"Remember: It's Elf's mind out there. Expect sickness."

This is off the top of my head, hit me in the shower, no proofreading or revision. Just plain silliness. Total time spent on it: about half an hour.

Raisin d'etre

( [sic] )

P'nyssa Cringed.

Animal testing center
Hosted on Flickr!. Click to enlarge.

I am not opposed to animal testing in general. I recognize its necessity and I'm not interested in debating the moral agency of bunny rabbits or mice. I'd like to diminish suffering as much as possible but with the current level of technology there are some tests that are only viable on things bigger than a bacterium.

But I can't help thinking, every time I walk past this building, how some of my characters would react to the knowledge of what would go on inside here. The two strongest ones are P'nyssa and Bambi, one because she's telepathic, the other because she's distantly related to the victims. This cheerful, bright blue building on the waterfront is where the University of Washington Medical Center does its animal testing on medical technologies and drugs, which is why the place is plastered with security cameras, the glass is bankglass, and there are no loitering and no trespassing signs everywhere.

Light Over Puget Sound

Every once in a while, I get lucky and snap a pic I really like. This one is from my office window.

( Cut because it's a pic and it's really big. )

Deliberately Lost in Translation

Izakaya?
Hosted on Flickr!. Click to enlarge.

The other day, while I was waiting for my bus at an unfamiliar stop. I looked across the street and spotted the sign shown at the left. While I was waiting for my bus, it nagged at me. It looked like just another bar, but another sign said, "New in Seattle! A Japanese Izakaya."

So I pulled out my laptop and typed it in to my dictionary. Only one word came up: 居酒屋 (いざかや) (n) bar; pub; tavern.

Whee.

It's snowing again.

( Kidpic: Kouryou-chan with her tongue hanging out. Feel free to ignore. )

Okay, it's snowing again. It can stop that right now. The weather guy told us maybe one to two inches, and now we have at least three inches with more still coming down. The neighbor kids are building snowmen. It's a good thing Omaha made me buy chains. I think the girls are going to be disappointed that there might be no school tomorrow.

The last time she went to MacWorld and it snowed this bad, the only people in the house were me, Kouryou-chan, and Shaterri, and I caught the flu and my temperature shot up to 39C (102°F) and I was so miserable I could barely get out of bed long enough to pee. Then the heat and lights went out.

I doubt it'll get that bad again, but the circumstances make me nervous.

Words of Wisdom

Sarah Carey writes:

Most people are good and decent, yet all we hear about is violence and crime. Most people are worth loving, yet we are trained to despise ourselves for falling short. There's too much money involved in hating ourselves and we seem to have accepted self-loathing as a fact of life. So when you read in a brochure that your fatigue and mental weariness is the result of possessing a poisoned body, it's easy to believe.

So I think we need more sex. The corny kind of sex that is about tenderness and love, the kind you can't really talk about without wanting to cringe. Maybe if we could convince each other that we are fragrant and not poisonous, then we could counteract some of the marketing that tells us the opposite

Read it all, and put down that enema bottle. Really.

Oh, uh, emphasis mine. Just because.