Always forget to add this part:
Listening: Gregorian Chants
Reading: Holy Blood, Holy Grail
Drinking: nothing right now, but I'm gonna get myself a cuppa tea soon. No liquor for a bit. My stomach hasn't been too happy with me.
Playing: Klonoa for the Game Boy Advance, Metroid II for the Game Boy, and still Advance Wars, the finest GBA game on the market. (Not that I don't love Castlevania or Tony Hawk with an equal passion, mind you.) Still awaiting Golden Sun, the last game I really worked on intently. Everything else I've been working on feels like I only have a partial influence on writing, and I'm starting to get a little frustrated at how little actual, first-draft editing I'm doing. I'm doing the last-minute cleanup work, and that's not terribly satisfying right now.

Still trying to post regularly, still letting my lack of inertia stop me altogether.

My dog is doing better. Her vertebra will never heal, not in her remaining lifetime. She's going to stay on painkillers, though. My father is opposed to euthanizing animals. Well, I think he's opposed to euthanasia altogether. It's a strange thing to discover someone you've known your whole life as a strongly held, yet never suspected, opinion on something like euthanasia. I'm not sure how I feel about it exactly, about his position, that is. I certainly don't want my dog to be put to sleep, but she's old, she's sick, and this whole vertebra thing adds a new layer to the blanket of misery that seems to cover her these days.

That may be too harsh a way to put it, though. My mother says the dog seems happy and largely comfortable now. Yesterday, my dog was doing so poorly that my mother and father had agreed to have the dog put to sleep on monday. Today, she seems almost limber and spritely in comparison. I almost wonder if my father insists on keeping the dog alive long enough that I can see her one more time this thanksgiving. It's hard to say.

In other news, we are at war. Or are we? We never made an official declaration of war, or at least, Bush never indicated to us, the citizens who, by just under a majority, voted him into office (the mathematics for this, I still don't understand), that we declared war. Bin Laden's video speech (aired on CNN and now archived on cnn.com) was a frightening thing. It was being translated on the spot by some poor CNN person. At one point, bin Laden called for all muslims to chop off the heads of all americans. The translator froze as he recited this line, then he waited a few seconds, then he began translating anew, skipping some section of the speech. When I went to the transcript posted on CNN's website, there was no mention of head chopping at all. I suspect CNN excised that little element of the speech in order either to prevent any americans from renewing violence against arab american citizens or to prevent that particularly frightening element of the speech from affecting the CNN audience. I suspect that a little bit of 'cleansing' has been performed on the transcript.

I've got little more to say beyond that. I don't know how many people still bother with this infrequently updated web thing, but if you're out there, maybe you'll drop a line.