Okay. I'm Back.

I don't have any great excuse for being gone, but I did manage to have a busy weekend. So here's an all encompassing getting up to date post.

First off, Norbert has a cold. I think. She doesn't seem tired, her ears are what I assume is a normal temperature, and her nose feels moist. So all those things check out, yet she still sneezes cat boogers all over me from time to time. It's kind of cute when her nose is aimed safely in some other direction, but if I happen to be face to face with her and she lets fly, I find that it leaves me a little grossed out.

Today I also discovered quite a bit of kitty litter in my bathroom sink. It's a long way from the litter box to the bathroom sink. I wonder if she's carrying litter around in some sort of handbag.

My last cat discovery is that if you nuzzle I cat without shaving for a couple days I end up with quite a few cat hairs on my chin and upper lip. If I ever need to fake a mustache I guess I just have to wait a few days and then rub Norbert all over my face. If people ask why my hair is brown and my mustache is white I'll just say it's genetic.

In non-Norbert related news (bye Jootastic), on Saturday night I went to the opening of the new de Young museum in Golden Gate Park. I have to say, the stuff inside the museum is pretty run of the mill museum stuff, but the building itself is pretty cool.

For the grand opening they started letting people in at noon on Saturday and left the museum open for 36 hours straight. I got there at 10:45pm or so and left at 1:30am. Wandering around an art museum at midnight while DJ's and live drummers pound out dance music in the basement and noisy people wander around looking at paintings and old African sculptures is unsettling. I kept feeling that I wasn't really in a museum. It felt more like an elaborately themed club.

Another interesting aspect of the opening was the sheer variety of people in attendance. EVERYONE was there: A guy in a suit, a girl in a ball gown, a guy in a sleeveless sheepskin vest, silk pants with 70's running shorts on top, and a purple hat, a girl with an eye-patch - everybody. I had more fun looking at the people than I did looking at the art.

The other satisfying bookends of my weekend consisted of a dinner party with my San Francisco friends where a surprise chocolate cake with cinnamon bears on top appeared for my birthday pleasure, and a Sunday trip to the Cheesecake factory with most of my Sacramento friends for the traditional special-occasion meal of Chicken Madera.

It was a good weekend.