Wednesday, November 24, 1999: Happy Birthday to me! I went to Hobby Lobby yesterday to buy Christmas lights. They're so incredibly inexpensive now (around two dollars a box) that I find it hard to resist them. This year I thought maybe I'd try stringing some around inside in different places.
So this morning I strung a string of them around the etagere in the dining room, which immediately required that I remove everything and clean the glass shelves. I knew they needed it, but it was made even more evident by the lights. I ended up packing almost everything away and putting up just a few things--one shelf of some of my Fiestaware, one with just a few pairs of salt-and-pepper shakers, and the top shelf with candles and some brightly painted pottery things that I've been acquiring lately. Oh, and Eeyore, a birthday present from Barb, dressed up in his Christmas outfit. I got a box from her on Monday, and saved it until this morning to open it. There was Eeyore, with a birthday pinwheel rubberbanded to his wrist (the pinwheel is now in my pen cup and the rubberband is hidden from Dinah), a Winnie the Pooh advent calendar, Ringo Starr's Christmas CD, "I Wanna Be Santa Claus" (for my collection of weird and unique Christmas music), and a cat astrology kit with a book, a pendulum, and a little metal cylinder for the cat's collar, to hold its star sign (I think).
Last night a friend sent me an Amazon.com gift certificate, and I immediately went and spent it on two books that I've been wanting--Nick Bantok's newest, The Museum at Purgatory, and a dream book by Ray Grasse--The Waking Dream : Unlocking the Symbolic Language of Our Lives. Bob's taking me out to dinner tonight, but I haven't decided where yet. I don't want to make it into a big thing, especially since tomorrow's Thanksgiving and we'll be going out to my parents' house, but I did want to do something. Maybe the brew pub. That would be sort of low key, and we can both find things to eat there. So tomorrow's Thanksgiving with lunch at my parents', Friday night we're going out to eat with Bob's parents and his grandmother, Saturday night we're going to a Japanese steakhouse with a bunch of Bob's friends, mostly because one of his friends is having surgery next week and wanted to get a good meal in before that, and Sunday we're having a belated Thanksgiving at Bob's parents'. I went to the grocery store yesterday, but I'm not sure why. It doesn't look like we're going to be eating at home until next week.
I do almost all my work at home on a laptop on, as Dave Barry would say, my actual lap. And with two cats in the house, it's quite likely that I'll have one or both of them on my lap as well. And to get there, oftentimes they (or, most often, Pye) will jump up and land on the laptop keyboard on their way to a comfortable spot. Sometimes, if I'm writing email to a friend, I'll let their typing stay--who knows? They could be sending a message. Now, though, there's PawSense, according to an article my friend Mike sent me last night. This is a program that senses the unique keyboard press patterns of cat typing and blocks their input. You can even configure it to make a scary noise when cat typing is detected. The application sits in the keyboard tray with an icon of a little kitty pawprint with a red slash through it. Pretty clever. Once the application is triggered, it goes into screen saver mode to prohibit any further keyboard input, until someone types "human" into the box. I could be wrong, but I bet Dinah could learn to do that . . .
I just looked up at the header on this page and remembered that it says "November." I guess I need to figure out what to do about December, which is coming up next week. I guess I'll probably keep on with the Chinese theme; I haven't gotten tired of it yet. But I could also do some sort of Christmas-theme, I guess. I'm kind of getting into a Christmas mood, stringing Christmas lights up and everything. I need to buy Christmas cards, and I just added an item to my online to-do list to make my digital Christmas card soon. As I was unpacking from vacation, I took out the Christmas t-shirt I bought at Disney World. It's bright red, nearly neon, in fact, and on the front is Santa Mickey in his sleigh being pulled across the sky by Pluto, and the legend reads, in strangely mangled English, "To what do my wondering eyes should appear but a miniature sleigh and a smiling reindog." To what do my wondering eyes should appear . . . I almost didn't buy it because of that, but decided it wasn't a big deal, and I don't have a Christmas t-shirt. But still, it makes me wonder. How does stuff like that happen? Who made up the image to be printed? Did someone just pull the text out of their head, convinced it was right, and no one, during the entire printing process, noticed or said anything? I suppose, more probably it was made somewhere outside the U.S., by people who don't speak English, so it could have said anything and I suppose it could have been much worse, but still, it seems odd, especially for a company like Disney. Oh well. It's unique, I'll say that.
I was thinking that today I would go and collect a bunch of different horoscopes and put them up here, but as I was doing that, I sort of lost interest. They were all so different that it really didn't make any sense. I suppose what I need to do is find a site that I really like and just stick with it. I do like Rob Brezsny's RealAstrology, but he only forecasts once a week. It's pretty good, though:
SAGITTARIUS (Nov 22-Dec 21)
As I was meditating on your fate, I dozed off. I dreamed you were an astronaut in a ship orbiting the Earth. Clad in a silver spacesuit and attached by a tether, you opened the big metal doors and floated out into the clear blackness. Through the glass of your helmet, your face looked shocked yet exultant, as if you felt you'd escaped every limitation. When I woke up, you were doing cartwheels as you passed over the Himalayas below. Now here's my dream interpretation: You will soon have a brush with a dizzying liberation. It'll imprint you profoundly. The entire rest of your life will be freer because of what happens this week.
Someone also sent me a URL for Astrology Zone, which,
on a brief viewing, seems exceptional.
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Bob came home last night with a gift bag for me--another one of those wonderful Yankee candles, this one black,
in Midsummer Night frangrance (bought, he said, because he liked the scent and because it had a moon on the
label), a Christmas ornament of a mouse surfing on a computer mouse ("Surf the Net") and a tiny,
tiny ornament--a glass bottle with a lighthouse inside.
