Kitten on a plane!

Tiki in her carrier in the airplane cabin

Tiki's about to go on her first flight!

Tiki is ready for take-off...

...asleep

So about a week and a half ago, I took Tiki onto the plane with me to Winnipeg. She flew in the cabin with me in her carrier under the seat in front of me. Her ticket was $50 each way. We were sitting in a specially designated seat in that if the cabin lost air pressure, there would be an extra oxygen mask (in addition to the 3 for the 3 seats in the row) that come down from the ceiling that reached all the way down to the floor! I think aside from that, the only thing special about our seat (window seat, closer to the back) was that there was enough space for her carrier (as opposed to the middle seat where there is usually a box in the way for the tv screen stuff I think. We flew WestJet b/c Air Canada don't allow pets in the cabin anymore (they stopped last year I think).

Tiki was great during the flight. She didn't make a sound and didn't try and get out of her carrier. She just slept the whole time, curled up in a ball. I think she was just scared, so she went into a defensive position and just kept wishing that the nightmare would end :p. I periodically pet her, but I wasn't allowed to take her out of the carrier and I was told to keep her carrier on the ground after I tried to put her carrier on my lap.

The weirdest thing about the trip was that I had to take her out of the carrier when I went through security since they had to scan the carrier and it would've have been a good idea for her to be in it when that happened :p. It was kinda strange walking through the metal detector holding a kitten! I didn't have her on leash, so I had to just hope that she wouldn't struggle and jump out of my arms. Again, I think she was just scared, so she was basically a stuffed animal and didn't move. Luckily, we didn't beep, so we didn't have to endure any additional scrutiny.

Tiki's doing great here now. She likes the extra space to roam around, but still mostly follows me around. She's made my room her home base, much to Mi-Mi's chagrin, as it was previously her main sleeping quarters while I am here. Tiki and Tiggy get along quite well now, it took a few days, but they're fine together now. No unforced cuddling yet, but they still have another week and a half or so to work that out. Mi-Mi does not like the new addition at all and Tiki growls and hisses at her in return. The girls fight over me :p

Oh, and I'm up at 4am b/c I'm waiting for my laundry to finish since Mi-Mi peed on my bed again, just like old times... Fortunately, my pillow was spared this time.

Cat play dates and Catbook

Tiki had her first cat play date today! It was with Stella, a big brown tabby, owned by my friend Anne on the 2nd floor. I want to expose Tiki to other people and cats so that she's comfortable around them and it's important to do so at a young age. Plus, if it works out well, then she'll have another cat to play with :). The play date didn't go so well. Stella was scared, much bigger than Tiki, but scared, which is understandable b/c she was in a new place with new smells, and there was another cat here. Tiki was pretty scared as well, but managed to calm down. There was hissing from both cats and Stella growled a bit, but at least no claws were thrown. Next time, Tiki and I will go down to visit her place, and Stella should be more comfortable.

I discovered Catbook today and it's the best thing since well, facebook :). Catbook is an application in facebook that lets cats make their own profiles. They post their own profile picture, information, and they get their own friends, wall, mini-feed, etc., just like facebook! I made... err... I mean Tiki, Mittens, and Tigger made their own profiles on Catbook today :).

They're violating the copyright on my life!

I'm pretty sure that all these web comics get their material from me. Case in point, today's xkcd, which totally rips off my "It's not official until it's on facebook" slogan. If you hover the mouse over the picture it says "Facebook defines relationships".


PHD Comics stole this one from me last year:


I need a bug scanner or something b/c I'm pretty sure that my apartment is bugged and that these webcomic authors are reading my e-mail and spying on my life.

I built this with my bare hands

I forgot something on my "Why I haven't been blogging" post.

Over the summer, I built my own computer for the first time! I've been taking computers apart, fixing them, and upgrading them myself for about a dozen years now, so I've known the inside out of computers for a while now, but never actually built my own from scratch. It was fun actually (some frustration when some things didn't work as planned) and I learnt quite a bit from having to research each individual part in the computer that I wanted to get.

My computer turned out to be cheaper (about $1500, which is worth it since I'm on it all the time), more powerful (2.4Ghz Intel Core 2 Quad (4 CPUs), 4GB RAM, 1TB hard drive space, ATI Radeon Pro X1950), and quieter (I got a case that muffles sounds and bigger fans that can push the same amount of air by spinning slower).

It's about 3 times faster than my old computer (which was 4 years old) and I'm quite happy with it.

What's with cats and buckwheat?

Tiki at the top of my closet

...sitting on my bag of buckwheat,
which she would later spill all over my closet and floor

If they're not peeing on it, they're spilling it all over my closet and floor. I had an extra bag of buckwheat from my pillow (they come too full, so you're supposed to empty some out to fit you) and she decided to play with it today and rip a hole in it. If you see brown stuff on me, feel free to flick the buckwheat off me. I know that I'm going to be finding this stuff everywhere for a couple weeks.

Stop whining about the weather

All I hear are all these wimps in Toronto complaining about how cold it is. Please. -10 is not cold. Don't complain to me about the weather unless it's at least -30 outside before the windchill.

Let's compare the current temperatures in Toronto and Winnipeg:

People in Toronto think this is FREEZING

People in Winnipeg think this is normal

They didn't even issue a cold warning in Winnipeg for this (like they did in Toronto last week for something like -10) because they aren't wusses over there. You are in Canada and it's December, deal with the cold!

Happy Birthday Jill!

You've finally caught up to me in age!

Jill, to commemorate your birthday, I'm starting to blog again!

Why I haven't been blogging

Hint: It starts with "L" and rhymes with "crazy"

I had a backlog of posts that I wanted to post and I didn't want to post new posts until I had posted these posts for fear that if I didn't post them, I'd never get around to posting them and they really needed to be posted, so due to my laziness and this posting mentality, all posting of posts was halted, and now to catch up, I'm posting a single post that summarizes all the posts that I wanted to post, and because of the diversity of topics in this post, I think there are more labels on this post than any other post that I've posted before. Post.

I have however, been keeping my delicious and picasaweb up to date, and those are always good if you want to check up on what I've been up to.

Here are the posts that you missed from the last 3 months or so:

iCat

• iCat backwards is taci, but iKitty, or iKit, for short, backwards is Tiki!


• I got her off of Craig's List and she's much cuter than your cat, dog, hamster, mouse, budgie, fish, snake, chinchilla, emu, baby, etc. :)

I've literally posted hundreds of photos of Tiki (737 as of this posting). I upload new pics as I download them from my camera (about weekly or bi-weekly).

Volleyball

Toronto Warriors 9-man Volleyball (San Francisco tournament pictures: here and here)


Coed Volleyball Intramurals


Men's Volleyball Intramurals

FaceDown

A program I made to download photos from facebook

Tribal Wars

I have a lot more free time since quitting this game

New TV show obsessions

(I didn't find this funny until I realized that Colbert was a fake character, at first, I just thought he was an idiot)




(I liked the video game)

Toilet Training.... my cat

Hint: it ends in a stand-off between a cat refusing to use the toilet and me fearing that she'll use my pillow as her new litter box

I've been tying garbage bags and shoelaces wrong this whole time

I recently discovered that knots are really cool (and useful!) I collected my findings on the most useful knots into a single illustrated document.


Real-life practical uses for the taut-line hitch, timber hitch, clove hitch, buntline hitch, sheet bend, and others

Happy 2nd (Real) Blogoversary!

I totally forgot about this (Oct. 14). Maybe I'll do a special post over the holidays about my blog, not that I've written too much here since the 3rd Blogoversary...