Three unrelated topics.

* So Yamamotoyama's website makes you print out a PDF of their mail-order form? It's crazy, it's like the 19th century or something! But the Tokusen Kokyu Sencha is really good and costs almost twice as much from Amazon, so I am willing to do this.

* The freezer is full of kielbasa for reasons that escape me. I'm thinking of turning some of it into some kind of soup.

* When I enter the living room, Anxiety the Cat sits on the back of the couch and mews plaintively at me. He continues doing this until I either give him his allergy tablet - he's decided he loves Pill Pockets, following a lengthy period of hating them - or sit down on the couch so he can roll anxiously around my lap, peering up at me uncertainly to make sure I'm not moving. Anxiety was Nixon's servant; he would sit down on the couch, and she would sit down on top of him and fall asleep, and he wouldn't move until she was ready to get up again.

I'm not sure if what he's doing is some sort of grieving behavior, or if he's decided that he is the primary cat now and must therefore behave as much like her as possible. If that's his goal, it's unfortunate that he's too self-conscious to do the role justice. He only vocalizes when I'm looking directly at him and he knows for sure he's got my attention, and though he's twice Nixon's size, he doesn't feel secure enough in his physical presence to follow me around or headbutt me. He kneads my legs like a kitten when he gets me on the couch. Poor neurotic cat.

Should I be calling him "Ford"?

Another unrelated thing - turns out Julian May doesn't actually know Japanese.

I read the Pliocene Exile and Galactic Milieu books in middle school, and found it extremely impressive the way she had characters drop phrases in foreign languages into their dialog. (I was twelve.) I just reread the Galactic Milieu books, and I unfortunately am no longer very impressed.

And neither Fury nor Marc is actually at all scary. They don't make very good End Bosses.