My boss is a 17-lb calico

So I'm currently cat- and housesitting for my friends while they're out gallivanting all over Italy. The cats haven't quite figured out that I'm the one who's supposed to feed them. They look at me imploringly When do our feeders return? And who are you? This is just as well, because they go elsewhere in the apartment to do their predawn dryfood assdance shakedown. I guess they'll figure it out soon enough, though, won't they.

I love housesitting for people. I love eating their food, using their toiletries, trying on their clothes, listening to their CDs. (I realize that admitting as much will not get me invited back many places, but oh well.) These friends in particular have the most excellent array of bath products and fancy foods. Organic butter! A quart of maple syrup! Gourmet salsa! Jacques Torres chocolates! The only thing the place is missing is cable. And coffee. And booze. (There's Ricard and cooking sherry under the sink, my friend offered helpfully before she left.) But these are all things that can be taken care of. And the Prisoner and Stanley Kubrick box sets certainly make up for the absence of the Hitler Channel and the You're a Miserable Cunt So We're Going to Give Your Cheap Ass a Makeover Channel.

Before they left on Sunday, we actually discovered that Saddam had been captured not on CNN, not even on Face the Nation, but on the Italian news on Channel 25. We were waiting for the Juve v. Parma match. A pretty, pneumatic blonde wearing a white suit with a plunging neckline asked people on the street in Rome what they thought. "Important if true," most of them seemed to say. (Who knows what they were saying, eh, but they shrugged fairly indifferently.) "Where is football?" S said, flicking through the four channels on the TV angrily. The Italians, knowing what was good for them, did not postpone the broadcast for some trifling captured war criminal, and soon we were shouting Juve! Juve! Juve! happily.

I still have very little to relay right now, I'm afraid. Oh, except this: I got a spam email from one Radunz Kahoohalphala. I don't know what it was for, as I didn't even open it, but the name so charmed me that it has become my mantra, my call to arms, and my idle threat. "Don't make me send Radunz Kahoohalphala over to your desk to hurt you! I need that manuscript now."

Radunz Kahoohalphala is also my date for the office xmas party.