Kitty litter, and feeling young again. Repeatedly. Repeatedly..

In my weekly household garbage patrol, I stopped for the most glamourous task. Armed with a rubber glove, I pulled off the plastic dome that protects us throughout the week from foul feline evidences.


Note: these roll-over 'auto' clean kitty litter boxes... (That's the exact model. The litter box, not the cat.) Don't work. Well, they do... barely. We keep it just because it gives Leela a little privacy. But changing to the clumping-style litter was a good move. A brave hand protected by latex makes short work of it all.

I was about half way done my work in the far corner of the bathroom, when I hear little footsteps behind me, followed by the 'clunk' of wood. I looked behind me; Caitlin was already gone. One of her little wooden chairs I'd painted had appeared.

I turned back to the litter box. Behind me, she reappeared with her other little chair. Then her little dolly highchair. Then three stuffed toys:

Bert, (as in "& Ernie"), which had been mine at her age. In the last 3 decades, Bert had lost all his clothing, and his hair. Baldness hadn't shaken his confidence however, still getting through life his his confident, scrutinizing scowl. Without eyebrows.

Bert had been renamed of late. Caitlin has fallen for a TV show "UmiZoomi". There's no toys relating to this show that I've seen, but she doesn't need them. She just delegated the roles of the main characters to existing toys. Bert was now "Geo", a little blue-clothed fellow with geometric powers who can build anything with his shapes.

The second member of team UmiZoomi was being played by a little pink stuffed bear, which once was named "Berry", and has gone through a few names since then. It was now "Millie", a pink-dressed sister to Geo, whose primary ability is 'pattern power'. Her dress changes to a pattern she needs, then can apply that pattern in various ways. Her secondary power is to extend her pigtails to swing on, or to form rulers. Look out spiderman.

The third and final member was being played by a... an anteater. (Do you remember my anteater story? Anyway, this anteater gets to play the role of "Bot", a creatively named green robot, whose main ability is... a TV screen on his chest. Which can show anything. In the exotic examples of what he can show, he cites a skyscraper, a taxi cab, and a traffic light. Yay? What happens when Geo hit puberty? How many traffic lights will he be asking Bot to show, huh? anyway, Bot also can act as a storage container, his hands turn into handy little food processors, and yada yada.

You wanna watch some? Are you sure? I've seen a lot. A lot.

UmiZoomi 2025: Bot shows porn, and turns his hands into cityscape leveling maser cannons, while Geo builds nukes, and Millie uses her pattern powers to supply camo, while she swings around like spiderman. Umizoomie 2280? :

Children's TV. Children's TV never changes.

No, well, we're still in 2010, and Caitlin declares the purpose of this Umi-filled gathering as she brings in a box, covered with a little brown silk cloth. "We throw you PARTY, Daddy! Surprise party! Your birthday!"

Well, OK, My birthday is a couple months away, but she recently had her own birthday party, and evidently liked it. Seemingly having gotten over her globapobia, she inflated three imaginary balloons, and set them to rise to the ceiling. I guess she breathes out helium.

She declared the box to be a 'birthday' (cake) and the silk cloth on top to be chocolate icing. I had to blow out the (pre)'tend' candle. Despite being the birthday boy, SHE got the first piece. Me next, then Geo, Millie, and Bot. Then presents. I received imaginary Dora bouncing balls (like a pair she got on her own birthday), a Simpsons driving video game, and a Simpsons game based in space. I have to pretend to play them both. I asked her how old I was. I was informed that I was 'three old'.

Ready for my release from the bathroom, I caught holy heck for trying to move a chair out of the way. It was now time for Caitlin's party. She was also 'three old'. (again). We went through the whole thing again, down the the same three presents.

She was being very cute about the whole thing. I told her, "Sometime you just need to be hugged." Too busy with party arrangements to stop for a hug, she replied, "And sometimes I don't!"

As I feared, Bot, Millie and Geo all needed a party. Thankfully, she threw them one party for all three of them. They were 'three old' as well, by the way. As I type this, she is being tucked in alongside Bot and Geo. Millie couldn't be found. We decided she was out camping.

In other news: Claudia Black. Sorry. I must stop doing that. That is all.

Se7en, No, wait, just Seven. Sorry miss Paltrow

Before I go off on windows 7, let me tell you about The Day Of Seven.

Seven what? Seven tiny pairs of pants. Seven tiny pairs of panties. (If they're called pairs, and there was 7 of each, maybe I should call it The Day Of Twenty-Eight... but that doesn't have as nice of a ring to it...)

Kiddo's knee deep in potty training. some days she's into it, and runs with a song and a dance to ye potty, whether she's made it in time or not! One day she did it all herself, including wiping herself from a #2!.... badly. Baby wipes also work on walls, FYI. But she tried her best. The listerine on the floor was my bad, although I have others to lay SOME blame on.

The Day Of Seven was not a day of effort on her part, nor enthusiasm. It was a day of denial. "You need to go potty?" I ask many times through the day, if only to put the notion in her head- to help her pay attention to her body a bit. "No." I heard in reply many times on The Day Of Seven. Most of the time, she was right.

A 'yes' would end up in an honest attempt by her on the potty, OCCASIONALLY with results. On The Day Of Seven, she performed admirably in the #2 department. Whether a successful #2, or a false alarm, I praised her efforts. alas, minutes later, she peed her pants. New panties, new pants, and often new socks. (The Day Of Forty Two? Oh my... 42... DON'T PANIC! We have a new washer and dryer!)

Some of these liquid mishaps happened under my care, some under the care of my mother, and the last one was saved for mommy when she got home. By that time, Caitlin and I were barely on speaking terms. We were both equally fed up with changings. I almost put her into a diaper at one point, but I held strong. 'Never fall back' in training once the commitment is made, they say, or you erode what they've learned.


SPEAKING OF ERODING WHAT'S BEEN LEARNED....

Welcome to Windows 7.

My old laptop, which was far from new when it came into my care, had been showing many signs of giving up the ghost. A smallish hard drive that occasionally liked to slide out the side, a CD drive that no longer read CDs (but read DVDs just fine) and a power cord that, by the end, required a finger held in just the right place, at just the right pressure to work. The most recent injury to the cord was right by the plug that goes into the laptop, making a repair difficult at best.

It was time to retire the old girl. We knew it was coming.

So now, I have a new machine. It's not top-end, but it's pretty dandy for what I need, and beats the crap out of the old one. It's been named "Minmay"

Why name a computer after robotech's vacuous, fickle, not-so-loyal, possibly incestuous idol singer? I honestly don't know. It's certainly not the lessons I want my computer to learn. One of the selling points of this machine was ATA drives, which are going out of style, but make installing windows XP much easier... in case I hated wondows 7... I was going to go in with an open mind. Guess what happened?

Yup. It's OK. My new machine has 3gigs of ram, which might help also., but it feels OK. It has a lot of behaviours that I don't like, but after some tweaking, I think I'm just going to have to adapt a bit. Heck, running windows XP, I always tweaked it until it looked and felt like windows 98, so I guess I just have to take a step forward. It's ****ing microsoft. Conform or die, kill me now.

Shush, linux. Linux and I have come to terms with things. My MS alternatives will have to remain in the browser, email and office arenas. (On that topic, check out FireFox, Thunderbird [if you hate outlook] and Openoffice all of em free and awesome.)

Aside from my old laptop, I also still had my old desktop, Moria, (which was SUPPOSED to be named after the ship on Farscape, which I later learnt was actually 'Moya'.)
My Moria is about 7 years old, and of all the machines that have been in this house, only one has exceeded her speed, by 0.1 Ghz. She's a 3 ghz, with every bell and whistle that was available at the time. She cost a lot. It was my one needless indulgence when the settlement from my injury came around. She also had the bulk to my files... baby photos, music, graphical resources... FIFTEEN DVDs later, I have everything I wanted backed up. To put that in other terms, since a single layer writable DVD holds roughly 5 CDs worth of data, that would be about 75 CDs of data. I didn't load ALL of that onto the new laptop... Much of it I only need now and then, so it remains archived. But this frees up Moria to go live with my mother, who was running a pretty sad machine. She now has the fastest under this roof*, even above my new laptop. Moria just didn't fit in my lap very well.
*my playstation 3 runs more cyles by far than anything else in the house, if I wanna be picky.

And since I bring up Moya, in a related story, Claudia Black is awesome.
Despite that she hasn't returned my calls about playing Regan Grier in the Lifehack movie. Speaking of which, it's time for me to leave another message on Joss Wheadon's answering machine.