It's not THAT big a mess

In absolute terms, it's really not very big. Even if you restrict it to the universe of messes which I personally created this month, it's not that impressive.

Still, all things considered, in hindsight, I probably should have re-potted the plants somewhere other than on the kitchen table.

(Don't worry, dear: I've already cleaned up. Potting soil vacuums up very easily.)

Words are strange sometimes. . .

So, I was looking up information about gerbera daisies, and a site stated that they were "endemic to South Africa."

This sounded, to me, like someone didn't know what "endemic" meant.

But I was wrong. "Endemic" was precisely the word they meant to use. See, I knew that a disease was "endemic" if it was always present in a population. And I'd only ever encountered the word in epidemiology. But it turns out that it also means, in botany and zoology, "exclusively native". See, the difference between "native" and "endemic" is that a plant or animal can be native to more than one place. But a plant or animal that is native to exactly one place is "endemic" to that place.

Neat, hunh?

So, why do cats puke?

I bought a spider plant for the house. And I left it on the floor while I was re-potting other stuff, and Boopsie wandered over and started munching happily on it. As spider plants are non-toxic, and apparently delicious, to cats, I didn't worry too much about it.

And then, a couple minutes later, Boopsie walked over to the corner of the room, did that "spinning around and hurking" thing that cats do, and puked up a big spider plant leaf.

Do cats deliberately eat plants as emetics? Or are they just dumb?

I was just looking at the website of one of my favorite restaurants

The Cragie Street Bistrot is a wonderful little French restaurant outside of Harvard Square. It's really, really good food, for cheaper than it has to be. I mean, it's not cheap, but it's nowhere near as expensive as the quality of food would suggest. And they've got neat things like a $35 chef's choice tasting menu which is fantastic.

Anyway, I happened to look at their page on Employment.

And, damn, but if jehanna was 1) planning on moving back to MA anytime soon, and 2) still interested starting her own restaurant -- two statements both of which are currently false -- that sounds like it would be a great kitchen for her.

On birthday candles.

It is my considered opinion that, after a certain age, one should stop doing birthday candles on one's cake in base one -- that is, one candle per year -- and start using binary.

I suggest sixteen as the cutoff point. Up to age sixteen, you can have one candle per year. On your seventeenth birthday, you will have five candles, with only the first and last candles lit. In this manner, even Methuselah would only have required ten candles, had birthday cakes been an antediluvian tradition.