First, the color change; yeah, pink really isn't my thing, but we're Going Pink For October and Breast Cancer Awareness Month anyway. I encourage all of you to make a donation; to Elizabeth's Walk for the Cure, or to someone else if you know someone else who's walking, or directly to the Susan G. Koman Breast Cancer Foundation or the National Breast Cancer Foundation, links to all of which are over in the sidebar.

This week has been a little this and a little that. I've been trying to get my house in order, trying to mend clothes and hem skirts and sort through things in preparation for working again. I've also been trying to memorize eleventy-seven airport codes, and ya'll that is a LOT of airport codes, and acronyms and definitions and announcements, and I'm here to tell you it's a lot harder to memorize stuff now that I'm old and have a leaky old brain. (That is still, in my opinion, the funniest column Dave Barry ever wrote and he wrote some humdingers. Probably because it's so true ... and also it explains a lot about why this memorization stuff has been so hard, what with the Knowledge Fairy last visiting me in 1873 and all. It's been a while.)

This whole memorization thing has reminded me of something, though. Do you remember when you were in .. fourth grade, I think it was. And you had to memorize your times tables? You had flashcards and the whole nine yards? Mom promised you a kitten if you succeeded, which you did, and she was a very good kitty too regardless of the whole having-kittens-on-your-bed thing. ANYWAY. I broke the pages and pages of airport codes down into bitesized morsels and made myself a huge teetering scary stack of airport code flashcards, and I've been studiously working with them. I'm pretty sure I'll have them all down pat by Monday, and that's a lot of damn airport codes, and I'm looking around, and where's my kitten? (Of course the reality is that Onyx kitten is probably all this house can handle, but this was hard and I want something damnit.) It seems dreadfully unfair that when you're an adult you have these goals, things, hard things, that Must Be Done leaky old brain notwithstanding, and you bust your ass and wander around the house muttering ACK, YOW, BFD, HPN, GRR, and taking flashcards everywhere even in the bathroom and in traffic and in line at the bank, and in the end you succeed and ... nobody gets you a kitten. Not even a kitten-substitute. Being a grownup sucks sometimes.

Being a kitten, however, does not suck. Not even a little bit. Cats don't have flashcards either. Cats can RELAX. Boy howdy can cats relax. Case in point: Onyx, sleeping through Steve's conference call.