Since Bridget's pee problems began, closely monitoring her litter habits has become part of everyday life. Months ago I moved one of the litter boxes to a place downstairs where I could easily hear if a cat started scratching in the litter, so that I wouldn't miss any of Bridget's trips. For months and months I have been attentive to the litter box, and Rob knows to pay attention, too. Whenever Bridget places a paw in the box, one of us is watching.

Actually, we don't even need to watch anymore. If we're in the other room and see Bridget head for the litter box, we can tell if all is well just by listening. We wait while she scratches, and then we listen for the sound of the urine stream. Silence after the scratching is bad, because that means she wasn't able to pee, although fortunately that hasn't happened for awhile. But if we hear peeing, there is much kitty-praise and rejoicing.

The other night I woke up and went to the bathroom, and my getting in and out of bed woke up Rob, too. Soon after we had settled back down to go to sleep, I heard scratching in the litter box. I figured it was Bridget, because I'd seen her near the litter box when I got up, so I strained my ears to listen. There was a pause after the scratching, and then I heard the gush. It was a rather long gushing. And then it tapered off and I heard the scratch, scratch of the covering-up.

And then next to me, with his face buried against my back, Rob murmured, "That was a good one."

I sighed contently. "Yeah, it was. It lasted so long!"

And then I giggled, realizing that while many couples have perhaps had that very conversation in the middle of the night, never in the history of pillow talk has the topic been listening to the cat pee.

On a recent trip I noticed that the photo file names from D-Fiddy were approaching DSC_9999.NEF. The four digits in the file name track the shutter counter on the camera body, so I was quite curious to see if photo DSC_9999.NEF would be followed by DSC_10000.NEF or DSC_0000.NEF. As it turns out, it is neither; the counter resets to DSC_0001.NEF (which means, incidentally, that on the second counter reset the camera will not have taken 20,000 photos as would be expected, but rather only 19,998. Skipping 0000 in the counter sequence seems like an odd choice to me...).

Anyway, our camera's "odometer" flipped over 10,000 photos after about 500 days of ownership, which works out to an average of about 20 photos per day. Since we post daily photos on juxtapose, that means that about 1 out of every 20 photos makes it onto the photoblog.

People are now harassing my brother - my brother! - about when I'm going to have kids. My parents and brother went to a family reunion today, which I didn't attend. And then this evening my brother calls me and halfway through our conversation, he says, "Oh, by the way, [one of our cousins] is asking about when you're going to have kids."

"Are you kidding me?"

"Well, he didn't really ask it about you, exactly. He asked about me."

"Huh? About when you're going to have kids?"

"No, he said, 'So, when are you going to get a little niece or nephew?'"

"My god. What the hell?"

"I know."

"What did you say?"

"I said I didn't figure that was any of my business."

Preach it, brother.

Over at Hit and Run I've been tagged for a meme in which I am supposed to list eight random things about myself...

• I have a favorite plate. Its pattern is more swirly than the rest in our set. When Rob sets the table, he knows to give me the swirly plate. If he forgets, I switch them.




• I love to scan barcodes. For this reason I am slightly addicted to self-checkout lanes. And those price-check kiosks at Target, which I might perhaps use every time I go to Target, just because I can.




• I get really grumpy when I get hungry. Like, beyond reasoning with. Rob claims there is a very small window of time (about 2.5 minutes) between when I am not at all hungry and when I am STARVING, and that the most important survival skill he has learned in this marriage is to "recognize the warning signs and act quickly."




• I only wear nude nail polish. You know, like the flesh-toned color they use for french manicures. I like how it makes nails look nicely finished but still natural. I don't think I've worn a real color on my fingernails since high school. I've always painted my toes with a maroon or deep rose, but just recently I've abandoned colors altogether. I have nothing against them on other people, but I don't like the look on myself.




• In the morning while driving to work, I can only listen to NPR. NPR is quiet and mellow; everything else is too loud and too damn perky. When Rob and I used to drive to work together, he liked to listen to some obnoxious morning show on the rock station, with lots of crude jokes and loud laughing and the people constantly shout-talking. It was all I could do on those mornings not to fling myself out the car door.




• I was a DJ for awhile at my college radio station. Doreen and I, and another friend, had a folk show.




• I grew up listening to country music, and so completely missed all 80s pop and rock music. The only time I ever heard any of those songs was when we went to the skating rink, and so as a result, I'll say, "Oh, this song reminds me of Skatetown!" about any 80s song I actually recognize. I don’t listen to country anymore, but I’ll never catch up on all I missed. Rob is still amazed when a classic rock/pop song comes on the radio and I swear I’ve never heard it before. But, name a Dolly Parton song and I can sing it.




• I go to great lengths to ignore people I know when I see them out and about. Unless you are in my very closest circle of friends or family, I will avoid you. I'll duck into an aisle or become very preoccupied with my cell phone to prevent us from having contact. It sounds snobby, but mostly it's just because I'm lazy - making inane chit-chat is such a pain in the ass.

I won't tag anyone, but feel free to play if the spirit moves you.

"Perhaps imagination is only intelligence having fun."

been reading: Love's Labour's Lost by William Shakespeare

This past weekend we went to see Love's Labour's Lost at a nearby theatre, and being the English major geek that I am, I decided to read the play before seeing it performed. I've read many of Shakespeare's plays, most of which I read during a college course I took entirely devoted to The Bard, a course taught by a professor who had the reputation of being the biggest asshole in the English department, which he totally was. This is the prof who falsely accused me of plagiarism because a paper I wrote was so good. That's actually what he told me, that my paper was so smart it couldn't possibly have been written by an undergraduate. Of course he couldn't prove his accusation because I had written it, every word. He ended up giving me a B on the paper. B for Bastard.

Remarkably, that course with that man did not quell my appreciation for Shakespeare. I didn't get much from the class itself; I never spoke a word, terrified that he would either mock me relentlessly or I would say something so brilliant he would make me go before the Honor Council. But the benefit of taking the course was simply that it gave me reason to read play after play after play. Because, of course, Shakespeare can speak for himself.

I had not read LLL. The premise is that the King of Navarre and a few of his men take a vow to devote themselves for three years to study. Part of this vow is to avoid women for the duration of the time. But the very day the men sign their contract, the Princess of France, and several of her attending ladies, arrive on very important business. The men fall madly in love with the women and, as our play program summarized the entire final act, "pageantry ensues."

LLL is full of wordplay, arguably more than any of Shakespeare's other plays; it is delightfully witty. But it is not one of his more popular plays, partly because there are many references to which today's audience cannot relate, and probably also because it's a comedy with a dark ending. (There's thought to be a sequel, Love's Labour's Won which has, ironically, been lost.) Neither the plot nor the characters are as full and complex as in many of his plays; it seems Shakespeare's primary focus was on the intellectually intricate latticework of the language.

Although I was glad to have read the play, seeing it on stage was proof that Shakespeare's works are meant to be performed. It was fantastic. I laughed a lot. I cried at the end. And throughout, I sat amazed.

You may have noticed that there has been a flurry of recent bliss bits and relatively few bitch sessions on klog lately. Thinking that this is surely an indicator of Kelly's increased happiness, I set out to quantify it.

I compiled the historical data covering blog posts from the beginning of klog in February 2005, comparing the number of bliss bits to the number of bitch sessions on a monthly basis. Subtracting the number of bitch sessions from the number of bliss bits yields that month's "balance of happiness" indicator. This number ranges from 5 to -5 with an average just barely above zero (there have been 46 bliss bits as opposed to 42 bitch sessions over 2.5 years of klog).

You may think this is a crude measure, but I challenge you to find a clearer, more objective, and more quantifiable indicator of happiness. The results are summarized in the line graph below; I'll let you draw your own conclusions about the trends.