After several days of temperatures hovering around 108 million degrees or so it's finally back down in the 90s. Today there is even a breeze and it's a little bit muggy. (By "muggy" I mean relative humidity has gone from 29% to 37%, which would make anyone from the East coast fall down laughing.) Hard to sleep when it's this hot and I always have wacky dreams when I sleep with my feet uncovered anyway, so haven't been getting a whole lot of rest lately.

On Sunday I went to the Oakland Zoo with Birgit, Amanda and Jared. Here I am trying in vain to interest Jared in a monkey. He's not buying it.

Mike is off on a Disney cruise this week so I have the office mostly to myself. Our private screening of Night Watch at the Roxie last week went mostly ok, and my last-minute desperation tchotchke idea of red mini maglites with a single black feather wired to them with the game logo went over very well.

Have made it to the next most infuriating level of Luxor, Inundation of the Nile. At this point I'm just saving the game files in a temp folder to reload when I lose so I'm not forced to repeat the beginning of a stage over and over and over. A little more labor intensive, but it keeps my blood pressure down.

Current obsession: BLTs--sometimes with avocado (no, not steamed ones) and sometimes not--especially when watching the World Cup.

Current reading: TS Eliot and Robert Shaler's book about the forensic process of identifying 9/11 victims. In kind of a downer phase, I guess.

Note to self: when lighting candles in a decorative grouping atop a table, light the tallest candle first. Starting with the shortest candle leads to hot fingers. Also, do not lean right over the candles if hair is not in a ponytail.

I am an EAD-encoding fiend these days. EAD is Encoded Archival Description, an SGML- and XML-compliant markup language for publishing finding aids electronically, and the class I'm taking this summer. It's loads of fun, and once you get going you want to markup everything in sight.

This morning for breakfast I had a lemon ginger scone and Koosh had a large mouse. It's the fourth one she's eaten since Memorial Day (fifth one caught--I threw one away when she wandered off to take a nap), and for whatever reason she feels it's necessary to bring them into the house to consume. Usually she eats everything or leaves only what we call "the bean," a kidney bean-shaped purple bit that is probably the stomach. This time she left a foot and an unidentified grayish innard. It was a pretty large mouse and she's a small cat, after all. There had been a little lull in mouse meals for several days while the nesting scrub jays took over the backyard and wouldn't let Koosh out of the house. Somehow they sensed Isis isn't really a threat and left her alone for the most part, but Koosh was under continuous avian bombardment for about a week.

Current reading: EAD: Context, Theory, and Case Studies, EAD Tag Library, and Seamus Heaney (while marking up his poems in my head).

So I was playing Luxor again yesterday because the client wants us to be "more creative" with the promotions and I was trying to generate some ideas. Mostly what I came up with were some extremely inventive swear words. But I finally did it: I beat Khufu's Revenge. With three lives leftover, no less.

During the hiatus from Luxor I worked my way through both 7 Wonders of the Ancient World (the less said about that the better) and Big Kahuna Reef. Believe it or not, I've actually gotten a lot of work done too. We've been unbelievably busy, in fact. June used to be the slow month in the videogame world, but those days are over.

This morning I hauled myself out of bed to watch England run all over Paraguay. At least this World Cup the matches start at somewhat reasonable times compared to the last in 2002 which had us all either getting up at 4am or taking afternoon naps to stay up 'til 2.

One thing I will miss about living in Danville is going to Peet's and the farmers market early Saturday morning. It's become sort of a routine to go grab a coffee and watch the cyclists with their skinny legs and tiny butts clomp around in their cycling shoes and jeer about who "bonked," pat all the dogs, and then go pick up some spinach paranthas and cilantro chutney from the surly Indian family. The tamale people were late this morning so I broke with tradition and got some sausages instead.

Somebody was trying to tell me the other day that Miss Vickie's Lime & Black Pepper potato chips are definitely superior to Lay's. They're supposedly "limier." I had lunch at Erik's Deli today and took a closer look at the Miss Vickie's bag. Among many other interesting things, it says right there on the back, "manfactured for Frito-Lay, Inc." My guess is that Miss Vickie's chips are definitely identical to the ones you get at Safeway.

Had to stop playing Luxor because I noticed every time I finished a game my eyes really hurt. Odd, but probably for the best. Instead I'm now obsessed with a new game that's not really a game at all, but ridiculously fun anyway: FindYourSpot.com. You answer a bunch of questions about where you like to live and it spits out a long list of towns and cities that supposedly match. For some bizarre reason it insists I would love Little Rock and Fayetteville, but I have a sneaking suspicion the Arkansas chamber of commerce has something to do with that because two other people who took the quiz got that too even though they're other results were totally different.

Top 3 of the moment:
1. Black Pepper & Lime potato chips
2. Sandalwood incense
3. Lost