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Thursday, March 25, 1999: Strangely put together
Bob's out again tonight. This time he's having dinner at John's. I ordered a pizza for myself, and as soon as that comes
I'm going to go sit down and eat and read for awhile.
The pizza came just as I was writing that. The doorbell rang, and Pyewacket jumped up and ran to the door. I scooped her up before I
opened the door, and held her under my arm as I paid for the pizza. I told the delivery guy that I had to hold on to her or she would have
run outside to meet him. He thought she was cute, and she got a good throat-scratching from him. This was a different guy, one
I hadn't seen before. One of the other pizza delivery guys always wants to take her home with him. She is pretty cute, but if
they really knew her . . .
This morning she was lying on my lap as I did email, all curled up with her head tucked under my arm. She raised her head
and looked lovingly up at me, said, "Mew?" then stretched her head around and chomped my arm. Or was that, "her head spun around . . .?"
I was talking about her at work today and Misty said, "I think she has multiple personalities. There's the good Pyewacket and the
evil Pyewacket," and Jane said, "She already thinks she's a dog." Maybe that's the problem. Maybe she's a dog trapped in a cat's
body. A Doberman, maybe, or a Rottweiler. Or maybe one of those nervous little yappy dogs. I wonder if we could get her a species-change operation?
As I was writing that, an email came in from Mike with a link to a page about "Tama," a robot cat
developed in Japan as a companion
for the elderly. Apparently Tama is supposed to be some sort of user-friendly computer interface that can transmit messages from
an elderly person's doctor ("Time to take your medicine!") and record certain interactions with its owner. It doesn't seem to me that a talking
cat would be an ideal companion for an elderly person, though. For one thing, I don't think it's necessarily a good idea to give an
elderly person a model of a non-sentient being and make it appear to talk. You might as well make the toaster talk.
Maybe the cat model was chosen as something non-threatening, but from
my perspective, that doesn't seem ideal . . . "Time to take your medicine!" "Oh, come here, Tama, let me give you a cuddle . . . "
"I said it's time to take your medicine!" "Aieeeeee! Bad
Tama!!"
And as I was writing that, Pyewacket turned around and bit me again. I was writing back to Mike about all that, and I suddenly
remembered something that the vet said. He had mentioned after he spayed her that her insides were extremely strange, i.e., her
bladder and kidneys and reproductive organs were arranged sort of backwards. He asked me rather tentatively if I'd noticed her having
any trouble urinating; apparently she was put together strangely enough that he wondered.
When I took her in for her shots last month, he asked me how she was doing, and I said she was doing a lot better. He put forth a
theory that he hadn't mentioned before. He said that with all
the problems we had with her going into heat so early, then coming out and going back in so rapidly time after time, and with the
obvious problems with her anatomy, there might be some weird gland left in there causing her "mood swings." He said it would
be interesting to see if her behavior was cyclical, and he said he'd like to know how she was acting "in April or May," which would be
six months or so from November, when I was at my wit's end with her and talked to him about taking her to the kitty
psychiatrist. Maybe it's all hormonal.
I thought I had the readability problem in the sidebar
licked earlier today--I changed the link color to white and set the style as "underlined," so even though visited and unvisited links would
be the same color, at least they were distinguishable as links, and at least they were readable. And I know I checked the pages in
both Netscape and IE, but when I got home and looked at them again in Netscape, the font color wasn't registering. So who knows. I'm still
working on it. Does anyone know how to have two different link color schemes on the same page? I would much appreciate any
suggestions.
Visual Page continues to drive me crazy with regard to changing my code. I still feel so comfortable with it, and it's so nice to be
able to open up a window and have the words appear the same way that they will appear on the web, but this week, since I've been
trying to figure out style sheets, I've been continually frustrated with it's penchant for rearranging things.
Right now I'm working in HomeSite, which, although not as user friendly, at least doesn't change things . . . most of the time. It still
has some hard-to-get-used-to idiosyncrasies. I suppose I should probably just go back to Notepad . . .
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