For those of you who read my blog exclusively for updates on my cats, I will not disappoint you.

Even now Moriarty is splayed across my desk, writhing in strange cat ecstasy as he rubs himself over every available surface, firing off random macros as he falls upon the keyboard. This is a daily event. No work is too important for me not to stop and scratch his ears.

As my apartment is twice the size of the one in Albuquerque, they have plenty of room to run around, explore and play. They usually like to be wherever I am, so they have staked out numerous sleeping locations throughout the office. Alucard enjoys draping himself across the bookshelf or the other end of the desk. They each have a corner on the floor as well. But if they are feeling especially decadent, they will nestle amongst the pillows and blankets of my window nook.

There are plenty of tiny flying bugs and imaginary creatures for them to chase. This is not to say that my apartment is infested. Occasionally a gnat will get in and the cats will pursue it relentlessly.

Another favorite game is Make Loud Banging Sounds In The Next Room And Play Innocent When Drey Comes To Investigate. They always win that game.

My apartment has many doors, so Alucard and Moriarty are confounded daily by their closed mystery. “What could be behind the door? Last time it was a closet, but I’m sure this time will be different. This time it will open upon the fabled catnip forest. If I keep my little cat heart pure, I will soon look upon its leafy bounty.”

For the voyeuristically inclined, I present a thorough investigation of my day, in all of its tedious detail.

Sleep was punctuated by coughing fits every hour or so, as I am in the end stages of defeating a cold. I had survived all of the minibosses and was now facing off against Master Phlem. It is a protracted battle, spread across various arenas, including my sinuses. When I did manage to sleep, I had sexual mini-dreams of someone awesome. I didn’t have much time to sleep in the first place as I had gone out to see my friend’s band perform at Joker’s. She kicked much ass and sang tunes both resonant and prescient. I also witnessed much male posturing by a dude at our table. I’m above such peacockery, but it amuses me to see them dance before her. There was also this other guy that kind of made me want to be gay. Like if she had suggested a threesome, I’d have said “cool.”

So the alarm finally goes off at 6AM. I have it tuned to a radio station I hate, so I will be eager to get up and turn it off. The wacky morning DJs are actually calling a listener and getting her out of bed, which actually seems like a useful service. It reminded me of the alarm in the movie I watched last night, American Astronaut. The astronaut’s alarm blares “What did your father teach you?” over and over until the astronaut answered, “My father taught me to kill the sunflower.” The alarm would then say, “Congratulations, you are now awake.” This was very much like my interactions with Dave when we were roomates in college. He was the astronaut and I was the alarm.

I peed and coughed and herded the cats around. I wrote a provocative email. I fed the cats. Alucard is on a special diet, so I have to sequester him in the bedroom while the other cats eat normal food. He is then free to eat his special bunny and green pea nuggets. They all started out eating it, but it makes Neeka puke. $30 a bag. It’s a real drag.

I may or may not have had some tea. I’ve been drinking Gypsy Cold Care all the time. I think I looked at a few web sites. Gabe’s late on getting the comic up and Tycho’s early for a change.

I get in the shower. I need to think about ordering more conditioner. Is this stuff really working? There’s still a wad of hair in the drain. Getting out of the shower, I decide to postpone putting the waffles in the toaster until right before I have to brush my teeth. Defeats the purpose otherwise. Then I use The Device. I bought The Device a few weeks ago when I was ready to shoot myself rather than suffer another morning of hacking up snot due to the cold weather and how it interacts with my throat. The Device helps. Its pulsating jets of salt water ream out my sinuses. This morning I was able to smell the carpet. It’s that good.

The pimple by my nose is almost gone.

Even though my hair is fairly short, it is still not short enough. I tie up a little 1″ ponytail so I can see what it would look like with the back cut off. I will wear this the rest of the day so I can get a feel for it.

I make sure my iPod is all loaded up and then I head out for work. I’m maybe 20 minutes late. It’s okay because I’ve been going in 15 minutes early all week. I’m almost to the freeway when the coughing fit hits me. I pull into a parking lot and cough and choke and vomit. I head back home and cough and vomit some more. I think about eating breakfast again, but decide instead to take some of Amy’s Organic Ravioli with me for lunch. I head back towards work, listening to GeeksOn. They are having a rather heated discussion about copyright and deep linking on web sites. I haven’t heard them so wound up. Peter and Matt are especially intense.

At work there are now too many things for me to do. In addition to ongoing web site redesigns, I am learning CSS, writing articles for the new newsletter, running a batch of find & replace tasks on the site code, making icons, taking over some sites from the other designer, and thinking of new ways to revamp the company’s business model. I have some tea and answer emails. I finish another site. I never noticed how often I have to use the restroom until I started being someplace other than my apartment for extended periods of time.

I find myself thinking of someone awesome and smiling a lot, thinking I might just go for it.

Eventually, 1PM rolls around and I get out of there. I stop at Style America and have the hairdresser cut it even shorter. Sitting in the chair, I am painfully aware of how I am talking about nothing at all with the hairdresser and I am doing it vigorously. I used phrases I didn’t really need to in order to describe the simplest of things. So now I have a wedge cut, like Starbuck.

I listen to GeeksOn on the way home. There is traffic on I-40 as they have decided to do construction on the left lane. There is so much road construction going on around the city that the detours actually lead you into more construction. The Washington overpass is simply gone. There’s some kind of archeological dig happening on the eastbound side of I-40. Central is a nightmare of orange barrels. During one such meandering detour, I drove past the new Uptown, a dazzling array of new stores that once only existed in California.

At home there is no good email or regular mail. I file my taxes. I’m getting a refund for the first time in like forever. I already spent it on a new movie screen. For lunch I reheat the gnocchi I made last night, but it tastes like ass. Nothing like Saggio’s. I decide to rejoin the GeeksOn forums. I was gone for about a week, nursing a bruised ego. I had made a valentine for Lisa Lassek, building it from bits of Wonderfalls and Firefly footage she had edited. They called me a stalker and that hurt. It was a cool valentine. I get caught up on the forums and then write a few emails.

Then I started writing this blog entry.

I always have the weirdest, most intense dreams when I wake up for a bit in the middle of the night and then try to go back asleep. I awoke at 4 and didn’t really get back to sleep until around 6 or so. What made this dream so realistic, I think, was the fact that I was dreaming inside of the dream and then woke up.

The dream inside the dream was a full-sensory, super realistic sexual dream. I really thought I was having sex. But then I woke up into this other dream where I was in a new apartment. I was really freaked out by the sex dream and was really disoriented. I kept seeing this strange pattern,a network of black, shattered lines against bright white. It is something I could probably make in Photoshop. In the dream, I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror and saw the pattern in the veins in my right eye. It was bloodshot, but just in one spot, like a blemish on my eye. Then the pattern glowed out of my chest, like there was a flashlight under my skin projecting it. It throbbed out of my forehead too. As I moved through the apartment, the pattern shone out from the dark corners. I looked out the window and tree branches against the moon formed the pattern. I went outside to get some air. I saw the pattern in the shrubs backlit by low lamps.

Back inside the apartment, I got hungry so went to check the fridge. It was loaded with food. Then I remembered that a bunch of people had been there earlier today while I was gone at work or school or whatever I did in the dream. I grabbed some pizza and began eating as I walked around the new apartment. It was actually a small house. The details of everything were so fleshed out. Two of the rooms looked like they were under construction, with piles of debris in the center. I heard something in another room, so I went to investigate. The floor was covered with mice and ants. My cats were flipping out, chasing the mice around. Three of the mice were balanced on each other’s shoulders, doing some kind of circus trick, when Kallista leapt at them, spinning in midair to grab the top one and run off with it. Moriarty was trying to swallow one whole. The scene was so incredible that I had to get a picture of it. I found my cell phone on the kitchen counter, but when I flipped it open, I realized it was someone else’s phone.

Then I remembered that I was sharing the house with someone else. The shadowy house suddenly grew light and began to populate itself with the family I was staying with. Eddie Cibrian, an actor from a movie I watched last night, walked in and began to chastize me for leaving the kitchen in such a messy state. All of his (I can’t remember the word for really fancy food) had grown a thick mold over it because I had left it out on the counter. I tried to explain that it had been the people here before and that I hadn’t had time to clean the house yet. Later I startled his wife who still wasn’t used to me living there. I kept referring to Eddie as “Russell,” his character on “Invasion.”

And that’s all I remember.

Just before 6:30AM this morning I was awakened by banging on my door. When I asked who it was, I was informed it was the police. Sure enough, there was what appeared to be a SWAT team huddled in the small hallway outside my door. They burst in, sweeping my apartment with their assault shotguns and pistols. They had armor and everything. It was like something out of Rainbow Six.

They got me up against a wall (my movie screen, actually) and started searching my apartment. They kept calling me Mr. Greene, which was the name of my landlord. I was concerned that my cats might get out the open door and I told them so, but no one seemed to care. They didn’t frisk me. I guess they could see I wasn’t packing heat in my undershorts. Well, you know what I mean.

Then this severe black dude right out of a movie comes up to me and asks, “Where does your landlord live and don’t give me no bullshit because we know he lives here.” I told him the landlord didn’t live here but his brother lived across the hall. I could see them searching my bedroom and bathroom and closet and kitchen. No, no meth lab in there, boys. Just to be thorough, they tore the lid off my House of Whack game box and checked in there too.

Then they decided to try the door across the hall. RB, my neighbor, asked several times who it was and said he was naked. They said they didn’t mind and then burst through *his* door. There was RB, a nice friendly kind of guy, all naked and up against his kitchen counter. They said they had a warrant for his arrest. One of the police asked if they should take me in too, but they decided not to.

I can still hear them over there, doing something. I’m afraid to open the door and look.

ADDENDUM: I couldn’t stand not knowing, so I opened the door just now. RB was seated out on the front steps, handcuffed, under the watchful eye of a police officer. RB looked up at me and gave a rueful grin as if to say “Ah, well.” I told him I had called his brother. The police guy said it was best if we didn’t talk to each other. I saw into RB’s open apartment. There were huge bags of pot on the floor along with large scales. Ah, well, indeed. I feel bad for RB; he seems like such a nice guy. He installed my swamp cooler.

Alucard just ran into the room carrying something which he dropped and began chewing on. It was my wallet. Not only that but he had managed to pull out all the cash. Thankfully he left it in the bedroom, being interested only in playing with the wallet itself.

The dream still lingers in my memory despite the fact I didn’t write it down immediately after waking.

I and another person (my sister perhaps) were being held hostage by a gang of terrorists. They kept us under heavy guard inside a warehouse. We seemed to have freedom of movement inside the warehouse as we could wander about all we liked. I had all my cats with me and I spent a great deal of time making sure they didn’t run away. There was a young girl being held hostage as well and I hung out with her for a while. She had a pet ferret that had given birth in a hole in the wall beside one of the huge warehouse doors. I asked if perhaps I could have one of the baby ferrets. She said they’d be ready for adoption in about a year. At one point my cat Moriarty grabbed her ferret by the scruff of the neck and ran off with it. We got the ferret away unharmed. They were just playing, I guess.

The guards came to collect us and take us to a banquet hall where we would be executed by a firing squad. I stood at the head table, surrounded by men with machine guns. A huge door opened at the end of the hall and figures clad in grey camo gear walked in. One of the guards near me wondered who they were. I informed him they were ninjas armed with uzis. A battle between my captors and the ninjas ensued. I took that opportunity to slip out the back.

I found myself in the backstage area of a large theater. I ducked around crates, dangling ropes, scrims and backdrops. One of the guards was hunting me. I made my way past a very long series of backdrops and sheets, thinking my pursuer would lose track of me. I looked back to see that an opening had been blown through the scrims, making a sort of long corridor of curtains. At the far end was an immense genie with a rotund belly, lying on the ground. I realized that the genie had farted and created the corridor.

The camera then pulled out of first person to third person, revealing that I had become an animated character much like Aladdin or the Prince of Persia. I leaped out of the corridor and into the ocean where I was immediately swallowed by a fish only slightly larger than I. The fish spat me up on the shore of an island.

That’s all I remember.

This morning I awoke to find that one or more of my cats had successfully stalked the elusive gold tassel often found clinging to new curtains hanging in bedroom windows. As I slept, the golden tassel was pulled from its safe perch and dragged out to the living room where it was properly mauled. The remains of the tassel were found stashed inside the hunter’s den, which had at one time been a table. Only piles of gold string testified to the existence of this rare beast. Good job, cats.

See how my living room is vigilantly guarded by my cybernetically-enhanced sentry cats? That window would be a poor choice as an infiltration point. That’s Kallista on the right. She’s frothing with a sick madness that I wouldn’t want to encounter on some dark night with my leg halfway through the window.

He keeps many secrets.