(I just found a photo of the bath in question, taken immediately following my discovery of LUSH bath products, at http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2007/10/teabreak-over-back-on-my-head.html)
For months, the house was a building site. The place where the bath was going to go, a mass of water pipes and insulation, was also the place where Zoe liked to bed down -- the hot water pipes warmed the soft insulation and created a perfect sort of a cat nest.
The builders put in the bath on a friday afternoon.
Zoe doesn't mew. She does a sort of a "mwelp?" noise, as if she's talking to herself about things that puzzle her or that she's trying to remember. It's not very loud.
Truthfully, I don't know which happened first, whether I noticed that Zoe wasn't around, or I noticed that the bath was going "mwelp?".
I didn't know how to find any of the builders, but I knew how to find their boss, dragged him away from his dinner, and together we uninstalled a large bath. It took a while. And when, finally, we lifted it up, deep down in the pipes and insulation, blinking at the light, was Zoe. I picked her up, and she chewed happily on my chin, and said "mwelp?", and went back to sleep.
Which I write down here because it is a small story that I would hate to die with her.
Lorraine is bringing her home tonight.
Thank you all for your good wishes (and spare some for Olga -- http://olganunes.com -- who always planned to come and take Zoe home again, as soon as Olga was in one place long enough.)
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Amanda's nominated for both best-dressed and worst-dressed at the Golden Globes, at http://gofugyourself.celebuzz.com/go_fug_yourself/2010/01/globes_bestworst_012210.html. I'm pretty sure that either would make her happy, so I voted for her in both categories. (Here's a link to a picture of us, with her wearing the lovely Kambriel dress she was photographed changing out of after that after-party.)
(She's on a plane to France right now, for the Midem Conference, then on to Australia. We rendezvous in New Zealand, mid-March...then I'll go to the Philippines without her for two days and rejoin her in Poland. And, between now and then, I will miss her.)
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I think I may abandon Chrome on the Office Mac Quad thing until it comes out of Beta. I am tired of waiting for up to half a minute while a "resolving host" message comes up, almost every time I open a page, and then quite often it telling me that pages that do exist don't, while the various online suggestions for ways to fix it have made not a blind bit of difference.
Back to Camino and Safari, and I think I'll play with Opera for Mac as well. (Which I just have, getting links for this post, and it's blazing.)
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I wrote two out of the eight books on the Library Journal's best Graphic Novels 2009 list, which was very kind of them. I was glad they had the Crumb Genesis on there. It's an amazing work.
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It's probably still a secret, but what the hell, it cheered me up today and I will tell you: I'm going to be in an upcoming episode of ARTHUR. Today they sent me the script, and it's a delight: with luck it'll have kids all over the world making their own little graphic novels, and will usher in the dawn of a new golden age of comics and creativity. And without luck it'll still be a really good PBS kids' cartoon but with me in it. (No, I do not know what kind of animal I am going to be.)
And finally, a photo, taken by Amanda, of the Golden Globes afterparty CORALINE contingent (L to R; John Hodgman, Henry and Heather Selick, some author):
Labels: Arthur on PBS, bestyworst dressed fiancee, browsers are not really very interesting, mwelp?