The heat is on and the flies are... well, flying

Drinking coffee, eating oatmeal, trying to get my motor running enough to work. I have to finish 20 pages of MM by late tomorrow. It's recon work, so it's not like I have to create color from scratch, but the pages have complicated color and recreating it will be... fun.

We have a hellacious (in the sense of both "bad" and "amazing") fruit fly problem right now; there must be at least a couple hundred of them in our kitchen and every so often they show up elsewhere in the apartment. We've cleaned up the dishes in the sink, which was probably what was sustaining them, but the little beasts live a few weeks, so there's no light at the end of the tunnel.

By any chance, does anyone know a quick fix for a fruit fly infestation?

The Tale of Slippers the Cat, Part Two

About ten minutes ago I was sitting in front of the iMac, working on MM, when from outside the studio window (that is, on the fire escape), I heard: "Oh, fuck!"

Because the blinds were down, I couldn't see who was responsible for the exclamation, and so I ignore it -- until there was a knock on our back door.

When I opened the door, there was the lady from across the fire escape, with an embarassed smile. She'd come out onto the fire escape from the main apartment hallway, not realizing that the outside doors automatically lock. So I closed our back door, went outside our apartment and around, and let her in via the main hallway door again.

But when I re-entered our apartment, guess who I found wandering around in our own hallway?

That's right, Slippers. The little grey cat with the white feet that I "rescued" a few days ago.

After doing a double-take ("What the... how the hell... oh, when I opened the back door, right..."), I picked Slippers up (purring happily) and carried him down to apartment #11, where I presented him to his surprised owner. "How did he get all the way over there and into the building? I just put him out on our fire escape!"

*headdesk*

I resisted the urge to tell her that people who let their cats wander, especially in winter, are idiots in my book, and settled for suggesting that she might want to get a harness and a leash for him.

Apparently Slippers likes our back door. Enough to end up at it twice within the same week.

*headdesk again*

A photo and exercise

Psst! If you want to see what one of my bookshelves looks like, check out today's Project 365 photo:

http://prairiecrow.blogspot.com/

I just finished exercising for about 10 minutes. This is not great (it was 8 minutes of warm-up and 2 of actual exercising), but not bad considering how long it's been since I exercised at all. And it was step exercise. Whew. Even the warm-up is quite challenging. Now all I have to do is... keep... doing it.

I'm only 3 pages into the 20 page issue of MM. Will this mean an all-nighter for our Intrepid Colorist? Possibly -- I really don't want to blow this deadline with my editor. On the other hand, George's brother Reg is coming over tomorrow afternoon to visit and use the Internet, and I really want to be awake for that, in part because I want to cook a meatloaf dinner and have to go out shopping for groceries sometime tomorrow morning. Not much fun when you're totally bagged from working on art all night and can't see straight.

I'll have a bowl of French Canadian Pea soup (mmmm, fibre) and see how I feel in a few hours.