Ask Metafilter, really, ask anywhere, in a nutshell:

Q. Hello, I would like to read some Rollicking Space Adventures! Can you recommend any?

A. What about [author]? He does gods and monsters, not aliens and space. Or what about [book]? It's not in space, but it's got superheroes!

(I am not the questioner. I offered up Lindsay Buroker's Fallen Empire and Rachel Bach's Paradox series.)

So I've owned one of those electric cat boxes, which had a rake that combs through the litter about 10 minutes after the cat uses it, for a little over two years now. While you can buy them now with timers so that it won't run during the night, mine's a little too old to have that. And it's in the bedroom because I refuse to feature a catbox in the living room and there's no other place for it. So in the middle of the night, when the cat does her thing, I am often awakened by the horrible SKREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE the motor makes, and in fact this morning I ended up getting up an hour before my normal wake-up time because there was no way I was getting back to sleep afterwards.

And now I feel like an idiot, because it took me two years to figure out that maybe I could try one of those timers you can set your lights on. Two years, folks, TWO YEARS.

I am only slightly mollified by the fact that none of the people I complained to over the past two years has ever suggested it to me.

Sad thing when a book's title is misspelled on its spine. Watercolor Faires indeed.

*whimper*

Since we humans are prone to seeing patterns in things, I'm sure that you guys notice also that events or ideas seem to strike everyone on your friendslist at the same time time. I've seen mysterious, debilitating to one limit or another, illnesses strike the friendslist at the same time, as ell as other trands that I am not yet awake enough to remember. The thing that's currently going around the friendslist is crazy online stalking-type behavior from exes, relatives and aquaintances, such that three or more of the people I know online have sprung for rename tokens, and others have taken other measures.

So my message is to all the crazy people out there: STOP IT.

Won't do a lot of good, but there's not much else I can do.

I went to the grocery store right after work to pick up desperately-needed laundry detergent and a few other things, and as I was checking out, I ended up in line behind this utterly clueless guy. He was buying his stuff on a debit card, and wanted $10 cash back. Fairly easy to do, right? No. This guy couldn't follow the simplest directions form teh cashier, and she eventually called a cashier who was on his way out to come over and stand next to the guy and step his way through the process. And then the guy COULD NOT grasp the concept that he bought $5.87 worth of groceries and got $10 cash back, and this his bank account was charged $15.87. He INSISTED that the coin-change machine should be giving him change. No, I have no clue why. The cashier couldn't get it across to him. I finally leapt in and said "It charged your account $15.87 even, no change necessary." He more-or-less accepted that, but was still suspicious. And before he walked away, he said to me "I guess they do it differently here than at Wal-Mart." I merely said "They're all run by different companies and they all do it differently." instead of what I was thinking, which was "HOW many DRUGS does it TAKE to fry your brain THAT MUCH?"

In other news, the wind is blowing extremely hard here, and we're in the middle of a dust storm. Or, rather, dust and pollen storm, to the extent that when I was driving along the highway I wasn't sure if it was dust or if there was a fire nearby. I feel like hell. SPRING CAN JUST STOP NOW.