Moving Day - T plus 38 days and counting

---I know.. I'm lagging on the pictures, I am. I know. I've been looking forwarding to talking endlessly about the million and a quarter things i did to the place, so.. soon. for reals.

---I had a housewarming party on friday, which was cool, everyone liked the place.. but if any of you remember that rectangular silver lava lamp thing i had that wasn't really a lava lamp (it had small square metal flakes suspended in a mystery oil of some sort & they swirled around with the heat convection from the lightbulb beneath the bottle of oil/flakes - I had one of these as a kid, maybe you or one of your neighbors did?) .. I rarely used the lamp in SF and never in new york soooo... i decided to change that - I found a great spot in the kitchen for it where it lit a cool reddish light onto the kitchen for the party. On to the fun part: Despite having formerly used the lamp dozens of times and having forgotten about it a few times even (leaving it on all night) ... it seems that it chose mid-party for an excellent time for..... the oil to overheat, expand, and blast the cork and metal lid into the ceiling (with enough force to take a small chunk out of the ceiling) and somehow, shower ALL of the oil and metal flakes (they actually turned out to be transparent plastic, who knew?) ... ALL ... OVER... every-one. and everything. and every wall and every glass and dish and plate and person and flapjack. (whom we cleaned off - he was a-ok in 2 mins time). seriously. the whole event was almost more amazing than it was scary or frustrating - the uniformity of the spray, the sudden shock of it all during a party, the randomness of it choosing right then to blast off, that no glass broke & no one was injured, etc. sadly, the new paint job on the kitchen is pretty much ruined (i tried scrubbing the walls 3 times the next morning - always fun with a mild hangover) so I'll need to repaint. aside from all that.. the party and the apartment were, are, super great.

---Another fun fact: I ended up using all the crap Elizabeth and I had gotten at Ikea & elsewhere for my last apartment (mostly intended for "the office room" that never really was an office) ... shelves & such mostly but keep an eye out when i send out a link with the pics.. I'll try to note all the stuff i reused from .. i mean.. am now using, not reused. i sorta treated it as a challenge to find a perfect spot for all that stuff instead of throwing it away.

---State Of The Kitties Union: the kitties, minus the oiling, are doing super great too. flapjack has benefited much from the Iams weight control food that I've been feeding them for the past few years, hambone just eats 3 times the amount he should and remains on par to reach jabba the hut fatty burrito stages by.. oh about June. FJ has gone headbutt crazy lately.. you don't even have to be awake anymore to be forcibly prompted into paying attention to him. HB is still crack-addicted to head scratches since the whole universe revolves around any human he sees eventually realizing that scratching his head is what they really wanna be doing. i mean, really... what did I do to them to make them like this? note to new kitten owners: withhold some degree of love/attention/headscratching or your cat(s) will be touch junkies, chasing the head scratch dragon all the way to Perpetual-IndulgenceTown. other than that.. sorry, including that, they are still the same'o same'o bundles of fun and annoyance. I go from loving them unconditionally to imagining felinicide, sometimes within the space of 2 seconds. OH! they are excellent cockroach hunters (and eaters, thank you boys for not making me deal with your kills). i know i shouldn't want to have the occasional small cockroach in the apartment, but when it provides such fun for them and let's them use their hunting and chase skills, who am I to argue? let's see... what else? flapjack always seems to looks at me suspiciously. and accusingly. if you could somehow tell him to stop it, that would be great. it's weirding me out.