The Dangerous Existence of Madame Lee

Last night, X-chan drove up from Tennessee. I saw her pull into the driveway, so opened the door to let her in; she was carrying a Tupperware baking pan. The light wasn't too good, so she handed me the baking pan, and I made a joke about getting Tupperware for Christmas.

l33: It's just what I've always wanted!
X-chan: I wouldn't hold it too close to you. Also I'd wash my hands. It's got poop in it.
l33: Poop.
X-chan: Yup.
l33: You brought us poop for Christmas. This isn't your poop, is it?
X-chan: No, but I do have a surprise for you! :D
l33: Oh? Is it pee?
X-chan: No! It's out in the car. I'll go get it now. :D :D :DDDD

Presently, X-chan returned with a cat carrier. At first, I thought, "Why the hell did she bring the SpastiCat home with her?", given that X-chan is happy to leave the SpastiCat to her own devices for a few days if it's a short trip, and then, when X-chan set it on the dining room table, it became obvious that this was not the SpastiCat.

l33: Is this. Is this a KITTEN???
(For those of you who just met me earlier this year, my last cat died in '09 and I wasn't ready until a couple of months ago to think about getting another one. I figured it would be sometime in 2011, but the lolmom and I had wanted to pull up the carpet in the living room etc.)
X-chan: Yes. Don't worry, Mom knows. :D

The kitten is black and white (X-chan kept calling her "little tuxedo cat") and gives the impression of being carbonized on the top and undercooked on the bottom. We are pretty sure it's a girl, though obviously we're going to have the vet make sure. X-chan thinks the kitten is about 3-4 months old, though neither of us has had a kitten in years so we're not sure; she's friendly and sociable, not afraid of people, and basically stalked X-chan until the latter gave in. The new surroundings were very interesting to her, but she let me pet her and purrs obligingly, and we think she can be trusted not to repeat Callice's toileting offenses. She is slightly damaged; something bad has happened to her tail (it looks like it was run over or possibly like something took a big chomp out of her there), but the injury has healed (she doesn't cry or run away if her tail is touched), and it may need to be amputated, but I'll let the vet make that determination. She's also a sneezy little thing and has some discharge coming from one eye; since the injury to her tail is healed, X-chan thinks she was likely deliberately neglected or turned out of doors and that she's not someone's beloved pet who got out or ran away, and I'm inclined to agree.

( Look at the KITTEN. )

Orders of business:
augustuscaesar, thank you for the v-gift :D

forgottensanity, I received your package but have not opened it yet, in a rare show of restraint (also, KITTEN). Thank you :D

Finally, I leave you with this, the second greatest Christmas story ever told. (The greatest Christmas story ever told is "Duel in the Snow, or, Red Ryder Versus the Cleveland Street Kid", by Jean Shepherd.)

Everybody have a happy Saturday, since people of all cultures and creeds can agree that tomorrow is that, and if Tara makes a smart remark about her hemisphere and time zones I shall take her away and have caponata shoveled down her throat and THAT will show her. :P

So I'm back now. Actually, I was back yesterday when AT&T came out to fix the Internets while I was at work, but didn't feel like LJing then due to the throes of irrational paranoia et al and would likely have bitten someone's head off. (Irrational paranoia isn't ended, but has been greatly reduced; I am unlikely to bite anyone's head off unless they piss me off. Then all bets are off.)

Things that have happened (exciting and not):
+ I am attempting to fix my life. Again.
+ At some point between the last time I weighed myself (sometime in the spring) and last Sunday, I apparently dropped ten pounds. Experts speculate that I may have done nothing whatsoever to deserve this, but hey, I'm not complaining.
+ I have started to clean my room on the grounds that since I'm likely stuck in this shitpit for a while, my room might as well look like someplace where a teenaged girl with ADHD a grown-ass woman lives. I haven't been at it very long but it is already a vast improvement.
+ In the process thereof, I found that Callice apparently let herself into my bedroom on a regular basis and peed on a huge amount of things. I knew that she occasionally got in there, and that because I often didn't know she was there, I occasionally shut her in there and she occasionally peed on things as a result. Apparently, she was in there and peeing on things a lot more often than I thought. I now have huge piles of laundry that may or may not be completely ruined. My cat keeps on giving. (On the off chance you're just tuning in to the long-running, if not terribly popular, Wang Xi-feng Show, as I know a couple of you are: Callice was my last cat. She died in September.)
+ I found my Russian dictionary (the good one, not the Langenshit one) and was pleased, as I had been wondering what the Russian word for "seahorse" was. It's morskoi konyok, which unfortunately does not lend itself well to adorable nicknames for the adorable duokinneas, who will have to remain a plain old regular Angloglot seahorse.
+ I failed to find my elementary Russian textbooks, which I assume are somewhere in the bowels of my room. I know I did not sell them, because foreign language books are unsaleable at IU. AWESOME JOB l33.
+ Our tomatoes are turning red and yellow. (Yeah, we grow yellow tomatoes.)
+ I fucked up my federal income taxes, apparently. I received a refund check last week, and (true to form) a couple of days later a letter followed which informed me that I was too entitled to a refund because I miscalculated my tax burden. No complaints.
+ forgottensanity! I received your package the day before yesterday! You will be pleased to know that I have not yet opened the present. (O HAI WUT IZ TIHS THING CALLD RESTRAINT.)
+ On the off chance you wanted to talk to me on AIM, which means this next is mostly for galhea, work schedules and pavement-pounding unfortunately mean I am not going to be on too often in the next few days. I'll try but no promises, k?
+ So glad to be back.

Everything that's born must die someday.

( Cat update: last for this particular cat )

(Coda: I'm still on the library computers. The computer is still in the shop because, apparently, the hard drive has breathed its last (THAT'S ODD, IT WAS JUST FINE WHEN I TOOK IT IN) and we basically had to buy a new computer. The tech thinks he can get most of our old files off the old hard drive and onto the new, so hopefully we'll have that back within the week or so. I'm not holding my breath at this point. Anyway, that's not what I wanted to talk about so that's why it's at the end of the post.)