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Woke up in a terrible mood this morning, compounded by the air conditioner not really working* and M fretting about it while I tried to get 20 minutes more of sleep after my alarm went off (so much for the morning's planned yoga). I got over seven hours of sleep last night, which is a little unusual, but I think I need to get either 6 or 8+ hours to function, 7 just hits my rem cycles wrong or something. In retrospect, I very much wish i'd just gotten up when i was supposed to and done the yoga.

*we shouldn't have had the a/c on at all last night really--our model relies on the air outside being hot to cause the condensation in the coils that then provides the cooled air to be blown into the room. At least that is my not very educated theory.

Well. On a cheerier note, I've seen a family of swans a few mornings this week on my way to Alewife. They've been hanging out on a sandbar in the Little River when the bike path crosses it, two adults and two fluffy soft cygnets. If I stop to look at them, at least one of the adults will turn and stare at me until I leave. Such good parents. And one has to smile at the ugly ducklings with the promise of their future gloriousness standing beside them.

I just read Cory Doctorow's Eastern Standard Tribe. It's funny, so much of it is so familiar-sounding that I thought of it more as slightly speculative fiction than as science fiction per se. A lot of the ideas were provocative, but I felt let down by the pacing and plotting of the book, as though it was really a framework that had yet to be fleshed out. There's an extended sequence in which the main character experiences excruciating back problems, the entire point of which seems to be to explain why his back will go pop, without any serious consequences, later in the story. Well, I guess it was also supposed to show how Art built his trust in Linda so quickly, but I didn't really buy it. Anyway, I am glad I read it, I'll most likely check out his other books, but it definitely needed improvement. If anybody would like to borrow it after my glowing review, you're welcome to it.

Speaking of Canadians, happy Canada Day to my Canadian friends!

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A Canada Day comic, with dinosaurs!

Having done some research into air conditioners, I now know that air conditioners freeze over inside if it is too cool outside, and then stop producing cool air. Which seems a little contradictory, seeing as how you'd think that something full of ice would be cool, but anyway now I know. The mysteries of evaporation and condensation...

The ferrets met with the vet dentist this week, not last week. Their teeth do indeed need cleaning, Seti's almost as much as Ronan's, but they aren't bad--the dentist said this is when he likes to catch them. I do have to get better about brushing their teeth in the future. I do not look forward to that; hopefully they will like the chicken-flavored toothpaste you can get for pets. Though actually now that I think about it, I should find out if you can get fruity-flavored toothpaste for babies, the ferrets might like something like that better. The dentist said even brushing with no paste will make an important difference, but I still have to get the weasels to sit still for it. I'm not very good at scruffing them, because I don't like asserting dominance over them when it's not necessary from a ferrety point of view. Anyway, they have a teeth-cleaning appointment for September, but we'll be on the wait list for cancellations in the meanwhile. At least they're small, so if somebody cancels one dog, my two ferrets can take its place. I'm not happy about the anesthesia side of things, but it's unavoidable, and certainly worth the risk as compared to painful tooth decay and gum disease and infection.

I had my annual check-up yesterday. The doctor--I started typing vet there--says I make her job easy by being healthy. I wasn't happy with the results of my annual weighing, but I do know that my measurements haven't changed much over the last 2-3 years, so I tell myself it's muscle mass and try to move along.