Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"I like you. You're funny and you're nicely shaped and frankly it's ludicrous to have these interlocking bodies and not ... interlock. Please remove your clothes now." -- Anya, on the television show, Buffy the Vampire Slayer

A kutten is a cat genetically-modified to double its cuteness, deployed in military and political conflicts as weapons of mass distraction.

Wow. Lost track of time; Hallowe'en is nearly upon us and yet again I'm behind on holiday prep. Time for the annual "just how lame is it to re-do a past year's costume?" debate in my head.

Had some good days lately and some really, really bad ones. Tried to get some network maintenance stuff on the good days, but alas most of the to-do list items I've poked at have turned into yak-shaving. (Hey, why is it that the first thing 'apt-get' wanted to do when I tried to add stuff after a bare-bones Debian installation, was to delete the kernel and make the system unbootable? I thought that sounded sub-optimal (well, pessimal really) but maybe that's just me.) I can't seem to get a floppyfw diskette with a 2.4 or 2.6 kernel to boot on any machine in the house (but I can run a 2.2 one). And somehow the SPARC Debian CDs I downloaded and burned months ago turned out to have i386 stuff on them instead, despite what directory I thought I was getting them from. Hmph!

Perrine made me laugh hard enough to need my athsma inhaler a few nights ago. She pounced and swatted at me then ran away, which I took as a sign that she wanted to play chase. So after evaluating the functionality of my knees at the time, I started stalking her and springing at her, chasing her from room to room. When she went up the stairs, I gave the trade-roles signal and ran down the hallway, ducking aside next to the basement door to wait for her. When I heard her approach, I stepped out ... and she did this beautiful, cute, cartoonish stiff-legged spring straight up -- not a coil-and-leap pushing with her rear legs, but a four-legged spring that gave the impression she levitated. I guess I surprised her more than I thought I would, because I expected her to either recoil and retreat or accelerate past me like usual.

She's been very cuddly lately, and following me around from room to room more than usual. I guess she's forgiven me for the uncomfortable palak paneer incident ...

I was heating packaged Indian food from the grocery store a few days ago, which comes in a silver pouch (boil in bag, or dump into a bowl and microwave -- I was doing the latter). The darling feline looked curious and headed over, so I let her sniff the torn-off end of the pouch. I expected a brief sniff and a decision that it didn't smell like food-for-cats, but no, she decided to take a couple good licks of the sauce that clung to the plastic. A moment later she gave a start as though something had bitten her on the tongue, started to run away, looked confused as to which way to run from an enemy that was in her mouth, and finally sprinted to the other end of the house where she eyed the direction of the kitchen with a suspicious expression.

If I'd been expecting her to do more than sniff, I would've said, "not for cats" as a warning (I think she understands that phrase -- I'm not certain). Whoops. Poor kitty.

Still trying to sort out whether I'm feeling combobulated enough to be sociable, or whether I should let myself get my head stuck in a computer problem again and bang on OS installs until my body tells me it's lie-down-and-scritch-the-cat time again.

I had about eight other things I'd planned to write about the next time I sat down at an already-working computer, but they've gone out of my head.