• It’s rare that I blog in the evening, much less that I assemble a list of bullet points in the evening, but I haven’t had a moment to slow down today.
• The economy may be slowing down, but business is heating up at work. We’ve had several really solid sales days. If we could keep that up — by getting the salesmen to actually be on the road selling things! — we’d be rolling in it. Part of our current success is several new contracts with Bombardier and Heroux Devtek. Our tooling is knocking them dead. Though not literally, I hope.
• Listening to Bloc Party’s Silent Alarm is an exercise in noticing they used to be fun and interesting to listen to but are no longer fun or interesting. Several big producers and big albums later and they’re just well-coordinated noise. Remember “Positive Tension”? Great song.
• Nathan was playing a Collective Soul song at work today. It reminded me of a more innocent time, when the Mix 99.9 played actual music, and I was dating Laura #1. Not a particularly great time in my life, but still, a more innocent time. I drove a blue Saturn! (Was it blue?) It had those seatbelts that automatically sealed you into your seat but annoyingly required the lap belt to be done up manually. In any case, the point of this point is: Collective Soul sucks. They always have, and they always will. They aren’t innovative. They’re bland. They aren’t interesting. They’re stale. If you like them, that’s fine; just don’t expect me to share your excitement.
• How I Met Your Mother is in the download queue! Yes!
• It strikes me that morality is, after all, innate. A priori. Arts and Letters is right on that count.
• Part of me wants the US government to bail out the banks. Another part of me wants the US government to nuke the banks from space. I’m torn.
• Cats can really smell up a place real quick. Especially younger cats.
• I’m reading “Dune” again right now. It’s a lot more interesting than I remember. But it’s still ruined by its surrounding novels, the prequels especially but also the sequels. Neither Herbert’s continuing vision or his son’s diving into its past have added anything to “Dune” but taken much away. It should be the only book in the canon.
• I got something like 4 hours of sleep last night. I rather hope some of my friends’ sleep problems aren’t catching or anything like that.
• People using the laptop on the toilet really freaks me out. What if, right now, you were talking to someone and you had no idea they were sitting on the can? That’s uncool!
• I’m making a main course for a thing our church does. It’s called “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” and it’s a basically a way for people to meet other people they might not know. It’s pretty much awesome, but I haven’t the foggiest clue what to make for it. Do you people have any good recipes I should make? Keep in mind I can do multiple dishes!

Laura and I have three cats. We can’t have children right now — or are actively preventing it, I should say, using methods uniformly more effective than those I have seen lead to some interesting child-rearing experiences — so we have cats instead.

I love our cats in an abstract way. They’re not people. They’re more like objects. They definitely have minds of their own, and do things that make even children seem logical and tame by comparison.

Nothing, however, prepared me for today. Today was The Great Dashboard Caper.

Laura was taking our second cat, Qubit — named after the quantum bit; and yes, she decodes 128-bit SSL in her spare time, if it’s covered in gravy — to the vet to have her claws yanked out and her uterus disposed of. Laura was carrying her in the usual cardboard carrying case, the same one we’ve had since we had the cats. Little did she know that Qubit had gnawed her way through the cardboard, planning an elaborate escape from the vet, an escape that eventually led to her wedging herself up in the car, behind the glove compartment, so far up that we could barely touch her when we reached in to see if she was still alive.

All attempts to extricate her failed. She seemed absolutely stuck. She didn’t want food, she didn’t want treats, and she most certainly seemed not to want her female bits tossed in the trash.

Ten hours later I was home from work, Qubit still stuck behind the glove compartment. I decided to do the inevitable and remove the glove compartment. Now, General Motors, in their infinite wisdom, decided to make our entire dashboard out of one gigantic piece of molded plastic, held in place with alternating Torx bolts and regular hex screws. I headed to Home Depot to buy some Torx drivers — I’ve never had to take a car apart before, you see — and an adjustable wrench.

Finally, I gave up. There was no way I was going to do it. So I took the car to Canadian Tire and they took out the airbag, revealing… balled-up cat. I performed the cattectomy the only way I knew how: By pulling really, really hard. She finally popped out of the hatch only to immediately dig her claws deep into my forearms. I crammed her into the new plastic case Laura had bought, and left to get myself some scotch.

She’s currently running around the house, a little jazzed from all the excitement, but seemingly in good spirits.

Now… she back to peeing in our plants. Way to go!