Yesterday I called my great aunt Gert, my father’s mother’s younger sister, on her 94th birthday. She sounded wonderful and we talked about all the cats in my family’s life, including a couple of Siamese cats my parents had before I was born. I realized she has lived more than twice as long as I have, and thought about what I would do if I knew that I had another chunk of years ahead of me equal to the ones behind me. A true mid-life crisis. I can only hope I have inherited her genetic make-up and not that of my parents.

I now have 4 remotes in my bedside table. I’ve tried to condense them down to one “universal” (hah!) remote, but there is apparently no technology that will allow a remote to operate more than one device. I used to have a “universal” remote, which stopped functioning when I got the digital cable box. Now the cable remote refuses to control the TV, despite being reprogrammed with the special TV code multiple times. It also will not form an electronic handshake with the DVD player, since it seems to have been developed back when there was still a debate about Beta vs. VHS. So there are remotes for the cable box, the TV, the DVD player and the stereo, none of which will acknowledge that the others exist. So instead of standards for electronics, we get ever more new gadgets, which do not talk to each other and barely converse with their human owners. Now I want a remote to start my car so that on evenings like this one, when it was well below 30 when I got out of work, it is not physically painful to sit in the cold car for the first 10 minutes or so. Maybe *that* one will turn on the TV too.

This morning when the radio came on and I was reaching for the snooze alarm, I opened my eyes about a millimeter and swore I saw a squirrel on top of the clock. The squirrels have been climbing into the bird feeder because it was placed too close to the bushes when we did some landscaping last summer. The evil little rodents are now invading even my half-waking hallucinations.

TV: The L Word. In L-Word land everyone is very pretty, they have pretty houses and pretty jobs, they tell pretty little lies, have pretty sex, go to pretty (smart) shrinks, frequent a pretty coffee shop, and are more-than-pretty vacuous and shallow. But very pretty eye candy for everyone.