
Sleepy kitteh is sleepy
16


Outside my bedroom window this morning.

My birthday is coming up soon. I mention this for two reasons: first, because it means that I have to renew my vehicle registration; and second, because… well, I’ll get to that in a minute.
The registration is relevant to the object of my lust, because, you see, Georgia requires vehicle emissions testing every time the registration on a car or truck is renewed.
This afternoon, during my lunch break, I went to have my emissions tested. The place where this is done is a tiny steel building, about the size of a Quonset hut or metal shed, with a diminutive office–really, a space hardly big enough for two chairs and a magazine stand–attached.
In the magazine stand were several copies of some “high fashion” magazine or other; I don’t remember their names, as they all look the same to me.
In the magazine I picked up at random and flipped through while the technician revved my engine and prodded my car was an article on wristwatches. And in that article was a description of the thing to which I am by degrees coming.
It is a wristwatch made by a company called Romaine Jerome.
It is not a wristwatch in any conventional sense of the term, however. Rather than a dial and hands, it tells time by means of small drums which rotate, and on which are printed numbers. The drums are driven by–get this–a tiny chain, like a bicycle chain whose miniscule links are well under half a millimeter in size. The whole thing is steampunk and retro and gorgeous beyond belief.
This, gentle readers, is the Romaine Jerome Cabestan watch:

Just the thing for a steampunk ‘con costume.
The only down side? Suggested retail price: $220,000.00 US. Did I mention my birthday is coming up?

So a couple of projects have managed to wiggle their way into my attention lately.
The first is a book, based on Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice, called Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. It’s a rewrite of the classic with extra bonuz zombie footage (by day, she woos Mr. Darcy; by night, she’s an unstoppable zombie slaying machine!).
Yes, I’m being 100% serious.
The second is the next movie in the Predator franchise, called Pride and Predator, a Predator prequel set in the time of–you guessed it–Pride and Prejudice.
Now, personally, I think this is brilliant. There’s nothing that can make a chick flick entertaining faster than the addition of a zombie horde or an extraterrestrial killing machine. Can’t get enough of that for my entertainment dollar!
But, sadly, I fear this trend doesn’t go far enough. So, this afternoon, I put together some more chick flicks I’d really like to see (clicky on any pic to embiggen):
Last night, I spent about a half an hour fixing some minor bugs in the interactive version of the Human Sex Map. Cleaned up the way the toolbar works when you scroll (so it doesn’t jump all over the place in some browsers) and fixed a minor issue in Firefox where it sometimes moves the pins three pixels down from where they should be.
And then I tested it in Internet Explorer.
And it was totally, utterly, completely broken.
Goddamn festering, pustulant heap of rotting garbage pretending to be a Web browser anyway. I will never, for the life of me, understand why people use that decaying mound of rubbish when there are Web browsers that actually work correctly that you can download for free. Everything the Internet Explorer development team knows about Web standards would fit in the white space of a postage stamp. If these guys had any decency or self-respect, they’d all ritualistically disembowel themselves on Google’s front lawn.
Words can not express my loathing, hatred, and contempt for that tottering mass of bugs and misfeatures that the folks in Redmond laughingly call a Web browser. It’s a mad sick joke at the entire Internet’s expense. So, I turn to a more visual communication medium:

It took me until six o’clock in the morning to code around all of Explorer’s bizarre bugs and rendering issues. Longer, by nearly an order of magnitude, than it took to make that picture. So if you tried to use the Map at all yesterday, sorry ’bout that.
Still sick.
That’s the bad news. The good news is I’m not horking up internal organs any more, and I can breathe without feeling like I’ve got bits of broken glass where they shouldn’t be. Even felt good enough yesterday to leave the apartment to go shopping and do laundry, both of which needed to be done in the worst possible way.
On the down side, it’s hard to walk from the door to the mailbox without wheezing, and all the various medications are making me feel almost as crappy as the damn bacteria. Plus I still sound like a frog being strangled at the bottom of a deep well when I try to talk. Thank God for Netflix, that’s all I can say.
Liam the kittycat has been absolutely delighted to have me home for the past three weeks, at least. Poor little guy is going to think I’ve abandoned him once I start working again. He follows me around the apartment and curls up on my lap when I crash on the couch. He’s in the habit of sitting on the edge of the tub when i shower and watching me with this expression:

Doctor’s appointment again the day after tomorrow. Probably more chest X-rays and stuff. If they don’t like what they see, the next step may be to go into the hospital for IV antibiotics. Ugh.

Seen on the way back from lunch last week. Apologies for the poor quality of the image; it came from my iPhone camera, and my windshield is very dirty.

Last night as I was going to sleep, zaiah started drawing on my back.
There’s something delightfully intimate about this sort of activity. It’s a really neat way to express affection and love, and it’s an inherently creative act, too. I highly recommend it.
She’s also a better artist than I am. Here’s what she drew. (The Kanji mean “Toy,” which has been her name for me since very early in our relationship.)
