Today is proving to be the most annoying of days. Let me explain! No, really. Let me. I was grounchy at the Keelhauler last night for stealing all the blankets at the place we're house-sitting, so I went to sleep in the living room, in a ridiculous chair.

The chair looks expensive--I don't know, I'm house-sitting, and hence, not privy to the prices of the objects around me. It's kind of modern, but totally bland, and has this leather footrest and everything. It's probably from the Sharper Image, or like "Sundance." It has that kind of "I wish for my furniture to reflect my spirit of gentle kindness towards the Earth yet still have the same basic function as a Laz-e-Boy" or whatever. Instead of "Brown" or "Green," you get the "Smoky Mountain Rain" or the "Catalina Island Fern" recliner to go with your Mystic Navajo entertainment center. Whatever, Zenmaster. Your ass reclines in front of "Murder, She Wrote" at the same angle mine does.

It's just enough of an angle, I discovered, that if you sleep on this chair, your neck vertebrae become permanently fused into the letter J, especially if Bitey Kat, who weighs twenty pounds, decides to have Chair Camp-Out Adventure along with you.

Anyway, I wasn't out there long. The Keelhauler left at 12:30 am to go to San Diego for his Social Studies 101 class. Oh, I mean, some sea-style school for mariners. At sea. I don't know what he's learning, but it does involve a classroom. I'm just going to say that they're studying the Nixon administration (pros and cons) and the Three Branches of Government.*

I got him a Blackberry yesterday to replace his terrible old phone, which had practically broken in half from the force of his manly conversations. I didn't intend to go all-out Blackberry on him, seeing as he tends to treat electronic gadgets with the approximate care one might lavish on an anvil, but he was mesmerized by Andrew, the nice Phone Store Man, who made it all look so easy and shiny.

We didn't have time for a lesson in predictive text, so I've been getting text messages from beyond the 6th Dimension. ghiu, they say. Ghiu...

Another read:

Iii am at h.

h otrell

Adding to my irritation today is the fact that I was unable to apply the proper moisturizers to my face this morning, on account of oversleeping and then finding a vibrant little spider in my makeup case. My brand-new, free-with-purchase Clinique makeup case! I closed the case back up, and when I got to work, opened it on the balcony, so spiderboy could go free. He did not crawl out when all the various moisturizers, etc., escaped, but when I shook out the case, he was there, slightly worse for wear in the form of being mostly crumpled. I squashed him for good measure--why prolong the suffering when there is arguably no money in it? But I do feel kind of terrible. If this were a detective movie, I could now go into a whole drinking binge on how I destroy everything I try to save.

Usually, I sic a cat on spiders, but Bitey Kat shows zero interest in hunting.

As a result, I have "rescued" several spiders from the bathtub by picking them up in a tissue and placing them out on the patio, or lowering them via broom from the ceiling, and then rushing outside and propping the broom against the garage for several hours. No wonder that one spider crawled into my makeup case--the word is out that Spidey Fun Park is open for business. "Wheeeee!"

So, the sky is grey, or Meadow Vole (if you're reading the Sundance catalog), or Mushroom (if you're at Banana Republic) or Sludge (if you're shopping for Urban Decay nail varnish).

Let's hope for a bright tomorrow.

Ghiu.

P.S.!

One more thing! The Independent Band contest is going until Wednesday, so go here and cast your vote for Strange Bird! We are 100% Bitey Kat-approved.




*The Nina, The Pinta, and the Santa Maria.

Star of the day. . .Lee Pace