I still haven't been forgiven, so you get to see a picture of my other cat.

The cat with the shoe fetish. I promise that this is the last cat picture I'll post. Until my next trip to Maine. Tomorrow we move onto more important things, namely how few days left we have living under 6N and how my happiness seems to be correlated to the amount of time left in this apartment. I'm also happy because I checked our new building's website, and as of today, we don't have upstairs neighbors!!

I'm sorry Newtster!

Yes, you GET to see pictures of my cats! X-ray cat!

The band so far

I've only received two responses to my request to start a band.  Not too shabby, considering tons of people post in the musicians section of NYC Craigslist.  When I first posted the ad, I almost included a line about how if the band didn't work out, the person should at least be up for drinking some beer.  Turns out that maybe I should have included that line, because the first response I got was from a girl in high school.  Aside from the age, she does have a knowledge of physics (though she said she doesn't want to be in the class, so protests by reading comic books in the back...not sure that qualifies, but hey, at least she read the ad!).  Unfortunately, she plays the keyboard and sings, and wants to make "truly beautiful music."  I just can't allow a high schooler with true musical aspirations into my new "band," because she's never had to rent her own apartment, so I'm not sure that she quite understands the real purpose of my band.  Plus, it's creepy to hang out with a high schooler that you meet on Craigslist, even if it is to be in a band.

The second response, from Frank, was much more promising although he used a lot of emoticons in his response, which always makes me a bit wary.  He sings, but not very well, and is a beginner on the electric guitar.  His musical inspirations include Three Doors Down and Breaking Benjamin, and he wants to play music like that.  Besides the excessive emoticons, he seems like a keeper for the band, mainly because I think his musical tastes will be recognizable to 6N.  He also included a "p.s. say hello to your neighbors!", which I found amusing.

This cat sits in the hallway in our building a lot.  As soon as it sees you, it starts hissing.  I thought it looked funny sitting under the umbrella, so I took a picture, and even managed to capture the evil in his eyes.  Or I just had the camera on the wrong flash setting.

I'm in Maine.

I'm in Maine for a few days studying for final exams. It's very relaxing, because there are no upstairs neighbors, and no drum sets. I figured the short study vacation would be a good idea so that I can get a little extra sleep, and have a quiet place to study. The library at school isn't really an option for me because it's more like a dungeon with books than a library; it's always freezing, and it's underground, so it's pretty dark.

It's been a pretty relaxing day here so far. I started out the morning by studying for my tax fraud & prosecutions exam. I even had a study assistant!

After studying for awhile, I took a break to do some laundry. My other assistant helped me fold. She wasn't much help.

Then I went back to studying, and am just taking a break now to update my blog. My assistant says hello. She wanted to guest blog, but she was getting too much fur on my computer.

I kind of forgot that Maine has distractions too, and these ones like to follow me around and try to sit on me.

All cats are not dicks

I posted a couple weeks ago about adventures in pet-sitting, and how the cat was too much of a dick to ride on the dog's back. I got a comment from a reader that all cats are dicks. As a general rule, I agree with that, but my family has a cat in Maine that is an exception. Her name is Binky (don't remember how we came up with that one, but I was only 12 when we got her), and she doesn't really have much of a personality. She's been very timid her whole life, still is, and is 15 years old now, so that's probably not changing anytime soon.

What wound up to be so endearing about Binky is that she almost died. She suddenly stopped eating and drinking, and had some sort of kitty tumor in her stomach. The vet tried all kinds of crazy stuff for her, but she was just getting more sickly, and finally the vet determined that the answer was to euthanize her. My parents decided that we could keep her at home for one last night. Later that evening, after dinner while my mom was taking my brother to karate, the vet called and told my dad that he thought of one more thing to try for the cat, but that it probably wouldn't work. My dad drove back to the vet, picked up the prednisone, and by the time my brother got back from karate, Binky was eating again and was back to her old self. Yay steroids! So, the cat was on steroids for a few years, we eventually had to wean her off, and she's been in excellent health ever since. She even developed a little bit of a personality after her episode, and she has a shoe fetish now:

If you take your shoes off, within 30 seconds, Binky will sidle up and promptly stuff her head in the shoe. While I was in Maine over Christmas, I was bored one afternoon and thought about taking 12 seasonal photos of Binky with her head in different shoes (slippers in December, boots in January, red shoes for February, etc) to make a calendar. Then I realized that the black lab calendars are way cuter than a calendar featuring a cat with her head stuffed in a shoe, so I went back to watching television.

EDIT: My family does have another cat, Trixie. She is definitely a dick, but an amusing one. When she was a kitten, I got a little kitty leash for her and would try to take her for "walks." She was so well trained at one point that I could just take out the leash, and she would immediately run to the front door and sit and wait for me to put on her little harness. Unfortunately, cat harnesses/leashes are a little different than dog leashes, and don't have any give. So she'd dart out the door really fast, reach the end of the leash in under a second, and since I couldn't shut the door and run after her fast enough, she'd snap to a stop. Sometimes when I go back to Maine and I'm bored, I'll take her out on the leash again, which almost always results in her somehow escaping the leash, numerous scratches on my hands and arms, and her hiding under the deck hissing. Last Christmas, she wouldn't come near me for the whole time I was home, because I found some old Pokemon toy of my brother's that made a noise, and it totally freaked her out. She hid in the basement for days. Wait, maybe I'm the dick?