Pillow has been missing for twelve days. *snif*

I wish I’d asked the vet to check his chip, when he was in for a shot last month.

…

Pillow brought home a little brown snake, about a foot long – the size of the biggest earthworms I’ve ever seen. I put it out in the grass, for the cycle to begin anew.

A few hours later, as I was composing the above in my head, I saw the same(?) snake in the living-room again, now dead from obvious trauma.

Around noon the other day, I saw a steady stream of moths flying north along the BART track: not dense enough to call them a flock, let alone a swarm, but enough that I always had a few of them in view. (Maybe they do that every day; I wouldn’t know.) When I came back a few hours later they were gone.

In the dawn’s early light, Pillow (a cat) often sits at the one window that’s near a tree, seeming to watch the birds. He sometimes makes a queer choking noise, like kekekekek; Dad says his cat sometimes makes the same noise. I conjecture that they’re trying to sound like a bird, though I wouldn’t have thought their little brains could conceive of such a trick.

We’re miffed that our favorite catfood, Fancy Feast, has apparently changed its formula: both Fluffie and Pillow, who formerly ate it eagerly, now turn up their noses. To our relief, they’re usually content with Trader Joe’s tuna.

Whenever I get settled in my big chair, Pillow (the junior cat) is all over me; but when I’m in bed he almost never comes within reach. So I was surprised when, on waking in the night, I found him sitting on the bed, in the spot most convenient to my hand, waiting to be tickled.

Having spent the previous night in hospital (where many tests found no cause for my chest pain), I thought of Oscar.

Tsk. A current radio spot gives the web address “wachovia dot com backslash new”.

Meanwhile, what’s new with me?

I’m reading Coxeter’s Non-Euclidean Geometry in the hope that it will give me the stuff I’ve sought in vain in other books: the actual formulae for coordinate transforms under the various isometries, rather than useless taunts like “a matrix with such-and-such properties” (which I don’t know how to recognize let alone generate). But it uses so many cryptic notations that I’m afraid I won’t understand the formulae if they do show up. Exercises would help. [Later: No such luck. It barely touches on H3 at all.]

My car’s starter burned itself out. Luckily this happened at home on my day off; a few hours later, all was well. My housemate pointed out that my last bit of car trouble (a dead battery) also happened at home. What a well-behaved car!

Pillow, the junior cat, has been smelling of smoke lately; and we don’t know where he’s pooping. It would seem he has found a second home, though that’s odd since he consistently flees human strangers. Perhaps he was seduced with catnip.