Thursday, October 20, 2005
Please borrow my cat
Dear friends (and yes, I do mean you, you who is reading this post),
I have a wonderful cat. Her name is Tigger. I got her from the humane society when she was a kitten and I was eight. Even when I was little and had no idea how to hold cats, she let me hold her and did not complain. To this day, she loves being picked up, and if you so much as appear to be about to pet her, she will start purring. She does not meow, does not eat much, and is litter box trained. Here are pictures of her: http://wso.williams.edu/~ddavis/tigger/
Why does this matter to you? Well, my parents are retired now and they are going to go to Florida for a couple of months and sort of drive around and travel. My cat would not be a good companion for this sort of journey, so they have been trying to find someone who could take care of her from January to April. Everyone they have contacted either has a family member who is allergic to cats or will be away for too much time to take care of her. So, where will she go?
The current option that my parents are considering is to put her in a kennel for three months. They were recently extolling the virtues of this kennel, where she would live in a little box with food and water and litter and a little window to the outside world. For three months. It is almost at the point where I would take a semester off of school to prevent this from happening. But, not quite.
So, I ask you now: Would you or your family, or anyone you know, or anyone anyone you know knows, be willing to take Tigger in? If you, or your parents in most cases, would not mind having an unobtrusive little cat around, who likes being petted and held, I would be most appreciative. If you or anyone else you could put me in contact with might be interested in borrowing a cat, PLEASE let me know. We will happily deliver her to any location on the east coast (broadly defined), from Maine to Florida. I kid you not.
Tigger is a Maine Coon Cat. She is an indoor cat, and does not go outside. She does not scratch on things, but she does shed, less if she's combed, though. She has been an only cat all her life, all else equal would be better in a house without other cats. I do not want to subject my cat to staying in a little box for months on end, and I hope that one of you will be willing to borrow her.
Thank you very much,
Diana
I have a wonderful cat. Her name is Tigger. I got her from the humane society when she was a kitten and I was eight. Even when I was little and had no idea how to hold cats, she let me hold her and did not complain. To this day, she loves being picked up, and if you so much as appear to be about to pet her, she will start purring. She does not meow, does not eat much, and is litter box trained. Here are pictures of her: http://wso.williams.edu/~ddavis/tigger/
Why does this matter to you? Well, my parents are retired now and they are going to go to Florida for a couple of months and sort of drive around and travel. My cat would not be a good companion for this sort of journey, so they have been trying to find someone who could take care of her from January to April. Everyone they have contacted either has a family member who is allergic to cats or will be away for too much time to take care of her. So, where will she go?
The current option that my parents are considering is to put her in a kennel for three months. They were recently extolling the virtues of this kennel, where she would live in a little box with food and water and litter and a little window to the outside world. For three months. It is almost at the point where I would take a semester off of school to prevent this from happening. But, not quite.
So, I ask you now: Would you or your family, or anyone you know, or anyone anyone you know knows, be willing to take Tigger in? If you, or your parents in most cases, would not mind having an unobtrusive little cat around, who likes being petted and held, I would be most appreciative. If you or anyone else you could put me in contact with might be interested in borrowing a cat, PLEASE let me know. We will happily deliver her to any location on the east coast (broadly defined), from Maine to Florida. I kid you not.
Tigger is a Maine Coon Cat. She is an indoor cat, and does not go outside. She does not scratch on things, but she does shed, less if she's combed, though. She has been an only cat all her life, all else equal would be better in a house without other cats. I do not want to subject my cat to staying in a little box for months on end, and I hope that one of you will be willing to borrow her.
Thank you very much,
Diana
Wednesday, October 19, 2005
Chicken & messengers
I think I forgot to mention, I have a new recipe for chicken. I was sort of following this recipe online, but then I just got so far away from it that I decided to abandon it altogether and just set out into the wilderness of cooking by the skin of one's teeth. So, here is my new recipe for chicken:
I now have my webcam, and I am not going to do the picture online thing because it is too difficult what with WSO requiring sftp and me not being able to figure out how to set up my computer as an internet host. However, if you would like to view it, you can sign on to Yahoo messenger, the latest version (Yahoo Messenger with Voice), send me a message and I'll get it all hooked up. Most of the time I have four messaging programs at my disposal -- AIM (dianathemath), Google Talk (dianajdavis), Yahoo (dianathemath), and Skype (dianathemath) -- which should be enough for anyone. So if you want to do the webcam thing, install Yahoo with voice and send me a message.
The next 24+ hours will be entirely saturated with Moot Court.
Take a normal package of chicken with four boneless skinless chicken breasts in it, or the equivalent. Cut off the yucky bits and cut the chicken into bite-size chunks.So, that's what we had for dinner last night. We also had couscous and salad, but that's not very interesting, although the couscous was delicious. But Valerie made it, so what would you expect, huh?
Combine 1-1.5 cups of plain yogurt with about two tablespoons of spices, including chili, curry, cumin, salt, pepper, etc. The total volume of spices should add up to about two tablespoons, in case my first sentence was unclear.
Put the pieces of chicken in the yogurt, stir it all up, and marinate in the fridge. After a couple of hours, overnight, a few months (it'd better be in the freezer in that case), etc. pour the whole deal into a skillet and stir it on medium to high heat until the chicken is cooked. If you have to cook it for a long time and the sauce evaporates, add more yogurt.
I now have my webcam, and I am not going to do the picture online thing because it is too difficult what with WSO requiring sftp and me not being able to figure out how to set up my computer as an internet host. However, if you would like to view it, you can sign on to Yahoo messenger, the latest version (Yahoo Messenger with Voice), send me a message and I'll get it all hooked up. Most of the time I have four messaging programs at my disposal -- AIM (dianathemath), Google Talk (dianajdavis), Yahoo (dianathemath), and Skype (dianathemath) -- which should be enough for anyone. So if you want to do the webcam thing, install Yahoo with voice and send me a message.
The next 24+ hours will be entirely saturated with Moot Court.
Tuesday, October 18, 2005
Moot court
This post will not be about Moot Court. This is just a heads-up.
Yesterday a couple of interesting things happened. First, we had maritime skills. Second, it was blowing about 16 knots. Third, we were super annoyed that we'd only gotten to go sailing once this semester, and so we really wanted to go, 16-knot winds or not. Fourth, we were supposed to take out JY-15s, which we had never sailed before, and our first time was to be in 16-knot gusty winds, which is less than ideal. Fifth, we took out the JY-15s and did just fine, which was pretty neat. And sixth, I met Val's mom, who writes more comments than you. Unless, of course, you are Val's mom. Oh, and seventh, we found a poop on our front step, which later turned out to be from Carr House and made of chocolate frosting, but we didn't find that out until today; yesterday we just thought it was poop, and so I moved it with sticks. And then today it was gone, which would be weird if it had been poop, but it was less weird since it was frosting and living creatures enjoy eating frosting, even if it looks like poop.
This weekend was not terribly eventful. I read a lot of Moby-Dick, went for an hour-long run around the circumference of the estuary up to the drawbridge, during which I remembered how much I like running, and I met with Lisa about my science project. So now I have MatLab on my computer. This program will ostensibly allow me to map out the shape of the area around the Charles W. Morgan and plot vectors of the current and model how the sediment gets deposited. Unfortunately, though I worked through most of the tutorial, I found nothing about making pictures and modeling currents; it only told how to add and multiply matrices, etc.
Today I went on a run; I decided that since I had limited time, I would run uphill. This is Mr. Parris's advice: if you can only run limited mileage, make it uphill. And it was a good thing I did, and that I did the hill on Bruggemann street, because I forgot that history class was starting at 10:30 instead of 11:00 today, so when I saw Chella and Ariel at 10:27 as I was coming down the hill after my fifth repeat, they advised me that I had better go to class. So I didn't get breakfast or a shower, but I did manage to entirely change my clothes and get my notebook and pen to Labaree house by 10:31, which was an excellent effort indeed. Instead of class-class, we drove to Stonington (which was why we met early) and had a walking tour, where we learned all about the houses and people who lived there. Cool.
Oh, and if you people knew that Karen ran her marathon, I think that this is something that I would have liked to know, no? So, since I didn't know, I assume that other people didn't know, either. Karen ran her marathon in Maui, in a time of 4:26:26. The person before her finished almost exactly a minute ahead, so there was not much competition there, but someone finished three seconds behind her, which suggests to me that she out-sprinted someone at the end. Well, in any case, yay.
Also, Tyler ran this marathon about a month ago. And he was fourth. In the whole marathon. In 2:38. That is pretty impressive, considering that for maybe two entire months of his training time, he could not really get out of bed, much less train. But he read Lance Armstrong's book, just like all the other inspired people of this generation probably will, and he battled for first place until the last few miles. Well, congratulations to Tyler. He doesn't read this, and I already congratulated him. Right.
In any case, we have moot court on Thursday, for which I now have a very spiffy blazer. Our team has nine people (18 students / 2) which naturally makes for extremely long meetings, especially when people do not come prepared. I am giving the closing, which is excellent because otherwise I would be nervous about how we were ending, but this also means that I wait until the end of our meetings to talk about my part, and my attention span is somewhat shorter than a few hours. Well, hopefully in about 36 hours we will have our arguments much better in mind.
Oh, and we read the first half of Moby-Dick for Monday's English class. Now, Steinbeck puts in those seemingly unrelated chapters between the story narrative chapters to help strengthen the story or sense of place, and I like that. But Melville puts in unrelated chapters about whales in general or other expeditions or scripts for plays, merely to illustrate the facade of the novel as a form of literature. I have little patience for these interspersed chapters, interesting though they are on their own. Everyone thinks that Moby-Dick is about Ahab and Ishmael and Moby-Dick, and that's the part that most people enjoy and remember, but it's maybe 25% of the book. And that's the 25% I like, too.
Yesterday a couple of interesting things happened. First, we had maritime skills. Second, it was blowing about 16 knots. Third, we were super annoyed that we'd only gotten to go sailing once this semester, and so we really wanted to go, 16-knot winds or not. Fourth, we were supposed to take out JY-15s, which we had never sailed before, and our first time was to be in 16-knot gusty winds, which is less than ideal. Fifth, we took out the JY-15s and did just fine, which was pretty neat. And sixth, I met Val's mom, who writes more comments than you. Unless, of course, you are Val's mom. Oh, and seventh, we found a poop on our front step, which later turned out to be from Carr House and made of chocolate frosting, but we didn't find that out until today; yesterday we just thought it was poop, and so I moved it with sticks. And then today it was gone, which would be weird if it had been poop, but it was less weird since it was frosting and living creatures enjoy eating frosting, even if it looks like poop.
This weekend was not terribly eventful. I read a lot of Moby-Dick, went for an hour-long run around the circumference of the estuary up to the drawbridge, during which I remembered how much I like running, and I met with Lisa about my science project. So now I have MatLab on my computer. This program will ostensibly allow me to map out the shape of the area around the Charles W. Morgan and plot vectors of the current and model how the sediment gets deposited. Unfortunately, though I worked through most of the tutorial, I found nothing about making pictures and modeling currents; it only told how to add and multiply matrices, etc.
Today I went on a run; I decided that since I had limited time, I would run uphill. This is Mr. Parris's advice: if you can only run limited mileage, make it uphill. And it was a good thing I did, and that I did the hill on Bruggemann street, because I forgot that history class was starting at 10:30 instead of 11:00 today, so when I saw Chella and Ariel at 10:27 as I was coming down the hill after my fifth repeat, they advised me that I had better go to class. So I didn't get breakfast or a shower, but I did manage to entirely change my clothes and get my notebook and pen to Labaree house by 10:31, which was an excellent effort indeed. Instead of class-class, we drove to Stonington (which was why we met early) and had a walking tour, where we learned all about the houses and people who lived there. Cool.
Oh, and if you people knew that Karen ran her marathon, I think that this is something that I would have liked to know, no? So, since I didn't know, I assume that other people didn't know, either. Karen ran her marathon in Maui, in a time of 4:26:26. The person before her finished almost exactly a minute ahead, so there was not much competition there, but someone finished three seconds behind her, which suggests to me that she out-sprinted someone at the end. Well, in any case, yay.
Also, Tyler ran this marathon about a month ago. And he was fourth. In the whole marathon. In 2:38. That is pretty impressive, considering that for maybe two entire months of his training time, he could not really get out of bed, much less train. But he read Lance Armstrong's book, just like all the other inspired people of this generation probably will, and he battled for first place until the last few miles. Well, congratulations to Tyler. He doesn't read this, and I already congratulated him. Right.
In any case, we have moot court on Thursday, for which I now have a very spiffy blazer. Our team has nine people (18 students / 2) which naturally makes for extremely long meetings, especially when people do not come prepared. I am giving the closing, which is excellent because otherwise I would be nervous about how we were ending, but this also means that I wait until the end of our meetings to talk about my part, and my attention span is somewhat shorter than a few hours. Well, hopefully in about 36 hours we will have our arguments much better in mind.
Oh, and we read the first half of Moby-Dick for Monday's English class. Now, Steinbeck puts in those seemingly unrelated chapters between the story narrative chapters to help strengthen the story or sense of place, and I like that. But Melville puts in unrelated chapters about whales in general or other expeditions or scripts for plays, merely to illustrate the facade of the novel as a form of literature. I have little patience for these interspersed chapters, interesting though they are on their own. Everyone thinks that Moby-Dick is about Ahab and Ishmael and Moby-Dick, and that's the part that most people enjoy and remember, but it's maybe 25% of the book. And that's the 25% I like, too.
