It’s the first snow day in Dallas TX in my memory, at least since last February, and last February it only snowed on Valentine’s Day. This snow threatens to last only one day also, but at least it will give a few of my Taiwanese students the opportunity to see actual snow.

I went to the office of one of my clients yesterday and was deluged with fliers, posters, and other copyrighted material to “put on the website”. Which means attributions are going to fly, and I will have to quote every single picture’s source and be especially careful about noting who wrote what. The LAST thing I need is to have my itty bitty company sued by a Fortune 500 company.

We got a TiVo for Christmas from Tony’s friends, and now we have to figure out how to hook it up. TiVo is a subscription service, and usually the update data runs through a telephone cord and “Presto!” you have your amazing updated TV stuff. We have no phone line, however, which complicates things. We’re going to have to use the internet to update TiVo, but our computer is in a totally different room, and I wonder how difficult this will be to do. Lots of cables and wires involved, I think, and my husband, the erstwhile networking guy, thinks it won’t work. I hope to prove him wrong because I’ll be damned if I am going to give up my land line. My cell phone costs the same as a land line here, and I can’t pay for both. I’d rather have the option of an unlisted number and portability. Land lines suck.

So anyway, TiVo is charging $50 for the USB adapter on their website, while Best Buy is charging $29.95 online. Maybe I can find a better deal at Fry’s or something, but I am not too keen on going out to the department stores with snow on the ground. I am not worried about my driving, but the driving of the other idiots out there. It’s not a biggie in New York to have a little snowfall like today, but in Texas, the “Get Out Of My Way State” full of SUVs and pickup trucks…there was almost an accident in front of the apartment in the 5 minutes I was watching the traffic this morning. Not good.

So I am blogging, doing laundry, and dodging Kiki. She wants to be near me, follows me around the house, and then swats at, spits at, hisses, and growls at me. Confused much? I wish there was a way to change her, to make her less scared of everybody. She must be an unhappy kitty inside, and I wonder who messed with her when she was a baby. Like Salju’s irrational fear of plastic bags, Kiki’s only way of dealing with people is aggressively. Hostilely. I pray to God she never gets sick and needs medicine, because I am not about to try to pill her, even with Tony’s help.

I joke about smacking her into next Tuesday, about a possible brain tumor, etc., but I know deep inside that she’s just afraid of everything. Snarly girl is cute when she wants to be, chirping at the hairbrush I pet her with, chirping at Tony when he comes home. But with my hand, she’s terrified. But she wants to be near me. But human hands are scary. So she growls and lives the adage “the best defense is a good offense”. So she’s offensive, and my Mama says “If that was my cat…” and “I can’t believe you put up with it…” But it’s because I know the source that I put up with it. Should Kiki ever be given away for adoption, she would be destroyed. No one would take her. So we live with a very hostile cat and pray for the day we move into a house big enough to put some distance between poor Mecca and Kiki.

Oh, and here’s a funny. Mecca eats paper when she is trying to tell me she’s hungry. Well, she doesn’t exactly eat the paper, she picks at the corners and edges of papers. So which paper did she decide to pick at recently?

This one: