This looks like a good way to spend my time after classes are over, but I haven’t been able to find it in the Ikea catalog. Has it sold out already?

Finally, I’ve waded through the entire backlog of grading for my genetics class, and have sent every student a personal email stating where they currently stand, what assignments are missing (I’m offering amnesty on all the homework), and what they can do to improve their grade this week — lab reports, for instance, can be revised to correct errors. There is still a gigantic take-home final looming ahead, which constitutes about a quarter of their total grade, and I’ve warned them about that. That does mean that this is only the lull before the storm, though, but at least I’ve got a couple of days to work on bailing out my lifeboat. I expect to be swamped by the end of this week and early next week, again.

It also means my class content for this last week is taken care of. I get to deal with students’ concerns about their grades, and also review the entire semester to prepare them for the final.

Now to celebrate this fleeting triumph by…uh, I dunno. What do we do to party anymore? I know, maybe get started on wrapping up my second class.

They didn’t get it from me, that’s for sure.

I was up late, working on various things, when a stray link wandered across my photoreceptor array, and like a fool I clicked on it. I ended up on seafood YouTube. This is like porn to a west-coastie living deep in the center of the continent, so my eyes glazed over and I started to drool and I was probably looking a bit Homer-esque, I had to watch it all. A sample:

I eventually staggered off to bed, hungry. There is a dearth of exotic seafood here in Minnesota.

Maybe it’s just me, but Pacific seafood looks so much better than Atlantic. It’s also the size — Dungeness vs. blue crab, or geoduck vs. those tiny little clams that are mostly shell. Why bother? I’ve eaten most of the crustaceans and molluscs he brought out, but I’m not so enthusiastic about urchin roe, and what was that weird thing he called a razor clam? I’ve never encountered that thin strange beast. It’s apparently the Atlantic jackknife clam, Ensis leei, but I grew up digging the Pacific razor clam, Siliqua patula, which again is bigger than those reedy little Atlantic specimens.

I was also getting into the casually brutal way he dismantles crustaceans.

Anyway, now I’m hungry and tired, and I have a lot of work to do. I’m tempted to dart off to MSP tonight — flights are cheap I hear — and ruin my health and mental state further by bingeing at a Seattle seafood bar.

Not really. I’m not leaving my house for a while.

That’s an astronomy shirt!

No grandchild of mine is going to be caught in public with a non-biology related shirt! What will people think?

This cat. This cat is killing me. She’s usually pretty good — I got up this morning, gave her a little time, fed her her wet food (she’s very eager for her twice daily serving of wet food, but she also has a bowl of dry food always available), and then she trotted into my office to jump up on the windowsill and demand that I open the blinds, which I did. She curled up there to watch the world go by.

Then the retching began.

I jumped up to shoo her out of my carpeted office. If she throws up on the kitchen tile, it’s an easy cleanup…but on carpet, oh god no. She jumped down and ran off, and I hear that awful “huck, huck, eeewcchh” noise from under the futon. So I slide the futon away, and what do I see? A lovecraftian nightmare.

Apparently, for the last few months, she has been crawling under the futon when I’m not around and vomiting everywhere. There were slimy fresh puddles and caked dried piles. There was filth and cat hair clinging to everything. I’d show you a photo, but you might react as I did: I actually screamed. I started weeping. It’s all just too much.

Now I’ve got to scrub the most revolting floor I’ve ever seen today, and further, I’ve got to move all the furniture in the house to see if she has other treasure troves.

At least it clarifies one thing: I will never ever adopt another cat. It might be because this monster outlives me, but there is no way I’ll ever be persuaded to take responsibility for another mammal. Repugnant, sneaky, nasty creatures. Spiders are a much more dignified and elegant gentleman’s companion.

Good news — my daughter sewed me a mask, and it arrived today!

So comfortable…now I can go rob a liquor store and no one will know who it is! Or whatever this is for.

Unfortunately, almost no one is wearing any kind of mask when they go out in Morris. We need a few thousand of these here in town.

No further answers are necessary.