Urgle-murgle mumble

So, when I got to bed after GURPS last night, it was about 3:00 am. I got up at about 7:20 am and even at that, we overslept: I needed to deliver Otis to Phinney Ridge by 8:00 so she could ride with Hi-Lai to a creativity retreat on Whidbey Island. We got her there right on time, and I pointed Renty Red back home (and found my same parking spot). I debated going back to bed, but had to talk to the painters for a little bit, and then slammed a window shut on my finger, so I decided to just stay up and take a nap later.

Yesterday was kind of busy. Otis had work, we went out to lunch and compared our schedules, worked on projects in the afternoon, and before we knew it, it was time to start prepping for the RPG crowd. The game ate up the last six hours of the day, and a couple of the first of this one. It was good to have Otis back around the house again, but it will hard to tell today that she even came home!

Watching the cats this morning, I have decided that much of the time when Selkie chases Mountie around, he's just playing. But sometimes he's not. Unfortunately, Mountie can't seem to tell the difference, and always responds as if it is serious, which sometimes escalates Selkie's play into a real fight. I wish we could all just get along.

I mentioned parking and painters above. The townhouses on the property are all being repainted; right now the crew is in the scraping mode. A genie lift and a scissor lift are parked out back, and the remaining parking spaces are taken up by painting supplies, so the residents all have to compete out on the street for a while. We also have to keep our windows shut while the painters work on each of our units; right now, they are on the back of my place, so we get the fun of no cross-ventilation. The work is not supposed to last much more than a week (although I think that is optimistic), and then we'll have nice, new, pretty paint.

Well, it looks like the Pluto lobby has been tirelessly working behind the scenes since 2006, when the former-ninth planet was demoted. Those wacky guys and gals of the International Astronomical Union Committee on Small Body Nomenclature have proposed, and the full organization has accepted, the naming of trans-neptunian bodies that meet certain criteria as plutoids. As currently defined, this august category includes just Pluto itself and Eris, the planet who, going under her unofficial name Xena, stirred up the whole controversy in the first place by seeming to become the "tenth planet" when she was discovered in 2003. As we now know, not only didn't Xena/Eris make the cut, but she took Pluto down with her, both getting assigned as "dwarf planets," leaving us with only eight proper planets.*

It's a small comfort to us plutophiles, but it's nice to see the little guy back in the limelight again, if only briefly. All of us here at HKC send Pluto and Eris our best wishes for continued success together in the new endeavors, and remind them that it's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog.

*Ceres is another dwarf planet but it isn't a plutoid because it's not trans-neptunian, it's in between Mars and Juptier. Yeah, go figure.