June 7th -- Up with Cats!

I thought, therefore I twittered:

• Time to stop playing with a Flash accordion menu and go do Sunday shopping already!

I found a CC licensed version of  the classic  functionality that I'm free to adopt and adapt for my own purposes, making a video-displaying widget that opens 'drawers' showing videos.  Thank goodness for the kindness of strangers on the internet, making me not have to reinvent the wheel to get this to work.

In practice, the amount of work needed is somewhere between "taking a perfectly nice car tire and slapping on a new hubcap" and "cutting down the car tire until it fits an electric scooter." 

• From an Accepting Father of a Non-Conforming Ten Year Old Boy << Open Letters to KRXQ Sacramento ow.ly/cKkS

Background: some radio hosts at KRXQ went off into a pretty horrible and ignorant rant about transgender kids and how they should have it beaten out of them, et cetera.  And they are rightly getting the response they so richly deserve.  This post is a long and thoughtful, well-written entry that will educate many on the problems these kids and their families face, and why this is a great teachable moment.

• Chumley, despite having had a full and healthy breakfast, is now licking the Spare Cat's empty bowl. He really does have an eating disorder

Sometimes I need a reminder that I am a dutiful CatMom, and having Chumley licking the extremely empty bowl kind of shows that it's not entirely my fault that he's overweight, i.e. he's relentlessly pushing for PleaseSirCanIHaveSomeMore.

• I lied, played with accordion menu ActionScript some more. Even though I need lunch, et cetera!
• Spare Cat got out of the donut again, but she uncarefully left it next to the location where she'd stashed the soft collar! Ha!

It turns out that she sort of shoved it underneath the blanket in the closet in the box where she likes to hide.  I mean, she really did manage to ruck up the folded blanket and deposit it underneath, or maybe she accidentally moved the blanket in the process of struggling out of the donut.  But the soft collar is once again found!  HA!

• Off to see UP. No, that doesn't sound right, exactly....
• After having seen UP, I keep telling Spare Cat she's wearing the Cone of Shame, but she's not much mollified.

OK, OK, "the Floppy Cone of Shame" since she's back to the soft collar, but as a friend of mine says, really for cats it's the Funnel of Frustration.

As for Up, I had a really fun time of it, especially because I loved the dogs so much.  We didn't catch it in 3D, which from the reviews doesn't sound all that much a loss, particularly because now I've done enough 3D animation to really catch what an amazing job Pixar does with the technology of 3D rendering.