My Staycation

Since my cat Niko needs me to give him meds every day, anything but essential travel is out of the question. Over the 4 day break I gave myself over the Christmas holiday here at home, I spent Christmas Day with my parents in the suburbs and the following day managed to get my car inspected AND visit the DMV to purchase a parking sticker in a record 20 minutes. I also organized a few computer files and found this video clip, taken 5 years ago by a Dutch student working at the same field site where I did my post-doc. I don't think I could ever get tired of watching this video:

In addition to getting some work done while watching several Star Trek episodes (my keepers gave me the entire digitally remastered original Star Trek TV series for the holidays), I also played some video games on my new PC laptop. I still prefer my mac for all work and blogging and most of the stats programs I use are only available through the Windows XP I run via Parallels on my mac, but I did finally replace my PC laptop when it died (as all PC laptops do, typically 5 years earlier than any mac laptop I have owned - only recently did I have to recycle a mac laptop through which I was hit by lightening in 2009!).

So during my Staycation the one thing I did with no clear purpose aside from pure escapism was a little geeky gaming. I started playing The Witcher 2, which has amazing amazing graphics:

During my Staycation I also created a new character in the World of Warcraft (my only female character), a Draenei monk appropriately named Nerdycatlady: