s e v e n i s a j o u r n e y

[Posted by Tam, who as usual is too much of a dork to notice who she's logged in as...]

Friday – Watched .HACK//sign with Geoff and Beth. A creepy and rude white-haired kid appears to be a ghost in the machine that is Everquest. Or, rather, another MMORPG very like Everquest. Possibly this kid is in turn haunted by the ghost of his/her dead mother in the shape of a hacked character profile with the face of a cat — we don’t know yet. Either way, the other plaYers are deeply confused, and the sysadmins are having conniptions.

Saturday – The BURNINATOR STRIKES !! Yes, with all permits in place, we put a match to the big pile of gorse out back. It burned real good. Stephen is already dragging more cut gorse to make a new pile in the ashes of the old one. I got some shopping done — flannel sheets for the guest room, groceries, looked at some furniture.

Here’s the dilemma: We need sofas. As with many things, one has the option of spending more moolah for something that will last longer, or getting something cheap and expecting to replace it in a couple years when it wears out. I tend to lean toward quality, when I can, but the equation is complicated by one simple fact: Cats scratch sofas. We want a sofa that the cats won’t immediately destroy — the floral print loveseat that we inherited from my mom was a good cheap test run. The leather chair we got from Costco suggests that cats don’t scratch leather, because their claws don’t stick in in such a satisfying way. However, they *do* mark it up a bit — Rasputin likes to dig his claws in and stretch, or someone will jump up and slip. And leather doesn’t heal these little nicks the way some fabrics might. So, should we get a cheap sofa, and assume we’ll have to replace it in a few years whether the cats get it or regular wear and tear does ? Should we still go for leather ? Or even faux leather ? Is there some kind of cat-resistant fabric ?

Sunday – Stephen went to fight practice while I puttered around cleaning splattered food out of the microwave and the sasser worm off my computer. Oh, for the days before I gave up on Macs. After that, Stephen and I went up to Battle Hill Farm Park to hike around a bit.

Here’s something I’ve never seen before: There was a police roadblock stopping traffic on Paekakariki Hill Road. They’d pull you over, hand you a little flyer with road crash statistics on one side and information about the park on the other — it was a public awareness campaign to make people aware that those twisty little hill roads can be kinda dangerous, so please slow down. And while we’ve got you stopped here, we’ve got a barbeque set up over there serving up free sausages and soft drinks — help yourself. How wacky. So we chatted a bit with the guy running the grill about police community relations, the U of Chigaco, and race relations. Then we went and had a lovely hike.