should be doing at least seven things regularly -- Exercise, Python, Steno, ASL, Violin, Cleaning, Webpage -- and the thought of doing all that makes me not want to do anything but get my deadline work done and then sit around on the internet until K. gets home.

Exercise got really boring when I was just doing a hundred situps a day. They weren't hard. They just took forever to do and they were boring. I'm thinking of getting an ab wheel. I've never used one, but they look kind of fun, and they're pretty cheap.

Ever since I started learning how to work with classes in Python, I've been dragging my feet on finishing the awesome puzzles my brother's been writing for me. I just haven't gotten the hang of them yet, and I let them cow me. I've got to push back against that. Little steps, little steps.

Steno should be okay. I have a subscription to Realtime Coach, and I'm at my steno machine most of the day anyway, so I should probably be able to make myself do five minutes a day, at least. It's been nice having a break, but I want to get back some of the discipline I developed when training for the CCP. It turns out I have to get the RPR before I can get the RMR (bleh), so the next step is going to be an even more reasonable goal than I thought it would be, but I've still got to be diligent about it. Maybe I'll interweave Realtime Coach practice with audiobook practice, to mix it up a little.

ASL is getting frustrating too. I feel like my fingerspelling is about as good as it's gonna get, though I worry that not maintaining it will mean it slowly degrades; but I'm pretty sick of the online fingerspelling sites. And my vocabulary is really terrible. I think I'm gonna focus on vocabulary building for summer and then maybe try to work on actual vlog comprehension when fall comes around.

Violin has always been a sticking point. I've played since I was three, and I've never been able to make myself practice diligently. But I'm going to aim for at least two to three times a week, now that I'm playing weekly with my harpsichordist. It wouldn't be fair to him otherwise.

Cleaning I actually like doing. It's just hard to break the inertia and start. I think I'm gonna go for one cleaning task, big or small, a day. That's actually the least intimidating one on the list, for some reason.

Webpage design I'm hoping I can drop by the end of summer, if not earlier. If I do a little copywriting each day in July and then assemble all the pieces (with K. The HTML Stud's help) in August, I should have a content-rich and fully functioning webpage by the time the school year starts again.

But how am I gonna keep track of all this? Should I stick with Everyday Systems or go back to something like Sciral Consistency? Should I give myself red marks if I don't meet my goals, or just track what I do and don't do? I'm gonna sleep on it and probably not start anything up for a week or two, especially because I have to report for jury duty next week. And of course none of this is taking into account the Hearing Loss Academy work, which is self-paced but has to be finished within one year. I'll get the materials for that in a couple of weeks and then I guess I'll figure out what kind of time I need to be devoting to it. But Seven Things will most likely become Eight.

Then there's my actual paying work. My direct client, whose audio files are the cleanest, whose subject matter I like the best, whose format is the least annoying, whom I make the most money from (I actually charge very reasonable rates, but because there isn't a transcription firm taking a cut I enjoy a bigger profit) has the most flexible deadlines, and the two other transcription firms, who pay me far less and whose files generally take far longer to transcribe, have really tight deadlines.

In this chart, green is my direct client. Pink is my higher-paying indirect client. Red is my lower-paying indirect client. The higher the dot, the closer the transcription time was to the audio time. A dot at 0.3 took three times longer to transcribe than it would have taken to listen to straight through. A dot at 0.9 would have taken almost the same amount of time to transcribe as to listen to. As you can see, the majority of the green dots are high on the chart, and the red and pink ones are generally lower. I spend most of each day on red and pink dot files, due 26 hours from the time I receive them, trying to make out the audio and twiddling the formatting, and find myself completing the green dot files just before their deadlines rather than finishing them as I get them and delivering them well ahead of schedule. No real solution to this one; I need to be as efficient as possible in all my transcription work. It's just a little frustrating.
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And I just renewed my associate membership in...

Sat, 13 Jun 2009 18:25:39 -0600

And I just renewed my associate membership in ATHEN and registered for the year-long online course at the American Academy of Hearing Loss Support Specialists. I feel all competent and professional and stuff.
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Designed by the eminent K. to my specifications...

Sat, 13 Jun 2009 16:03:16 -0600

I haven't gotten official confirmation in the...

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 17:31:06 -0600

I haven't gotten official confirmation in the mail, but according to my transcript on the NCRA website, I appear to be a CCP.

This makes me very, very happy.

I'm basically a gibbering mess and can't think of anything to say at the moment, so I'll just post the official NCRA boilerplate on what this means.

The Certified CART, or Communication Access Realtime Transcription, Provider (CCP) exam is a two-part exam consisting of a Written Knowledge Test -- testing a candidate's abilities at research, language skills, writing realtime -- and a skills test. A Certified CART Provider possesses comprehensive knowledge of the English language in order to detect and correct mishearings during realtime transcription and anticipate and prevent mistranslations. The technology utilized by a CART provider is similar to television captioning, which can be provided as an accommodation in keeping with the spirit of the Americans with Disabilities Act to assist persons who are Deaf or hard of hearing, have a learning disability, or speak English as a second language.

Also, after I found out I went downstairs to see if my certificate was in the mail, and when I came back, the cat snuzzed me, which he hasn't done in ages. It's been a good day.
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"Or Calcutta" came out "oracle cut that".

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 12:21:40 -0600

"Or Calcutta" came out "oracle cut that".
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A poem about cuttlefish, refuting the latest lame...

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 18:43:08 -0600

A poem about cuttlefish, refuting the latest lame salvo from the Intelligent Design contingent, to the meter of "Casey At the Bat"?

You're darn tootin'.

Via, once again, the geeky-poem-promulgating Maradydd.
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I've probably been doing it for ages, but I only...

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 22:25:27 -0600

I've probably been doing it for ages, but I only recently realized it consciously: whenever I'm in bed, trying to fall asleep, I imagine myself way up near the ceiling. Sometimes I imagine hooking my arms around the apex of a monkey-bar cage and dangling upside down. Sometimes I picture my feet stuck in epoxy-mounted gumboots. Sometimes I picture myself woven into a strong, soft web of sticky fibers. In all of them, though, the soles of my feet are touching the ceiling. I hold the image for a while in my wide-awake mind; gradually it makes me drowsy and I pass into sleep, still seeing myself up there, a good 10 feet from the bed I'm lying in. A little while ago I noticed that I was doing this, and after a few nights of pondering the reason, I figured it out. Even though my brothers moved out when I was a toddler -- so I essentially grew up as an only child -- I had bunkbeds in my room until I was a teenager. Sometimes I'd sleep on the lower bunk, draping blankets over the front and pretending to be in a cave or a train car or the berth of a ship; but more often, and especially on summer nights, I'd sleep on the top bunk, putting my feet against the smooth plaster of the ceiling to cool them and looking down over the railing at the shadows of my bedroom. I guess some habits are hard to break.
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From the same online shop, I just bought four...

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 23:04:35 -0600

From the same online shop, I just bought four servings of one of the most delicious foods in the world and six servings of what's bound to be among the least delicious, though I haven't actually tasted it. Never hurts to hedge one's bets.
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I recently had the delightful experience of going...

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 19:07:28 -0600

I recently had the delightful experience of going to a program's website to submit a feature request, then seeing when I got there that the newest beta not only incorporated the feature I wanted to request but also a feature I requested in the previous iteration of the software. ManicTime is even more invaluable than before. Now I can type in the name of a transcription file and get exactly how much time I worked on it, no matter how other things I alt-tabbed to during the course of transcribing it. This lets me compare the audio time with the transcription time (not figuring in web research or formatting time, but I could if I wanted to) and graph it in Google Spreadsheets, to see if I'm getting more or less efficient as my summer transcription groove wears on. The other great new feature in this version of, the one I requested back in February, is auto-refresh. Before, I had to click out of and back into the window to make it update, which interrupted my flow. Now I can just glance over at my other monitor and see the dark green bar of Total Eclipse charging through my day; conversely, when I'm taking internet breaks, I can see the dreaded red bar of Firefox getting bigger and more fearsome as it ticks away each minute of slack. The only thing that would be better is if I could extract just the activity bar from the status and statistics display and have it always on top of another window, so I could have my email ready to hand instead of needing to alt-tab away from ManicTime whenever I see that my inbox has gone from 0 to 1. Still, it's a tremendous improvement over the already fantastic functionality of the previous version. I can't wait 'til they actually start asking donations for this thing, 'cause I can't think of a program more worthy of my money. For now, though, it's free! Download it immediately, and find out where your seconds and minutes and hours are really going.
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Happy birthday, Flicka!...

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 19:50:16 -0600

Happy birthday, Flicka!

Both K. and I cite this production as a primary formative influence on our preadolescent development. Via Parterre.
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M: Oh man, this tea is so freaking delicious...

Sat, 30 May 2009 18:09:38 -0600

M: Oh man, this tea is so freaking delicious. I just want to drink it all the time.
K: That's how it starts. And by "it", I mean colonialism.
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My two desktops, cross-posted to the Lifehacker...

Thu, 28 May 2009 16:32:37 -0600

My two desktops, cross-posted to the Lifehacker Desktop Flickr Group:

"This is the wallpaper of my default CART (Communication Access Realtime Transcription) profile, which I use when transcribing classes or other events in realtime for Deaf and hard of hearing clients. I used TweakGUI to make this profile load automatically unless I hold the shift key down while booting up. So my clients will only ever see a clean, icon-free desktop, and then when I go home to edit the transcripts, I can hold down shift and boot into my transcription desktop, which has all my files and shortcuts arranged for easy access. This wallpaper is also useful in explaining how my steno machine works, when curious onlookers come up and ask me what that weird-looking keyboard thing is for."

"This is the desktop of the profile I use for freelance transcription and transcript editing. The wallpaper is a modified version of Nick Pan's grid wallpaper. The events and to-do list are from Google Calendar and Remember the Milk, routed through Rainlendar, and the clock is from Bootmaker's Analog Clock skin. The files in the upper grid are current working files, such as audio that needs to be transcribed and scripts that need to be edited. The files in the lower grid are commonly used programs. I get into this profile by holding down the shift key while booting up; otherwise, my computer will automatically boot into my default CART desktop."
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K: Whoops...

Thu, 28 May 2009 11:22:14 -0600

K: Whoops! I just almost dropped the butter lid into the cat water. Butterlid and Catwater, Attorneys at Law.
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From a lovely brief history of the cornetto:...

Mon, 25 May 2009 13:35:33 -0600

From a lovely brief history of the cornetto:

Some were blowing with their cheeks on a rod,
Another was biting on a sausage which was 7 quarter long,
He was biting pieces out of the sausage.
I truly believe the sausage was very hot,
For his fingers went up and down every time he bit,
And his eyes were popping out like stones.
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Jabberwocky in ASL.

Sat, 23 May 2009 17:50:11 -0600

Jabberwocky in ASL.
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Three interviews transcribed. ...

Thu, 21 May 2009 23:44:55 -0600

Three interviews transcribed.
Three glasses of ouzo drunk.
Three Bach violin sonatas played (by Emlyn Ngai on mp3, though hopefully soon by me with a harpsichordist somewhere in Manhattan! Just for fun, but I'm excited. It's been so long since I played anything with anyone.)
One Python puzzle that's been stumping me for three days solved.
One me, one K., one cat.
I love this life.
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Okay, fine...

Tue, 19 May 2009 23:00:48 -0600

Okay, fine. I've been going back and forth on this all day, but now that Tim's broken the catblogging ice for the evening, I just have to. I've been trying to be good and stay focused on working, since my days are currently unbounded by anything but my own forcible slack-curtailment measures. The trouble is that being good all the time makes for boring blogging. I could blog about the FREAKING AMAZING INCREDIBLE OH MY FREAKING FLARGH Leonard Cohen concert we saw on Saturday, but... I have no words for it. Holy hell, but that man is fabulous. Or I could blog about... Um... My trip through the park to the grocery store to shop for shiitake mushrooms and crimini mushrooms and mushroom-filled ravioli and probably some other things that weren't fungoid, though I can't remember what. Oh, yes. Blindingly good ice cream. I could blog about K.'s adventures in paper writing, but she'd probably look sternly at me. (She's a kickass paper writer, but doesn't like it bandied about.) I could blog about bawdy songs by Thomas D'Urfey. Uh, probably got that covered already, yeah. The ASL comedy show I went to? It was very funny, and involved a dude telling the story of Odysseus's encounter with Polyphemus in such a way that it looked like he was getting wasted at a party. My Python studies? My oldest brother is being awesome and sending me daily puzzles to code, the latest of which involved a Madoff-inspired scam to steal the assets of unsuspecting depositors. My daily workflow? Got up, transcribed an interview about a 3D head-up ophthalmological operating microscope, did some prepping of a Noel Coward play, talked to my mom, applied for some jobs, went shopping, made dinner... Um... Yeah, see, this is why people catblog.

Okay, so: This morning. Approximately 4:22 a.m. The cat is in a mood. He's wandering around batting things around and chirping at us. (He doesn't really meow much. He makes little birdlike burbling noises which, when combined with his mad dashes up and down the hallway, get dopplerized into what we call "scrambled eggs". As in, "Agh! Scrambled Eggs! It's 4:22 in the freaking morning!" He's recently started answering to it.) The humans are asleep, he's bored, and there's nothing to do but chirp, burble, scrabble noisily under the desk, and attempt to assault the Forbidden Bookcase. After about 20 minutes of this, the humans are fed up and put him in the bathroom, along with his food and water. Actually, we don't have to put him in the bathroom. Whenever we go in, he always follows us, because there's usually something Interesting going on in there. So I walk in with food and water, he follows, the bathroom door is closed. The bedroom door is closed. We go back to sleep. Half an hour later, we hear this great loud booming banging noise echoing throughout the apartment. Boom-bang! Bang-boom! Fwham-fwham-fwham! "Oh, no!" Says K., half asleep but guilt-stricken (she's very talented). "He's throwing himself at the door! He's going to batter himself senseless! You have to let him out!" I stagger to the bathroom and open the door, expecting to see a bruised and hysterical beast hurling himself bodily against the door frame. Instead I see two paws and an inquisitive harlequined head poking up from the bathtub. He'd been romping about in the hollow tin tub, making a din like Hannibal's elephants, but was perfectly whole and unharmed. He burbled happily when he saw me, followed me back to the bedroom, hopped onto the book bins at the foot of the bed, and slept peacefully for the rest of the morning. Here's hoping I wore him out enough today throwing tentacles that he'll sleep all the way through the night tonight.
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They have a new drug that is called the close hug ...

Fri, 15 May 2009 19:35:33 -0600

They have a new drug that is called the close hug
Which will mend your complexion and make you look smug.

Oh, Thomas D'Urfey, I <3 you.

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Sestina. ...

Thu, 14 May 2009 17:53:07 -0600

Sestina .

(Warning: PDF.)

Both poem and proof. Bloody brilliant. Via Maradydd.
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