Kat Dancing

Ghastly morning. It was cold as fuck when I got up to milk - cold enough that when I got to the barn Dad said, "Don't bother washing down - the water's freezing on the concrete." It was, too; a bare five minutes after you'd sprayed something with water, it'd be covered with a thin sheet of ice. There wasn't much snow but the wind was howling, and everything in the parlour seemed to have soaked up an extra dose of Cold overnight.

Things went downhill from there. First it was the vaccuum pump. I'd just started putting milkers on and was noticing that they weren't really staying on very well when Dad came in and started cussing. We were a good ten bar below pressure, which meant that we either had a leak or a blockage somewhere in the tubes. We went over everything in the parlour trying to find the spot. Then we went over it again with hot water, trying to thaw anything we thought might be frozen. Then we went over it again. And again. Then Dad went over it with a stethascope.

An hour and a half later, we finally got the damned thing working, and I started milking. The cows were in a really evil mood by this time (as were we, to be honest) and it hadn't gotten much warmer, but I figured hey, the worst is over, right?

Until we realized the cooler on the milk tank wasn't working.

A relay somewhere had - guess what - frozen. More hot water, much more cussing, all useless, and Dad finally had to call the tank electrician - who was almost a hundred miles away at the time - to come out and fix it, because until he did our milk was staying warm. Warm milk = illegal milk. Illegal milk = milk down the drain.

In the meantime I finished milking turned the wash-down cycle on, causing one of the milkers to fall to the ground and shatter - and not only shatter, which isn't that big a deal as we keep the plastic parts around for replacements - but somehow, in falling, to bend the screw that was holding it all together. Not massively, mind you; quite subtly, so that I nearly went mad with frustration trying to put the thing back together and wondering why I suddenly couldn't make a simple screw thread straight before I finally realized what was going on. The screw was, of course, an intregal part of the milker body. The milker body will cost about $250 to replace.

By the time I got through milking it was noon - giving me exactly five hours before I had to get my butt out the door and start evening milking.

And tomorrow morning I will get to do it all over again. Oh joy.

On the bright side, the tank guy got here fast enough that we didn't have to dump a few hundred gallons of milk down the drain. That's something, right? Makes up for the whole rotten day, right? Right?

*sigh*

###
"... and finally, I do not appreciate your attitude, which I find singularly lacking in respect." Caprice Mondoux folded one arm behind her back and lifted her chin, for a moment the very image of her famous father. "I suggest you remember yourself."

Max gave her a moment more to pose before unfolding one long finger. "First, I am not your employee. I received my commission from your aunt -"

"That old biddy," said Caprice, loosing her poise. "Just because she's too old to have any fun -"

"Second," Max lifted another finger, "even if you were my employer, the Niccosian Code of Conduct expressly states that a bodyguard may contradict his employer if he believes that obedience may in any way threaten or endanger said employer -"

"Oh, stop being such a baby. The Treasure Box is perfectly safe."

"Caprice, may I remind you that I am a Niccosian bodyguard. Men of my training are neither common nor cheap. Considering the kinds of scrapes you get yourself in, you should perhaps consider just how difficult it's going to be to replace me."

That had the salutory effect of shutting her up, at least momentarily.

"Third, we've been sitting in front of this wall for four days, and it seems to be retaining its wall-like nature. Even a bodyguard can get bored. I vote we beat a strategic retreat to some civilized planet, preferably one with a supply of alcohol and some decent food, and forget the whole thing."

"But we're so close!" Caprice waved her recording tablet at him.

"That's what you said about the last three dead ends."

"It's not a dead end. I've done a data analysis on the layout of the Maze and there's a pattern to it - even to the dead ends. This is anomalous."

"That's what you said about the last three, too. My faith in scientific analysis is waning, Caprice."

"This is the last one. It has to be here. My theory -"

"Theories can be wrong. This one is showing all the signs of it."

Caprice changed tactics. "Just one more day. Please? Please, Max?"

"Oh, for - fine. One day. Then we're leaving if I have to tie you up and drag you out."

Caprice gave him one fierce smile of triumph, and then, wasting no time on gratitude, whipped around to face the wall again. Max sighed and trudged off to get some breakfast.
###

So, yes, I'm writing again. For the moment. If it sticks, this will turn into a short story... although for the moment it, like most of my first drafts, is largely dialogue.

My Amtrak tickets to Toronto arrived yesterday. It's real now. New Year's in Canada, here I come!

Kat program page. Kat fix bugs. Kat fix bugs again. Kat make page work.

Good Kat.

Kat sleep now.

*thump*

This post is brought to you by Burned Out Kat, the person who is having to redesign her mother's web order page before the pre-Christmas rush starts on Friday, including rewriting the php scripts, which would be a lot easier if she knew php.

Actually at this stage, having successfully tought myself php and banged my head against the computer enough times to have gotten something useful out of it, I'm more or less down to the hand-coding-in-the variables bit. Which I don't want to do. There's a lot of goddamn variables.

Oh, well.

Further dog photos, to make up for the lack of actual post:



This is my father's dog, Shep, with his pet fish, Mr. Fishy. Mr. Fishy was a Christmas present to Shep two years ago (along with a companion fish, unnamed, who led a brief but hopefully fufilling life before going to that great big toilet bowl in the sky) and has proved a good one; Shep adores him, reminds us to feed him and change his water, and (being a Border Collie) spends hours and hours sitting absolutely still and watching him, to the vast entertainment of the rest of the family.

You may notice from the picture that Mr. Fishy's bowl is directly under the tv. This is because at my house we don't watch tv. We watch the dogs instead. They're more interesting and don't take commercial breaks.

No, there's not much to do around here.

My mother's birthday present arrived yesterday - late, of course (Damn you, Powells! Damn you, UPS! Damn me, last minute order-er!) and with it a copy of Stanley Schmidt's Aliens and Alien Societies. I'd already had my hopes lowered by the other two books in the Science Fiction Writing Series I'd bought, but still.... *sigh* Oh well. At least I only blew twelve bucks on it.

The most annoying thing is that I can't figure out why these books are so damned useless to me. At first I thought it was simply the prejudice of the author but that doesn't seem quite right; I enjoy reading prejudiced authors. Even if I don't agree with their prejudices, it's always more fun to read something when the author's genuinely passionate about what they write.

Then I thought maybe it was because I'm just not a hard sf writer of the Hal-Clement-worshipping type, but that doesn't seem right either, because I do like getting my facts mostly right and so books chock full of facts ought to be useful to me, right? Right?

*sigh*

Finally, yesterday, I tracked down the nagging sense of deja vu that reading the Science Fiction Writing Series was giving me. Back in my sophomore year of college I used to walk into my Chemistry II class, dump my bag under the table, sign the attendance sheet, nudge my neighbor, say, "Wake me up if he starts looking at me funny," and take an hour and a half long nap. This was partly because I was working the 5 am to 7 am shift on the pig crew at the farm and Chem II met at eight, but mostly it was because I'd found out I got better grades in the class if I didn't listen to the teacher. A really bright guy, mind you - but a terrible teacher. Generally he'd start out by slowly, painstakingly, going over the ground we'd already covered, explaining things that even simpletons like me had already gotten the hang of and explaining them over and over, in the most simplistic terms possible, repeating himself intermidably - until something would catch his attention and he'd forget that he was talking to a Chem II class and be off on quantum physics and higher-level math and the interesting consequences of this, that, and the other and in general would be teaching grad-level chemistry to a class of people going, "Excuse me? What?"

Reading these books is almost exactly like that.

I'm figuring that these books are good for exactly two types of people: rank beginners with no scientific background, who will find all the painstaking, elementary-level background helpful and not even try to understand the advanced speculation bits, and true science-y types, who will have to skip over all that annoying background but will happily delve into the complex speculations.

But for me - with a solid background in biogenetics and a skimpy one in chemistry, astronomy, and physics - it's bloody useless. I end up flipping through pages going, "Big Bang, nebulas, DNA, evolutionary theory, come on come on come on," and then suddenly I'm bang in the middle of a discussion on fluorosilicone life forms and photosynthesis being catalyzed by something other than chlorophyll, and I have to read back through the stuff I've missed in case there's something there to explain what's going on now. Which there isn't; it's like five or six rather major steps have just been skipped.

God, that is irritating.

Oh, well, there's a chapter on alien societies that looks semi-interesting, even if from the opening I'm guessing that the author thinks the social sciences are for wussies and really only put this section in out of a sense of obligation. And I may be able to eek something interesting out of the rest somewhere.

And it was only twelve bucks. *sigh*

Now this is a good idea.

I've started listing to NPR's Morning Edition (that's the news, for you heritics that don't know what National Public Radio is) in the mornings to wake me up. For American news, NPR isn't half bad; they generally make at least a nod towards objective reporting and recognize that other countries besides America do, in fact, exist, which is more than CNN (aka "the civilian arm of the Republican propaganda machine") bothers to do.

It's generally pretty alarming. I've been avoiding the news like the plague since I came back to this country, and damn, was there a reason for that. On the bright side, occasionally something comes up that's truly amusing - like the nugget of news that came up this morning while NPR was covering the ridiculous state visit to Britain. It appears that Bush will not be delivering his only major speech of the visit to the British Parliment because, it was agreed, the atmosphere of the Brit Parliment would be "too rowdy" for Mr. Bush. It appears that when Bush addressed the Australian Parliment there were "hecklers," and officials are determined to prevent any such thing happening, and Mr. Bush has been promised a receptive and respectful audience of Iraqi-war supporting members only.

Well, my goodness! You mean to tell me that the British Parliment still has a spine? Well, really! Don't they know that it's their duty as duly (and rightfully) elected representatives of the people to bow down to their leader and unquestioningly support his decisions? Don't they realize that dissent labels them traitors, sympathizers, enemies of "our troops", dirty Commies, and most of all, terrorists?

And don't they realize that our brave, noble commander-in-chief is so terribly fragile that these voices of dissent are dangerous to him? I mean, look at the way he's protected from seeing demonstrations against him or protestors, the careful screening of audiences that he is allowed to personally see, even if it means spending five billion dollars to clear every living human being out of the streets of London to assure it. For that matter, look at the minor invasion of London with gun-toting, grim-mouthed security people whose sole purpose is to keep those nasty frightening Brits away, the insane and unprecidented amounts of security that surround the President at all times. It ought to be clear that the President is deeply offended (or should we say frightened?) by any threat, verbal or physical, to his own precious self.

That there's a word for people who behave like this, and that it is "coward", is not the point. The point is that Mr. President should never have to see these disturbing things, and certainly he should never have to hear an opinion that disagrees with his own or, perish the thought, suffer hecklers! Our President's intellect is to... delicate... to be subjected to such acid commentary. Free speech be damned; the President is a great leader, like Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, and did they have to suffer jeers and heckling from their audiences?

Don't answer that.


Heavens, you'd think this was a democracy or something.

A little over a year ago, my brother and I were on our way to visit some friends of ours - my brother driving, I passengering - in our old Izuzu Trooper. Like most of the county I live in, the friends' house could only be reached by driving through some of the twisty, narrow back roads that this area is famous for. We'd just topped a hill and were going down the other side at a fair clip of speed when a wild turkey suddenly sprinted out of the underbrush and across the road.

Now, we were still about a hundred yards from the turkey, so this was not a big deal; the bro didn't even bother tapping the brakes, and we kept on flying down the hill, which would have been fine if the turkey's best mate hadn't made the decision to likewise cross the road when we were about five yards from it.

At that distance, at the speed we were going, there was no question of stopping... and it would still have been no big deal, just another sad story of roadkill, if the turkey hadn't at the absolute last minute decided to take off. Now, turkeys are not real graceful fliers, so this was about as effective as throwing pine cones at an incoming hand grenade, but the overall effect was that instead of hitting our well-protected, impact-resistant bumper, or even our radiator, the turkey slammed into the windshield.

We had about a split second to see it coming. I screamed, threw up my arms, and closed my eyes, and my brother screamed, hit the brakes, and closed his eyes. There was a loud whump noise, a second, softer whump from above, and a sensation of motion somewhere to my left, which we later identified as the rear-view mirror coming unstuck and flying into the back seat but which my panicked mind interpreted as "crazed turkey coming through windshield". My brother grabbed for the stickshift but got my knee instead, I, mind still full of bird-in-car visions, shrieked and dug my fingernails into his hand, and my brother (who had felt the rear-view migrating as well) yelled and tried to beat the turkey that was clawing him away, and there were a few seconds of pointless misdirected hysteria before we thought to open our eyes.

We did not have a turkey in the car. What we did have was a dent in our roof where the turkey had flipped after impacting the windshield, and a rather pretty spiderweb-shaped pattern of cracks all across the useless pane of glass that had once been our windshield.

We looked at this for a while.

"Well, shit," said my brother. That seemed to more or less cover it.

We drove the rest of the way to the friends' house in a state of silence and adrenaline overload, and were so shaken that we didn't even notice the absence of rearview mirror until the next day, and were mildly surprised to find it sitting in the back seat, in hiding from kamikaze turkeydom, presumably.

And that was that. The windshield got replaced, the rearview mirror was glued back on but retained psychological scarring which manifested itself in a tendency to fall off until the end of its days, and in fact the Izuzu Trooper itself has since gone to that great used-car dealership in the sky (RIP - or at least RIP until we get around to paying the junkman to come and tow you away) and the whole episode would really have no relevance if I hadn't nearly had the exact same bloody thing happen to me today.

Different road, different car, one would hope different turkey, and I was coming around a curve, not down a hill. The turkey was alone, this time. But it flung itself in front of my bumper in the same way that the previous turkey had flung itself in the way of the Izuzu. I hit the brakes instantly, of course, and I wasn't going as fast as the bro had been, so the thing had time to run to the double yellow line and back a couple of times before - with my bumper practically touching it - it decided that now would be a good time to remember the flight thing, and took off in its lumbering turkey way. Its claws, I kid you not, scraped the hood of my car, and if I hadn't managed to get myself to a complete stop by that time (thank God for good brakes) it would have been turkey-in-the-windshield all over again.

I sat there, staring at the thing as it flapped its ungainly way across the road to a tree, and thought "My God, those things are stupid."

Which got me thinking about intelligence. It's not entirely fair, after all, to judge the turkey stupid. Prior to the twentieth-century invention of roads, the poor things probably never had to react so quickly, since nothing but a cheetah can hit car-like speeds and there are a distinct lack of cheetahs in the Appalachian mountains. So really, here's the turkey, happily bobbling along for centuries and centuries, and then we humans show up and change the rules on it and there it is, playing the same old game. It's bound to look a bit stupid.

On the other hand, isn't that the true nature of intelligence? Not the ability to spot this or that or the other, or get the right answer on a multiple-choice test, but the ability to adapt to novel situations. The ability to not only see what's going on in the world ("Hey, this black shiny thing, it wasn't here before, was it?"), and make connections ("And, hmm, those loud vrrm-vrrm things seem to travel on it a lot, and very, very fast,"), but to extrapolate and learn from those connections ("So... perhaps I should stay away from the black shiny thing, then?") It's adaptability - flexibility - alert observation and the ability to draw conclusions from those observations, and not merely to plod along unthinkingly following the same course, that creates intelligence. Having only one course to follow, only one way to think, one way of life that you are capable of understanding, inevitably leads to extinction.

And the logical conclusion is, therefore, that Republicans are inevitably headed towards extinction. One of these days. That's the problem with mother nature, she's just way too damned slow.

(This post was brought to you by sleepy Kat. As if you couldn't tell.)

A friend of mine recently blogged about this interesting toy called Gender Genie (which he had, in turn, heard about from another friend's blog, who had undoubtably heard of it from another's... you begin to see why Google is underwriting Blogger these days. Damn, the advertising potentials) and I've been playing with it, with... interesting results.

I would appear to be male.

Oh, not entirely male. A selection from my second novel Harmony Station was identified quite firmly as female, although it thought my first novel Anagenesis was written by a man. (The protaganists of both stories are, by the way, female.) On the other hand, I ran two of my nonfiction articles through it, and both were apparently written by a man. As were three of the four blog entries I ran through it. (The one that Gender Genie correctly identified as female, by the way, was yesterday's. Go figure.)

The friend whose blog I nicked it from apparently had very accurate results, though, as did the guy he nicked it from, and the thing is apparently 70% accurate overall. So I guess I'm just weird.

Oh, and:

It has been pointed out to me that I refer to my dogs way too much. Well - actually it hasn't, but I think I do, and anyway there's this nifty "upload image" feature that's appeared since I moved to ftp that I'm just itching to try out.

So you don't get less canine references, but you do get visual aids.

Visual aid number one. This is my dog. When I refer to the mad dog, the stick fiend, "that damned walking heater blockage", or simply Kid, this is the dog I'm talking about.


Further pictures will be inflicted on the captive audience at a later date.

Oh, and this post? Male. By over a hundred points.

Yesterday was the first truly cold day we'd had so far. Oh, we'd had warnings. There'd been some heavy frosts, a few brisk mornings. We'd had days that I thought at the time were chilly. But this was cold. The kind of cold where you open the door at 7 am to go to work and immediately close it again, go back inside, and put on another layer of clothes. And it wasn't just cold; it was the wind. They were registering 90 mph winds not that far from us, and while we weren't that far gone, it was pretty damned windy out there. Bits of the roof blowing off and smacking you upside the head, sort of thing.

Milking was a nightmare. Anything that hadn't been washed out of the holding pen the night before had frozen solid, turning the place into a kind of bumpy-ice obstacle course, and thanks to the wind both the holding pen and the milking parlour were filled with hay and leaves and rubbish. We'd drained everything we could but one of the hoses had frozen solid anyway and had to be thawed in a bucket of water before we could milk. We had to keep the teat dip sprayer in a bucket of warm water so the cows wouldn't get a spray of ice on their little titties. The milking parlor is, of course, open on three sides, so there's absolutely no way to heat it. I kept gloves on for as long as I could, but there's no way to milk in winter gloves, and by the end of milking my hands were so cold I could barely flex my fingers.

And this is only the beginning. God, I hate winter.

Today isn't so bad - we thought for a while that we were going to get snow, but it warmed up and so we're getting rained on instead. But the wind's died down. Calm before the storm, I'm sure, but I'm going to enjoy it while I can.

We brought my baby heifers down from the top field and put them in the field behind my parents' trailer yesterday as well - today being the start of deer season, always a worry. Beer consumption is an important part of deer hunting around here, and with enough beer a 300-pound calf apparently starts to look very deerlike. We've never actually lost an animal to the idiots, but we've caught more than one drawing a bead on an innocently grazing cow. I suppose I can understand. They are brown and four-legged, after all, and in the heat of the moment a few minor details like, oh, the size, the lack of antlers, and the presence of a tail may escape the alert hunter's notice.

You'd think the eartags would be a bit of a tip-off, though.

Ta-da.

Welcome to my biggest and best example of cat-vaccuuming *ever*.

In the practical sense, though, this means some changes. The blog will now be moving to here, which will at least get rid of the skanky banner ads and let me upload some images. As far as I have been able to tell, this page (kfeete.blogspot.com) will remain, but will not be updated. This post will be at the top for ever and ever, in other words. So if the last few posts haven't turned you off on my deathless prose for life, you'll need to go to the new site....

(Addendium: to the person who will come in and click on the above link within the next five minutes, while I am still fighting with technical issues and trying to make the blog work, and helpfully email me to tell me that the link is broken: Die.)

We've got a deal going these days with one of my mom's employees regarding meat chickens. Essentially, we buy the chicks, provide the feed, and help with the kill, and he provides the labor. He doesn't have to lay out a bunch of money, we don't have to waste time on the revolting little sods, we both get chicken that isn't the revolting industrial imitation, everybody's happy.

Today, however, was the day of reckoning in chicken-land. Sixty-five chickens to get from squawking bundles of feathers to neatly packaged freezer food. I'm fucking exhausted, and I didn't even have the hardest job - in spite of my years on the farm, I'm still a bit of a wimp about actually killing things, so I typically get put on gut duty, for which I am better mentally and physically suited (without getting into the gristly details, this is one time when having small hands and long fingernails really comes in handy.) But I spent four hours standing on hard concrete and cutting up dead meat, and that takes its toll.

At about this point most people would be asking me, with varying degrees of horror, how I could stand to kill and eat an animal that I've raised.

My answer varies, depending on what particular species we're talking about, but with chickens it's easy. I can quite happily help kill and eat a chicken because, having raised them, I know what foul and revolting beasts they are.

Disney movies have unintentionally done a real disservice to the human race, I think, because of the way they typically portray animals. At this stage, when I say "chicken", most people are thinking of cute brown hens scratching for corn in the barnyard and looking motherly and so on. And it's perfectly true that chickens will scratch in a barnyard, and that they eat corn. They also eat worms, flies, maggots, rotten flesh, and each other. When we raise baby chicks we have to use a heat lamp that gives off red light and will therefore conceal it if one of the chicks is bleeding, because the instinct of a chicken is to attack and peck whenever they see blood. Any chicken that is not actually the mother of a chick (and from time to time, even those that are) will go out of its way to catch, peck to death, and eat any young chicks that are around, and I can't tell you the number of times I've seen chickens attacking one of their number that was weak, old, or sick, pecking it to death, and eating the corpse. In addition the roosters are really vicious bastards who will fly at you the minute your back is turned, or even fly in your face and try to claw out your eyes if they think they can get away with it.

Add to this that these particular chickens were meat birds. Now, your average chicken is not exactly Einstein to begin with, and in fact generally falls into that rarified category of stupidity more often seen in creatures like sheep and George Bush. And chickens aren't generally the cleanest and pleasantest of beasts either - well below hogs, which are actually quite fastidious if given the choice, and certainly not something you'd care to be far downwind of. But meat birds, thanks to the brilliant breeding program of us humans, outdo even their own species in these areas. They're so stupid that they have to be taught to eat and drink, and taught repeatedly, as they often forget; so stupid that a full-grown bird can drown itself in half an inch of water; so stupid that an unexpected phenomena, such as, say, sunrise, will often send them into such a desperate panic that they will crush and kill each other in their frantic rush to get away from it. They can't be trained to not to sleep in their own shit, which means that by the time they're full-grown, even when you're moving the pen twice a day, the ammonia stench is still enough to knock you over at ten feet. They can't seem to learn not to shit in their own food, nor not to eat the food afterwards, which means that they're buggers for catching various diseases. Their sole purpose in life, from the time they're born, is to eat, shit, and die.

Overall I fail to feel any guilt in helping them with the last.

Hum, that turned into quite a rant - perhaps people have asked me that question once too often?

In the meantime, I have parts of the chicken I'd really rather not know existed under my fingernails and a clinging smell of burnt feather and warm meat surrounding me. I think it's past time for the bro to give me a turn in the shower.

I spent most of yesterday up on a ladder painting the side of the barn, which in general wouldn't have been that bad, but which in this specific case was hell. I like painting, but painting from the top of a ladder is uncomfortable at best, and this particular ladder was at its worst. There was a massive slope beneath me which made keeping the ladder stable a nightmare; I had to have a second ladder set up to balance my brushes and paint can on; there didn't seem to be any way I could set up the ladder, or any way I could sit/stand on the ladder, which wasn't hellishly uncomfortable and a strain on one set of muscles or another; it was bizarrely hot weather and I was on the sun side of the barn, so I nearly passed out from heat exhaustion more than once; and the dogs, who thought the whole thing was very interesting, kept coming around and banging themselves against the bottom of one ladder or the other and looking up at me with an interested expression. It's a miracle that I didn't fall off, and a larger miracle that none of the dogs earned themselves an unexpected paint job.

Finally got it done, though, and went back this morning to finish up the inside posts, and it *does* look a lot better, not to mention that with the wood painted it'll last a lot longer.

And of course I could have been my brother, who was welding together some sort of clamp thingy for the side of the manure pit while I was painting. First he welded it together backwards. Once he got that straightened out and put it back together properly, he realized that he'd done the measurements wrong and the whole thing was worthless. So he broke it up, salvaged what he could, recut it, rewelded it, and realized - guess what? - that he'd welded it together backwards *again.* I'm not sure what happened after that, as I prudently escaped the area.

In the "good news" region, my mom apparently shipped out 55 wheels of cheese today. At an average of 8 pounds a wheel. A *lot* of cheese, is what I'm getting at. And four of those were to *the* top cheese shop in New York City, a massive coup for Mom if they like us enough to reorder. Now she's biting her fingernails off worrying that there'll be some kind of massive, cheese-destroying heat wave between today and Friday. *sigh* My mother, the optimist.

So the first part of an article I wrote on artificial intelligence is up on Vision. Vision is also becoming a paying market as of next issue. I'm now trying to figure out whether it would be appropriate for me to ask if I'm getting paid for the second half of the article, which Zette has already bought. It's not as if I really care about the money, or will care particularly if I'm not getting paid, it's just... hum. That would be my first paying sale. I'm curious, I suppose.

In other news, testing out BlogWorkz,, which will supposedly be posting this to my page without me having to go through a browser. If so, it'll be a godsend, as Blogger's interface is just annoying.

Oh, and in other news yet, it's my birthday. Woo hoo, twenty-three. Why is it that birthdays somehow loose their thrill after twenty-one or so?