Not much to say here.  I haven’t seen my cat in over 48 hours so I’m pretty upset.  After calling for him yesterday and today, and biking around looking for him, I handed out flyers to a little over half of my ~80 neighbors today (the ones who answered their doors).  One lady said she saw a black cat laying in the road (just laying there, not hit) on a small side-road near my house yesterday.  I biked there tonight before the rain got too hard, but didn’t find him anywhere.  And one guy said he saw a black cat being really friendly with some kids at a bus stop right outside my development.  Tomorrow morning around 8 I’m going to go there and hope to find that it’s CJ, or at least talk to the kids and parents if the cat isn’t there tomorrow.

Konstantin keeps laughing at me because I’m upset about this.  He says he doesn’t get attached to animals, because the 3 cats they ever had all got hit by cars before they got to be a year old.  Well, no wonder then, of course he can’t sympathize, much less empathize.  We’ve had CJ for a long time, something like 6 or 7 or 8 years now, I think.  You get pretty attached in that amount of time.  And he isn’t "just a cat."  He’s my cat.  And personal feelings aside, almost everyone who’s ever met CJ is amazed by how friendly he is.  He really is the most friendly and lovable cat ever.  We’ve had quite a few other cats, most of which I liked a lot, but as great as they all were, none were anywhere near as amicable as CJ is.

Today CJ did something he’s never done to me before.  For no apparent reason, he walked over to me and bit my big toe.  Not a real bite; more of a "pay attention to me" kind of bite.  I wondered what his problem was, and went to check his food/water/litter box situation, and sure enough, he was out of food.  Pretty clever move, I’d say.

He got brave enough to walk upstairs today, and of course, he was tip-toeing around, all scared-like.  In a turn of events that somehow didn’t surprise me, someone managed to set off the smoke detector during the 10 seconds he was up there, sending my already-high-strung cat flying back down into the basement.  Poor meow mix.  But he also finally got brave enough to go outside, and he’s been out there since about 11pm.  He usually stays out all night at home, so I think (hope) that he’s doing the same thing here now, and he’ll be right back here in the morning.

After a few days of taking these new dumb vitamins, I discovered something weird.  If you put one of them (or presumably any similar item) in your mouth, and then take a big sip of liquid, you can get the pill to float to the back of your throat and just sort of fall right off the edge, without having to swallow at all.  It’s really awesome and handy, if a little unsettling at first; the secret is to not fight it.

I really like the Nissan Murano.  That car is about the only vehicle I’d consider driving that isn’t a Volkswagen.  But since VW has the Touareg now, the Murano would have to be really exceptional in some way in order to make me choose it over that.  And come on, Touareg has three consecutive vowels in its name.  What could stop it?

Speaking of driving, I propose a new mandatory test for all persons who currently drive, or who would like to drive.  This test would require the taker to correctly define the terms "passing lane," "turn signal," and "passing lane."  What you’d see is a 90+% drop in driver stupidity, as 90+% of drivers are no longer on the roads.  (As a bonus, by seeing which people put down different answers for #1 and #3, you identify those people who should not only be off the roads, but should be summarily executed.)

In even more random news, I seriously love these 10-10-987 commercials with John Stamos.  They’re so laid-back and conversational and funny, and the people say the dumbest things to him.  In one of them, a bunch of people are like, reluctant to try it or something ridiculous like that.  So the one guy is like, "How do I know it’s that cheap?"  And John goes, "You know how you’ll know?  Try it."  And then a lady is like, "I just can’t believe it’s really that cheap."  John says, "I PROMISE it’s that cheap."  That’s just not something you ever hear in a commercial, someone doubting what they’re selling, and the guy saying "I promise" to reassure her.

One last piece of ridiculosity: the music teacher asked another absurd question last week: regarding the word "hybrid," she asked, "For how many of you is this a new term?"  Come on.  She might as well ask, "How many of you have completed grade school and/or high school before enrolling in college?"

I brought CJ to school with me!  I am well beyond stoppable now.  (In case you didn’t know, CJ is the best cat of all time.)

He survived the 3-hour trip OK.  It was really funny to watch him walk around the basement here when I first let him out of the car carry cage.  His eyes were gigantic and his every step was carefully calculated for the first hour or so.  He won’t follow me up the stairs to the first floor, and when I opened the basement door to the backyard, he sniffed the air, took a few steps out, and then came right back in.  I think he’s overwhelmed.  There’s a tiny space between my hanging-file caddy, my old monitor, and some plastic containers -- a space just big enough for a cat, with a narrow opening to get into it -- and when CJ isn’t in my lap or following me around, he’s sleeping in that space.

He has no problem eating, but he won’t drink the water (not that I blame him; the water is awfully chemically here, and I won’t drink it either).  But I put some spring water in a bowl, and he didn’t drink that either, at least not while I was watching.  But the food is in his food bowl from home, and the water is in a normal bowl from here, so maybe that has something to do with it.  Or maybe he is drinking it, and he just doesn’t drink very much very fast.

The bad news: large portions of southern California are on fire.  I hope Patrick and family are OK out there.

The good news: everything is working on my new server.  I had some problems with email and name resolution, but they’re fixed now.  All my content has now been removed from the old server, so if you’re reading this, you’re at the new one.

The more better good news: there’s a new song up.  Go listen to it, read the lyrics, and post comments, all on the song page.

Hey Honeybunny, (sorry, Moms just have to use those cute names once in a while from way back when)  uhmm, is there some kind of prize for being the 50,000th visitor to your site?  It’s getting close since March.  What’s the total to date from inception?  Just wondering.

The server change I mentioned a week or two ago actually didn’t happen, because there were some issues that had to be ironed out with the new server (telling it to use eastern standard time instead of UK time, for instance).  Anyway it’ll happen over the next 3 days -- I just updated the DNS resolution for nodivisions.com to point to the new server.

What this means for you, fair and noble visitor, is that you might not see some posts, or some posts might suddenly disappear, because they got posted to the site on the old server.  I’ll eventually move any such posts to the new server.

In the meantime, if you want to start using the new server right away and avoid all that (not that "all that" is really anything...), you can edit your hosts file, which will be in one of these locations:

C:\Windows\hosts
C:\WinNT\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
C:\Windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

Just open it up in Notepad and add a line to the bottom that says:

212.13.208.64 nodivisions.com

(And the amount of space or tabs in between doesn’t matter.)  Then File, Save, and exit.  Close your browser and re-open it, and you’ll be able to see the new site.  Which is, of course, the same as the old site.  I made one little change so I could tell when my DNS servers get updated -- the new site has a capital S at the start of the "song of the moment" link (in the Fall theme, of course).

(If you use Linux, you can add the same line to your /etc/hosts file... but if you use Linux, I probably didn’t have to tell you that : )

I took a little nap and ended up sleeping through all but the last 10 minutes of American Dreams.  It’s the only show I watch on TV, and it’s only on once a week, and I freaking missed it.  Gr.  (OK, I watch O’Reilly too but that’s not the same; for one, it’s not a continuous story where you’re somewhat lost when you miss an episode, and two, it’s on at 8, 11, and 4am, so you can always catch it later.)  If anyone knows anyone who saw it, and could give me a summary... or who taped it and can hook me up... let me know.

subject?  where to sign in.  that’s the subject.  you know some people don’t adjust well to change.  it can be quite a shock to log on and not be able to sign in, ya know.  of course, then again, well, ok.  the sun will come out tomorrow ;-)