I have my kitten! Jim has taken many pictures of her with the digital camera, so expect them in some far-future entry when we actually bother to upload them. She's tiny and fuzzy, white with black splotches, and completely adorable. The bonding thing has already started occuring, and I'm acting ridiculously like a new mother, fretting every time I'm a few feet away from her, worrying over how other people are treating her. Practise, I suppose.

The weekend was good, very busy -- too busy to write entries or even really think about writing them. Friday night was the long drive to Stockton to get the kitten, with Marith to keep me company. It was nice to just sit and talk to her, to have a long conversation without tons of interruptions, and we sang a little too. Once there we admired the kittens and I re-discovered how absolutely perfect mine is; she laid in my arms and tilted her head back to nuzzle my face with hers. Sheer bliss, on my part at least. Eventually I pulled myself away and got her into the carrier, intending to leave very quickly -- but then Ambar played Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee for Marith, and then next thing I knew we were listening to the first Indigo Girls album and singing, there in the kitchen. Ambar has a great voice, and somehow I wasn't shy, which in retrospect surprises me -- but at the time it was just the right thing to do, to sing along and occasionally make up harmony and just enjoy it.

The ride back was a lot quicker, as Marith foretold, and almost entirely conversation. It helped that the roads were basically empty so I could go fast (eightyish) without worrying. Then home, hugged Marith goodbye, and brought the kitten inside to pet and soothe and show off to Jim while he told me about his daylong meeting at his new company.

Saturday was sleep and cleaning and sleep, with Michiru there for all of it. I neatened the living room and did some laundry, then ended up falling asleep on the couch with her next to me, warm and soft and purring hard. It's funny; I'd never really heard her purr for more than a second or two until she was first in my cat carrier Friday night, and since then she's being purring continuously any time she's near me. A huge purr, vibrating her entire tiny body, shaking her tail, audible from several feet away. It's amazing, and delightful. Jinian has a purr just like that, and it's one of the things I love about her. Two extra-purring cats seems an enormous bonus.

Sunday was Rachel's birthday party; lots of people, lots of food, pretty good fun. I saw Lieven and talked to him about jobs, and Tien told me about the elaborate jokes she's playing on a friend of hers in Manhatten. I spent a lot of time in the living room eating, then a lot of time in the spare room talking with people who wandered in and out and petting Michiru, who'd been locked away there so she couldn't get stepped on or terrified -- all the people seemed to be overwhelming her seriously. As things wound down I ended up outside rolling up a D&D character (how pleasantly nostalgic), as Harold's decided to run AD&D for the Thursday night gaming group now that our usual game seems to be almost over. Finally it was down to just about eight of us, and I got a chance to catch up a little with Rachel and hold Miriam for a while. Once things were cleaned up we went to CPK for dinner, where I had some nice soup, and then ran across to Border's to pick up the two latest Katherine Applegate books. Much fun. Home to play MM7 with Michiru in my lap and Jinian sleeping on a box a few feet away, and then sleep.

Which brings me to today. The power was out this morning; Jim woke up about 9:40 noticing that the alarm hadn't gone off yet and woke me up. felt really well-rested, got into work around 10 which is pretty usual for me anyway. The day has been good but flat, since work has ground to a halt as we let people finally get the latest version of the product out. So the only work to do is things like looking at debuggers, checking versions of 3rd-party software, splitting trees... tiny fiddly tasks, or vaguely defined research tasks. Boring, either way. Omi gave me a list this morning and I'd finished it by 4pm, and that was with a lot of pauses to chat with Liralen about some email we exchanged ages ago, and from there to our weekends and cooking and cats and everything else. We always have so much to talk about.

Now I'm watching the 2.0 tree compile strangely slowly, and feeling the boredom really hit. It's still sort of early, but I think I'm going to go home and adore Michiru some more, probably while sitting and playing MM7 for a while. The lack of things to accomplish is leaving me sort of unhappy restless, so there's not much point to staying here any logner. I guess I could work on polishing old entries, but flick is doing its frequent trick of heavy lag, so I don't think anything requiring a delicate touch would work for me right now.

Tomorrow should be better; once the 2.0 tree is compiled I can start doing 2.0 bugfixes. No rest for the developers.

Last thoughts: Jane Siberry's Maria is growing on me, as one might expect given that I listened to it ten or so times today. I also read The Forever War over the weekend, and while it was reasonably enjoyable it wasn't the stunning epic work I was expecting. It felt very dated, especially in its 'equality through lots of sex' depictions of women -- something I inwardly connect to Heinlein and thus to the early seventies. According to Amazon the book as originally published was substantially cut, so I suppose it's possible that I'd enjoy the uncut version more... but given that my problems with it were all stylistic I don't think more material would really help any.