We named her Ripley for her no-nonsense attitude and the fact that Loki does nothing but chase her like a facehugger. (He also seems to think she is a trampoline, which is as fallacious as it is problematic.) I’m hoping it’s just a rough adjustment phase, but Loki needs to get over his insane jealousy pronto and make with the friendship so that I can take many adorable photos of the two of them plotting to overthrow me together and divide the universe amongst themselves.

She is in every way the exact opposite of Loki. She is graceful and acrobatic, able to land on the finest of ledges and the most precarious of bookcases. Also unlike Loki, who can do a flying leap into a sliding glass door, rebound halfway across the room and trot off unharmed, she seems to have gotten into medical trouble first by swallowing something that scratched up her esophagus and landed her the grand prize of an emergency trip to the vet this morning. She wouldn’t eat or drink yesterday, probably because it hurt to swallow, but I wouldn’t have known that because she didn’t have the decency to get up from her comatose state and let me know what was wrong.

This morning she was given stomach acid neutralizing medicine and an IV of hydrating fluid-goo that made her back puff up like a camel’s hump and caused her to leak for a few hours if she moved around too quickly. Grody.

But I haven’t gotten to the best part. She can’t eat normal cat food because the chunks might cause problems with her sore throat and whatever horrible thing Loki convinced her to swallow in an effort to bump her off and reclaim the apartment as his own. Until she’s well, she needs pureed baby food. But she also needs incentive to eat, as eating isn’t something she’s enthusiastic to do. The doctor said I would probably have to warm it up and feed her by hand. If I was very lucky, she’d eat on her own once I get her started.

And, dear reader, I did it. That’s right. No fewer than five times today yours truly, evil robot and conqueror of worlds, was down on her knees serving a sick cat baby food with her fingers. Dude.

I’d like to submit to the Evil Robots Union that this behavior should not get me banned from our upcoming Evil Robot Swim Party and Barbecue. I count Ripley as a valuable minion to my cause, and feigning kindness to poor helpless kittehs is an excellent tool of deception to fool my meatbag neighbors into thinking I’m one of them. Really. That’s why I’m doing it. It’s not because she’s absolutely adorable and I want her to feel better. Like, right now.

Best Buy is well lit, clean, neatly organized, and the staff are generally well informed about their area of the store. For example, all Best Buy staff I’ve ever met in the video game section are hardcore gamers, and they share my pain when we talk about the Red Circle of Death, how Microsoft still sucks at designing stable hardware, and that if Halo were available on PlayStation, Sony would eat the Xbox for breakfast. Stuff is usually a pretty good price, and sale prices are awesome. Apart from the fact that the manager of every Best Buy store will murder the employees with laser cannons if they don’t ask you how you’re doing every 32.7 seconds, it’s not a bad place to shop. But they won’t have everything, and they won’t have individual components. You can buy a PC at Best Buy, but not very many PC parts.

Fry’s, on the other hand, sells everything and I mean everything from motherboards to lamps to porn on Blu-Ray. And it’s all cheap. But shopping at Fry’s is like getting an enema. You don’t want to go there, but you have to. So you just grit your teeth, clench your buttocks, and try to get it over with as quickly as possible. I had to go there today, and I still have that icky feeling deep down inside.

I’m not saying don’t shop there. I’m just saying educate yourself to the risks first.

Reasons to shop at Fry’s:

1. They have everything. Yes, everything. In one store.
2. There isn’t some jackass in a blue shirt by the front entrance saying “Welcome to Best Buy, I love you,” to every shopper who walks in the front door.
3. The prices are extremely good. There are generally no gimmicky sales, but you can very likely get the most competitive price on what you’re looking for at Fry’s.

Reasons not to shop at Fry’s (aka you get what you pay for):

1. The entire staff wears cheap, cheesy suits that make them look like used car salesmen.
2. The entire staff have no ability to communicate in the English language, even if English is their mother tongue.
3. Nobody on the entire staff knows anything about electronics. Some are only vaguely aware that they are working in an electronics store.
4. Every Fry’s is roughly the size of Tibet, and without your very own Sherpa your odds of escaping are slim. My local Fry’s is so big that it has a restaurant and showers in the bathroom because it takes at least a week to walk from one end to the other. Today I met a woman clad in a robe made from the discarded manuals of HD-DVD players who had set up camp at the base of a mountain of keyboard trays. She said that she’s been living there since 1996, surviving on beef jerky, Rock Star energy drinks, and the hope that one day she’ll be reunited with her WOW guild.
5. At Fry’s, the only apparent organization scheme they follow is to divide each kind of product evenly and randomly between every shelf on the store, guaranteeing that you must walk down every aisle to find what you want.
6. All the signs at Fry’s are about as big as a postcard and all of the price tags are printed in illegible pale gray robotext, so even a competent non-doofus still can’t find anything easily.
7. If you are stupid enough to ask for help, the sales person will drag you back to their station and make you stand there while they put all your items in a computer so they can get commission on it, wasting tons of your time.
8. Fry’s doesn’t trust its customers to wait in line unassisted. They actually pay some dope to stand at the head of the line and help you line up properly. You must then kneel to the gate keeper and kiss their pinkie ring before you are granted permission to walk to the next open register.
9. You get the KGB shakedown at the exit from an illiterate person who insists on checking every single item in your bag against your receipt. Nothing makes me feel better about a company than seeing that they are going to assume that I am a thief, yet they seem not to have heard of a simple device called a magnetic security strip which causes exit alarms to beep.

Almost done.

Can I finish?

I won’t if this blog post is too long.

Back to the wordmill.

Gentlemen, tonight is the night to hit the bars, hit the clubs, and go on those blind dates. Because I guarantee you that all the crazy girls will be at the movies. Any females left out on the streets will be semi to completely normal. So get out there and use this as your pickup line:

“So you didn’t go to the movies to see Twilight, huh? You must be one of those smart ladies I keep hearing so much about.”

Bam. You’re in. She’ll at least give you a charitable laugh, if not let you talk to her for a few minutes. If she responds warmly to your joke, say something about how awful the Stupak Amendment is and I guarantee you’ll get digits.

As for me, I think it would be a great idea to walk around all weekend wearing my new shirt and see how many cat fights I can pick with Twihards without saying a single word:

* Why no, I didn’t like the Twilight series. How could you tell?