Evening

I'd decided to vacuum today. Between sleep, sleep, and more sleep, I got around to that when my roommates got home. I abruptly found out that the vacuum cleaner again had no suction. Sis and I attempted to un-jam the clogged passage just behind the brushes. Once that was reasonably cleared, I decided to slurp the rest out with the vacuum cleaner hose, but found that this, too, was not sucking. There proved to be more of the same nasty cat fur, dirt, and hair clogging the inside bits. I tried to get some out, but was largely unsuccessful. Sis will take the vacuum cleaner over to Clover's husband, who will attack it with proper vacuum cleaner cleaning tools.

I wound up at Sprouts in search of lettuce. While there, I noticed a very familiar tall person with dark red hooded sweatshirt. It turned out to be none other than Problem Child, a former co-worker who was very un-suited to phone work. He evidently works there now. I said hello to him as I was leaving. I think this job will suit him much, much better than doing phone surveys. He seems happier already.

There was a LiveJournal outage for the Filetmignon cluster. I find out about these things in weird ways, actually -- when my assorted LJ friends IM me in a general panic to see if I know what's going on. That sends me first to http://status.livejournal.org, and then blipping off to the Support IRC forum (when Status says there's nothing wrong). Support was just spinning up to Full Tizzy. I discovered that I was not on Cartman, as I'd previously been, and I was now smack dab in the afflicted cluster. I called foul. One of the other Support volunteers discovered that the same had happened to them, and threw more of a whiny-fit.

It was laundry night. Yay, laundry. It was also time to fold up the The Cheat costume poncho and stuff it inside the The Cheat head. Consequently, I can see my floor. Amazing!

Weird Questions: "How did my soul get into my body? I mean, this body?"

The other day, I believe Wednesday when I was watching the Little Fayoumis, he asked one of those questions that takes about a paragraph of rambling description, and winds up being best-answered with the answer to a completely different question. He was talking about how his soul got into his body, but it parsed out to actually mean, "How did I turn from a baby into a big kid, because I thought my soul couldn't jump between bodies?"

That turned into a lecture from me on how his body actually grew bigger, and he grew from a baby into a big boy. That was nice. Then he asked about how he got out of his mother, when he was born.

It wasn't quite the How Are Babies Made lecture, but it was close. I told him that inside a woman, there was a part of her body called the uterus, and that's where a baby grows if she's having a baby, and then when it's time for the baby to come out, there's a special place that's made for the baby to come out by.

"What's the name of that?"

Since he'd asked it in the context of childbirth, I figured the best, least confusing name was "the birth canal". It's a good, solid, adult name for the body part, and it emphasises the birth function of the anatomy. His mother is what I'd call highly uncomfortable about the topic of sex, and especially the idea of him learning about sex too soon, so I wasn't about to introduce any advanced concepts. I went on to the placenta, and especially the umbilical cord, and I tied it all off with how the place where that was attached eventually turns into the bellybutton. His bellybutton.


I figure that he comes to me with this stuff because I'm the one who's good at giving long-winded scientific lectures on Just Randomly Anything. Besides that, I was the only one home at the time.

New note_to_ community

Welcoming... note_to_machine.

Hooray! I figured it was necessary, y'know?

GIMP tasks

I really need to take my assorted old icons and touch them up so they don't suck. This is one of the ones that really needs me to sharpen it up. The red in the "Danger" bit is all blurry, and so forth.