Service with a smile

All righty, then …

Kitten update

It’s been a while since I last talked about the kittens, and I know everyone is dying for an update, so here ya go:

They’ve completed their final shots of the vaccination series, and I’ll be making an appointment for them to get “fixed” (I’m unclear what this entails — Do they get their tubes tied? A kitty hysterectomy?) in February, which seems like gallows humor, coming as it does in the same month as Valentine’s Day.

In the meantime, they’ve gotten much bigger, as may be obvious in the latest of Jenn’s photos. Lucky in particular seems to be almost adult, which a muscular body and good coordination and a generally mellow temperament. After so many years of having an elderly cat around, it’s a little bit of a shock to have one who’s all sleek muscle and killer reflexes.

Her sister Hanna is lagging behind her, developmentally. Her body still feels like a frail little kitten’s body, with a little bird’s rib cage and lower weight and less muscle mass in general, although the vet says she’s still within the range for a “runt” cat.

Hanna makes up for it in other ways, though. In the best possible light, she’s athletic, adventurous and a real go-getter. In a worse light, she’s a defiant little brat. I will come out of the study to hear soft feet hit the kitchen floor and see Lucky streak off to hide behind something so she can’t get squirted by the water bottle. Hanna, on the other hand, will be sitting in the kitchen sink with a “what are YOU gonna do about it” air about her. (Squirt her with the squirt bottle is the answer.) I’ll chase the kittens away from something, and while Lucky will go do something else, Hanna will be trying to sneak back to the scene of the crime seconds later.

Of course, nature plans for this: Both kittens are very lovey dovey, to prevent angry male ogres in the household from turning them into mittens. The kittens seem to have conspired to divide us up and work on us individually. Around midnight, Lucky will jump on me each night, purr-purr-purring her head off, then start licking my face like crazy. It’s odd, but certainly endearing. She’s also very mellow, in an older dog sort of way, which is exactly what I like in my pets.

Hanna, on the other hand, dotes on Jenn who, in turn, dotes on her. This reaches a fairly strange peak every night (or perhaps morning) around 5 a.m., when Hanna burrows against Jenn’s neck, licking and kneading and mewing and (once in a while) nibbling. If Jenn blocks her with sheets or a sweater or something, Hanna will nestle up against her neck and go to sleep. It’s completely odd, especially as Hanna is a maniac the rest of the time.

When I go over to the Ellis Truss yard, Patch and Penny are enormous and quite emotionally mature (i.e. not maniacs), and they’re only about six months older than Lucky and Hanna. So we’re riding out the worst of Hanna’s craziness (about half the time, Lucky follows along, but she rarely seems to lead in mischief, only in play with toys) and enjoying the cute kitten stuff (hiding in laundry baskets, falling out of our laps in a deep sleep, chasing a laser pointer or toy mouse or a tail in circles so many times they get dizzy) while we can.

They’re going to be damn good cats. Assuming I don’t turn Hanna into a mitten, anyway.

• Elsewhere, Merlin weighs in on cats and dogs. Warning: naughty language.

Maria’s blog page thingy

Apparently, there are so few people from Guam, you can actually have a Web site called PeopleFromGuam.com. I know this because our office manager, Maria, has a page there. Very MySpace-ish, but with a tropical flavor.

(Fun word to say: Chamorro. It’s the native people of Guam and their language.)

IRE follow-up

It’s been pointed out to me that I haven’t written about how the IRE conference went. I expect I’ll have to give a report to the editor-in-chief over at the Daily Press this week, so it’s probably a good idea to organize my thoughts here.

I was probably naive going into this (it was my first professional conference), but I was disappointed. There was a little bit about covering local elections — and I did learn some valuable things that I will put into practice during this election cycle — but the majority of the time was spent on statewide and national campaign coverage. This confuses me: Do we really need more coverage of the same Washington hijinks? Even Sacramento is pretty well-covered. But local politics? Not so much. And if the local papers — I saw reporters from Riverside and Ventura there — aren’t covering the local politicos, who is?

A more charitable reporter from the Daily Press suggested that a lot of this applies to local elections, but I must politely disagree: I’d used the resources they were talking about, and they absolutely don’t drill down to the local level.

Besides the (to me) somewhat off-point focus of the day, two of the three speakers (both from the same paper) seemed to think that the day was about talking about how much they rock. There were numerous stories that literally had nothing to take away from them, other than the alleged awesomeness of the speaker. (When you’re in a room of 100+ people, and fewer than seven are laughing at your jokes, you’re not funny, move on.) I saw people muttering about one of the reporters and ditching early because of her, in fact.

It was telling that, in a room full of journalists, only a handful of people asked questions all day. As Jenn will tell you, getting journalists to not ask questions is a real trick. But at the IRE panel, it seems like I wasn’t the only one who didn’t think there was much chance of getting anything worthwhile out of most of the speakers.

I’m hoping this was the exception, and not the rule, especially since I think the IRE magazine is so useful.

(USC is a spectacular campus, though.)

Beep … beep … beep …

I’d just like to thank the folks who built this (rented) townhouse for putting a smoke detector at the apex of a 15-foot ceiling, so that when the battery starts to die after midnight, you get to realize you have no way to get up there and shut it up.