December 2, 1999

Thursday, December 2, 1999: Delight

The cats delight me. They're so delightfully able to amuse themselves. Pyewacket is currently racing around the house in an orgy of -- well, delight, to resuse that word for the third time in this paragraph.

I'm building a bookcase. Well, I'm not building it as this moment, I sat down to take a break and write a little bit, and Pye sidled up and stole one of the little wooden dowels that hold the aprons on the fronts of the shelves. They gave me several extra ones, so I let her have it. (The nails, though, are in my pocket, after she tried to take one of them.)

She grabbed the dowel and raced off with it, and I heard her growling and mewing in the hallway. She has this wonderful, funny little voice that she hardly ever uses with us—any time she cries, I think there's something wrong with her, because she never talks to me.

But she talks to herself. After we've gone to bed, we'll hear her down in the kitchen, batting something around and talking to herself. Wouldn't it be great to know what she's saying? Probably it's just little mews of contentment and happiness, but maybe it's something like, "There! Take that, you little piece of trash! You won't get away again!"

This is one of those things that I can't resist downloading, will play with for a few days and then probably never use again, but since it's shareware, that's sort of the idea. It's a Holiday Lights Screensaver, but it's not just a screensaver, it's also a holiday decorating package for your desktop.

It's customizable and configurable to use lots of different kinds of "bulbs," and you can even design your own. Very silly, pretty useless, but, for me, irresistable. If you decide to keep it after ten days, the shareware fee is $19.95.

Here's a screenshot of my computer right now, as I'm writing this. Of course, it doesn't show the animation—the lights are blinking.

Obviously, that didn't last long. It seemed to affect the memory load, too, running that way—my response time when typing suffered. So I turned it off from running on top of applications, and left them blinking on the desktop only:

My desktop background picture is from Digital Blasphemy; I use Allaire HomeSite as my web design application package.

The coming week's horoscope from Real Astrology:

SAGITTARIUS (Nov 22-Dec 21)

Week of December 2, 1999

I have no objection if you try to push the river. The other signs of the zodiac invariably get into trouble when they mess with the primal forces of nature, but you Sagittarians seem to be able to get away with it more often than not. Maybe it's because you're more likely to collaborate with Mother Nature than bully her. Which leads me to ask, why stop at pushing the river? From what I can tell, you can probably bend the sky and seduce the wind and call down the moon and steal the thunder, too. You're a master of elemental energy.

Cool, huh?

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