While listening to Snoop Doggy Dogg's "What Am I (What's My Name?)" in the car the other day:
Snoop Dogg: "Mr 1-8-7 on a undercover cop..."
Arna: "What's 187?"
Josh: "What's 187? MurderDeathKill! You've seen Demolition Man, haven't you?"
Of course she had, but that was all the motivation we needed to go out and rent it a couple of days later. (I'd own it if there had ever been a decent DVD release with any amount of special features.) As I Twitterized at the time, if, some time after Josh Junior is born, I should find myself in possession of a daughter, Lenina Huxley will be high on the list of possible names. I must also make more of an effort to tell people that they are an incredibly sensitive man who inspires joy-joy feelings in all around them.
Took the cat to the vet yesterday -- he's been coughing, and not from hairballs. In the past we've borrowed a friend's cat cage to take him to the vet, but we figured we should probably get one of our own. After looking around half of Auckland (but not, notably, the pet shop in Onehunga, which I forgot was there) I settled on the only model I could find: one of those plastic ones with a door in the front, where the top clips onto the bottom and can be removed. It's big enough for the cat to sit comfortably in, but expecting him to sit still on the base while we clip the top on isn't that realistic, and the door in the front isn't very large. We ended up having to hold the cage on it's end and dangle him into it back legs first. Some sort of cat funnel would have been useful*. As it turns out, he's got some sort of cat asthma, probably caused by an infection - antibiotics for the next three weeks for you, young feline.
Bedroom renovations proceed apace. A slow pace, but a pace nonetheless. We've finally found a way of scraping off the final wafer thin layer of wallpaper that needs to go before we can get a plasterer in, so we're getting somewhere. For those who haven't seen it in its semi-renovated state, our bedroom had been re-painted some time in the recent past, but they only pulled down the existing wallpaper in some places and not others. This means that there are bits where we could just pull off the painted-over regular wallpaper and had only the thin layer of Bastard Wallpaper to contend with, and bits where all there is is Bastard Wallpaper with a layer of paint on top of it, which stubbornly resists any attempt to remove it. We may end up attacking the latter with the sander, to relieve stress if nothing else.
What else? I see that
British teachers are being told not to teach children the "I before E, except after C" rule, on account of all the exceptions that make it bollocks (heir, weigh, neighbour, veil, caffeine, sufficient, science etc.) The pragmatist in me says fair enough - grammar is a bunch of crap a lot of the time. On the other hand, if they aren't familiar with all the rules, how can they be pedantic and condescending on Internet forums once they get older?
* Note to self: Invent cat funnel; make millions.