Good lord it's 4:18 am and I've been up for a good hour or so. I drank a cup of coffee too late in the evening and even with my sleepy pill I take I think it's disrupted things. Now I'm huddled over my computer with all the lights off. I figured the less lights on the better if I actually want to get some shut eye. It doesn't help that I'm huddled over a screen of light. I never get tired when I'm sitting in front of a computer shining light pretty much directly into my eyes. I think the first key would be to not get on the computer if I'm thinking about trying to sleep -- I definitely won't get tired now. I have noticed that I tend to get a detached experience of myself when I'm on a computer -- I might not even notice I have to go to the bathroom or that my legs are numb or something when I'm sitting in front of a computer. That can't be good.

Anyway, I don't have other lights on so I can't see the keyboard all that well, and one of the cats is sitting next to me and I can see its eyes. And I can hear his cute little tubby breathing, my little pigglesnort! Sidenote: lately I've been enjoying when I go to pet a cat they do this things where right before your hand touches them they squint a little a move their ears down, getting ready for you to pet them, sort of like it's preparing itself for getting some love. Anticipation of cuteness! The other one just jumped up and now I'm surrounded by cats! La! I never grow tired of them and I never ever ever take it for granted how amazing it is that there are such things as animals living with us. Like I can look at the cats and be like, "Oh my god! We have real animals here!" and kind of imagine our kitties as pumas -- I can see that non-domesticatedness in them, if that makes sense. It amazes me and I love it. I would like to get some other pets too, but that's a whole lot of extra work that I don't have the time for right now. But I would love to have a dog. Well, when the kitties move on to their next realm, Joe and I will get a pug. I will mourn the loss of the kitties, so I think I would have to wait a little.

Finally I'm getting to some of the e-mails that seem to pile up super quick, and the internet is slow and sluggish lately, so it takes forever for anything to load. I hear that that seems to be true for a lot of internet processing lately because apparently Netflix is responsible for a lot of the slow down because of all the live streaming. Like I heard (read?) that that's responsible for like 85% of internet traffic or some crazy statistic like that. People! You do NOT need to be watching "Babe 2 In the City" or whatever at 4am. That'll do, pig! So now I have to find something to do while each page takes 27 million hours to load. So that means continually coming back to writing on the blog. That probably slows my computer down.

In other news, I am signed up for I-Tunes alerts when certain recording artists have new things on I-Tunes but the alert reminders are sending me things I have no interest in. This time around the alert is for Olivia Newton-John's "A Celebration In Song" and "You Can't Touch This - Single" by DJ Party. That second one kind of makes sense because being an enjoyer of karaoke I think that one is a karaoke version, and I do remember signing up to get certain types of karaoke alerts, so I guess that sort of makes sense. But why Olivia?

Yesterday at work I was going through a frontlist catalog (as in the catalogs for the next season's releases which I preorder to sell at the store) for the comics/graphic novel publisher Fantagraphics. I saw a solicitation to preorder Tardi's The Arctic Marauder that was described as being an "icepunk adventure." I had to investigate because I assumed that was in some way related to steampunk, which indeed, it looks so. What I really wanted to see was a picture of Vanilla Ice wearing brass goggles but the only thing that Google pulled up when I put in "Vanilla Icepunk" were mashups that fused the aforementioned Mr. Ice with Daft Punk. So much for that.

Bah! It's 5:16am. I can't believe I'm still at this. In 7 hours I go for an art consultation with the tattoo artist who is doing my next tattoo! I am very excited. He's Patrick at Speakeasy Tattoo, and he's doing some botanical illustration stuff on me. He's so popular that I had to book him like a year in advance!

Ah! Joe's awake! Someone to keep me and the cats company.