I know, I have been a bad journal writer. I’ve been awfully busy this week moving Spot into my bedroom and quarantining him, and trying to placate the other cats for being barred from the bedroom, and trying to help him not freak out about being indoors, and sleeping on the sofa in the living room, and other such general cat-related craziness. But he’s so cute! (Although on closer inspection, I am beginning to have a sneaking suspicion that he might be a she rather than a neutered he. My other cats don’t really want me getting close enough to their bums to do a proper comparison. I think I may have to wait for the vet to tell me.)

Anyway, things are starting to settle down, and if the vet gives him a clean bill of health tomorrow I’ll be able to un-quarantine him and then everyone can go everywhere in the apartment and I’ll get to sleep in my bed again. Of course, a whole other type of craziness will probably ensue when the cats meet without a pane of glass between them, but I’ll deal with that when it happens. And I have a couple of people who are possibly interested in giving him a home, so that’s good. None of them can take him for at least a few more weeks, which is not really a problem because I am already loving him dearly and the longer he can stay with me, the happier I will be. But that’s pretty much all I’ve been doing the last few days.

On the plus side, my wonderful mother sent me a gift today out of the blue, and one part of it was the new Neil Gaiman children’s book, and the other was The Poets’ Grimm, an anthology of late-twentieth-century poetry inspired by Brothers Grimm fairy tales, both of which are right up my ally. I have passed a lovely afternoon reading them, with Spot curled up near my feet. But now I am agonizing over whether to shelve the book with the poetry books or fairy tale books. (Or, whether to reorganize entirely so those two sections are next to each other, and then the book can be the dividing point.) Oh, the dilemmas of my overly compulsive book organization…

I knew that craziness was coming up with the big giant experiment we run twice a year, but at one point this morning I realized I could actually feel the weight of complete work-freakout-mode settling onto my shoulders. The problem is that I have a different sense of how soon something should be done than everyone else seems to.

It’s a five-day-long experiment, and I’m the one who’s actually there running and dealing with crises if things go wrong. And I think that before the experiment actually starts, we should have everything ready to go for all five days, so if any crises come up we can devote our time to them and not be worried about whether we’ll have the materials ready to run the experiment at all the next day. Everyone else seems to think that as long as we’re one day ahead of the game we’re fine, so we can just think about the day one stuff and ignore the other four. I work with a lot of very intelligent, driven people, but most of the time we all work in our separate areas and our differing styles don’t cause friction. This experiment drives me crazy every time we run it, though, and makes me want to yell at everyone around me.

I really need a job where I just never have to interact with other human beings, ever. Or I need to return to copy editing, where my only interactions involve grammar snark, which makes me happy. If only there were a copy editing job in town that wanted to pay me at least what I make now, and doesn’t care that my only qualifications are three years at the campus newspaper and 24 years of living in a grammar-freak family.

All of this is not helped by the fact that I thought my estranged father’s impending visit was next Tuesday, but I’ve recently been informed that actually they decided to drive in early and spend several days in town, so he’ll be here the day after tomorrow. Fortunately I can use the “I’m really busy and won’t have time for more than a dinner or something” excuse free of guilt, because it’s actually true. Plus, once Monday rolls around they’ll be busy getting my little brother settled into his new dorm room and doing other freshman orientation things, so they won’t have much time either.

Thank god the Toronto film festival begins almost right after the Experiment From Hell ends, so I can get the hell out of town for a week-plus and relax, see some good movies, spend time with some good friends, and just generally unwind. Because I am already way too tightly wound, and the real craziness hasn’t even started yet. All of which is a long-winded way of saying that I hope to squeeze in a journal entry here and there over the rest of the month, but it’ll be the exception rather than the rule.

I had such good intentions of writing tonight, since I was reminded that I missed my five-year journal-versary in July. And no, those entries aren’t currently available. They will be at some point, but with the format they’re in it’s a slow process uploading them. And besides, when I re-read those entries I am reminded that I was quite the idiot in many different ways at that point, so I tend not to read too many at once lest I be tempted to invent a time machine just so I can go back and yell at myself. But at some point those older entries will be online.

Meanwhile, it’s just kind of nice to remember that they were there, because I vaguely recall how new and interesting the whole thing seemed then, before everyone and their mother was doing it. (Not that I was on the vanguard of the online journalling scene or anything, I missed that by a good two years — but at that point it was just everyone doing it. The mothers hadn’t caught on yet.) And besides, I am the queen of picking up new hobbies or intending to pick up new hobbies and then forgetting all about them instantly. So it’s kind of amazing to me that I’ve kept anything going for five years, even if there have been chunks of several months at a time where I was on hiatus. Anyway, that’s what I wanted to write about, except that I was going to be eloquent or funny or at least put up my first couple of entries to both mock and appreciate them. But I am dead tired and it’s four thousand degrees in my apartment, plus I’m totally frustrated at a work situation and I know that I shouldn’t write about it publicly since it involves an undergraduate experiment participant and I suspect that I’ve got some sort of ethical obligation not to write about it in any detail.

So instead I’m mostly just popping up to say hi, and marvel briefly at the five year thing, and note once again that my writing is going to be pretty sporadic until mid-September, so if you’re not on the notify list you might want to be rather than checking back here regularly to find nothing here. Also to note that the coolest thing happened today. I was walking across campus on my way home from work, and I ran into my brother. Just walking around campus, on his way to a freshman orientation thing. Because he’s here for good. And I can just bump into him anytime, after only seeing him once since his very early toddlerhood. My baby brother! It made me very mushy and happy and I walked the rest of the way grinning from ear to ear, because it was just so neat, that that could happen. I’m really glad he’s here.

I realize that everyone who knows me already knows that I am a great big musical theatre geek, but sometimes I startle myself with my display of geekery. Like right now, where I’m at work and have my MP3 list on random shuffle. I have a few songs from the show Tick Tick Boom on this list (and yes, I know there are supposed to be some ellipses in that title, but I don’t know where.) So anyway, on comes Sunday, and I start giggling madly at my desk. This song cracks me up every time, not because it is particularly funny or a good song in and of itself, but because the tune and most of the lyrics are a play on the title song of Sunday in the Park With George, my favorite show ever. And so this is not just musical theatre geekery, but multiple levels of geekery because I’m cracking up over intertextual references between shows.

I am such a complete and total dork, it is no wonder that no one is answering my emails today. Although I know it’s working because my mother and Len are answering my emails, and yesterday Eliza got my email about Ellen Emerson White’s books. Reading this journal entry of hers I was utterly horrified to realize that a book I remember fondly from my adolescence was actually the third in a trilogy and I’d never read the first two. Curse you, crappy public library where I grew up that had a tiny YA section and couldn’t be bothered to stock the beginnings of trilogies! Clearly I must now hunt down the first two books and read them right away, and then reread the third for good measure.

Except that I also need to get started on Dreaming in Cuban because since I harassed Laura into maybe joining a book club, the least I can do is read the damn book so I can discuss it with her. And I am trying to simultaneously read Mrs. Dalloway and The Hours, which is a terrible idea all by itself because clearly I should read one first and then the other, if only I knew which order would be best. And I also need to do four thousand tons of work and then go to Canada, where I will not have time to read my own books because I will be mooching from Blake and Amy’s fabulous library instead, in between watching 20 movies in 9 days. Why are there so many good books to read, and so little time in which to do it? I need to be independently wealthy so I can just read all day. Which would probably drive me crazy in practice, but it’s a nice daydream.

Why, yes, this is a totally scattered and pointless journal entry, and it’s never going to go into the good writing hall of fame. Perhaps the “run-on sentences with crazy over-use of commas” hall of fame. But it’s amazing that I’m finding two seconds this week to write anything at all, so this will just have to do. Besides, if I weren’t rambling about this stuff I would be whining about my job, which would be annoying and also unfair because 98% of the time I love my job. Just not at this time of year. So instead, musical and book geekery. At least it’s not about the cats for a change! (Although they all continue to be insanely cute, if overly needy because I am at work all day and night this week and not spending enough time with them.)

Oh, man. Every time I sign on to Movable Type to update this journal, my poor book log stares at me pitifully and whines, “What about me? Why don’t you ever update me? I am withering and dying a slow death!” It’s really terrible. It’s not as if it should be a chore — I love reading other people’s book logs, and I really like the idea of having one of my own so I can look back at the end of the year and see what I read and what I should read more of, yet I’m terrible at keeping it up. I suck. But I finally updated it, so now I can temporarily breathe a sigh of relief and for a few days I won’t feel guilty whenever I think about updating the journal and not the book log.

Otherwise, it’s been an eventful day for two reasons. First, to get the obligatory Spot Update out of the way, I took him to the vet this afternoon and he has an almost-clean bill of health. He might have worms, so they gave him a dose of de-worming stuff and I need to give him another one in two weeks. But other than that he tested negative for feline leukemia and AIDS, and all vital signs checked out healthy and strong. He got some vaccinations and the vet confirmed my guess that he’s a neutered male, and that he’s between 1 and 2 years old. Now all that remains is to get him used to the other cats, and to see if I can find him a permanent home. I’ve got some prospects for a home although none that would be ready to take him in for several more weeks, and the cats all spent a few hours together this afternoon without bloodshed or even hissing, so I think that’s going to go well. The next couple of days will still be a cat-sequestering logistical nightmare to be sure that they maintain separate litter boxes, but then everything will be much simpler after that.

The other main event of the day was a much more intense clinic escorting day than usual, since today our clinic was the lucky target of the Operation Save America gang’s “Face the Truth” tour. Which, to be fair, although very crowded and really bad about obeying the laws about blocking the crosswalk and the clinic entrance, was actually relatively good about not following the patients and talking to them, just standing near the curb holding up signs and praying. But there were four or five times as many protestors as usual since they were coming in from around the state and nearby states to converge on our clinic, so even though they were being fairly low-key, it was still kind of crowded and crazy and overly intense. And while they were pretty good about not harassing the patients, they were not so much so about not harassing the escsorts. Especially when we were visited by a couple of relative bigwigs in the pro-life movement, both of whom were getting up in the escorts’ faces trying to get us to talk to them. We asked them not to talk to us because that’s standard operating procedure, and while we’re usually somewhat lax about it we try to be more strict when we have a big group like this, and then that got them mad and they started in with the voice-raising and the lecturing about how we’ll all burn in eternal hellfire, and all that fun stuff. Really delightful people, they were.

I’m engaged in an ongoing struggle with my issues with religion, because I know it’s not fair to have a knee-jerk negative reaction to people or situations simply for having a religious bent, when there are such varied religions and such varied ways that people interpret and practice their beliefs even within one religion. But people like these guys just don’t make it any easier for me to vanquish that knee-jerk thing I have. The really weird thing was that with these obnoxious new guys yelling at me, I found myself rather wishing that some of the regulars were over in my area instead. At least I know them. I know their quirks and which ones are likely to get into religious debates, and which ones will call me evil and which ones will tell me how much Jesus loves me, and which ones will race to beat us to an incoming patient. (And also, quite a bit about their personal lives. It’s amazing what people will gossip about even when you’re standing two feet away, once they’ve decided you might as well not exist.) They’re a familiar quantity and apparently I’ve developed an odd sort of “I don’t like you at all and I really hate a lot of the things you do and say, but you’re such a regular part of my life now that it feels weirdly wrong when you’re not actually where I expect you to be” feeling toward them. Which requires further pondering.

But I think first I should go separate the cats for a while. They’ve been running around the living room together for several hours now, and perhaps that’s enough for a first introduction.