Claw trimming time

It’s probably about time to trim Talore’s claws. She hasn’t scratched me, and never tries, but when she’s sitting on me she tends to knead, and most of her claws are about as sharp as they’ll get and pointy enough to hurt. She probably won’t mind me cutting them, but I would imagine that not being able to snag things with a single paw won’t be appreciated.

She did manage to get away with the toy on the elastic string the other day. When I put it down Talore chewed almost through the cord next to the handle where I didn’t expect or check it, then the first time she caught it after that it broke off when I pulled. That toy is now missing a significant amount of fur (the flap holding the back half on came off) and doesn’t get chased as much in the mornings.

Talore seems to have stopped picking at my furniture, or perhaps she’s careful to do it when I’m not around. At one point it seemed like she was listening for me to turn my chair and stick my hand in the cup of water, because that’s all it took for her to look at me guiltily and prepare to run. She still drinks the water out of the cup on my desk, and I’ve now had two almost empty cups of water swiped off my desk because they were so light it didn’t take much (and because they’re on the edge away from my computers). The third is about at that point now, perhaps I’ll refill it.

I finally managed to get into my apartment in the afternoon without Talore meeting me at the door. I got home over an hour earlier than usual, and both the roomba and the air conditioning were on providing a high enough ambient noise level for me to sneak in. Talore still managed to be sitting up and looking at me when I walked into the bedroom though.

Talore had finally stopped seriously trying to wake me up in the mornings last weekend, but then I had a few days when I had to get up before it was fully light to get to work early. Now Talore again insists that as soon as there’s light it’s time to get up. She’s attacked my feet a couple times recently (with sharp claws), but I promptly pushed her off the bed both times and hopefully she’ll stop that.

Cube races

We’ve got a new way to race rubik’s cube solving. The old way was just to have everyone start solving at the same time and keep track of the order people finished in. That’s not near an even race with six or seven people, so the order of finishing was mostly set before it started. Now we’re doing relay solving, where we split into two teams and the teams race each other, solving in sequence.

Friday at the end of the day was my first chance to join in the fun. I suspect the teams would have been more balanced (or at least easier to balance) with Jeremy there instead of me like it’s been the previous times they raced like that, but the first round was pretty close. The most entertaining part was when Ryan showed up in the lab with the cube transport, meaning he had a lunchbox with everyone’s cube in it so nobody would have to walk through the halls just carrying a rubik’s cube. I always take my backpack to work and carry my cube (and lunch) in that.

I don’t feel like my rubik’s cube times have been improving lately because my timed runs (of which there haven’t been all that many) haven’t come close to my best time or even consistently faster than my 3 of 5 average. On the other hand, my average seems to be approaching my 3 of 5 average very slowly, so eventually I’ll probably get lucky and beat it if I do enough solves.

My efficiency is improving on my slow solves at least, and I’ve had several solves where I made less than 60 moves. If I could just learn to spot things faster I might be able to use move optimizations for speed.