Suicide girl

One of our cats (guess which one - a pictorial hint is posted below) attempted suicide when we were flipping the mattress on our bed last night.



Whenever atara changes out the sheets on our bed, we do a ritual flipping of the mattress. According to legend, this ritual will give one a better night's sleep and, more importantly perhaps, extend the life of your mattress. In this instance, it required a lengthwise flip, so we positioned ourselves on opposite sides of the mattress, grabbed it by the side handles and stood it on end. The moment it was clear of the box spring, Merry jumped up to investigate. Since we had our hands full of mattress at the time, we were reduced to scolding her and cajoling her to get off the bed. In typical feline fashion she ignored us. I could just reach her with my foot, and I tried nudging her off the bed (with varying levels of force), but that simply made her dig in, hunker down and complain.

I assured atara that I could keep the mattress balanced on end if she wanted to temporarily let go of her side and toss the cat off the bed. She did so in a very unceremonious fashion, and we quickly swung the mattress down into place before the cat could jump back up. Well, that was our plan anyway. As atara was walking around the end of the bed, she let out a shriek of "Merry!"

There was a familiar tail sticking out from under the end of the heavy mattress.

Apparently it takes more than being kicked and scruffed to thwart a determined cat. We lifted the end of the mattress and once again shooed her off the bed. Aside from being a little flat, she was apparently not fazed by the incident, because she immediately jumped back onto the bed (on top of the mattress this time). She is lucky that her tail was sticking out the end of the bed or we might not have noticed her for awhile. The mattress is very heavy, and there was no visible bump where it was lying on her.

Technology makes everything better!

I was going to post about this before I left work today, but I was busy, and I forgot.

We received an interesting (if badly punctuated) email from our administration department this morning, advising us that Facilities had just installed "touchless", powered hand sanitizers next to the two main entrances to our office. Aside from rankling a bit over the fact that they referred to them as hand sanitizer's, my brain just skimmed over the message as company spam to be ignored. The message was filed and as quickly forgotten.

Thus I was surprised anew when I was sneaking out the back door for lunch today and I spied the new device attached to the wall. Oh, they meant today. It was shiny and new and not yet (inevitably) broken. They had not even been back yet to clean up the little pile of powdered plaster on the carpet that was left over from their drilling and mounting operation. Eager to try it while it was still working, I thrust my hand under where I assumed the hidden spigot would be. Nothing happened. I waggled my hand back and forth a couple of times to try and get its attention, but the machine was apparently as dead as it is fated to be in less than a week anyway. Good grief, the poor thing didn't even last an hour.

As I pulled my hand away to reach for the door, the machine emitted a "skraaawk" sound and ejaculated a little blob of hand sanitizer that arced gracefully away and spattered on the carpet. Oh, that has the potential to get messy. I held my hand under the machine again, but this time I refused to remove it until it had done its sanitizer bukkake thing into the palm of my hand. I guess I can understand why they had to put a timer on the dispenser, given that it's in a location that could potentially cause it to jizz on the leg of an innocent passer-by, but I wonder how many people will get faked out like I did the first time?

It will be interesting to see the state of the carpet in a couple of weeks.