She’s got her appetite back and other than the twice-daily pill trauma is back to being her old self again.

(Boy, she hates her pills though. And she’s getting good at catching them in her cheeks and spitting them back out, which makes them even more bitter and the entire thing far worse for both of us. I’ve got a plunger cat piller but her technique is to chomp her jaw like she’s chewing and swing her head side to side, which makes it very hard to get the piller in.)

Mouseycat might be sick. She had a very loose canine tooth removed the other day and we found she’d lost nearly a kilogram (nearly 2.2 lbs) since the last time she was weighed. There’s a chance that she just lost the weight because it hurt to eat, but it could be something more serious; blood tests ruled out diabetes but there’s still elevated white blood cell and liver enzyme counts so the current hypothesis is cholangiohepatitis. She’s on twice-daily antibiotic pills right now (which she just loves, let me tell you) and we’re back at the vet next Wednesday to find out what’s next.

Candice and I were in Belleville for Father’s Day weekend, and we spent Saturday with Dad at a weekend-long Beatles festival, with Beatles cover bands playing one after another on a single stage. It was surreal and straight out of the Simpsons, with the site map pointing out the “All You Need Is Food” food concession, the “Hello Goodbye” entrance/exits, the “She Came In Through the Bathroom Window” outhouse row, and a Paul McCartney lookalike wandering the crowds progressively drunker all night.

I took my bike in to get the bottom bracket overhauled and bought a helmet and now I’m ready to start riding everywhere. This is what I should’ve been doing instead of the motorcycle, I think. Silly me. I found that the commute to work along bike trails is about 10 miles on mostly level terrain, so I want to try bike commuting at least a couple times this summer. I took a test ride (to U of O and back, which I figured would be a handy benchmark for this fall) which was around 10 miles and found it easy, so I think it’ll be fine.

Related to that, I’ve been hitting the gym 2-3 days a week for the last month or so. I don’t like the workout I’ve been doing much but I just ordered New Rules of Lifting to give something else a try, but I’ve still been making it there regularly, at least. I need to learn to squat and deadlift.

In work-related news, this is not so good, apparently.

New laptop is awesome and so, so light. It also lets me leave my work laptop at work, which means I don’t have to carry a laptop as well as gym clothes and lunch when I go to work, which was getting particularly annoying on the bus, which I have been trying to take as often as possible instead of driving the car an extra 25 km/day.

Speaking of the car, I replaced the water pump recently because it was very noisy and obviously unbalanced (like me!), and pretty much every other noise the car was making went away too! It’s so quiet now. I guess I could have replaced the water pump a while ago.

Last Monday, Candice and I had been together for four years! In a couple of weeks it’ll be our first anniversary. Yay!

That’s about it for now. I’ll try to post more often, especially since I’ve got so many new things going on all at once. For some reason I try to avoid “Here’s what happened today” posts even when it’s sort of interesting. I shouldn’t do that.

It’s about cat-sized, if you don’t count the tail. If you count the tail, well:

But that’s not the great part. The great part is that they are easily domesticated, thrive on cat food and fruit, can be litter-trained, and make devoted pets with personalities somewhere between cats and ferrets. (Be sure to click through to see the kitten pictures.)

Now I want one! I’m sure they’d get along fine with the cats. Although I see that genet breeder I linked there also sells pet Fennec foxes. Who has giant ears? Is it you? Yes it IS you!

• I had spent a good part of yesterday evening tracking down an odd bug in Gaim in which it would try to participate in Jabber multiuser conferences using the nickname of the first other user it sees in the conference. It took me most of the night to figure out what was happening and what was supposed to happen, so I left it at that and figured I’d see about fixing it today. This afternoon, I found where it was picking up the wrong nickname, but couldn’t tell if it was safe to just cut out the offending code, so I went to check CVS to see when the code was introduced — and found that the maintainer had fixed the bits I was trying to fix a couple of hours before. Woops!

• A coworker of mine brought leopard geckos to work today to drop them off at the breeder he bought them from on his lunch — he’d bought them to breed with his, and they didn’t get along. I nearly came home with a pair of leopard geckos.

• I stopped in Future Shop tonight to pick up an S-Video cable for the satellite receiver and a component video cable for the PS2, since it’s taking over as DVD player now, but found they only carried Monster Cable. I won’t buy Monster Cable because they’re slimy and because they’re ridiculously expensive without being better in any useful electron-or-photon-moving way, but I’d forgotten how expensive: I’d have to drop $100 on the component cable and $75 on the S-Video cable, 6′ each. I crossed the street to Best Buy and bought both cables for $35 total. That’s the third or fourth time in a row that Best Buy has blown Future Shop out of the water. I should really just go to Best Buy first, except their parking lot is always busier.

• Going to quickly grab cables on the day the PSP is released is a dumb thing to do.

• The S-Video cable claims that it produces better signal quality than composite because it sends video signal information over “two discreet channels”.

• Just a moment ago on the TV guide, I saw that Pimp My Car was playing on MusiquePlus, the French MuchMusic, with the title translated as Pimp Mon Char. ‘Stie!

In other news, I’ve got gaim running again, so I might actually show up on AIM and MSN and Jabber and stuff now. Also, I have a four-day weekend.

but I think someone’s a bit confused, because it’s clear to me what’s on that turtle shell:

Yoshi! Of course, there’s the possibility that we’re both right…

Edit: Slashdotted. In the meantime, you can get the idea here and check back later.