Today at work I got an email from my boss asking for help getting a report finalized. Since I had most of the pieces available to me, I started putting them all together, and while trying to insert chunks of previously formatted Excel into a Wor document would make even the calmest person swear like a sailor, that was not remotely the worst of the whole thing. The worst was dealing with the dozen images that also needed to be inserted - except, of course, that the images exported to nearly 30 mb if I put them into jpg, Word refuses to play nicely with tif files (which was my only other export option), and trying to open the tif or jpg files with my usual graphic editors basically caused my entire computer to freeze up and make me do more than one manual reboot before I finally realized that it just wasn't going to happen.

I eventually ended up opening the stupid files in Paint, saving them to gif (because it's the only way I could think to compress them into something that Word would actually *recognize*. I run weekly processes on some of the remote servers that take quite a while, but at least with those I can be doing other things while they're running. In this case, however (and I learned the hard way, boom, crash went the computer again), the only thing that would work was for me to open the files, save them in the new format, and then sit back and twiddle my thumbs for the several minutes per file it took to do all this because the process gobbled up nearly every single available bit of memory on my computer and nothing else would work.

Have I mentioned lately just how much I really adore Microscoffed?

Anyway. To counteract the grumbling, I give you an Azzie story. Azzie, for those of you new readers, is a very fluffy black cat who is sort of a perpetual kitten even though he is now six, and would likely lose a battle of wits with an overripe cantaloupe. Think Nermal (from the Garfield cartoon) - wide eyed and hopelessly adorable, but really, really dumb.

A week or so ago we were sitting in the breakfast nook eating breakfast, and Azzie suddenly got all excited and jumped onto the window sill. Turns out he'd found himself a fly, and even better, he managed to catch it. He bapped it around for a bit, until the poor fly could only sit on the window sill and buzz weakly, and then, ready to give it his mighty death blow, he stepped forward in anticipation, and to his great surprise, the fly disappeared. He could not find it. He kept backing up and lifting up his front paws and looking at the sill underneath until he nearly fell off the edge, but still, no fly. I had my suspicions, especially considering how he kept shaking one paw every time he'd lift it, but I was laughing too hard to do anything about it until a few moments later, when he finally gave up the search for the lost fly, and came over to sit on my lap, and then got really, really annoyed with me because I wouldn't let him until I had removed the mangled fly carcass from between his very fuzzy toes.

Happy Holidailies