So, the thesis is done and the ineffable Chris has a shiny new job - both of which were worthy of noting with lunch and that excellent zombie movie, although I suspect some celebratory drinking may be in order down the road. I’ve still got something like eighty pages of Heidegger and more than a little Sartre to catch up on this weekend, so it’s not like the finishing the Thesis of Doom has really freed up any significant amount of time. But at least I can stop thinking about it for a little while - at least until I find out whether it’s been approved.

So I did stay home yesterday, and discovered that there is one good thing about those Visual Quickstart books - the Access one is better than NyQuil at knocking me out when I’ve got a bad cough. Today I’m still all hacky and wheezy, but the fever’s gone and I have all weekend to read and knit and touch up the final draft (!) of my thesis.

I haven’t missed a class since before Thanksgiving, but the throat is acting up and I haven’t really been sleeping well lately. Maybe tomorrow should be spent with tea and paper-reading in bed.

Thank you for successfully drowning out the crazies and teenagers and mariachi bands on the train so that I can doze or daydream or read and not get off at my stop ready to strangle someone, and thank you for not running out of battery juice even when I forget to charge you for three days in a row, and thank you for holding my entire music collection with 8GB to spare, and thank you making it so that I don’t have to be one of those people trying to hold two CD cases and an open Discman while the train is turning a corner, and thank you for having a case that fits perfectly in the side pocket of my bag and nevertheless coming with a little remote so that I almost never even have to take you out of your case except to show you off.

Congrats to my Dad, who will soon have one of his sculptures hanging in SeaTac. This will be a biggie, too, with a fifteen foot wingspan. It won’t be ready for a while yet, but I’ll post pictures when I get a chance to take some.

In the meantime, if you’d like to be as cool as that airport in Seattle, you could always get yourself one of the birds that nobody else has snatched up yet. My favorite of the ones currently for sale would have to be Orchid (below), although Buzz is a close second.

I suspect Kinja will hold my interest about as long as the various RSS readers did - which is to say, half an hour. But if there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s creating accounts. My public digest is here.

I generally use Adium as my primary AIM client because of its tabbed windows, but I’ve been having connection trouble with it lately so I’ve switched back to iChat for the time being. Already I miss my tabbing - a big list window and fifty tiny message windows is so far from being convenient or a good idea that I’m amazed anyone puts up with it voluntarily. Maybe the next iChat update will include tabs?

In response to yesterday’s post, several people sent photos of your own monster cats, but even more people asked for pictures of our resident monster cat. While I don’t have any that really provide a sense of the relevant scale, here are a few from when I was trying to make the bed and he insisted upon rolling around on it like a hussy: