The next day I phoned the doctor to reschedule and they were very apologetic: they said, “Oh, we were trying to contact you: the doctor was off sick yesterday. We’ll phone in a refill for you.”

I didn’t go to see the cat after all on Wednesday, because she behaves nothing like our cat did and doesn’t respond to her name, and people were afraid I’d give a false positive because I miss our cat so.

I spent much of the evening writing about GMarkup instead of fixing bugs.

I also had a very interesting email, which I might tell you all about later.

This morning, the company has given us all bags of love heart sweets and teddy bears. Thank you to the people who left comments for me on valentinr and places like that! If anyone sent one of those mutual things where you have to send another of the same kind in order to see them– well, I didn’t send any like that, so I won’t see them.

Fin, Alex: I am going to get you trees. But it is too cold to plant trees, so later in the year I will get them.

Link soup:

• Ande discusses why the current XKCD is actually hopeful. Well worth reading. “Love is not enough. In fact, that’s not what love is for. Love isn’t for curing people. Love isn’t for fixing everything.” Trigger warning: suicide, self-harm, etc.
• Fin’s awesome curried chicken recipe. Warning: also contains a picture of my tummy, in case pictures of tummies are not safe where you work.
• That guy from Torchwood in an anti-homophobia campaign.
• What would happen if you bought 25 bottles of Nyquil?
• I hesitate to link to this in a public post because it depicts sexual activity, but this is one of the most beautiful illustrations I’ve seen for months.
• A discussion of the interrelationship between advertising and gender in western culture.

Fin phoned and told me the SPCA had come by and told them they’d found a cat who looked just like our cat Zarate, who ran away shortly before Kirsten came to visit; Fin and Alex and Rio went to see, but the new cat (let’s say her name is Zaratbee) didn’t respond to her name or the feeding song, despite being about the right size and shape and colour. Fin thought it was her; Alex didn’t. I will go along tomorrow and see.

It snowed a lot. I was told I gave the best hugs. I came home and it snowed a lot and Fin in her awesomeness said “Why not let’s go to Los Aztecas?” So we did and the food was even better than it usually is, and almost nobody was there because of the snow. We talked about politics, and came home. I worked on some simple breadboard electronics on the dining-room table with Rio before she went to bed; she wrote up the findings in her lab notebook, which has a picture of Strawberry Shortcake on the front. Did I mention she has dyed her hair grape-soda purple? It really suits her.

I learned, or re-learned, about the __import__ statement in Python for a project I’m doing with the Metacity Journal (more will be revealed later). I asked jdub to move my public planet feed to blogs.gnome.org and I will automagically duplicate all content to LJ and blogo. I have not decided what I will do about comments. I also need to put some time into copying the stylesheets and formatting from marnanel.org to blogs.gnome.org.

Ande: I have started work on the river story. It is progressing nicely.

Things I wanted to share (because they were an interesting read):

• Lolcats who support Barack Obama (yes, I know lolcats are a tired joke: get over it. I still think All Your Smurf is funny.)
• You should probably eat more fruit. But if the nutrition won’t sell it, maybe sex will (not remotely worksafe)
• sabotabby explains why she thought black-focussed schools in Toronto were a bad idea and why she changed her mind
• nhw shares his thoughts on the Treaty of Lisbon and why it possibly doesn’t matter
• Andy Tanenbaum is running electoral-vote.com again this year, discussing the November US presidential election, with new analysis and discussion every day.
• Language Log provides a supporting example to ++Rowan’s comments about religious courts arbitrating on civil matters.
• Template Toolkit (my favourite templating system) is now beginning to be available for Python.

Now I will make more tea and then go and get out of these clothes and sit in bed and fix bugs, which I can do because Alex has fixed wireless networking, so hallelujah, say I.