Well, we took Dora to the vet just now. She didn’t mind the big dogs in the waiting room, didn’t mind her vaccination shots, didn’t mind the car ride. She just didn’t like getting a physical exam from the vet.
She’s a brave little toaster in general: She’s the only cat in the house who doesn’t run from the doorbell nor, frustratingly, from the garage door opening. She just sits on the “spare” (not thrown out yet) couch in the garage and watches the door go up and down. This wouldn’t be a problem normally, but she was originally a stray after all, so we have to watch her. Still, that’s why we have her wearing a collar with a tag.
She and Lucky get along great, and mock fight and chase each other (yes, Dora, a quarter of Lucky’s weight if she’s lucky, sometimes chases Lucky down the hall) around the house. Hanna, on the other hand, is increasingly frustrated by the situation and hostile toward her, and I’ve taken to locking one in a room at a time, so Lucky and Dora are out when Hanna’s in the master bedroom and Lucky and Hanna are out when Dora’s in the nursery.
My folks are coming up this week and driving her back to Oakland. (I picked up some kitty sedatives for her trip up north, which I know work like a charm from my experience flying Motley Sue from New York to Cairo with a six hour delay in Vienna. She was still woozy 24 hours later with only a half a pill in her system.)
Jenn and I have bought nearly all of our Christmas presents online for most of the last decade, but we don’t know every trick. Luckily, Wired comes to the rescue with a number of good hints. I certainly intend to check out the linked-to online coupon sites.
Days after putting up my LinkedIn profile, I just got contacted by a headhunter. Surprisingly — or perhaps not — it’s because of my Blizzard and CBR experience and involves doing PR for what I suspect is the next big MMORPG. I won’t say more, other than, if I weren’t intent on staying with journalism as long as journalism will have me, I would be dancing around the study right now, incredibly pumped.
I’m looking forward to this MMO being officially announced, instead of just existing in rumor land. There’s going to be a lot of happy gamers out there in fandom.
If you are a journalist, or want to be one, you should probably be listening to Grammar Girl’s podcast anyway, but this week should be of special interest to journalists, because she’s talking about her interview technique.
I do most of the same stuff already, and it’s amusing that we both use the “Big Dummy” technique, which works great, although sometimes at the expense of your dignity. And she also does an outgrowth of that technique that I’ve used ever since I realized how often I don’t know as much as I ought to about my interview subjects:
And finally, I’m going to share with you my secret weapons for interviewing and getting story ideas. My last interview question is always, “Is there anything I haven’t asked you that you think is important or worth talking about?” I always asked that question no matter how much preparation I did for an interview, and about a third of the time it got me something I hadn’t anticipated.
Her audiobook, available at Amazon and in iTunes, is also worth checking out for anyone who writes for a living, even if it’s just company e-mails.
Yes, we’ve become one of those families: James posed for Christmas card photos on Thursday. (This was not one of the Christmas outfits.)
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