Laura Banana

One of the things I never get used to about Ithaca is its extremes in appearance.  The winters are so cold and dreary, it is hard to imagine any form of life surviving them without shelter.  But every Spring, everything bounces back.   This is what our street looked like last weekend:

And this is what it looked like last January, and will again soon:

But right now, it’s my favorite season: Autumn.  The leaves are just starting to turn:

I realized that my blog was in danger of becoming a cronicle of the antics of my cats only.  So here is what’s going on in my life outside of my pets:

• Work is still very stressful.  My thesis is basically written, but there is an ‘anomaly’ in the data that is causing me endless grief.
• I’m going to turn 29 next week.  Ack!
• In the hopes that I will someday not be a student, I went to a career fair last week and found many companies actually seem keen to hire a physicist turned software engineer.  It’s nice to know that, as our economy spirals into the toilet, people are still willing to at least feign interest in employing me.
• Howard claims he has not decided what he’s getting me for my birthday.  I think he is doing this to avoid me weasling it would of him.  My current suspicion is a that I’m getting a Wii.
• I might get to tag along on Howard’s business trip next month to Colorado Springs.  Does anybody know whether Colorado Springs is a cool place to visit?

I guess my life is not very exciting.  I’ll get back to cronicling cat cutness soon.

My cats came to live with me about 6 years ago when I started grad school, long before we met and moved in with Howard. One of the first times that Howard came over to the apartment I used to live in, Lucy peed on his jacket! But somehow, she managed to worm her way in to his heart right away, in spite of that. They are really cute together — they have little nonsensical conversations like this:

Lucy: “Meow”

Howard: “Okay”

Lucy: “Meow”

Howard: “Okay”

Lucy; “Meow”

I guess maybe you have to witness it to appreciate its adorableness.

But the other cat, Julius, was another story. Julius is a big sweetie that most everybody likes, but he is prone to pushiness and occasional stinkiness, neither of which Howard appreciates much. I often accuse him of not treating Julius quite as well as he does Lucy and Oliver (though that’s not saying much since L&O are spoiled rotten). But lately Howard and Julius seem to be getting along better:

Another step in inter-species peace!

They are at it again, the scoundrels:

I think my cats should be fined, for both excess laziness and excess cuteness:

Yeah, they should definitely pay me for putting up with this nonsense.

There has been a little progress in cat-dog relations in our house.

“Kitty?  What Kitty?  I don’t see any stinkin’ kitties around here!”

“I’m just gonna sit here and destroy my deranged carrot, because there are certainly no cats around here”

Ignoring the cats is definitely way better than chasing them, so I guess our wacky little slumber parties are working.

I’m up late working again, and while I’m waiting for some scripts to run, I googled “Willy the Worm,” a game that was about the only thing my first computer (an IBM PC jr) was capable of running.  Eventually, the 5 inch floppy that stored the game was corrupted, and that was basically the end of my relationship with computers until I went to college 8 or so years later.  But behold:

Willy is back!  I used DosBox to run it on Linux — the first time I ever used DosBox, but it seems cool so far.  At first the game went crazy fast (I guess it was not designed to run on a 1.8 GHz Processor?), but it was easy to adjust the rate.

It is a pretty lame game by any modern standard, but it amuses me to be able to play it again after all these years.  Oliver is sitting next to me, and he keeps giving me these looks like “can we please please please go to bed already?”