I'm trying to expand my abilities beyond wordpress and have started learning to work with Joomla. It. Is. Kicking. My. Ass.

I just can't seem to get a grip on it. Wordpress is frelling intuitive compared to Joomla. I also feel like the tutorials just aren't giving me the information I need, though it's possible that they're just not giving it to me in the way I want it.

It's just so frustrating! ARG!!

Poor kittens. They went to get fixed today. Tuna came through fine, and despite our best efforts is tentatively jumping all over the place. Mostly trying to follow me so I'm trying to stay put. She's also eating and drinking.

Aryeh is a different story, what was supposed to be a simple castration turned into exploratory surgery to find his missing ball. He's still completely out of it. And has to wear a cone so he doesn't mess with his stitches. He had a bit to drink and has thrown up twice, I hope he feels better tomorrow morning.

I could feel it coming, Thursday Friday I wasn't quite myself in the evenings. I figured it was just coming off the Concerta. I should have remembered.

It will pass. It always passes.

The joys of being nuts eh?

I was walking to the mall in the middle of the afternoon, while my mom was asleep. I had a very good reason to go, but when I got there, I couldn't for the life of me remember what it was. In fact. I stood there, outside, and said out loud. "Ok, now why am I here?" An old man next to me asked me if I needed help, but my Stranger Danger alarm went off and I told him that I was fine.

I walk around the mall, trying to remember what the hell I was doing there, and there's a song stuck in my head. Salve Regina from Sister Act. Except it was going too fast, maybe 150% speed. Eventually I end up in front of Dr Lick ice cream stand. There's this woman there in Arab garb, trying to convince me to try their new Winter Ice cream, it's covered in alcoholic hot chocolate, or rum based dolce de lece. It didn't seem too appetizing to me and I politely said no thank you, but the guy behind the counter motioned me over. "I know exactly what you want." He said, and gave me a taster spoon full of green pistachio-like ice cream. It tastes like musky sweat socks. I give him the taster spoon back half full. He doesn't relent, but every flavor is horrible. Finally he relents, but then he says "If not ice cream, how about a Pita with something?" I look around and his booth is suddenly filled with meats. I look outside and suddenly it's snowing. A strange snowing, as if someone had laid a snowing backdrop but forgot how snow actually works.

I look down at my watch, it's 16:21, I'm supposed to wake my mother up at 17:00. I tell him no thank you and I start running home. Then I wake up, and my first thought it, 'Oh good, now at least I don't have to run home.'.

My parents were in China, and came back. My mother's PET scan came back and it was crummy. She's just finished a round of radiotherapy and is starting chemo next week. In between my parents coming back and getting the results I was riding up the elevator with a neighbour, he asked how things were going. I told him "Nothing interesting." He, kindly, said, "That's not good." To which I replied, "Better than the alternative."

My reply now when people ask how I or my family are doing is "We live in interesting times." That's pretty much the only thing I have left to say.

We're going through some Interesting times.

The part of you that hopes so hard and so strongly that it knows that everything will be alright? That's the part that gets kicked in the teeth when reality breaks down the door.

As more and more things get passed to me through facebook (including my last billable job) and as more and more events are organized via facebook, the peer pressure finally overflowed my objections cup (I don't need another distraction!!).

I, my dearest friends, have a facebook. Please do not recoil in fear! I do this not for myself... ok I do it for myself.

*sigh* I honestly thought I'd get a twitter account before I got a facebook. I guess I was wrong.

My cats finally sleep at night and I have insomnia. Hey at least there's stuff to watch on tv on no actually because everything is pre-empted for the Emmys! And they have weird commercial breaks. You think I'd get bored enough to sleep, but no, mostly I'm just annoyed.

I've already finished all my laundry and am contemplating changing my sheets.

I don't know, at what point during the night do you give up the idea of sleeping and just get up?

I love you. You're adorable, the way you manage to climb on everything, the mid-night play sessions, the early morning wake up calls. It's adorable. I love the way you make sure gravity works in every single room of the house, often several times a day! You're so considerate. And the way you've taken over my trash can giving me countless heart attacks when I looked down and saw your faces covered in a plastic bag to the point where, I no longer use my trash can, so cute. I also love how you make sure that every single one of the wires on my table is dead, completely dead, and will not try and hurt me in any way.

So when I say this, understand dear cats, that I say it with all the love in my heart.

I can't wait until you get lazy and apathetic.

Signed, the provider of your sanitation, food, amusement and comfort. Me, or as you like to call me, Meow.

One, I am out of coffee.

I WANT MY COFFEE!!!

Two, I might want to put up a "Warning: Cat in Residence" sign. I'm thinking of a yellow triangle with the silhouette of a cat pushing over a vase would be the most appropriate.

I woke up today from a great crash in the living-room. No one was hurt, though the lucky bamboo's dignity was slightly bruised. The cats (see? no longer kittens) generously helped me find all the marbles that they had scattered by finding them and playing with them whenever I left the room.

They are now sleeping. Part of me wants to poke them awake and keep them up until tonight so I can be assured of a full night's sleep.

Either way when one of the kittens tries to get into my trash can and it tips over on them, I have to laugh.

Just when I think I'm growing up, developing some sort of emotional restraint... my mother's going to China for five weeks and for the past three days or so I've been snapping at everyone and biting their head off for nor reason. My threshold of frustration is about two centimetres off the ground.

I feel bad about the fact that I get this stressed out because my mommy's going on vacation, part of me is terrified that I'm never going to see her again, part of me is dreading being alone with my Dad for two weeks. We get along pretty well now, but ...

Kittens continue to provide comic relief, I'm starting to think that cats really are messengers from God, considering the trail of destruction they leave in their wake. Tuna doesn't meow, she sort of coos like a pigeon. Aryeh doesn't stop meow. He just walks around looking for someone to meow at. They're both still suckling like crazy.

The past few days my mother and I have been staying up late and watching Babylon 5. We finished Whatever Means Necessary last night. I'm also watching Star Trek: The Next Generation with Barak. I was thinking the other day about what my "scene" is, and I came to the conclusion that my perfect evening is a bag of potato chips and Doctor Who on the tube, like-minded people optional but welcomed. I feel lucky and blessed that I have those people in my life.

maybe they know they're going to the vet?

I have phases with reading, I'll read ravenously for a while and then not pick up a book for months, It doesn't seem to have anything to do with the amount of free time I have nor does it coincide with book purchases. The last time I had such a book reading phase I read mrlightning's entire collection of Pratchetts.

This time I went for the old battered copies of stories so old they've become cliché, except for that one book in Hebrew about children with sensory regulation issues that was written by one of the shrinks that work at the child development institute (which was a good read even if it was not well written).

In the past week I've finished:

Godsfire by Cynthia Felice, a race of Cat people with Human slaves. Not much drama, it sizzles pretty evenly all the way through with no climactic feel at any point in the book, and no really satisfying ending, but world-building and characters made it a very enjoyable story all in all.

The Eternity Brigade by Stephen Goldin, sort of like The Forever War but not. After a war soldiers volunteer to be cryogenically frozen so that their experience in battle could be used in the next war, and the next, and eventually their patterns are just stored in a computer so they can be called on to do battle over and over again. A deliciously descriptive book that I can easily see being turned into a movie. Let me rephrase that, a deliciously descriptive book that I can easily see being ruined by Hollywood.

Fallen Angels by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle & Michael Flynn. In the near future science and science fiction are all but outlawed, two citizens of the orbital space stations get caught on an unwelcoming earth. Their only hope? Science fiction fans. I really liked this book, towards the end they got a little overzealous with in-jokes and unexplained references, but the plot was well paced, the characters were engaging. Also this book made we want to become more active in the Israeli Science Fiction Fandom so... yeah.

City at World's End by Edmond Hamilton. Bad book. no biscuit! A small town in the USA gets thrown millions of years into the future to a cold almost empty and dying Earth. They manage to find shelter from the cold in an abandoned dome city and even manage to rig some of the incredibly advanced technology (THEY DON'T USE VACUUM TUBES!1!!one) to send out a distress call. It is answered. Then they find out that their rescuers (who managed to get the city running with power, heat and water) were going to evacuate them off earth due to it's current inability to sustain life. The people refuse because they don't want to leave Earth. At this point I stopped reading, I was feeling completely alienated from these characters already with their blatant male chauvinism and their instinctive xenophobia, and this was just the final straw. I know (I guess) that at the end of the book they manage to restart the earth's core so it can provide heat and energy and then terra form terra firma but I'm not going to put myself through that.

I read so much an in so many different genres, sometimes I forget just how much I truly love science fiction.

My meeps have grown into small mows, it's still weird to hear a full meow from them (Aryeh mostly, Tuna's the strong silent type).

Last night I had a dream with Tom Baker, except he was sort of a cross between Tom Baker and Jar Jar Binks, august is getting to me I think.

Here's a creepy thought, what if Michael Jackson had played the goblin king instead of David Bowie in the Labyrinth?

When we first brought the kittens home a friend of my mother's suggested we call them Boom and Slam. They are now starting to live up to their suggested names and it's driving my father crazy. Beyond the normal cable chewing, laptop conquering and early morning the main issue currently is a dresser in our living room which has a plant on it, which Tuna and Aryeh like to play in (the plant, not the dresser), flinging dirt everywhere and breaking the glass of one of the two pictures that also occupy the space.

Me and my mother's reaction when we see them in such forbidden places (the dresser and the clean laundry basket being the only two really) is to grab them by the scruff, say No is a firm voice and give them a small smack on the nose and put them down. Now the usual reaction to this is to immediately repeat the action that caused that reaction. My guess is that they want to make sure they understand what not to do, my father thinks they're doing it to be irritating or because they can't learn, so even though he says he picks them up, tells them no and smacks their noses, I don't think he actually does, and then he gets annoyed and angry.

When we took the kittens to the vet he told us that some people "threaten" him by saying if the cats don't stop misbehaving that they'll get rid of them, we discussed how once we fix everything else that's wrong in this country we'll institute a test for people who want to adopt a pet, to make sure they know what they're getting themselves into. I never thought my dad would be one of the people who'd need to take the test.

We tried to remind him of how Chubby would chew on everything when he was a puppy, and showed him some of his handiwork on the baseboards we still haven't bothered to fix, we reminded him of how Paruly had a habit of unrolling toilet paper all over the house, but he was working during those times so he was less concious of the mess young pets tend to make.

He regrets brining the cats home, which makes me want to strangle him, which makes me feel bad. Grrr

I am quickly learning to alt-ctrl-L whenever I leave my computer, unless I'm actually curious about what results google will show for wwwwfffffffff///////////////vvvvvvvvvvvvvvppppppppppppppsssssssssssssiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii44444444444444444444444444

I'm starting to recognize days where I know I won't get anything productive done. These days tend to start with me turning off the alarm, rolling over and going back to sleep. These are the days where I turn on the TV for about fifteen minutes before I can force myself out of bed. These are the days that the static in my head doesn't go away even after I take my Concerta. My movements are jerky, I feel a sort of blanket anxiety that has no specific source, no peaks or valleys but sort of just blankets everything.

So maybe I'll do some grunt work, I have some information I need to gather, maybe I'll just continue tagging my LJ posts. Maybe I'll spend the day playing flash games, surfing the net, or watching TV. There are kittens that want to be played with, and toilets that need to be cleaned. And it's ok that I have days like this, because I also have days like yesterday and the day before where I wake up before my alarm and I don't turn on the TV at all.

Sometimes I wish I was just normal enough that I could work a "normal" job, wish work hours and a steady paycheck at the end of the month, but if I can't do that, I'm glad and grateful that I can do this.

So in an effort to start using my LJ more often I've completely revamped my LJ and started going through my old posts and tagging them. I enjoyed watching my tag cloud grow and grow. The two most prominent tags are life and random, but that's obvious. At one point I'll have to go back over the random posts and add a meta-lj tag for when I talk about livejournal or using livejournal, but that's later.

The kittens are now getting everywhere and it's driving my Dad nuts, my old cat was really fat so she couldn't really get places so my Dad's just not used to making concessions. We're teaching the places where they absolutely can't go but that's going to take time and meanwhile you just have to remember that if you leave something somewhere the cat's will probably find it.

There's also apparently something about his body language that they're reading, because they're actually really careful not to scratch my mother or myself, but my father's legs are full of scratches. My Mom says it's his passive-aggression, he'll just say ouch until he can't take it any more and explodes, while when they scratch us we make it very clear that we don't like it, by pushing them away or not reacting to their requests for play.

We continue our battle with the fleas. We've given them baths and even ran a lice comb through their fur, but the buggers are too quick for us. Then we sprayed them with Frontline and the buggers ran to their face. There are less of them now but still too many. We sprayed the house but my mother woke up with bite marks this morning so apparently that didn't work too well either. When the kittens are slightly older (should be another few months) then we can use those drops that you put on the back of the animals neck. We've had good results with those in the past. Meanwhile we just have to take each outbreak as it comes...

I've also decided to sign up for Nano this year. I figure maybe if I start creating an outline and characters now I might even manage to do something interesting in November. I don't know, I've lost confidence in my writing skills.

1, Their heads are proportional to their bodies.
2, They make 9 out of 10 jumps without eliciting laughter from everyone around them.
3, They can get everywhere you don't want them to be.
4, You stop making sure you know where they are every moment of the day.
5, They no longer fit in my bra. (I wish I'd gotten pictures of that)


ETA: Regarding #4, apparently you don't stop making sure you know where they are, you just change the reason why. At first it's to make sure they're ok, and now it's to make sure they're not plotting something.

I just had a dream where I was accompanying Patrick Stewart on his travel food show.