It looks like our year-old cat Albin is dead. We have no concrete proof of it, but well... that's what it looks like at the moment. Thursday I'm told by my brother that one of his friends had seen a runover white cat further down the high traffic road from where we live. Thursday night my mom tells me one of the people at her job had seen and told her the same.

I got my shoes on and went looking for this alleged runover cat but found nothing. Saturday one of Jimmy's friends tells him that someone came and asked his grandmother (who lives close to our neighbourhood) if she was the owner of a white cat they'd found runover. And, well... Albin is an outdoors cat, but has never been gone longer than two days, and is still missing.

I think that's all I want to say about that.

Friday was Midsummer's Eve (hence library was closed) - one of the few Swedish holidays I really like. I didn't have anything special planned (as usual), but I like the concept of celebrating midsummer solstice (even though that was several days before - we put the holiday so that it always fall on a friday, I think) and I have plenty of weird memories of hopping around the maypole singing about frogs.

Well, as I said, I didn't have much planned. My mom and brother were both going to be home with me (my brother was celebrating with his friends on grandma's balcony), and we were all going to barbecue.

Originally I was to go with my mom to the park and have a picknick with some aunts and cousins and even my grandmother, but when I was told that me and my mother would have to walk to the park because "there was no room left in either of the cars" I got so angry I refused to go. On my way home I met my mother walking out there.

Dammit, just writing about it makes me mad all over again - it just pisses me off that relatives would invite people to something and then not even have the courtesy to make a second drive to pick us up and take us there - it's not as if it wouldn't just take 8 minutes, you know. Argh. But anyways.

While my mom was gone I fought with my brother to use kitchen appliances and cuttlery and told him a hundred times that I didn't want his advice even though I'd never barbecued things myself before and he's a cook. Eventually I got it all done, allll by myself, and I was so proud.

I cut 2 corn cobs into round pieces and rolled around in oil and spices, along with one green and one red bellpepper I had cut into large pieces, and put on the grill. Then I filled 6 mushroom (champignon) caps with some blue cheese and put lots of regular cheese on top of that and put on the grill to melt. I grilled a few veggy hot dogs for me and two for my mom, and set the table on our balcony so things would be ready for her - Jolt cola and potato salad and regular salad with italian dressing and roasted bread and everything.

And then I ate two plates and my mom ate one mushroom cap, half a hotdog, two bites of corn and 3 pieces of bread. No, no. She told me it all tasted great. It was just that she had eaten a lot at the picknick (you'd think "well don't eat and save yourself for my barbecue!" would kind of be an indication not to eat a lot at the picknick) and I of course got upset and pissy.

Well... I was just moping and hissing my best when Ninnie called. She wanted to invite me to her family's midsummer celebration that evening, and I said... well duh, yes. See, they own several vacation facilities, so the celebration would be at one of them, along with various summer guests and live music and things.

Around 7 p.m. she picked me up and drove me there and well - I could write a lot about what happened but I don't really want to. It's very easily summed up in "had a lot of fun, got a bit drunk, ate a lot of strawberries, made out with a tall, blonde heavy metal viking with long hair, laughed a lot, drove around with Ninnie a lot, came home and went to bed.

It really was as simple as that.

• No, I didn't know the guy before.
  
• Yes, his name started with a D. I'm under a strange curse where I am constantly surrounded by people with names beginning with a D.
  
• No, I'm probably not going to see the guy again.
  
• No, there's no special reason - it was just one of those fun things.
  
• No, I was not flashing him/people. I wasn't very drunk at all.
  
• Yes, he was cute. *grin* In fact, I was a bit nasty to him at first because goodlooking people annoy me.
  
• No, I did not have to talk him into doing anything, like my poor New Years Eve cowboy.

I finally re-designed the intro pages - let me know if you think it all stinks. (Click Here to look.)

At one point I got so frustrated I nearly gave up on the whole thing, but then I found a neat book (Creating Killer Web Sites) which didn't actually have much in it that I used (not because it was bad, duh, but because I knew most of what was in it, or it wasn't applicable) but made me wanna work some more on it, and I discovered that the author had created the font I was frippling with earlier (Tekton) through his website and uh, I e-mailed some fan mail and actually got a reply.

I dunno. It was just fun. Also, I got a reply from the bus person I harass back in Chapel Hill, and well, botht their name' "David" and the mails' were next to each other, so my mailbox just looked pure funny when I opened it this morning.

Also, the movie The Winterguest, directed by yummie Alan Rickman and starring Emma Thompson and her irl mother, Phyllida Law, and well, it was simply beautiful. The colours, the story, the works. Simply beautiful. As was the end credit song sung by Liz Fraser, to my surprise :)

One of the Darwin Award winners:

- PHILLIPSBURG, NJ. An unidentified 29 year old male choked to death on a sequinned pasty he had orally removed from an exotic dancer at a local establishment. "I didn't think he was going to eat it," the dancer identified only as "Ginger" said, adding "He was really drunk."