15 May 2001

Good morning, all. I'm going bookstoring with David this morning, and I want to get some writing done beforehand, so I'm going to keep this short. I talked to Christopher last night, and he's going to come for supper on Thursday, possibly with two cousins and a friend. (Whose friend, I don't know.) So I'm going to make company chicken for him. Mmm, dill. Oh, wait, I don't feel like enough of a walking ethnic stereotype, can we throw some almonds in there? Oh yeah. We can.

We serve company chicken to pretty much any company we get, as long as they're not vegetarians. It's nummy, and mostly people haven't had something very similar before. I do have a much larger repertoire, and Mark and Timprov do, too. It's just that company chicken works so well.

Anyway. I'm very territorial with my house -- this has nothing to do with Christopher -- and right now you can see why. We slept with the windows open, and there is a bug bite. On my face. A bug. Bit my face. In my own house. Can you see why this is upsetting to me? I live here. The bug does not live here. (Not any more....) I don't go sit out in the trees and bite bugs. I feel it only common courtesy that they should not come in here and bite me. I tried to have a reciprocal relationship with these bugs. But no.

I suspect it of being a spider. Some people (ahem) have suggested to me that I should not kill spiders, because they eat the other bugs. This is nonsense. They bite me. In our old apartment, we kept getting ants. We had to exercise eternal vigilance against ants. And yet the spiders didn't eat the ants. They bit me. I am clearly not an ant. I may be unable to stop the Supreme Court from making maliciously stupid decisions, but if spiders try to set up an implicit Social Contract in my house, I can be the government and make it explicit. If you're a bug who eats other bugs, okay, but if you bite me, you're dead. You and all of your cousins, just so that nobody is around to try to collect weregild for you.

When I move to a cave, it's going to be a cave hermetically sealed against spiders and other bugs. With an internet connection. We have our standards.