internet frustration

I moved into my new apartment on Friday. The internet was supposed to be turned on but it was not, and the technician could not arrive until Monday, and therefore I spent the weekend without internet.

This was pretty inconvenient while I was trying to move in and coordinate with sources that can only be reached online. I created several really odd analogies around 1AM last night to explain how I felt.

Analogy One: Comcast is a witch that made me do manual labor.

Not having the internet means that instead of doing your work, checking your email, and finding out crucial information online, you must instead busy yourself by cleaning your apartment and unpacking things. This unpacking is fraught with the idea that if you had internet, you could take breaks to be on your computer doing things that were equally productive.

As for the witch thing, I don't know. Apparently I personify Comcast as wearing a pointy hat.

Analogy Two: Making transactions on your smartphone is like trying to play Monopoly with a tiny gnome.

The gnome wants to play Monopoly. But the board is way too small for your giant fingers! You must make purchases and transactions, but you keep putting hotels and houses on the wrong properties. You don't even know what the properties say. You have to ask the gnome to read things to you, but he's not very talkative, so you just struggle along by yourself, slowly hemorrhaging money.

Gnomes and witches are in league with each other. They have a club of pointy-hats.

Yes, the number of accidental amazon and peapod orders I had to cancel was pretty monumental.

Analogy Three: Maintaining a positive attitude during an internet outage when you are moving is as much of a no-win situation as having a staring contest with your cat.

You can never win a staring contest with your cat. Even if you think you won, the cat still thinks he won, and basically that is tantamount to losing. Even if your cat were giant or you were really small, and you were therefore on equal ground size-wise, the result would be no different.

But in the end, my apartment is unpacked, the internet is back, and my cat just lost the staring contest I tried to have with him. So everything is good.

That is all.

i can has context?

Yesterday, while walking to the comic book store, we saw this:

Yup. That cat looks like he was having a pretty good time. I also love the poster in the background-- cat, perhaps you should find a new hobby. One that is less dangerous for your liver.

Anyway, the only reason why this is funny is because the cat is drunk next to a bottle of booze. Without the booze, it's just a sleepy cat.

Awwww, how cute.

But add the beer back in:

What kind of example are you setting?? Think of the kittens!

But maybe he's just sleeping. In which case, this picture would be clearer:

D'awwwww.

Or maybe he's sleeping, but also having a relaxing time on the beach.

And apparently is female.

That is all.

plants

When I was in college, I was not good with plants. At first, I named them, but then I stopped because they kept dying.

This is because I had two modes. In one mode, I cared a lot about the plant and was terrified that it would die.

In the other mode, I decided not to care about the plant, out of fear that I would kill it.

When I left college, I moved into an apartment with terrible lighting. Despite many panicked attempts to prevent plant death, I accidentally killed my boyfriend's beloved and long-lived pet cactus. This, along with all of my previous attempts at growing plants, earned me the reputation of being a plant killer.

So, I took a break from growing plants for a while. Green things around the world rejoiced.

Then, on a trip to Hawaii, I got a plumeria cutting as a souvenir. This is basically a withered stick of a plumeria, cleared for transportation back to the mainland, and sold in basically every souvenir store and Wal-Mart in Hawaii. Since it seemed really unlikely that these dry sticks would ever return to being living things, my boyfriend and I decided to have a contest to see whose plumeria stick would 1) become a living thing again and 2) grow the tallest.

Deciding I did not want a dead stick in my house, I defaulted to a sunnier spot in a window at work. Many people there had desk plants, and one in particular was very good at growing things. I asked him how to plant my plumeria stick. Here are the instructions he gave me.

- Plant it in soil
- Make sure the drainage is good (put some rocks in the bottom of the pot)
- Keep it in a sunny spot
- Add water whenever the soil looks dry

Although I had thought this was what I was doing with previous plants, I rarely had done all of them at the same time.

So I tried to do everything properly with the plumeria. It helped that I honestly wasn't sure that it would grow at all.

Now, the plumeria has many leaves! It's so exciting. I have even tried growing other plants! I have sprouted an avocado and even re-grown my boyfriend's rare cactus from seeds I bought from an Australian guy on e-bay. So, in conclusion, having a "green thumb" is actually pretty simple. Also, I am naming my plants again.

Also also-- I won the contest.

mysterious cockroach incident

Yesterday, I walked into the bathroom to discover my cat examining the toilet closely and staring at a dead, partially dismembered cockroach floating in the bowl. It was horrifying.

It was like walking in on a crime scene. It was gross. My cat looked alarmed. I froze where I stood and wondered what possibly could have happened. At first, I could only come up with two scenarios:

Then, I came up with an entirely different, possibly more likely scenario.

To understand why I came to this conclusion, you first have to know that my cat does not use a litter box. Rather, he uses the toilet. It does not only happen in Ben Stiller comedies-- my cat uses the toilet to dispose of his waste. And apparently his cockroaches.

Here is what I think happened.

Upon discovering the roach, I was simultaneously grossed out and impressed. I wasn't sure if the cat should be punished for trying to eat a roach or rewarded for correctly disposing of it. I guess I should just glad he didn't do what I thought he'd do upon finding a gross bug: