Free Cat, Maybe

Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness: an album name that came to mind today. 

Our super-duper sweet kitty cat, the only non-meowing cat I ever met and, according to my daughter "the best friend ever, ever ever!" may have to go.  She keeps putting her nasty cat-stank PEE in non-litterbox locations in the house.  This makes my Darling Wife go into homicidal rages.  I've barely kept the cat around a couple of times already by getting #1 to keep the litter cleaner and going to a different litter.  Changing the litterbox to a place that doesn't smell like potty-training-in-progress-boy pee, and using the old litter she used to have, is the final test.  Next time she pees elsewhere, she's out for good. 

#1 said "Thanks for the bail money" and meant it, but I told her to get used to the idea that the cat is going to have to go.

If you can train a cat better than a 10 year-old girl,  do like a quiet, gentle animal, and don't mind the razor-sharp claws, well...

So It Begins

So this is how I take over the world.  Appointment by bureaucrats in closed-door session.  Well, you don't have to do any fund-raisers this way so that's good, at least.

I have spared you the gory details, but I had a controversy with my Homeowners Association.  They decided that the place we've kept our trash can for a decade is so good they would fine us $100 if we kept using it.  I went to the next meeting to complain and ended up with a pinky-swear from the lady who drives around "inspecting" that she'll ignore my trash can going forward, and the President says he's willing to make case-by-case deals with other complainants.

Oh, and I was elected to be a member of the HOA board, I think.  Somebody was retiring and that would mean they didn't have enough to conduct business sometimes.  If I'd been on there a year earlier, and the ex-board member who also showed up to complain hadn't left, the rule would have been voted down.  Well, next time, the insanity will have at least one voice of reason against it. 

First the HOA board, then on to the White House?

English Ivy . . . It Stays

My Darling Wife and I put in (count 'em) FOUR new planted beds at the house this past weekend.  Two for flowers, two for "let's get this dirt covered with something" plants that tolerate the shade better than the "grass" we are supposed to have.

She picked out some English Ivy and set it up in a patch of ground by a brick wall.  First I worried for the wall.  Now I wish we had more brick on the house.  Turns out, an 8" layer of leaves and sticks is pretty spiffing insulation and it doesn't damage intact brick structures.  News to me: Ivy sticks to bricks and whatever else it can get vertical on - it doesn't stick IN mortar, it sticks TO mortar.  When you pull it down, the roots will remain stuck, but it doesn't damage a good brick wall.

So says a three-year study at Oxford, where they have a good reason to know if English Ivy will damage brick walls.

Just don't try to sell the idea to anyone in Washington or Oregon.

Have You Ever . . .

Have you ever been so not-awake as you walked around that blinking your eyes caused an auditory sensation?  Right after the bad part of a bad dream last night my Darling Wife woke me up and told me she thought one of the kids was crying.  I got up and walked to their room, and listened by the door.  Silence.  I went in and found only solid-sleepers.

 

On the way to their room, when I blinked as I was walking,there was a fuzzy noise with each blinking of my eyelids, I kid you not.  The noise I heard as I walked back to the Master Suite was an airplane.  An airplane with a strange engine noise that sounded like a child crying.

A New Personal Record

This was the largest thing I ever erected, and it took longer than I have worked on anything since I converted the Hot Rod to a manual transaxle.  My Darling Wife and I put up a shed in the back yard today.  Well, yesterday and into the wee hours of today.  The shed is just a hair smaller than my room at my Dad's house when I was in high school.  It is about 200lbs of stamped sheet steel, and maybe that much again in lumber under the shed for a foundation.  Three trips to the store, total (one to buy it last week, two today for "hey I also need...") and we probably put 25 man-hours on it, total, and that's not counting the "help" from two- and four-year-old sons. 

The forecast was wind and rain.  I prayed and the rain held off until the roof was finished.  The wind was more of a breeze.  The really heavy rain held off until the doors were leaned up in place to keep it out.  Now at 01:00 the next day it's done except for the interior flooring, and my toenails hurt (?!) and it's bed time.  Thanks Jesus everyone is okay, #1 did a good job watching the rest of the Zoo, and DW and I only got a minor nick each on one hand.  If I hadn't worn gloves, the day would have been over almost before it started due to a trip to the emergency room, because one glove took a nasty gash to the palm.

WHEW!

Happiness is a Warm . . .

No, not belt-fed this time.

Today I had off from work and spent it tooling around the house with the Zoo.  After my Darling Wife came back from what she was doing, we spent some quality time demolishing a part of the deck in the back yard.  Then I smashed the wooden parts into much-smaller wooden parts and started a fire in the fire pit.  She decided to tend to some gardening while I did that and the Zoo was running around like the good little ruffians they all are.  Then the fire was dying out due to lack of decking, and I scouted the back yard for other wood scraps.  Parts of an old kitchen island and all of an old back yard table went in the fire.  As night dawned, I was standing there with my Darling Wife by my side, between the glowing fire and the path where the children were running around, keeping them from running into the fire.

Standing next to a warm fire holding your loved one . . . is good!

Well, at Least He's Thinking.

Two laundry machines were going and I was concentrating on work just now (21:50, well past bed time) and I didn't hear anything untoward.  My Darling Wife told me to go and chastise #3 for kicking the wall by his bed instead of sleeping.  I went in to the boys' room and #3 was sitting up in bed, on the side away from the wall. I asked him...

VFD: What're ye doing?
#3: My pillow is cold
VFD: It's cold because you're not sleeping on it.  Lie down
#3: (lies down)
VFD: (arranges blankets on the boy)
VFD: Go to sleep
VFD: (exit, close door)

I wanted to explain why she hadn't heard any gunshots or screaming, so I told my Darling Wife...

VFD: He was trying to re-arrange his blankets.  His pillow was cold, so he was trying to put his blanket on his pillow
DW: LOL
VFD: Some peoples' kids.
DW: LOL

Sick Puppy

I
am
sick.

I'll spare you the gory details but if I don't have at least a head cold I have a sinus infection.  Feel free to pray for me.

TIA.

I Hate Funerals

The last time I went to a funeral was several years ago.  Before that one, I don't even remember the last one.  I don't think I would even go to my own parents' funerals. 

But when you are asked to be a pallbearer at the funeral of your brother-and-shipmate, how can you say no?  So I went to a funeral today.  Mostly I was as stone-faced as ever but I had to point my eyeballs up a little extra when somebody in the family of the deceased started bawling by the casket, and again during the military honors.  If there had been a 21-gun salute I think I would have been Mr. Faucet Eyes already.

********
It wasn't supposed to be this way.  We were all supposed to have basically endless, carefree lives in intimate association with God, in person, on a daily basis.  Then a serpent had a conversation with Eve.  Physical death is hateful to me.  ESPECIALLY the death of somebody I care about, and ESPECIALLY a brother-in-arms.  It doesn't matter if he was 87 years old and barely kept one step ahead of the grim reaper for the last decade.  He wasn't supposed to die.

Well, he didn't really, but his widow from a 65-year marriage is probably going to miss him until they meet again.  It seems like it would be cold comfort, the first time you would go back to a bed that would always be empty when you left it.  Over coffee the next morning, it seems like it would be very comforting to know that your loved one is in a better place.

Still.  Standing at attention and staring down into a hole lined with landscaping timbers during prayers, and seeing an old lady's eyes all watery . . . sucks.

Magic Under The Lights

Imagine walking at night in near-total darkness on an abandoned city side-street
Straight into a forest
Where trees are a hundred feet tall
The grass is trimmed neatly
And each tree is covered in points of light right up to the top of the canopy 

That was the perspective from the eyes of #4 last week-end.  If this does not qualify as a magical experience for a child, I don't know what would.

Click the image to see it supersized, hit escape to close the image window.  Better yet, right-click the image and "view image" then click it again to see it full-size (I left it at 1600 pixels wide so it should cover your entire screen)

No News, As They Say...

My kids have taken to saying "I've got good news and bad news" lately.  On a recent trip home from church . . .

#2 (2.5 years old): Ah gah goonews ambanews.
DW: What's the bad news?
#2: No.  No news.
VFD: And no news is good news so...

"Well, [deleted]."

So I am trying to wipe the hard drive on a laptop with no optical drive.  No problemmo!  The Customizing UBCD page at ultimatebootcd.com has a two-line text command and a built-in program on the Ultimate Boot CD will automagically turn a formatted USB stick into a bootable Ultimate Boot . . . uh. . . Stick.  This used to be a hassle with older versions of UBCD, but now it is dead simple and worked

PERFECTLY

on the first go.  So I booted the laptop, changed the BIOS settings to boot from USB first and rebooted.  It loaded the UBCD menu in frikken RECORD time and shaBAM here I am in Darik's Boot and Nuke ready to blast the data on my hard drive all to smithereens.  So as usual I typed "autonuke" at the prompt and DBAN started a'wipin all the drives it saw.  Including my shiny new UBCD-on-a-stick flash drive.

At this point, I said rather a naughty word.  Then I was happy I had the Customizing UBCD page still open, and (after reformatting the USB drive in Windows Disk Management) I proceeded to REmake my bootable USB UBCD drive.  Like a boss.  Only perhaps, next time, I will tell DBAN just exactly WHICH drive to nuke. 

Complacency will get you, and your flash drive software, killed.

Well That was Gross

Listen to the children. Sometimes you'll get a valuable heads-up.

As we were driving home from church, VFDKitty was reported to have a tooth poking out funny. When we got home, she was brought up to the Master Bathroom (mine) where there are coincident bright lights and a big countertop. I had my Darling Wife hold the cat down on the counter while I held the cat's head. The poor thing had a lower canine tooth poking out the front of her mouth, with the upper lip resting on top of the tooth. I gave it a litle tiny tug and the tooth came right out.

The cat was none too happy about these shenanigans, but within a few minutes was reported to be back to cheerful and playing. My Darling Wife said "well that would explain why she hasn't been eating her food." I wouldn't want to eat anything either! I gave her 1/4 a baby aspirin in some peanut butter and she should be just fine.

Unless she's dying of somthing nasty with one of the symptoms being a tooth fall out. But more likely, she just snagged the tooth on a dog or something.

IF You Had a Sketchy Few Minutes There

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
[snip]
---you'll be a Man, my son!

You know it's a rough morning when Kipling is instructing you in manhood before 07:00. Well, it was a rough ten minutes, anyway. The morning is barely starting.

Not Dead, Still Busy

The last many nights have been split between sleep, family, and getting the next batch of stuff ready for sale on eBay.

Can anybody loan me a few extra man-hours? Preferably for the really high-skilled labor-intensive stuff so I can just kick it with the family.

Thanks for Scaring Me

A month ago I was in El Paso with family, and there was a sandstorm. Not much of a one as sandstorms go, but it was the first one our children had ever seen. Brown sky, low visibility, bit of thunder. I went out to close the windows on our Bad Robot, brought down some tipsy-looking flower pots from on top of a low wall, and went into the house and had an idea. I took #2 out into the enclosed front porch to see the sandstorm up close.

He has a hangup about bad weather. He was scared for the first half-minute or so we were out there. His mommy sensed terror and tried to recall the child inside during my lecture explaining what was happening outside. I think she was scared of the storm also, and it didn't help that she said in front of the boy that they were not allowed onto the porch when there was lightning/thunder (when she was a child). I finally managed through sheer obduracy to shoo her back inside and keep #2 out on the porch with me. He was as freaky as ever about the dusty wind and thunder, but I kept explaining to him what was going on, and ended up telling him that, after the sand there would likely be at least a light rain and then everything would be covered in mud.

#2 went in. #1 came out and was almost entirely uninterested and unperturbed. She likely just wanted to see what all the fuss had been about with Mommy. She went back in, and after a moment or two I went back in. I went in to the room where #2 was watching a movie and right out of left field he thanked me for explaining to him what was going on. He said he felt much more relaxed. I about did a back flip and told him to go tell his mother what he'd just told me. He did, as my mind tried to recover from the shock of such immediate and obvious results.

Later, we had a sprinkling of rain, just enough to cover everything in muddy water spots.

Hatred and Fear have the same mother: Ignorance.

One Final, Really Final This Time, Final Traipse. Maybe.

A year and a half ago, the city (my The City) started clearing a local woods as old as the neighborhood. Trouble is, it is actually a clogged and overgrown drainage culvert. The residents raised a stink and the city stopped clearing the ditch. They promised to study the drainage and see if mature trees needed to be removed. My prediction at the time was: all those trees are going.

Well, the other day I drove by on my way home and I noticed a small change. Click the picture to see it full size and look closely . . . they all have orange X's on them.



I had mostly forgotten, but the woods in this scene (and in the link, above) are weeds. The soil is washed down from the houses on either side. These weed trees are growing in what used to be people's back lawn dirt. It SHOULD look like this:



Well today it looks like this:



There is a trail back in there calling my name. I want to walk it again before they slice the trees all out. We'll see. Maybe this time I'll stop long enough to get all the pictures in focus!

Next year it will probably be barren and in a few years it will likely be covered in a grass carpet like all the other culverts around here.

For now, they have left the stuff growing in the dirt near the edges of the concrete, including this:

I Found You!

O hai! No, you didn't die, I left. The only computer near for the last couple of weeks which was able to get online was from 2003, not working, and they don't have Internet service there anyway. Getting off the Internet and being force not to do anything productive for a couple of weeks at a stretch is a highly recommended activity. If you haven't done it, you are cheating yourself.

Bonus points if it ends on a "donut" spare tire for the second half of the return trip, from the middle of nowhere to your destination!

Mothers Day Fail 2012

So this morning, my Darling Wife got up and found a new fuzzy blanket on the couch. Then her wonderful husband made pancakes. Then #1 came out slightly green around the gills and said she didn't feel good. And during breakfast, the phone rang.

So we celebrated Mothers Day by . . . going to my brother's house and fixing it up. He had a tenant move out of a rent house and there was a to-do-list a mile long. And he's up against a mortgage payment if he can't get it rented this week. I fixed his toilet which failed at least four different ways, fixed his oven that was not lighting at all, mounted some curtain brackets, helped reverse the doors on the fridge, and that was the day.

Now she's off to visit a friend who just delivered a baby.

Museum trip and Nice Meal for mothers day: not so much. Oh well. Better luck next year.

Go to bed

Spend the day out of the house. Time for bed. Ugh.