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Sleepy cat

Groggily the cat stirs, curled up on the ergonomic chair. She licks
herself before settling back into a comfortable position, yellow-green
eyes drowsily watching me before she involuntarily yawns and blinks -
long, slow blinks that get longer and longer until there is just a
ball of black and white fur softly snoring on the gray office chair.
The bell around her neck is silent for once in the day.

I yawn. She wakes up, glances around her and resumes her nap.
Nocturnal predator or not, she is of the opinion that it is way past
her bedtime – and mine as well. After all, it is 5:31 in the morning
on the day before New Year, and no doubt I will pay for this
unexpected wakefulness with sleep or grumpiness later. I will sleep. I
will not face the New Year almost dead with fatigue.

The locked door leading to our quarters could be opened with a call to
my parents courtesy of the phone system installed throughout our house
- even in one of the bathrooms – but with the hour so close to dawn, I
thought I might just wait out the darkness and perhaps even see the
sunrise. A little patience would mean not interrupting my parents’
dreams; precious time they have to rest.

Again I yawn. This time there is no questioning look, simply perked up
ears that turn toward the source of the noise and then disinterestedly
droop.

A few hours ago, I played a late game of chess with a friend over IRC.
It was a thrilling game, full of delicate traps and positional play.
The conversation at ChessGames may prove amusing to my readers, who
may also wish to play through the game to see how events developed.
Well-played – I missed a combination and teetered on the brink of
calamity, but fortunately a sequence of unexpected moves brought me
back on solid ground. There is a peculiar thing about me; I shake
violently during matches, shivers wracking my frame. I suspect it is
the adrenalin of a close fight, a fight-or-flight response tightening
me. Yes, chess is a sport like any other; palpitating heart, beads of
sweat and all!

Small talk seems so much easier over pawns and bishops. Chess provides
a natural segue into sports and hobbies. Until then – dreaming driftin in and out…

Short URL: http://sachachua.com/blog/p/1550

On This Day...

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  • 2011: Figuring out my CSS workflow — Yesterday’s coding session with CSS was fantastic. I used WinWarden to make my browser translucent, and I overlaid it on [...]
  • 2010: Thinking about housework — I’ve been thinking about the ideas in the book “168 Hours”, which strongly recommends personal outsourcing as a way of [...]
  • 2009: What will you stop doing? — New Year’s Day is just a day, a chronological convention. The long holiday season is a good time to reflect [...]
  • 2008: Websites that write websites — “So nat’ralists observe, a flea Hath smaller fleas that on him prey, [...]
  • 2006: I give up on WPA and WPC11! — After several days of compiling and recompiling kernels and tracking down HOWTOs and fiddling with configuration files, I officially give up on [...]
  • 2005: The five-year journal — Check out Cool Tools: The 5 Year Journal for a journal that promotes seredipitous discovery and reflection. =) Maybe I [...]
  • 2005: Fire — There was a big fire right next to our house. We all got out safely, including the pets. Fire In the meantime, [...]
  • 2004: More open source work — sachac: you'd be remiss if you don't include pmana's work. ;) and of course, iptraf is by a pinoy.
  • 2004: And the rest of the year passed by in a blur — August Turned 21. Threw birthday party/send-off party. Didn’t blog much; was very busy. September, 2004.10.01 Japanese language studies. Lots of lectures blogged. November Training at [...]
  • 2004: July — 7/21 Made it to the shortlist of the AOTS program, then 7/28 finally got confirmed. 7/30 Said goodbye. 7/30 Also [...]
  • 2004: June — Many notes on cooking and teaching. - 6/27: The start of my life as a street performer / amateur arsonist
  • 2004: May — - 5/12: Reflections on the Getting Things Done methodology Boring month. ;)
  • 2004: April — - 4/3: Assigned ERC copyright to GNU. Yay! - 4/8: Sand cats - 4/13: Started aikido - 4/14: Posted teaching evaluations - 4/15: 2nd [...]
  • 2004: March — Lots of Planner hacking. - 3/7: Techie dinner with William, Miguel and Jijo. Told him about fai. It made his Shopwise [...]
  • 2004: More Filipinos into open source development — sachac: there’s also my former work colleague – pol babao III - he’s the author of phpmylibrary.
  • 2003: Chickened out — So much for thoughts of a hard disk transplant – I shake too much and am too uncertain about hardware to [...]
  • 2003: Refreshing my Linux install — - Download http://http.us.debian.org/debian/dists/woody/main/disks-i386/current/images-1.44/bf2.4/root.bin - Download http://http.us.debian.org/debian/dists/woody/main/disks-i386/current/bf2.4/linux.bin - Boot grub with the following commands: kernel (hd0,2)/root/root.bin ide0=ata66 initrd=/root/root.bin initrd (hd0,2)/root/root.bin - Gleefully delete the [...]

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