….but don’t necessarily get used to it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s been ages since I posted anything. I’ve been working like a 3-legged sled dog in the Iditarod, so if you’ve been missing the opportunity to bask in the glow of my dulcet prose, that’s just too baddy Daddy, so saddy.

In addition to cranking out this year’s catalog, of which I am fairly proud (renowned mushroom photographer and friend of FP Taylor Lockwood emailed the office to tell us that he liked the cover so much that he tacked it to the wall of his office, which is high praise indeed), two weeks ago I and my IT cohort moved the electronic guts of our call center from its long-entrenched farm setting to a proper GMP-compliant business park, sporting such uptown features as actual conditioned power and real business-class Internet access. This was a serious upgrade from our previous digs, and took a mammoth effort on the part of the entire staff to accomplish. And yet all of our preparation seemed to pay off in a move that went way, waaaaayyyy smoother than I think any of us expected. We’re still ironing out the wrinkles, but so far, so very much gooder (“more goodly”?) than it might have been.

Outside of work (is there really anything outside of work anymore? I simply cannot tell) I’ve been indulging in a few domestic projects. One chief one was to finally address the problem posed by my cat’s constant desire to sit on my lap while I work. I can plompf myself down in one of our overstuffed chairs in front of the TV for hours and she won’t want anything to do with me, but sit in front of a computer keyboard and all of a sudden I am the cat’s pajamas….or in this case, the cat’s Snugli. She first tries to ensconce herself between me and my slide-out keyboard, resulting in the grandpappy of all PEBKAC errors. When that fails to actualize her goals she’ll most often attempt to perch herself between the back of my chair and the back of….well, my back. This works for about three minutes until she begins her inexorable scootch downward, prying open an ever-widening gap between me and my chair and forcing me to hunch forward in increasingly greater discomfort.

After about a week of contemplation and another week of testing, retesting, scrapping and restarting and re-re-retesting I finally perfected a carpeted wooden platform that clamps to the back of my chair, allowing Flit to rest sprawled out directly behind me or, just as often, plastered right up against my shoulders:

Took her about a week to get completely used to it, but now whenever I sit down to work she immediately gravitates to “the catform”, which is a great load off both my mind and my back.

Margaret and I also just barely managed to pull ourselves out of our stress-induced hermitage to throw our world-famous annual Pumpkin Pogrom, which we held last night. About 15 of our friends came over to eat chili and carve Jack-O’-Lanterns. Apologies to you if you were not on the invite list, but this is the kind of event that can really suffer if there is too great a participant-to-table-space ratio.

The hands-down winner this year was JauntHie’s zucchini slug, with baby pumpkins for eyes on Cyalume stalks and blinking LED spots on its back.

Thanks to everyone who participated.

Lastly, if you have not yet seen MC Frontalot’s new music video “Critical Hit” of the most recent album Solved, I highly recommend that you do so, provided you are a fan of geek culture. Many thanks to YakBoy for turning me on to The Front.

[vimeo width=”400″ height=”235″]http://vimeo.com/28173775[/vimeo]

That is all. More dispatches to follow as they become available. Please return to your homes and places of businesses.