Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Tossing a few thoughts out of my brain and into the ether before I try to deliberately induce a "hyperfocus" state to finish up this project I'm working on ...

Yesterday Perrine caught a moth. I very much want to encourage this. But as usual, she wouldn't kill it. She played with it on the bed just as she would a mouse. The funny bit was when she let it go and looked where she expected it to run before realizing it was going to fly instead. She very quickly adapted though.

I finally figured out what the really odd bad smell in my kitchen was yesterday. I couldn't figure out why it smelled like rotting meat -- I'm a vegetarian, so there's not a lot of meat in my garbage (i.e. only when a guest brings something into the house, and even then, it's rare that any winds up in the trash). The answer: while I was away for a few days, one of the wind-up mousetraps had caught half a mouse. They're designed to trick the mouse into running through a little tunnel, at which point the mechanism trips and scoops the mouse into a holding area at the end of the box, unharmed, to be removed and dealt with later. It looks like one wee mousie was just a little too fast for its own good, and nearly made it out the other side by the time the mechanism moved far enough to nearly cut it in half. So I've got a mouse face (dead, of course) peering out from the side of the trap, and I need to figure out how to back up the scoop enough to shake the mouse-parts out. Eww. For now I've just put it out on the deck to deal with later. I know it'll only get ickier, but I don't have time to mess with it right now.

Despite my illness making it difficult to do things quickly or for too many hours a day, I'm good at writing specifications; I'm quite good at designing systems; I'm pretty good at coding; I'm good at doing stuff ... but wow, do I suck at estimating how many hours a job will take. muttermutterbadwordmuttergrumblebadword feh

But hey, I understand Cascading Style Sheets now. Still need a cheat-sheet, but I understand them. Took me long enough to get around to learning 'em.

The weather has gotten comfortable. I've always liked autumn, and it's started feeling autumnal. (Almost on cue, astronomically ... it did start feeling this way what, a week ago?, but it went away again and came back.) My house is finally cool enough to wear clothes in. Maybe I'll actually put something on. (It's not cool enough to need clothing yet.) Of course this does mean that cold enough to want to run the furnace is only a couple of months away, and if I haven't found some way to pay my heating oil bill from last winter by then, it could get interesting, but for now I'll just rejoice in the fact that my favourite season is here, and that it makes my skin feel awake.