I'm sleepy, but I'm not in bed yet.

See, I have to give Lis a fifteen-minute or half-hour head start.

Apparently, last night, I was not only snoring bad enough to keep her awake, but one of my feet was twitching enough to wake her up, too.

At one point, she, apparently, whacked me to wake me up to stop snoring. I told her I was awake, but didn't stop snoring. She asked how I was snoring when I was awake, and I said that I snored when I was awake.

I have no recollection of this whatsoever, and suspect I was talking in my sleep. While snoring.

So it's only fair that I give Lis a head-start. It is to be hoped that, if she's enough asleep, my snoring won't wake her.

If I lost 30 or 40 pounds, I'd either stop snoring, or, at least, I'd have a less-impressive resonance chamber to give it that deep echo-y bass that is so impressive.

'Course, I come by my snoring honestly -- I remember my father woke me up with HIS snoring once -- and I was sleeping two rooms away.

Boopsie is dying

We're going to be taking Boopsie to the animal hospital to be put to sleep. She is just staggering a couple steps, and collapsing, and just trying to make herself comfortable. We're petting her and singing stupid songs to her and crying a lot.

Part of me feels weird feeling this much grief, given how many of you are in the process of losing parents right now. And, for that matter, that she's had 16 wonderful years, and isn't really suffering -- she's just weakening to the point of death.

I love her so much.

It's done

The Woburn Referral Animal Hospital treats people and animals with care and respect.

It took just a few seconds. They put the barbiturates in, and Boopsie was gone in just a couple seconds. Which means that she was already very weak and ready to go. She was obviously not holding on to life very hard.

We know it was the right decision, and we feel grief. And we know that the grief is appropriate and will pass in time. Right now, it's just a matter of feeling what we feel.

Don't feel bad for us -- we are dealing with it well. Which means that we're crying a lot, which is what "dealing with it well" means.

If you want to feel bad that you either never met Boopsie or that you won't see her again, that's fine, of course. But you don't have to feel bad on our behalf. We are grieving as is appropriate and good.

Weight loss ponderings

I know of only two things which have a real track record of helping with weight loss -- amphetamines and tobacco.

Those both have dangers. But the medical establishment assures us that being overweight also has dangers.

So it seems to me that someone really ought to compare the relative dangers of:
1. Being overweight
2. Smoking regularly, to the extent that it helps suppress appetite enough to lead to weight loss
3. Taking amphetamines to the extent that it helps to suppress appetite and increase metabolism enough to lead to weight loss
4. Bariatric surgery

If I worked for the tobacco industry, I would commission studies to quantify these things, and find a way to demonstrate that smoking was healthier than not smoking.

Of course, if I worked for the tobacco industry, I would have been working for marijuana legalization since the late eighties when it became clear that the anti-marijuana rhetoric also hit tobacco (and, in fact, was MORE true of tobacco than of marijuana). In any case, if it WAS legalized, the tobacco industry had all the agricultural, manufacturing, and distribution to benefit.