Black cat; gray cat

As I was getting into my car to go to work this morning, I saw an enormous black cat trot across the street. When I say "enormous," I mean possibly bigger than any cat I'd ever seen. I tried to come up with other quadrupeds to compare it to and came up with "calf."

I stared as the monster padded through the neighbor's yard and disappeared, and I wondered who owned him. I'm not (exactly) a superstitious person, but the thought did cross my mind that this cat could cause someone a whole lot of bad luck.

I saw another cat today. This one was gray and striped, and as he darted under my wheels on Mehring Way downtown, he also seemed huge. So huge, in fact, that as I felt the tiny thunk-thud under my wheels, I thought he must still be alive. Surely, that was the feeling of merely running over a leg or even a tail. Perhaps, I thought, I could find him on the sidewalk or in the shelter of the nearby bridge, and notify animal control.

He looked much smaller when I circled back and found he'd never made it out of the road. Small enough to easily be crushed under the wheels of my small car. It's the first animal I've ever hit. I've been assured that a cat running toward the river downtown in a place that's at least a half mile from any housing had no owner. I hope not.

The part of me that made me add the qualifier "exactly" to "I'm not superstitious" before was worried that somehow my cat would know - that I would be identified as a bane to the species. So far, she hasn't said anything, but I've still let her chew on my hand a bit in atonement.

I just got home from Mr. Wufflekins'. As I was walking through the parking lot, I saw two high-schoolers crouching by a car. They were feeding a skinny gray cat - I'm guessing a stray. I hope that it works out for him.

For all you regionalists out there ...

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Midland   "You have a Midland accent" is just another way of saying "you don't have an accent." You probably are from the Midland (Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, southern Indiana, southern Illinois, and Missouri) but then for all we know you could be from Florida or Charleston or one of those big southern cities like Atlanta or Dallas. You have a good voice for TV and radio.
The West
Boston
North Central
The South
The Inland North
Philadelphia
The Northeast
What American accent do you have? Take More Quizzes

The new frontier of technology

A week and a half ago, Stacie showed me the pilot episode of Heroes. Since then I have been a woman possessed - I simply must watch every episode that has aired, then glue myself to the couch every Monday night until May and watch every episode that will be aired in the future.

So I'm doing it the sucker's way - by downloading the first eight or so episodes through iTunes at two bucks per 45-minute episode. I figure the cost-per-minute is expensive compared to, say, oxygen, but a bargain compared to playing the ponies. Plus, I want to try that thing where I display my computer screen on my TV. It's so very 21st century.

So I went out to the Apple store and picked up the cord thingy for video, headed over to Radio Shack and bought the other cord thingy for audio (and endured attempts to sell me the expensive, gold-plated Monster Cable version of my cord thingy, plus a cameraphone - as in, no joke, "While you're in here picking up your $8 cable, do you need a cameraphone?"), and went home to test it.

It. Is. Awesome. The audio is great (not that it's hard to beat the audio from an iBook) and the video cable works perfectly. I can't wait to try it out on an HDTV.

So then I get on the iTunes music store to buy my shows. I've never actually downloaded a TV show before (haven't tried a downloading program since Gnutella, which never worked on my iMac in college), but it's the iTunes store, so of course it is simplicity itself. I click "Buy Episode" ...

... and the download time pops up: 5 hours.

Five hours?!?! Seriously? I haven't had to wait five hours for something to download since I was scouring AOL for Sailor Moon AVIs over 28K dialup in high school. Is this what it normally takes to get 45 minutes of video that still looks good on a 27-inch screen, or does my connection just suck?

So I've been buying the episodes two at a time, right before work or sleep. When I get home tonight, barring some sort of connection failure (which happened yesterday), I'll have them all save the one from this week, which is currently streaming for free on the NBC website. Then the agony inherent in being a slave to a TV show can truly begin.

The pressures of updating

Hmm, it's been a while. In my last post I was preparing for my Harry Potter party, which was like three weeks ago. (It went off without a hitch, as long as you don't count "people not showing up" as a hitch.)

When you haven't updated for a while, I think the expectations for a "triumphant return"-type post are far higher. I can feel you (both) judging me, waiting for something great.

So here I submit to you: quite possibly the Greatest Music Video of All Time.



Evidence:
- Two people making out in a bathub makes Kelly Clarkson sad. (2:25)
- A cat clock "raises the roof." (3:20)
- Clarkson finds her true love at a raging kegger. I think we can all relate to that. (2:50)
- The raging kegger has karaoke! BONUS! (1:20)
- This party house and the party house in the video for Fiona Apple's "Criminal" - separated at birth? (This party was made more "upbeat" by the addition of palm-tree wallpaper - I mean, you can't have Kelly Clarkson roaming around an orgy! That would just be crass.)