You’ll never guess what my cat did.

4am, Sunday morning. Is my sermon done? No. That is why I am up, eating breakfast, quite perky all things considered. I’d been up for an hour. My laptop was open on my desk because I’d been sitting there just a moment before, drinking some water, reviewing the readings and my notes. Then I got up to make myself a lovely bowl of cereal.

Klunk. Sploosh.

And, I think to myself, Zuko… What are you doing now?

The Klunk was the sound of the pint glass being tipped over by a furry paw.

The Sploosh was the sound of approximately half a pint of water flowing out of the tipped over pint glass and onto the open keyboard of the laptop.

Now, I make it a practice not to call my cat anything in anger like, oh, say, Monster, or Fiend, or even, Little Sh!t. It’s a habit of mindfulness that helps to keep me from anthropmorhizing him more than I already do, and it keeps my anger and frustration in check. This incident sorely tested my promise to myself, but I was strong and did not engage in any petty name calling.

He is, however, now something a very expensive cat. Officially.

And I have a spiffy new macbook named Museo (Museo, meet the flist). Am investigating an ebay purchase of microsoft office 2004 for mac, as regular purchase is more than the three year full warranty for Museo. (How do these people think you can get by with spiffy audio/visual stuff, and yet no decent text editor? Does no one write anymore? Heathen.)

Have spiffy new laptop, yes. Have next to none of my old data, also yes. This includes Firebolt Ring, among other things. And the last episode of Avatar that I’d been saving for some seriously rainy day.

I have every hope that some wonderful techie type person will be able to salvage the hard drive and burn me copies. “Didn’t you BACK UP?” I can hear you say – well, no, but there was a rather good reason. The CD ROM had stopped working at one point, and I hadn’t gotten around to getting it fixed with Dell. Dell can be rather a pain about these things, and there was always something going wrong with Viktor. Poor Viktor – poor, dead Viktor. ::sniff::

So, in addition to some family health stuff that is going on (Mom had her first round of chemo this week, and I took off from work and went with her), it’s been a hell of a week. Personally, I’m thrilled that I’ve met the practice of mindfulness. I think I’d be an absolute wreck otherwise. As it is, I’m hanging in there, thanks.