After many years of moaning about LJ going bad, and bitching about DW's T&Cs I've finally got around to making a new blog; thanks to ikiwiki.

Eventually I intend to migrate all my old LJ posts here but ikiwiki currently only supports unthreaded comments so there's a SMOP to handle there.

There is an LJ tracker for the feed at circle_feed.

Note to Cat: This is a Sink.

The primary purpose of sinks is to be receptacles for water, not for cats.

I was looking forward to going on a steam train day trip on Sunday, to celebrate getting olderer (it happens every year, tedious isn't it); but I've had notification that it has been postponed because rail engineering work near Ipswich has overrun so Network Rail can't allocate it the required paths.

Sigh.

Oh well, hopefully it'll be fun when it does eventually happen.

According to the BBC I'm in Saudi Arabia today...

Also, is that a "smartquote" inspired mistake there, Auntie?

We had to take Solo to the vet this morning :-(.

Last night, at about 7pm, she ate a piece of string about 2’ long. String is bad inside cats (and other pets!) because they can't digest it and it can make hoops and hooks that get caught on the insides and cause all kinds of pain and doom.

Fortunately the vet said that Solo is OK so far; but we have to keep her seperated from the other cats, with her own litterbox, so we can check if the string has come out; and phone them up if there are any of various kinds of distress. And we have another appointment to get her prodded again tomorrow morning.

If we'd thought to phone the emergency vet line then they might have been able to get her to vomit the string up; if we'd got her to them within about an hour; but we didn't do that sadly.

All the cats are quite distressed by the separation.

I spotted Mini Metro on the Humble Bundle yesterday and in a fit of trying to reduce stress tried playing it last night.

It clearly needs some work (and documentation) but it's a fun distraction right now. So far this is the best I've managed which scored 2470 passengers delivered:

Solo went to the vet again this morning, and was showing no negative signs; then about two hours ago she vomited up a bolus containing most or all of the string. So hopefully everything is now well; although she's finally feeling a bit sorry for herself.

I've finally won a game of Crusader Kings II. That is got to 1453 without either losing or giving up because I've been reduced to a single boring county somewhere.

I started off as Dublin (possibly the easiest independent county in 1066) and ended up as this (Irish) Empire of Alba (total score 167024, which I note purely for my future reference):

Sadly Norway took the duchy of Orkney back by getting the Duke of it elected king near the end of the game and there's a couple of enclaves in Hispania. Also it annoys me that when I create the the Empire level title my nice green Ireland colour becomes an ugly red.

I suspect if I ever get EU4 this will make a very OP starting position. Or I'd guess Lithuania or Pisa might make a playable start other than Alba.

Having won as a "normal" Catholic monarch, my next go is going to be trying as a Norse Republic (I've hand edited a Year 867 start to add this, based in Iceland...)