Tig decided to reclaim the title of most photogenic or die trying. He followed me upstairs as I went through old bags of papers to find phone bills so I can take the tax refund from the government with a true estimate rather than the lousy thirty bucks they want to give me. Turns out I’ll be claiming about four times that amount, and I strongly urge you all to do the same. If you pay your phone bills online, you can probably get at least a year’s worth of records to see what to claim. If you’re a Sprint customer, well, I found bills dating all the way back to 2002. But to the cats.

Tig followed me upstairs, with his, “Whatcha doin’? Can I help? Can I walk on your stuff? Can I climb in those bags?” routine. Yes, he’s very helpful when I’m doing housework. Except vaccuuming. He runs for the hills when that happens, and doesn’t come out until the noise ends. After a while, he got tired of helping and retired to the closet, which isn’t open much during the days of either heat or AC use, as the vent is right in front of the closet door and gets blocked. Plus, there’s the Gracie-has-IBD-and-yaks-a-lot thing, so the closet door stays mostly closed. When it is open, Tig often retires to the very top of the pile of comic boxes, or the shelves, where he has utterly covered a black sweatshirt with cat hair. (I did not buy it. I am not dumb enough to buy myself a black sweatshirt, not when I’ve had cats for, um, most of my life.) It’s his shirt now. And that is what he’s sleeping on in this picture:

No, Gracie says, I am the cutest one there is. And to prove it, she curled up and put her head down and snuggled into her sleeping bag, a fairly rare pose. They’re in competition these days. For some reason, Gracie has decided that Tig’s food tastes better than hers, and keeps on eating his instead of hers. I just shrug and switch bowls on them, and they’re both happy. Looking at this picture, you’d never know what a pain in the butt she is.

And now, off to bed for me.

Last night, I had about ten minutes left of work to do on my podcast. I had found and edited all of the sound clips, recorded my portion, and was pasting in the clips. I closed out of a file, typed “N” to “Save changes?” and then went to continue editing my file. I saved first. And discovered that I had just closed the audio track that I’d spent the last two hours working on, and saved an empty file to its file name.

Lost it all.

Dammit.

Stupid Audacity. They let you delete a track by closing a little x in a box, and don’t ask if you’re sure that’s what you want to do.

It was midnight. I went to bed after emailing Brian and Tom that my podcast would be late.

Which is a long way around of telling you that SNN will be up tomorrow. I did mine over this afternoon. In a lot less time than it took last night, as I didn’t have to waste any prep time wondering what was going where. But I also discovered that I have a habit of editing clips on the fly and copying them into the main track rather than saving the edits. So I had to make most of those edits again today as well.

So now, I’m going to take a leaf from my parents book, and tell you all that you damned well better like this podcast, because I worked really hard to get it to you.

I think next week, it’s going to be 800 or less words of sheer opinion and no audio clips. I need a break. If you have a subject you’d like me to discuss, let me know. I don’t write the script until Friday or Saturday, unless I’m feeling particularly inspired. I’d like to feel inspired this week. Mom’s coming on the 29th. There is housework to be done next weekend.