They were shooting me looks of pity, as if they felt bad there wasn’t room in the car for me to come too. (There really wasn’t – it’s a working weekend, so the car was stuffed full of all the tournament gear, and our son may actually have to hold the laptop on his lap for the 2 something hours it takes to get to Orlando. He said he’s cool with that, as long as he could bring it.)

I was trying not to look as excited at the idea of something like 100 hours of peace and solitude as I was truly feeling.

Hello, alone time. Where have you been? Did you miss me as much as I missed you?

*One of the 4 legged creatures is a beast so fierce that he doesn’t need his 98lbs of muscle and mouth full of sharp, shiny teeth to get his message across. But he’s not afraid to use them. Just sayin’.

Wasteland: The Wanderer by Crystal Jordan

Love is the most dangerous experiment of all.

There is only one rule in the Wasteland: survive.

The few remaining women are as reviled as they are worshiped, a commodity any man must pay to touch. And to touch a Wanderer, he may pay with his life.

For Ezra, the risk is worth the reward. People speak his name with the same reverent terror reserved for ancient wrathful gods, but he must always be ready to fend off those who would take what’s his. And what he wants to be his is Kadira.

Kadira, adopted after she witnessed the slaughter of her devoted parents, has vowed never to love or need anyone. It seems only fitting that she, an outsider, accept Ezra’s demand in trade for the fuel technology her clan needs—but her deep, unexpected need for him is the torture she’s fought all her life to avoid. Worse, the greater her wrath, the more he seems to like it.

Ezra’s mercenary half delights at having the warrior woman in his arms. His scientist half can’t resist the urge to see what makes her react—and what makes her explode.

The real experiment: if the bond they forge is strong enough to make her want to stay.

Warning: Threesomes, foursomes, boy on boy, girl on girl, boy on boy on girl, voyeurism, exhibitionism, sex at knifepoint, anal sex, ritual orgies, and, well…it’s just a really dirty book.

Buy it here!

But then there was also this, and my day suddenly seemed a little bit warmer.

See?

Hello, Vancouver. How’s the weather going to be for the opening ceremonies?

The kids and I have been watching Leverage on Netflix the past few weeks. We’re almost caught up to the “now showing” – oh no!

(This post made to test the new Android WordPress app. I like.)

Random pic to test image adding -

Hello, new friend.

Almost two years ago, we adopted a kitten.  Tiger was a ten week old baby when we got him, who’d lived all of his short life under a beach cottage porch with the feral colony he’d been born a part of.

He adjusted to the life of an indoor kitty well.  Mostly he’s content with his pampered housecat life, where he spends his days napping on the couch and his nights snoozing at the foot of my daughter’s bed.  Occasionally he makes a break for the outdoors, once getting all the way to the back bushes – about 30 feet from the door – before huddling into a pitiful ball of confusion and waiting to be rescued.  He endures the occasional cuddle, and plays with the dog or anyone who will roll a golf ball for him.

But he’s still only a step out of the streets, and that left its mark.  A cuddly lapcat he is not.

A few months ago, my sis started talking cats to me.  Let me be more clear.  She started linking cats to me.  Her heart will always have a tender spot where her memories of Sultan are, but she has a very big heart.  Big enough for Layla.  Which is it’s own special story, one you should read.

Of course the linking of one cat let to the linking of more cats.  And soon I realized I was checking the cats looking for homes with way more interest than someone that didn’t plan on getting more cats ever should.

Then just before Christmas, I mentioned this new interest of mine to my husband.  As expected, he wasn’t nearly as enthusiastic.  But once the seed was planted in the dark of his mind, it sprouted life of its own.

And soon after Christmas, he went from “No” to “Why didn’t you bring home a cat yet?”

Bringing a new cat into a house that already has other pets, and 2 children, has its own challenges.  Nothing like what my sister has had with her Bengal rescue, but there were things to think about.  We really wanted a cat, not a kitten.  Kittens generally find homes fairly quickly; adult cats are as likely to end up at the shelter as they are to find a new home.  And we wanted a lapcat.  A snuggly cat that would appreciate my daughter’s attempts to cuddle, not just tolerate them.

Thanks to the warmhearted, caring people at Adopt a Rescue Kitty ( AARK ) we found all that, and more.

Meet Aragon.  Or Eragon.  Or Earagon.  Or Argone.  All different ways his name was spelled on the various bits of paperwork that came with him. Poor guy, no wonder he’s so confused looking.  Ten months old, and no one has figured out how to spell his name yet.  (The first one is a community in Spain, and was a kingdom in the Iberian Peninsula.  The second is a dragon in a pretty well-known book.  I don’t even know where the other spellings came from.)

He’s a sweetie. A cuddle kitty.  A heart stealer.  And quite a camera hog.  Every time I pull the Kodak (or the Pentax or the camera phone) out, he walks right up and sticks his face in it.

But how can you get upset, when he purrs and rubs his chin against you right after?

There’s a bit more detail in the CNET story, where it says “The vulnerability affects Internet Explorer 6, IE 7, and IE 8 on Windows 7, Vista, Windows XP, Server 2003, Server 2008 R2, as well as IE 6 Service Pack 1 on Windows 2000 Service Pack 4, Microsoft said in an advisory on Thursday afternoon.” But it comes down to – if you’re still using IE, it’s a good time to give another browser a try.

Mozilla Firefox. Chrome. Opera. Safari. If you aren’t surfing safe, you shouldn’t be surfing.

Argh. It’s no time for coughs and sniffles.
This is me, scowling at my cabinet of vitamins (vitamins that I take every day) as I head off to bed.

“It’s been up for over 5 weeks. That’s more than a month – and that’s long enough.”

“But everyone else still has their tree up!”

“If everyone else jumps off a bridge, would you do it too?”

And a bit joyful Thank you, to the person in my family that taught my husband this phrase over the holidays. I don’t know how we’ve made it through 15 years of parenting without using it. It was right up there with “Life’s not fair” (which is the only correct answer to “That’s not fair!”) as my absolute favorite parental responses when I was growing up.

My take on this as a parent has been to ban the word fair, unless we’re talking about skin tone or weather. My daughter calls it “the ‘f’ word”, which raises some questioning eyebrows amongst the PTA set when she wistfully says “I would say it’s the ‘f’ word but I’m not allowed to.”

Raised eyebrows aside, my holiday is back in the boxes for another year. The last of the box-garbage sits by the door, waiting for good garbage day weather so it can survive a night on the curb without becoming curb mulch. And I still have no food in the house after 3 full days back home. So it’s off to the store I go.