Strange medicine in the fridge, needles everywhere, and twice-daily injections. It's the tawdry tale of all too many endurance athletes, right?

Well, not me. I'm blaming my extremely suspicious-looking collection of stuff on the cat, as it has been diagnosed with diabetes. This means twice-daily insulin injections (which The Lovely One and I practiced on the cat at the vet's office this afternoon; I have never heard such an aggrieved meow as it delivered when we first jabbed it today. It wasn't so much a sound of pain as a surprised "what the heck are you doing to me this time?"), special food, and occasionally monitoring the glucose level in the cat's urine. Fun fun.

Seeing as how the cat already pretty much thinks I'm scary and evil, doing the injections should be quite the bonding experience for us. Twice a day. I don't think I'll have the element of surprise on my side for more than a day.

Spent some time in Vancouver this evening, after dropping TLO at work. Started out at MEC, and bought a new set of tire levers to replace the three useless ones and the four destroyed ones I bought this year. This time I spent the extra $1.50 and got a set of Park Tool levers. I haven't used them yet, but just taking them out of the package fills me with optimism. They're a lot harder, and feel a lot tougher than the ok-until-they-broke MEC house-brand levers. Lesson learned about saving money by buying quality in the first place? Maybe.

I'm never sure if that's a good deal. On one hand, I have a lot of stuff where I ended up buying a high-quality product to replace initial attempts at cheaping out. On the other hand, I still have the original $25 floor pump I bought. Maybe more importantly, I'm never quite sure what I want or need in gear until I have spent some time making do. Thus, I started out riding in sweat pants and a Salvation-Army synthetic shirt. Now, I ride in bike shorts, bike jerseys, special bike limb warmers, and I came this close to buying special bike socks today. All that expensive, stupid stuff really does work just a bit better. For cycling, and almost no other activity, you really do want pockets on the back of your shirt and substantial crotch padding.

I hope as I age, I'm getting more thoughtfully cheap.

Also at MEC, I ran into Strider, a friend from university and even earlier. we caught up. He's doing some fascinating-sounding work involving face-matching, database interfacing, and child pornography (and aren't you glad I don't have AdWords now?). But in a good way. It sounds technically stimulating, and I hadn't even realized that face-matching systems were already a common part of police databases. So as of right now, I'm off crime.

After I caught up with him and offered up a gmail invite, I wandered over to one of the seedier arcades on Granville Street, and played pinball for the first time in ages. Boy was I terrible! But the Movieland Arcade had The Addams Family, Medieval Madness, and The Creature from the Black Lagoon. Three of my favourite pins. It was great.

Cat diabetes, pinball, and kiddie porn databases. Eclectic!