The dark side of receiving wonderful Christmas loot is that you then spend all your time playing with it. I have had a lovely several days but they’re not much to write about, because they’ve been spent in a haze of playing with my library cataloguing software, new books, new DVDs, new video games, and mixing things with my shiny red Kitchen-Aid mixer.

All of which was lovely, but now it is Monday and my actual job has resumed. I was up very late finishing The Brothers K, so I am sleepy and sluggish and generally not much use to anyone. I think I have forgotten how to be a useful adult member of society who goes to work instead of playing with video games and reorganizing my books all day.

Fortunately it’s still winter break here on campus, so there’s very little actual work to be done. I need to get some experiment paperwork together to be filed as soon as the semester starts up so we can start colllecting data right away, and I need to head over to the library to do a bit of research, and a few other little tasks. But mostly I can just bask in the last week of peace and quiet here before the students return and campus once again becomes a madhouse. Hopefully by then I will have regained my ability to act like a competent adult at work. Because right now I am seriously considering locking the door, crumpling up my coat to be used as a pillow, and curling up under my desk for a midafternoon nap. If only someone would bring me juice and cookies so I could properly relive the daycare experience.

Occasionally I wonder if I should just hang out a big sign on the front of my apartment saying “Stacey’s Home For Wayward Cats.” I seem to collect an ever-shifting array of stray or temporarily homeless cats.

First it was Dimitri, although I don’t know if he really counts since I got to keep him permanently. But he was definitely a wayward cat for a little while there. Then Len’s cat Antigone spent a weekend with me when she was displaced during a house inspection, since she is a stealth cat, not allowed under the terms of their lease. I loved having her but she was not very happy about it, and I don’t think she will be returning for a repeat stay at the Home. Then there was the month that my scrawny stray Spot spent here before I found him a home.

I had sworn not to take in any more cats who aren’t my own, but Myk and Merewyn have been driven from their house due to a carbon monoxide leak in the furnace, so I’ve gained temporary custody of their cat for an indefinite (though hopefully short) period of time. He’ll be arriving in a few minutes and for the next few days he’ll be living in my bedroom. Which I guess means I’ll be spending the next few nights sleeping on the sofa so my cats don’t freak out at being separated from me at night. My back hates me already, just thinking about it.

I think this should go better than with Spot, since this guy has an owner and is used to being indoors, and thus will not be trying to escape constantly, and I will not be racking my brains trying to find someone to take him in. But he’s declawed, and I’m a little worried that one of my cats could hurt him, although I’m going to try to keep them separated and their claws trimmed. Plus there will just be the inevitable joy of hissing and meowing through the closed doors, and trying to get in and out of my bedroom without letting any cats in or out, and having an extra dish to fill and litterbox to clean.

I’ve often teased my mother about her tendency to gather stray teenage girls with crappy home lives who become semi-adopted daughters in our family, but I begin to think perhaps she’s going about it right after all. At least her wayward creatures can feed themselves, and don’t usually scratch or growl or require locking into their rooms. Oh, well. I don’t really mind. It’s only for a little while, and I’m always happy to meet a new cat, and to help out a friend. But still, I’m a bit worried this is becoming a habit. I’m never going to be able to stave off crazy cat lady-dom at this rate.

The temporary houseguest cat has gone home and there is finally peace again in my apartment, after many days of hissing, growling, and racing through the apartment at top speed perpetrated by all four of cats. He turned out to be very sweet and friendly, but I’m glad he’s gone to live in a new apartment so we can get some peace and quiet here.

Not that there’s actually much peace and quiet going on. My landlords have accepted an offer on my building, so now there are four million different types of inspections that have to be done before the deal can go through. And lucky me, my apartment happens to be the one that has access to the basement where most of these inspections need to happen. So lately my apartment is a never-ending stream of radon inspectors, termite inspectors, asbestos inspectors, and I don’t even know what other sorts of inspectors because I’ve stopped listening. By now I’m just grunting a vague sort of greeting, waving them toward the basement door, and hoping they’ll finish up quickly and go away. (And hopefully that they’ll ignore the fact that my bras are draped all over the basement to dry.)

All of this also means I’m going to have to move this spring or summer, and I’m really not looking forward to it. This apartment is perfect for me in almost every way. The chances of my finding someplace I like as much that I can afford without roommates, that’s well-located, that isn’t in a big apartment building, is small. And when you add in the necessity of a place that allows cats, the chances become vanishingly tiny. I suspect that I will be moving into one of those big apartment buildings I hate, and/or moving somewhere I won’t be able to walk to work, and/or going completely broke paying a higher rent. So the next few months should be fun as I attempt to remedy the impending lack of a living situation. (Which means, Pittsburgh folks, if you happen to hear of any cat-friendly apartments opening up anytime between now and July, please send the information my way. I will be eternally grateful.)

But enough whining. The week hasn’t been all stress and invasion of my apartment by cats and inspectors and apartment-hunting stress. I got to take on some new and different responsibilities at work, which is fun because they’re things I like doing but haven’t gotten to do for quite some time. And some of it’s editing work, so I get to gleefully unleash my inner grammar bitch upon poor unsuspecting text, which always cheers me up. I was born to wield a red pen. Sadly this editing is all being conducted by email so there is not really a red pen. But in my head, I wield a red pen with fierce and unmerciful skill.

Tomorrow I get to go to Emily’s place to meet her fiance and her kittens, and play Animal Crossing, and possibly learn to knit. And if we don’t bore each other silly, we’ll go out and drink or get pizza or something afterwards. So that will hopefully be extremely fun and relieve me of the little black raincloud that’s been sitting over my head for the last couple of days thundering at me all Grumpy-Bear-style. How could it not, really? Emily, my Las-Vegas-roommate-to-be! Kittens! Video games and the possibility of junk food! Plus, no clinic escorting, so I can sleep in and then make banana-chocolate-chip pancakes! There is just no way that tomorrow can be anything but excellent. (Although now that I’ve said that, I’ll probably get murdered in my sleep or hit by a bus on the way to Emily’s or something. One shouldn’t tempt Fate. Fortunately, I don’t believe in Fate, so I can tempt without fear.)

In a fit of boredom yesterday, when I was in my post-party haze of being totally spaced out and tired and not in any condition to do anything productive, I logged into Friendster for the first time in a few months and wound up looking for some old friends from high school. Much to my delight, I turned up the one person who I’d really worried would wind up dead in a gutter somewhere by now, since he was into some pretty bad things when we all parted ways, and no one I know had heard from him since. I haven’t decided whether to actually drop him a line, but I’m really pleased to know he’s still around and looking reasonably well if pictures are anything to judge by. Of course, much to my amusement, his Friendster profile indicates that he’s gay, though he was dating girls when I knew him. This doesn’t surprise me terribly, looking back, but it does mean that yet another one of my early crushes has turned out to be not even remotely interested in women. I think I now have more male crushes who turned out gay than straight, which is perhaps to be expected given my teenage gravitation toward androgynous musical theater boys.

So anyway, that’s what I did yesterday. Slept until noon after staying up half the night at the excellent and fun party, came home and went right back to bed for a nap, made a few feeble attempts at doing laundry or dishes, and then gave up and cyberstalked old acquaintances for an embarrassing length of time. That party apparently managed to totally wipe out my brain cells such that I needed an entire 24 hours to recover. It was a good party, though. Bigger than the ones Len usually throws, and with a different and more entertaining mix of people. I managed to be uncharacteristically sociable and had some good conversations with assorted people (and some very silly conversations with a very drunken and bitter Joel), and most of the food disappeared before I could try it but what little I managed to taste was very yummy. The set-up process was a bit rushed and crazy, but hopefully we can plan that out better next time. I have no idea what to do next time in order to avoid having random Dutch people making out under the dining room table at 2 a.m., but I think maybe in such situations it’s best just to ignore the whole thing and steer clear of the dining room for a while.

Today my brain seems to be functioning again after being liberally supplied with sleep and pizza, so I’ve been tackling the small mountain of laundry that has taken over my bedroom. I think I have made significant strides toward its conquest and may achieve mastery over it by dinnertime. I did some reading and talked to my mom for a while about the itinerary for this summer’s trip to Germany, and programmed four million phone numbers into my shiny new cell phone. Nothing very exciting, but at least vaguely useful things. Better than spending another day doing web searches for people I don’t actually care about getting back in touch with, anyway. Now I think I should go update the poor book log, which has been sadly neglected since my giant book of Tennessee Williams plays took forever to get through.