Cogs can think.

Got some cool new gear.

A brand new TV, LCD, 83cm, HD, superawesome, scaringly large. Review on OSNews soon.

A Nikon D70 digital SLR camera. It’s actually not mine; I get to loan it from Adam and his wife Beth (thanks!) while I’m at OSNews. I took my first few pictures with it just now, without having dived into the manuals or other photography jargon yet. They already look a whole lot slicker than any previous photos I made.

More to come.

This morning I woke up at around 6 because of the pain in my chest. Unable to get back to sleep, I decided to make me a cup of tea and go do some browsing on my MacBook. As I sat up straight, I look at my cat Twiek and say:

“Go make me some tea, Cat.”

He lifts his head, blinks at me once or twice, and just stares at me.

I sigh. “I forgot I was the bitch in this relationship.”

I would just like to congratulate Heather and Jon with their daughter Leta. I’ve never met any of them, and they probably haven’t a clue who the hell I am (I sent a few mails their way, but they probably get a whole lot more than just mine), but I still want to congratulate them in public. No, it’s not the little girl’s birthday, it’s not her first day of school, and no, it’s not her first ever Linux installation.

As it turns out, their daughter hates insects, and probably spiders too. That is a good thing. Insects and spiders are the seed of the devil, they are evil, wrong, scary, and must be eradicated from the face of the earth. They. Must. Die.

I am terribly afraid of insects, and I have a fairly moderate case of arachnophobia. As in, if they get larger than, I don’t know, a centimetre, I’ll be screaming like a schoolgirl.

My house actually has a small shed located way off my property (in a whole block of sheds), but I haven’t been there in, well, I don’t know, 10 months or so. It’s a spider-infested hell hole, and as a civilised human being, I simply refuse to bless that hell hole with my glowing appearance. Let the spiders have their victory over there.

When I see a spider, it consequently means it will have to die. This poses me with a serious problem, as the mere sight of one puts me in a serious instinctive flight or fight response. Twiek can care of large spiders easily, but he has this nasty habit of playing with them; I still haven’t been able to train Twiek to be a mindless spider killing drone.

But we’ll get there.

So, today was The Day.

When I woke up, Twiek was miauwing like crazy, because he was not allowed to eat since the evening before. He didn’t like it at all to be in the cat carriage in the car; miauwing, trying to find a way out of that darn thing. He soon settled down though, and apart from a few complaining miauws when I was talking to the veterinarian’s assistant, he was a good boy.

At 16:30, I picked him up. I could see him lying down in his cage, still groggy and out-of-this-wold. When the assistant put him on the vet’s table, Twiek sniffed my finger, recognised it, and rubbed his head on my hand, as in, the Can Opener has returned. My heart melted. On the way back, he was quiet and still half asleep.

When I opened the carriage back at home, he walked out, but it was obvious he was still very groggy - every three steps or so he simply tumbled over, and his walking had a zig-zag pattern - distressing, yet strangely cute. He made his way towards one of my couches, but instead of jumping on it from the front, he opted for the backside - the high side. And jumped on top of it, almost falling off, but his nails came to the rescue.

Yeah. He’s die hard.

I just made The Phonecall to the veterinarian. Twiek is 15 months old now, and the time is ripe for… Well, you know. That.

The woman on the other end of the phone line sounded fairly attractive, and she just loved the little guy’s name. “It’s something else than Poekie or Teigertje.” In the meantime, it seemed as if Twiekie realised what the hell was going on, as he started miauwing as if he was… Well, you know. That.

Monday’s the day.

In case you’re wondering how my cat is doing… Well, he’s grown to be an outstanding specimen of the felis catus. He has an extraordinary healthy fur with a very chique, almost thoroughbred-like tabby pattern, he’s not overweight, he drinks enough water, and has an healthy urge to escape the confines of my apartment into my garden and the rest of the outside world. I have some new pictures of him. I call these the ‘Cat in the bag sessions’.

Cat in the bag sessions

He’s almost ready for castration, after which he’ll be free to explore the outdoors.

I have a deep and intrinsic fear of spider. This goes very, very, very deep, even to the extent that I can actually scream like a schoolgirl when I get caught off-guard by one.

I was just sitting on one of my couches, watching the ISU World Cup skating in Calgary, Canada, as something crawling over the floor caught my eye. It was a 5cm spider.

I jumped up, and stood upon the couch. I was in an utter state of total and complete panic; my instinctive response was to call for my father (I am 22, in case you didn’t know). I soon realised that would not really help all that much seeing he lives on the other side of town.

So, I started looking for my phone, which lay next to me on the couch. While I was trying to crouch to reach my phone, Twiek woke up; I could just read from his face he was wondering why his personal assistant was standing on the couch. I don’t know if he saw the fear and panic in my eyes, but in an act of heroism, His Royal Highness jumped off the couch, and trotted to the spider.

Now it was the spider’s turn to panic. It stopped in its tracks, and tried to make a run for it, trying crawl its filthy self underneath my other couch (on which I was not standing). Twiek started playing with the spider, tapping it; he was a little weary of it at first, but encouraged by my cheering (I kid you not), he started to get aggressive.

Jumping from couch to couch in which seemed like a scene from a really crappy Adam Sandler movie, trying to avoid the path of the spider trying to get away, I saw how Twiek killed the spider, in the only proper way: slowly, and painfully. When the spider stopped moving, I did my thing with the vacuum cleaner.

Twiek is my hero. He protected his slave personal assistant in the best possible way.

Only, sweety, could you next time also eat your game?

Having a cat is pretty much fun.

Despite what many cat lovers will tell you, they are fairly stupid, and desire little to nothing (with little being food, sleep, and in case of my Lucifer, some vital arteries to severe). When your cat is not my Twiek Lucifer Damien, you can teach it stuff in a very simple, yet effective way: whenever it does something it shouldn’t, just give them a hard but gentle (what?) tap on the head, and soon enough, the creature will lower its ears in fear whenever you raise your hand, promptly stopping whatever it is doing.

Crude, but effective. I raised three cats well with this technique, and Twiek will be the fourth. Sort of. Twiek is a special case; he’s possessed, and I’m still waiting for his little head to start doing 360s while miauwing Marilyn Manson’s “Posthuman” (“God is just a statistic”, that sort of stuff). It will take a while before Twiek realises that when I am in the house, he’ll get a tap on the head whenever he is doing stuff I don’t want him to. Of course, he can do whatever he wants when I’m not there (you know, tree falling in the forest, nobody heard it, did it fall?).

In the hope that Twiekie will ever take me off his death list (on which you’ll find things like that pretty plant my parents gave me, the couches, anything that happens to be on my desk, and of course my wrists and neck), I gave him a climbing tower covered in black pluche (vulgar alert). He is still indifferent towards it, but as soon as he finds out it has a nice little cozy hole where he can breed evil schemes to kill me, I’m sure he’ll love it.

Every culture has its own way of celebrating new year’s; even here in the west, each country has its own nuances. Where some prefer to look at what’s coming in 2007, Dutch people generally tend to look back and reflect on 2006.

For me, 2006 actually was a Very Good Year ™. First and foremost, all the various check-ups me mum got concerning her breast cancer were ok; doctors have not found a thing, meaning all the chemo and radiation therapy caught on. This is the single biggest reason why 2006 was a Very Good Year.

The second reason is of course the fact that I moved out of my parents’ into my own house, which took months to actually get ready to live in; as always, I had my mind set on a few very tricky things, as I wanted my doors/windowsills to be red (and anyone with a bit of experience in painting knows that means painting the same white door thee to four times), and of course the fact I wanted a wooden floor, and nothing else.

But now that I’m all settled, everybody just has to congratulate me with a very pretty house. It breathes me, weird colour choices, the walls filled with film posters, a huge glass desk and two humongous couches leaving no room for a dinner table; you name it.

The biggest kick is that I basically did everything by myself. Renate helped with tearing down the old wallpaper, and my dad helped with the final layer of paint on the doors (this is a very meticulous task), but doing the walls, laying the wooden floor; I all did it by myself. This insistence on doing it alone may have made evrything take longer, but I don’t care. This is now truly my house, and I will tear anyone apart who dares to lay a finger on it.

The third reason this was a Very Good Year are all my friends. I have so many good friends who are honest with and about me; mushy as it sounds, it’s a treasure.

The fourth reason is of course Twiek Lucifer Damien, my cat. Twiek is his name when he is relaxed and peaceful, Lucifer Damien when he has one of his many attacks of evilness (about four times a day).

It was a Very Good Year. What will 2007 bring? I can make a few wild guesses, but I’ll keep those to myself, okay?

Have a great new year’s, everybody, and take care of the things important to you.