Atomic Nerds

Ahh, Blogorado. The traditional time of year when LabRat and I gather up a few necessary supplies and hie off for the middle of nowhere, that being a vastly preferable alternative to civilization, the latter having cell phones galore, powerpoint, and a general excess of assholes, the former having good friends, good conversation, and, most relevant to our story, a joint with a really good breakfast menu.

Last year, day after day a mass of hungry, rambunctious, and very visibly armed bloggers descended daily on The Obligatory Cow Reference* for breakfast. While we represented a non-trivial increase in their daily turn-over for the run of the visit, they were a bit unprepared for a regularly scheduled mob scene. This year, with a bit of forewarning and a bit** of foresight, they had sense to stuff the lot of us off into a separate room, safely sequestered from the regulars. All was good, and many arteries were filled with delicious gravy.

Now in some parts of the world, the job of waiter or waitress is given as much cachet as being a full blown chef. Culinary schools in France, for example, require all students to spend time working the front of the house as well as the line, and being a good waiter is taken as seriously as any other part of the restaurant world. Unfortunately, our waitress on Sunday did not get this memo.

Now, I like to give people a break when the situation warrants it. A party of 20 or so, with roughly 25 different conversations running in parallel can be a bit daunting to jump in the middle of to find who wants biscuits and gravy and who wants their eggs scrambled and who wants tomato juice and so on. I would have had more sympathy had I not recognized this same girl from last year, but still, this situation was a bit outside normal operating parameters. No, the main problem with this situation was not her inability to juggle the juice, but in her signboard.

Sitting next to Matt, and his father JPG, shortly after our coffee was refilled, The Comment came from Matt.

“It’s driving me nuts. I’ve gotta fix it.”

No discussion was necessary. Everybody in the immediate circle nodded solemnly in agreement.

She was wearing a sign around her neck, proclaiming “Its my last day! Please tip generously!”

“Does anybody have a marker?”
“I’ve got a sharpie in my range bag, but that’s back at the hotel. I could be back before she gets the hash browns out, I bet.”
Breakfast conversations at Blogorado being highly fluid, Vine had picked up on the discussion and joined in.
“Marker? I’ve got one in the truck, and I can get to that a damn sight faster than you can get to the hotel and back.”

We all considered this for a moment.

“Do it.”

Vine nipped out, and returned within moments carrying a large, black, chisel-tip sharpie of unnecessary proportions.

“Who’s going to do it?”
“JPG and I are closer, but we’d be at an angle. Straight on may be the way to go.”
“You’ve got reach. We can distract her when she brings the oatmeal.”
“All right. Hand it here.”

We waited for our plates. And waited. And waited. And waited some more. We even got bored and tried to snag her as she brought out a fresh carafe of coffee, since the consumption of same was measured in gallons per minute, but our collective cries of “Miss?” “Waitress?” “Hey, airhead!” and so forth bounced off her like raisins off a canoe.

Finally we got her attention. She slid into an open space to stand between JPG and myself, directly across from Matt. Almost like we’d set up such a position in advance. JPG started in, nice and friendly. Well, he started that way.

“Tell me, miss, what are you going to do since today is your last here?”
“Oh! I’m going to college!”
If you’re familiar with the late 90s TV series “Daria“, just imagine Brittney’s voice here. Suffice to say her response raised more than one eyebrow. JPG, being possessed of age and cunning, kept his poker face.
“Well that’s excellent. Where are you going?”
“WTU!”
“And where is that?”
“Um, west Texas?”
“I mean what is the name of the school.”
“WTU!”
“Miss, I don’t think they’re going to let you in if you can’t say the full name of the institution.”

Our prey was growing wary at this point, and beginning to shy away from the table full of people demanding such unreasonable precision. Matt, using keen hunting instincts, realized that our opportunity was dwindling and sprang.

“Miss,” he inquired, causing her to turn a few degrees towards him, presenting the sign straight on. He continued, “Miss, just one thing,” and began unfolding himself across the table. Now to put this in proper reference, our waitress was maybe four foot ten in her good heels. Matt is roughly eleven foot thirty when he slouches. Suddenly, this poor, beleaguered blonde bimbo found a creature best known for shouting “Fee, Fie, Fo, Fum” rising in the direction of her chest.

Strangely, this caused alarm.

She began to back away. “Miss, I just need to fix this.” JPG put a hand up behind her shoulder to block her retreat. Still unconvinced she moved towards me, whereupon I did the same. She was trapped.

Matt struck, and deftly drew an apostrophe. A relieved sigh went up from the conspirators, and Matt sat back down as we released her.

“Thank you, miss. I just needed to correct your sign.”
“Huh?” The deer-in-the-headlights effect remained in place.
“Your sign was incorrect. It had the possessive form of ‘it’ instead of the contraction. I don’t think they’d appreciate it if you showed up at college and didn’t know the difference.”
“Oh, um, the kitchen staff… they made… can I go now?”

We finished breakfast, studiously not looking too closely at our food, just in case, and tipped reasonably generously, considering.

Amazingly, we were not banned from The Obligatory Cow Reference for forcibly spell-checking their waitress, but the staff for the next few days did keep a bit of extra distance unless strictly necessary.

*I’d give the proper name, but I’d really like Secret Location, CO to remain secret. Otherwise it’d just become civilization and Blogorado would fill up with assholes, and if I have to put up with assholes on my vacation, the scene will Not Be Pretty. Suffice it to say it’s like every other small western agricultural town, and local establishments sport various names like “The Jersey Heffer” or “Hoofs n’ Horns” or “The Golden Spur.”
**A bit, but not enough. We ran them out of quite a bit of food before their resupply.

Kang is in heat. For those of you who have not experienced the special joy and wonder epic pain in the ass that is a bitch in heat, especially if they are younger dogs that have never been bred, they get very swollen external genitalia, and they leak- blood and other fluids. Kang in full peak has had certain key bits compared to a rotting peach. We don’t want bitchgoo all over our carpet, so Kang has what we refer to as “bitch britches”, which is basically a diaper for dogs that can be used with sanitary pads marketed for humans. A visual illustration- click for big:

Last time we established a fairly good routine; britches on when she’s inside to prevent getting bitchgoo everywhere, britches come off when she’s out so she can clean herself up, and also because she will pee in them if she’s out. Or, at least she did once and I’m not eager to find out if that was enough to teach her not to.

Unfortunately, SOMEthing that we are both allergic to is blooming with extreme vigor right now, and I have a choice between being slow-witted and and out of it from the allergy attack or slow-witted and out of it from the pills that stave off the allergy attack. This morning I was operating on autopilot and unthinkingly turned her out in the yard to eat her breakfast while still wearing her britches. It only took me a few minutes to realize “OH GOD, Kang in heat, in yard, alone, still in her pants!” and I got to her as she was licking up the last of her food, completely unmolested. I asked her to come inside. She complied happily enough and soaked up the warm praise and petting- and promptly shot back outside as soon as I stepped aside a bit to let Kodos out to do his own business. She tossed me a big, smug, victory grin.

The one game that Kang enjoys above all else is being chased. She has come up with seemingly endless variations on ways to get us to want to chase her, from stealing tools to teasing the neighbor dogs; in the case of having stolen something, ignoring her does not work, as she will simply bury the item and the next time we’ll see, say, the hammer again is when she tries to tempt us with it at a random moment of yardwork. It’s just charming, in the sense that I have never been more tempted to turn her into a jacket lining than when she is forcing us into one of these little sessions. On our end, we’ve done all we can to convince her that under no circumstances are we willing to chase her, and her only chance at any sort of reward is to come to us, and if she has something, trade for it. This has been an uphill battle, but one we’ve mostly been winning lately.

I tried calling her as though nothing were unusual. The desperation in my voice not to have her soak her pants must have bled through, because she smirked at me and took off at that maddening trot calculated to be just ten percent faster than whatever pace I’m trying for. I tried again in what I hoped was my very best hey-let’s-party voice and wound up half-shouting:

“Oh come on sweetheart, please, please, baby girl, c’mon, I just want to take off your pants!”

She laughed at me and took off with a happy bounce in her step. Naturally. She did let me catch her a few minutes later- if you let your human get too frustrated too early on you won’t be able to reward desired behavior, after all.

So after several months she finally got one of us to play chase on her terms again, and now my neighbors may well think I’m a child molestor, but… at least her pants are dry.

I’m not going to beat around the bush. I hated high school. Sure, it had its moments, as does just about anything, but the introduction to the wonderful world of pointless bureaucracy, arbitrary regulations, and whim-driven policies, combined with five gallons of hormones per person didn’t exactly make it the shining pinnacle of my existence that it apparently was for some. And on a side note, I believed then and still do that if high school represents the best years of your life, you should probably do everyone else a favor and remove yourself from the gene pool as quickly as possible, and for preference in some hilarious manner suitable for a Darwin award. I didn’t struggle with my classes or any of that, but there were very few people around that I actually liked and found interesting. Combine that with the fact that I was already branded as slightly weird from grades K-8, had plenty of marksmanship medals on my ROTC uniform, and the most frequent phrase used in my English classes was “Go back to sleep, Stingray” after turning the correct answer to whatever was posed to me into a smart-ass remark*, none of my classmates were exactly gung-ho about boarding the ol’ Stingray’s Friend Train.

Needless to say, I did not miss my classmates after graduation. Of course there were one or two people I genuinely did like, blah blah blah, friends 4-eva, etc. I stayed in touch with them on my own. I didn’t get an invitation to the last reunion, and I’m rather pleased with that state of events.

So a week or two ago I was getting breakfast at the local hot-spot. While waiting on the crew to finish assembling my breakfast burrito, someone I went to school with walked through the door. There was really no question who she was, even though the last time I’d seen her was *coughgrumble* years ago. I also remembered just as quickly what a blithering idiot she was, and that she was more than a little vain at the time too. She looked at me for a few seconds while the gerbil tried to engage the wheel in her head.

“Say, aren’t you Stingray?”
I looked around to make sure she wasn’t talking to someone else. “Me? No, sorry miss. My name is Alan.”
“Are you sure? You look exactly like someone I went to school with!”
“Sorry, I went to school in Texas. I guess I can at least thank you for telling me I’ve got a long lost twin running around somewhere.”
“That’s weird, you really look like him.”
“Sorry to disappoint. Have a good one.” Fortunately, my burrito was ready at this point, and I was able to escape.

I should probably work up a better cover story in case they find me for the next reunion. Maybe I’ll call myself Michael Westen.

*That I could do so so reliably and answer so correctly at the same time unnerved one teacher so much that by the end of the year she had resumed smoking after being clear of the habit for five years. I found this out shortly after graduation from the teacher in the room next door.

In the comments on yesterday’s post about idiots who don’t leash their dogs, a few folks noted that it might be helpful to leash kids, too. Now let me just put forth that I have nothing against this notion in and of itself, at least not now that I’m an adult. Kids are often about as predictable as gas molecules, frequently move at around the same velocity, and require constant supervision. If your kids don’t heel off lead as well as they should, another training tool to help out would certainly be welcome, I imagine.

That said, it still helps to pay attention. When I was in the right age range to be a horrible little snot, running off and getting into trouble while my folks had me in public, my mom turned at one point to the use of a harness. Bouncing around in that excited state that only superheated gasses and small children can manage, I’d run up against the end of my tether, and mom would reel me back in. Other folks in the store were spared my attentions, and she didn’t have to stop what she was doing every five seconds to keep me out of trouble. Great system, right? Only, as it turns out, if I don’t have cover.

At one point in the local department store, mom was sorting through the patterns in the sewing section. Nearby were the usual clothes racks, circular affairs that when full of clothes had a hollow core that just screamed “Cool Fort Here!” to obnoxious little brats like myself. Since the rack was within leash range, I set about entertaining myself with all sorts of pretend battles and so forth. Just regular brat-in-a-fort stuff. Since all of this was right at the end of my leash, I was keeping reasonably steady pressure on the line, and this convinced my mom that everything was fine. Having noticed this pattern as she used the slack to keep track of me while distracted, I somehow formed a plan: I climbed around a little and wrapped my leash on the clothes rack to keep the line taut, and slipped out. Mom was still absorbed with the sewing patterns, so I set off on a unfettered romp around the store.

Some time later, the store owner (a gentleman my family had known for quite some time) noticed me bouncing around like a superball and led me back to mom. I wish I was old enough to either appreciate everything going on, or remember the expression on her face, or get a camera, or something, but I’m told she looked at me, looked at the leash, looked down the leash to where I had tied it off, and said something very unladylike that must be responsible for why I’m as warped today as I am.

There’s still a trace of shell-shock in her expression when she tells the story today, especially when she observes “I realized I was screwed when I was outsmarted by a two and a half year old.”

I consider myself lucky in my upbringing. Today, people consider it necessary to go to fancy places like BlackWater or Thunder Ranch to learn various ways to improve home security. Me, I learned everything I need to know by the time I was 12, and since LabRat is still shaking off her cold, y’all get to hear how it came about. Don’t worry, she’ll be healthy again sooner or later, it shouldn’t be more than a day or two more of my drivel.

When I was around eight or nine years old, the family’s pet tarantula was released back into the wild from which it came. I don’t remember the exact motivation for this, since no one in the house was afraid of spiders, and feeding it was a family entertainment event, but such is the storage capacity of a young mind. Fang was gone, and there was a gaping hole in the terrarium he/she/it had lived in. A few months later, our next door neighbor came by in a state of some concern.

“Hey, could one of you guys come take a look at this? There’s a snake cornered in my back yard, and I think it’s a rattler. I wanted to get some extra eyes on it before I kill it just in case it gets me or one of the dogs or something.” I recall even at the time thinking the expression betrayed a greater apprehension at the existence of snakes in general than the possibility of one being poisonous. Snakes were not his strong suit. I was told to simply stay put in our own back yard while Mom and Dad went to investigate. A few minutes later I heard their voices over the fence.

“Aww, it’s just a baby bull snake!” Mom exclaimed. “Don’t kill it! These are good!”
“The hell it is. It’s a snake, and it’s leaving here one way or the other.”
“Oh, fine. Chicken. Hey Stingray!” she called over the fence “Throw that little toy picnic basket over the fence, I’m gonna catch it!”

Moments later I saw our neighbor’s head appear above the fence line. He had climbed onto one of his junk cars so as to, ah, “not interfere.” Yeah, that’s why he was up there…

Anyway, a few minutes later we had a tiny bull snake not even a foot long in a plastic picnic basket. A brief discussion ensued, involving exclamations of “Oh cool!” and “Can we keep it?!” and without much arm twisting, my Mom and I convinced Dad that this hissing bundle of scaly cuteness should be the new pet in the terrarium. Me being of the age where Disney was still the preferred entertainment, the name “Little Sir Hiss,” was chosen after the snake in the animated version of “Robin Hood.” The snake didn’t respond when we called the name, and we didn’t expect the snake to play fetch, so everybody was happy with the arrangement.

Fast forward a few years. Little Sir Hiss was by no means little anymore. With a steady diet of mice (feeding was once again family entertainment, as well as a test of nerves for guests – “Go on, just hold it in by the tail, the snake will take care of the rest!”), Hiss had grown to well over three feet and a very respectable girth for a bull snake. His tank had been upgraded a time or two, and to keep his heat lamp at a good distance, my dad built a custom lid for it. Unfortunately, Hiss was apparently one of those quirks of nature who find the temperature their environment is supposed to be at on the cold side, and made a habit of climbing up into the lid to get closer to the bulb.

One day as feeding time was drawing near, I peeked into the cage to see how frisky the snake was. Not seeing scale nor tail, I leaned down and looked into his favorite hidey hole in the tank lid. Curiously, this was empty as well. I took this as generally Not A Good Sign.

Reporting in to my parents, we made a fair effort in searching the house. Under the sofa by the trombe wall, in the greenhouse, various places one might expect a heat-seeking pet to head for. Alas, nothing turned up. As we were reasonably sure the snake was still in the house, we simply sealed up any doors and windows he might be able to escape through, and figured he’d turn up. We were cautious about getting through doors quickly, and when folks came to the front door selling girl scout cookies or handing out fliers for the religion of the week or whatnot, we would step quickly through and shut the screen door behind us to conduct business on the porch.

Remember how I said this was all about home security? Well, as it turns out the only thing you need to do to make sure your house is never broken into is to casually mention “Let’s talk out here, the snake escaped and is loose in there somewhere” to a few people. In the week that snake was loose, I saw more faces go ashen, more knees begin to knock, and in one notable case, the pizza guy looked about half a second shy of actually wetting his pants.

“That’ll be $12.75.”
“Sure, let me just step out and get the door shut. Our snake is loose in there somewhere.”
“Snake?”
“Yeah, we’ve got a pet bull snake.”
“Pet?”
“Well he doesn’t do tricks or anything, but sometimes he’ll ride around on a neck or something.”
“Keep the snake inside. Definitely keep the snake inside. It didn’t get out just now did it?” He was backing up with every comment. If this didn’t wrap up soon, we might have been picking our pizza out of the grill of whatever hit him.
“No, he’s been missing a few days. We check when we go in or out to make sure he’s not — ”
“$12.75!”
“Um, ok. Here’s $15, keep the- ”
There was a twanging noise as his internal panic-spring finally let go and he ran back to his car. Shrugging, I went back inside. As I went through the entry way, I glanced over at where Mom habitually set her purse and keys when she came in. Perched atop her handbag, happy as I’ve ever seen a snake look, was Little Sir Hiss. He flicked his tongue at me in greeting, and I let him wrap around my arm before I took the pizza into the dining room.

We lived in a good neighborhood at the time, and LabRat and I still do (coincidentally the house where all this happened is two minutes walk from here), but I know now that if I ever need to beef up home security, you don’t need any fancy electronics, big guns, or vicious dogs. Just tape a simple handwritten sign to the doors:

“Remember to keep this shut so the snake doesn’t get out!”

I wish I could give you folks an mp3 of this, but thanks to the timing involved that just wasn’t possible. You’ll have to take my word that this is really how it went down.

Some months ago, due to reasons that I would love to bitch about but probably shouldn’t, I had to set up a laptop for one of my bosses with some business plan software on it. The easiest plan to get this done involved my name going into the software company’s computers instead of hers. Since then, I’ve gotten a little spam from them about their other products and services, but nothing major. Today, this changed. Today, they started trying to pimp their Business Plan Coaching service by phone. What is business plan coaching, you ask? Beats the hell out of me, but apparently it’s

“…to help you pursue your goals of business financing, show you how to develop a business plan that includes cash flow, pursue business growth by applying best practices to your plan, help you develop strategies for implementing your plan, hold you accountable to follow through and complete vital tasks, and to provide the experience and needed motivation to help you succeed!”

Among other things. Now I’ll be the last to begrudge anyone the chance to make a buck, but everything about this from the get go has seemed about half a step away from a headset and making sure the camera guy was following this. Today’s calls served only to reinforce this impression.

“Hello?”
“Hi! May I speak to Stingray?”
“Speaking.”
“My name is Heidi*, and I’m with {Personal Business Coaching}, do you have a few moments to talk about our services?”

After a bit of futher conversation, it was arranged that one of their Personal Coaches would call me back in half an hour to see if I was in need of Personal Coaching. If they had actually waited a full half hour instead of jumping the gun and calling ten minutes later, the rest of this might be a lot funnier, and accompanied by mp3. Oh well, can’t win ‘em all.

“Hi, may I speak to Stingray?”
“Speaking!”
“I’m Sarah**, a personal coach with {Personal Business Coaching}, and I’ve got a message that you may be interested in our service! May I ask how you heard of us? Did you download {software title}, or get our publication?”
“The software. Yeah, I needed a new business plan.”
“That’s great! A good business plan is always a good path forward. Is your company an existing business, or are you new to all this?”
“We’re existing, we’ve been around a couple years.”
“That’s great, and how are you doing? Are things going well? The economy has really been hammering small business owners.”
“Actually, we’re running a pretty good profit. Even with the economy, people still need porn*** when they’re bored and feeling down. It’s really a pretty stable vehicle, but you know how it is, there are always little gotchas and problems.”
“Um.. ok. So are you having any trouble with your business that we could help with?”
“Well, to tell you the truth, I am having some trouble with staffing.”
“Oh? What kind of trouble?”
“Mostly in finding competent staff. I mean, the population of albinos already isn’t huge, and to find one willing to work on top of that… well, do you know what kind of time and effort that head hunting takes?”
“Well, no… what sort of…”
“And even if you do find an albino who’s willing to act, there are certain physical aspects to consider, and keeping track of them is a pretty big timesink.”
“Um..”
“I mean, have you seen the shape of the fists on some midgets? Let’s just say it’s tricky. There can be complications.”
“*click*”
“Hello? Miss?”

I guess I don’t need personal coaching after all.

*Really.
**Heidi sounded much more gullible fun.
***I tried to muffle/distort that a little for good measure.

First, a little bit of background biological trivia. There will not be a quiz later, but I promise it is relevant to the story.

Cats, unlike dogs, need to learn how to properly kill prey from another cat, which will almost certainly be their mother. While you can see puppies descended from generations of show-ring ancestors practicing their killing bite-and-shake on a soft toy just as a matter of natural play, cats need to learn this behavior specifically- the stalk, chase, and pounce are built-in instinct, but the mechanics of the actual kill are not. Cats are one of the few predators that makes any special effort to kill large prey before it settles down to a meal rather than merely hoping to impede or immobilize it; most of us are familiar with near-surgical bite to the back of the neck to sever the spinal cord, but fewer have watched and understood footage of a lion or leopard firmly clamped on a large ungulate’s throat; the cat is not trying to “go for the jugular”, which is actually quite difficult to do properly, but to cut off its trachea and suffocate it. Useful tactics for a short-winded but powerful ambush predator but less so for a high-stamina chase-and-slasher, these techniques are apparently sufficiently advanced that they require enough education of young that the more rudimentary final-kill skills have faded from the library of instinctual behavior. Suffice to say, a domestic cat born to non-hunting indoor parents will not know how to kill prey. Our Siamese, Zydeco, is one such cat- fantastic enthusiasm and stalk-and-pounce instincts, but no practical knowledge.

So it came to be last night that at some point well past a decent hour, Zydeco started up with his I-have-a-problem howl. Stingray and I were full of immediate dread- Zydeco’s range of potential problems is limited, and most often his problem turns out to be that he feels sick and is about to create a spectacular new carpet pattern. However, this time, he sounded oddly… muffled. We were still trying to figure out what in the seven hells was going on when it became apparent what his problem was: he had bolted into our bedroom carrying a mouse, which he didn’t know what to do with. Being a sociable and fairly clever cat, he’d brought his problem to us. Being very excited and very inexperienced, he promptly dropped and lost control of the mouse, which was now firmly OUR problem. A confused session of upending and shaking everything in the bedroom eventually failed to turn up a mouse, and we were thus forced to give up and go back to bed for some very uneasy rest. (The dogs, who were of the opinion that it was WAY past their bedtimes and certainly too late for this nonsense, refused to stir themselves for any of it.)

Fast forward to early this afternoon, and Stingray noticed that Zydeco seemed oddly interested in the fireplace. He loves the fireplace with all his heart and soul, but he’s not usually excited about it unless he sees someone loading wood in. Stingray correctly drew the conclusion that the mouse had found refuge somewhere inside the fireplace, and summoned me to get an appropriate capture device. After handing him a cardboard box (far too large) and a jug normally used for iced tea (opening far too narrow), Stingray settled on having me empty the ash bucket so he could use that. Eventually he applied his Leatherman to the task of disassembling the appropriate part of the fireplace insert, and the mouse made an immediate break for it. Zydeco, who had been ready for just this moment for the last ten minutes and possibly his entire life, immediately caught it and attempted to race off with it. Stingray, figuring he was clearly just going to drop it unharmed again, lunged for the cat and mouse and succeeded in dumping the rest of the ashes over the cat’s head while the mouse escaped behind the entertainment center. Zydeco’s mews of excitement turned into furious yowls of outrage. We, and the newly interested Kang, regrouped in front of the TV, bringing the pack up to four actively involved members with three species represented.

Eventually, we succeeded in harrying the mouse out from behind the TV and shelving, where it made a bold strike for the dining room with Kang in hot pursuit and the rest of us in slightly cooler pursuit. She probably would have caught it then and there if the entryway in between hadn’t been tile- she nearly spun out making the turn, and had to get her hind legs back under control. As it was, she succeeded in pinning it by the bookshelves in the dining room… and, because it was small enough to completely disappear beneath her big snowshoe paw, she became confused about where it had gone and managed to let it go in the process of figuring that out. The mouse found itself a new refuge under another set of shelves in the office, which fortunately for us has enough space underneath it to look under- and, with the help of tools, reach under. Kang and Zydeco covered each end while Stingray covered the middle. Some sorting-out followed while we determined where the mouse was and Zydeco established that no, Kang was NOT to muscle in on his position. (She apologized with lowered ears and a noselick, which he seemed to accept.) I prevented Kang from solving the problem by upending the bookshelf while we pondered how to proceed.

After a period that consisted mostly of cursing and furred members of the family circling like sharks, and also involved the amputation of the mouse’s tail at one point when Stingray was a fraction of a second too slow with the bucket, it was concluded that the dedicated household predators had failed and human tool use was necessary. After a fruitless search for Stingray’s air pistol, which we apparently have the box for but not the device itself, a certain amount of overkill was applied in the form of his air rifle. (It was less overkill than using the crossbow would have been, mind you.) While Kang and Zydeco enthusiastically covered for Stingray’s absence while he fetched the pellets, they were less enthusiastic about his return to the proceedings – alpha pack mate or not. Eventually he was able to get the muzzle threaded between wildly dancing paws of various sizes and line up a shot. Confirming a hit, he raked the mostly-dead mouse out from under the shelf with a fireplace poker, and stood triumphant, rifle and poker in hand while I put a plastic bucket over it to keep the animals off.

“HAH! BROKE INTO THE WRONG GOD DAMN REC ROOM DIDN’T YA?!*”

“Is it dead?”

“It was breathing.”

“What do we do with it?”

“Plastic bag?”

“It sounds like it’s gotten up again. We’ll need to figure out more than that.”

“What if we AAAAHHH NOOOOO ZYDECO NOT THE BUCKET GAH DAMMIT”

Zydeco, not to be denied his prize by mere humans at this late stage in the game, had used his paw to flip the bucket back over, grab the mouse, and bolt. Naturally, he dropped it again, where it attempted a very aborted scurry until Kang swooped in to intercept the dropped pass. At that point the question of the mouse’s final dispatch became moot; Kang definitely is not confused about how to kill prey. Since she surrendered it reasonably willingly, she was given several of the most prized sorts of dog cookies all at once while the plastic-bag plan was put into action. Zydeco was given a bit of cheese to mollify him while cleanup wrapped up.

If you’re wondering where Kodos was in all this, he was waiting by the back door for someone to notice him and let him out so he could go lie down in the cool breeze- he was almost completely distinterested in the whole affair, once he figured out what we were doing. While Akitas are supposed to be a hunting-and-guarding breed, our two have apparently split the tasks between them.

Matt and Steve have achieved cooperative three-species hunting parties in the form of raptors and dogs. While we may now technically claim the same honor, I somehow doubt that dog-and-Siamese hunting is going to catch on.

*Stingray has been waiting for ages to get a chance to use this line. Geek points for you if you recognize the source.

Rumors of our slipped sanity leading to experiments with laser guided radioactive mutant monkeys are slightly exaggerated.

As LabRat mentioned in comments for yesterday, nothing particularly traumatic in and of itself happened, save one thing. Our tattoo artist went batshit and skipped the state. I don’t know all the details, and I don’t want to repeat things that may not be accurate, but what is known is that he walked off with a good size chunk of customer deposit money and left for what he apparently considers greener pastures. We were fortunate in that our long relationship with the shop meant that we didn’t have a deposit down, and Manny, the owner of Custom Tattoo was stand-up about the whole situation, preferring to break the news in person. After spending three or four years with Mark as our artist, with at least 60 hours of work between LabRat and I, this needless to say came as a bit of a shock. As Manny put it, it’s a kick in the dick. We suddenly feel like a neurotic person must when trying to pick out a new therapist. Again, we’re fortunate in that we already know both Manny and the other artist, Jason, to be highly skilled artists, so we didn’t have to look far to find someone to finish LabRat’s leg. Really, the worst part (to us) is just simply that he won’t be there anymore. Any time someone’s sense of humor and misanthropic outlook line up so neatly with our own, it sucks to have something like this happen, especially something this odd and out of character.

Moving on before this turns into a total drama laden tear fest, there is good news from the day as well. I mentioned that it looks like at least three more people are joining the pre-Obamaban gun rush, and three more armed citizens is always worth celebrating.

Some time back, a friend of mine started asking a few questions about firearms since he knew I was interested in the subject. His office wasn’t located in the most sterling part of Albuquerque (and his new office still isn’t exactly in a crime-free zone). We bantered back and forth a bit on the subject, and I answered his questions as they came up, and in general it was a pretty soft sell. He was one of those folks who support gun rights, but just wasn’t particularly interested in joining as a vested party. Yesterday, he and his wife joined us for a trip through a very well pecked over gun shop. We were along (aside from not turning away excuses to go to the gun store) to serve as someone with a bit of a clue to help out – sort of a walking bullshit detector and sounding board. The staff at Ron Peterson’s aren’t normally of the type to pull the oft-spotted “Whatchoo need h’yar is this Thunderblast 9000! Now don’t you mind that your hand cramped just from picking it up, you’ll only need to wave it around a’fore any bad guys crap themselves runnin!” schtick, and this visit was no exception, so we spent more time in the good info-dump capacity than in the bad.

The surprising part though was the unexpected third person tagging along. I’ve mentioned in the past that one of (well, more than one honestly) of my bosses have what I will euphemistically refer to as “leftward leanings.” Y’know. Of the Prius driving sort. I had a laptop for her for some work related stuff. She teased me by suggesting we meet at the Apple Store for the hand-off, so I countered back with an offer of the gun store since my day was full anyway, and promised that the bitter clingers wouldn’t give her any trouble. I figured we’d wind up with some neutral territory, but straight out of left field came her reply that not only would the gun store be fine, but by the way at some point maybe you could give me some advice on buying a gun.

LabRat swears my expression was priceless. I wouldn’t know, since I was too busy trying to keep dust bunnies from rolling into my mouth off the floor from where my jaw dropped.

So, lather, rinse, repeat. She amazingly wasn’t aware of Obama’s record on liberty restriction (or at least this aspect of it), but took it in stride, asked intelligent questions, and had two specific purposes (home defense, as she lives alone quite a way out in the boondocks, and the possibility of having to put a sheep, horse, or goat down in an emergency) in mind to make sorting through everything easier.

My friend and his wife, I know are going to buy something. I know this because his wife told me “Oh, I know how he gets. It was like this with his cigars and camera stuff. Pretty soon the house will be filled with every laser, light, holster, and other gadget and we’ll have two or three dozen guns and he’ll be asking you about a full-size safe.” I think that’s a good sign. As for my boss, I wouldn’t say she’s absolutely a sure thing, but I’ll note she certainly did like the Springfield XD she was checking out…

Oh, and whatever assholes on the road were responsible for the drive from Albuquerque to Santa Fe taking two fucking hours can choke on rancid whale blubber and water ski at Seal Island. Albuquerque to Santa Fe is normally about a half hour to 45 minutes, and those pricks kept me from getting to the homebrew store!

Just about everybody has heard the old saw that tradgedy plus time equals comedy. From the appearance of the Titanic in “Ghostbusters 2″ to various Hindenburg jokes, this pattern plays out again and again. Some of you all may remember that a few months back, we took Kang to her first dog show. LabRat noted at the time that her take on the event was somewhat different from mine. Well, time and the fact that there is another show looming in her immediate future have given me the urge to look back and remember just what happened that weekend in May.

The entire ordeal started out on shaky ground. When LabRat first got the invitation to the show, the timing was less than convenient right out the gate. In a best-case scenario, we would’ve driven to Albuquerque with Kang on a Friday to drop her off, driven back on Sunday to pick her up, and then driven right back on Monday for the tattoo appointment I had already scheduled a month or so in advance. With an even hundred miles from Los Alamos to Albuquerque as the redneck drives, this six hundred mile plan did not seem terribly appealing.

After a bit of debate, organizing, cajoling and general acts of juggling, we wound up with a reasonable plan. We would drive down on Friday, drop Kang off with her breeder for showing, and then spend a leisurely weekend in the Big City, tending to our myriad of standing errands to run whenever we’re someplace with more than a half dozen or so retail stores. With fingers crossed, we called Mark in hopes of moving my tattoo from Monday to either Friday afternoon or Saturday. While the show would be a trifle inconvenient and certainly a tad expensive what with the hotel room, it seemed do-able at least.

In retrospect, given Murphy’s residence in this house despite our best efforts to evict the bastard, that should have been a warning sign that all hell was about to break loose.

The Friday in question eventually rolled around. With the schedule calling for Kang to be on-site and ready to go shortly after noon, this left us with considerably less time than we would have prefered in the morning to attend to all last minute details and arrangements. Kodos had to be dropped with my parents for the weekend, LabRat’s habit of not packing until the jet is taxiing down the runway, as it were, and my general aversion to mornings (which for the purposes of this post, I will blame on LabRat, as before I met her rising at 5am was reasonably common for me), and all the last minute “what will we need for the show?” factors had to be accounted for. Before this morning, I was led to believe that Kang would be washed at the show grounds, as they would presumably have better equipment to handle the operation, and she would need Proper Grooming, whatever the hell that was, before she went into the ring anyway. Instead, while in the midst of gathering my last items before mistakenly believeing myself ready to leave, LabRat marched a confused looking Kang up to me and wanted to know when I was going to wash her this morning.

Having only minimal coffee in my system at that point, I made my first mistake of the weekend, one which I would sadly repeat as time went on. I froze in confusion.

“What? She’s getting a bath down there, remember?”
“Yeah, but I just went over the schedule and she’ll need more time to dry and if we get that out of the way here we can –” She went on like this. I relented.

Bathing the dogs here is a tricky proposition at best. With one well over 100lbs, and the other just shy of same, control becomes something of an issue. As such, it winds up considerably easier to simply coax/drag/shove/bait the dog into the shower stall, and climb in with it to perform the scrubdown. I’m sure your own mind can fill in the details of a grown man and a nervous large dog in a shower stall attempting to engage in vigorous acts of scrubbing. There was much howling involved and some disturbing amounts of licking the shower door. I am pleased to note that I had no part in the licking of the shower door.

With Kang’s shower done, and my second shower just begining so I could remove the 20lbs of loose fur she shed (which through one of the few bright spots of luck for the weekend did not clog the drain), we were only running slightly behind schedule. We packed up the dogs and our luggage and the assorted support gear we deemed necessary for Kang into the truck and made for my parent’s house to drop of Kodos. A short ride, and one the dogs have made many times, this was uneventful. Once we reached the highway, however, things changed.

It should be noted at this point that, despite my best efforts, Kang is a daddy’s girl. When we first went to pick her up from the breeder at the tender age of eight weeks, it was love at first sight for her. While the breeder dealt with another couple who happened to be picking their puppy up the same day and were on their way out, we were asked to simply have a seat and enjoy the puppies. Puppies! Fuzzy! Cute! Cuddly! Et cetera! Plopping myself down on the floor to pet the little balls of fluff, the one that was to be Kang trundled over to me and gave me a vigorous sniffing. She then stomped through my lap, leaving of course no delicate bits un-squished, marched a few feet away, peed on the floor, and then marched back to curl up and fall asleep in my lap. Aside from the location where she pees, surprisingly little has changed since. Anyway, back to the highway.

On the short drives to my parent’s house, or to the vet, Kang had traditionally been happy to look out the windows, or annoy Kodos, or occasionally stick her head up toward the front seat for a quick ear scritch. For longer rides, she apparently gets nervous. When nervous, she seems to want reassurance from daddy. Thus, for the next two hours, I learned to pilot a full-size pickup with dangerously insufficient caffeine in my system through the New Mexico highways and interstates with this head planted firmly on my shoulder, breathing wetly into my ear. At least I probably blended in with the rest of the drunks finally going home.

Arriving in Albuquerque, we had left time for lunch. This went surprisingly smoothly, despite the gigantic fuzzy mooch in the back seat. We called Mark to see about the tattoo reschedule, and for the most part the biggest worries of the weekend were the early morning and the unexpected bath. Then we tried to get Kang to the show, and that is where engines 2, 3, and 4 caught fire, the controls locked, fuel pressure went out, the bombadier puked all over and all the guns jammed. Metaphorically speaking of cousre.

After three or four passes on one of Albuquerque’s busier streets attempting to find the lone open gate to the appropriate area of the state fair grounds, we finally found a way in. We promptly blew our other lone piece of luck for the weekend by getting past the gatekeeper without paying a parking fee on the grounds that we were simply dropping the dog off to be shown, and wouldn’t be staying. We pulled in to an area reasonably near where the show was supposedly being held, and tried to call the breeder. Meanwhile, our lunch stop not having bathroom facilities easy to access, or of general maintenance above “might not explode,” my bladder was threatening dire consequences if I didn’t find at the very least a secluded shrubbery. Leaving the phone and dog in LabRat’s care, I set off to the clearly labled facilities in plain view from the parking lot. As it turned out, those facilities had not been unlocked since shortly after the fairgrounds were first built. With a few choice phrases directed at the door locks, I went in search of other suitable facilities.

Twenty minutes of marching through the mid-90-degree heat and relatively high humidity of Albuquerque in May, the only option availible was a vacant horse stall. After a series of looks from my neighbor, which I presume translated from horse into “Dude, aren’t you done yet?” I made my way back to the truck to find that LabRat had still not managed to reach the breeder. Taking Kang from her, she went in search of anybody who could point us in the right direction. At this point, regardless of the impact to the morning’s schedule, I was glad we had bathed her at home, since showtime was looming a fair bit closer than we had originally planned. In my head, by this point in the day, Kang would have been well off with the breeder, we would have checked into the hotel, and the leisurely weekend would be well underway, checking out various interesting looking shops we never had time to stop into before and the like. Eventually, LabRat came back into sight, moving at a fairly brisk pace compared to normal. Having finally found the breeder’s area, she reported, we threw all our stuff small enough to fit into the cab of the truck, crossed our fingers about the dog’s crate (the Albuquerque fairgrounds are not in the low-crime section of town) and went to make the handoff.

At this point, the fourth engine burst into flame, half the starboard wing fell off, the ball-turret gunner went plummeting off towards the green earth below, the radio went out, and the last transmission from friendly territory involved phrases like “on fire” and “court-martial.” Metaphorically speaking, of course.

“Oh, great! You’re finally here!” the breeder announced. “Sorry, my phone was in the glove-box in the car. Been kinda busy here. Look, the show is in about an hour and a half, which will be just enough time to– oh no! You didn’t groom her?!”
“We gave her a bath before we lef–”
“Throw her — what’s her name again?”
“Ka–”
“Throw her up on that table and get her groomed. There are tools on the other table where they’re grooming Uzi right now. Don’t get too close to her head, she’s cranky.”
“Uz- ?”
“I’ve got to run talk to the judge for a minute and get some other details squared away. You don’t mind and have time for this, right?” I repeated my earlier mistake and hesitated, confused.
“Um, I gue-”
“Great. Do you know how to groom.” It was not a question.
“What?”
“Oh. Frickin’ great. Ok, get her on the table and just start brushing her real good. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

We got Kang up on the table in question, and not knowing what else to do, set about our usual procedure for getting loose hair and undercoat off her. Uzi’s crankiness (and yes, the other akita was named Uzi, and yes, after the gun) had been fortunately overstated, and amounted to giving me a friendly lick as I moved past. LabRat held Kang’s collar and I worked her over with an undercoat rake and shedding blade I found nearby. The breeder came back into view, moving at full steam.

“What are you doing!? I said start grooming her! It’s nearly show time!”
“I –”
“Here, get this noose over her head so we can control her.”
“She–”
“Raise that post to keep her head in the right spot.”
“It –”
“Twist the other knob.”
“Ok.”
“We’ll start with her nails. She’s fidgety, so control her head. Just put her in a headlock.”
“Right.”
At this point, Kang felt it prudent to become involved in the process.
“ARRRRooooWWWOOoooOWWWOWOOOO!”
“Aw, you’re a fidgeter aren’tcha! Hold her head tighter.”
“Right.” I clamped down on my headlock.
“ARRROOOWWAHAHAAAARROOOOOAHHHH AHHHH AHHHH!!!”
“Tighter!”
“Right.”
“ARRROOOOOOOAAAAOOOOOOHHHOOOOOWWWWWWOOOOOoooOooOOOohwwwaaaO”
“Too tight. You’re hurting her.”
“Oooh-kay.” I eased off the headlock. Kang instantly transformed into a land-based Marlin. At least this is the closest description I can muster for the transformation in to “wildly-bucking and howling fur-beast.”
“Ok, put your fingers under her chin like this – ” she jammed two fingers under my chin for demonstration – “and push up like this” – which she also demonstrated on me. “That’ll control her head without making her afraid you’ll choke her.”
“And who’s idea was the choking?”
“Huh? Just push up.”
“Right.”

“AROOOMMPFFOOOOPMMMMMOOOOO!”
“Harder!”
“Right!”
“AROOOOMMMMMMPPFFFFOOMMMFPFF!”
“HARDER!”
“RIGHT!”
“ARRROMMMMFFOOOOOOOOFFFMMMMMOOOOOOO!”
“Too hard!”
“But you said –”
“You’re pushing too hard, it’s scaring her!”
“You just told me to-”
“You’re a crybaby, aren’t you!” She bonked Kang on the nose. Kang gave me a confused look. I returned it. “Ok, her nails are done. You can do her coat, right?”
“Huh?” I began to wonder why she was turning to me for all this, while LabRat hovered nearby.
“Oh, God. Ok. Take this,” she handed me a collection of brushes, “this,” a squirt bottle filled with something, “these,” more squirt bottles, “and this” a shop-vac set to blow, “and {perform a miracle}. Got it?” I’d offer a more detailed account of what she actually said in place of “perform a miracle,” but really, that’s about all I got out of her instructions.
“Well, I — ” she flipped the shop-vac to high.
“I’ll be over here working on Uzi, so I can walk you through it from there!” she yelled over the noise. Unfortunately, with the noise, all I heard was “I’ll…. work…. uzi…you…there!” I was unsure if I should take that as a threat, not having yet confirmed that the dog’s name was Uzi.

From there, through a series of interpretive dances, wild hand gestures, and a growing cloud of removed fur, Kang was Groomed. Kang did not like being Groomed. The only thing louder than the shop vac were Kang’s howls of disapproval and torment. Judging from the noises coming from this previously 99% quiet creature, it would be quite reasonable to conclude we were performing surgery sans anesthesia. The shop vac howled. Kang howled louder. I choked and sputtered as the cloud of fur reached densities high enough to spark fears in the back of my mind that gravity would take over and the cloud would condense and reach the point necessary to start a fusion reaction. My shirt was no longer blue, and the stubble I had foolishly failed to shave earlier in the morning was gathering such quantities of airborn fuzz that I’m told I took on a rather akita-like appearance myself, only with my mouth forming much more clear profanity, thankfully for bystanders drowned out by the shop-vac.

Forty seven hours later, the grooming was complete. Kang was resplendant in her show coat, fluffed to a volume I did not believe she was capable of, and looking every bit the (rather shocked and confused) ring queen. From there, we discovere (as LabRat mentioned in the original post), that Kang expected us to save her from this bizarre world of chaos and confusion we had thrust her into whenever she could see us. I sympathized, and was hoping someone would save us. We were thus banished from watching her compete. Hovering around, trying to keep a layer of spectators thick enough to keep her from noticing us, but thin enough to have some idea if we were even looking at our dog, the show progressed. Unaccustomed to being handled in such a manner, Kang dug her heels in and gave donkeys a good run for the title of “Most Stubborn.” Then, waving her front paw wildly about in the most clear demonstration of “DO NOT WANT” I have ever witnessed, she punched the judge in the face. The judge, a burly woman, took it in stride, fortunately. We later learned that she was a former U.S. Marine, which explained a lot.

In the midst of trying to watch the show, my accursed phone rang. The tattoo shop was calling about the reschedule. To make things worse, rather than hearing Mark as I expected, I heard a female voice. Apparently the shop had finally found some help to run the counter, adding just that extra dash of confusion for good measure. In keeping with our luck for the day, the only session possible other than the original as scheduled, was that very evening at 7pm. And as LabRat mentioned in the other post, we had for some reason agreed to have dinner with the local Akita club after the show. At 6pm.

Finally, the show wrapped up. I was more than a little concerned about the timing issues at this point. The last time we had been to our breeder’s house, where Kang would be spending the weekend, it was in a location best described as “Way The Fuck Out There,” at least 30 minutes each way, and it was already 5:20. Amazingly, she had moved to a location only slightly The Fuck Out There, and we were able to pack up dogs and equipment and make it from the middle of Albuquerque to the north end of town in reasonable time. Of course, when we got there, we discovered that Kang had picked up a case of worms from one of her kills. Nothing quite like marching your dog to the expert’s turf and noticing a white wriggler sticking out of her butt after a day like that to make you look like a competent owner, I can tell you that.

With dinner scheduled back near the fairgrounds for 6pm, we were a trifle behind schedule at this point. I will save the lurid description of the drive from breeder’s to restaraunt that I suspect LabRat would qualify as “death defying” and “bone chilling” because such claims are obvious hyperbole and have little in common with how the drive actually went. I will say that the engineers at Dodge did a hell of a job, because a full size pickup isn’t normally a vehicle folks consider capable of maneuvering well at 90mph through moderate to heavy traffic. Good acceleration too.

As we arrived at the eatery, it became obvious that we were a very distinct minority in considering punctuality that important. The judge Kang punched was there (once a Marine, always a Marine), and one other couple. The couple promptly began condescending to us, while the Marine was friendly to LabRat. Unfortunately, I missed a key section of conversation whilst washing up (buttworms before dinner? No thanks), and so some of the Marine’s conversation seemed a tad down her nose at us as well.

Finally, after a dinner in which I could not have understood less, we made it to the tattoo shop. I had never been so glad to be in agonizing pain before in my life. Mark was working over a section of my ribs which wasn’t technically the worst spot possible as far as pain generation, but was very high on the list. Throughout relating the day to Mark and the other artists, I think it tells all that needs saying that they all commented that nobody had sat that still for that much in that section in their memory. It was just that big an improvement over the rest of the day.

Finally, the day was over. Wondering if our reservation would still be good, we trekked off to the hotel. As we pulled into the parking lot, our luck held. The lot was full of school buses. A girl’s softball team was in town for whatever it is they do, and they had chosen the very same hotel we were in. And yes, they were on the same floor as us. In the next room on either side.

If you don’t hear back from us after this next show, I think you can safely deduce what happened. Hopefully the spot on “America’s Most Wanted” will be flattering.

One of the funny things about dogs- and animals in general- is, as I’ve said before, they don’t generalize well. Something that a human would readily figure out is the same person in a slightly different context- like a friend standing in water so that only their upper half was visible- can freak a dog right the fuck out, if it’s new and strange to them. Apparently, the familiarity can only make it more disturbing- kind of like how a human might react to seeing their mother with an eggbeater growing out her ear. Breeds that are developed to keep especially close visual track of their surroundings, like herding and guardian breeds, can be particularly susceptible to this phenomenon.

Akitas, for a guardian breed, are actually pretty stable in this way, probably because they’re also a primitive breed that’s experienced relatively little human meddling with their mindset. Certainly, both Kang and Kodos handle novelty better than the shelties and German Shepherd I used to own, and they’re also much better at restraining themselves from reacting to stimulus. We complain about how much Kodos barks at passerby, but that’s because it echoes badly in this room and because we both HATE excessive barking, not because he’s actually all that bad. God knows some people I know with terriers or sheepdogs would give their right arm if their dog, having a huge vantage point on the street in the form of our glass office doors, would actually sometimes just sit and watch quietly while the same person that went by every day did so again. He’s quiet enough that it’s actually worth getting up and investigating when he raises a ruckus, which a lot of dog owners seem to have given up on entirely unless they’re hearing the “OMG SERIAL KILLER!!!” bark.

Kang, on the other hand, barely barks at all unless it’s important. She is very breed-typical in this, and it’s one of the reasons we have Akitas in the first place. If Kodos is barking, it’s probably worth checking out- if SHE’S barking, then that means for sure that someone is actually coming up the front walk, or that there’s a dangerous animal in the yard. (She is very noisily fierce with snakes, which thank God have all turned out to be nonpoisonous so far.)

This is why, when I was in the bathroom last night thinking Higher Thoughts, when I heard her erupt in a fury of barking and growling, I was actually concerned and a bit anxious about being caught with my pants down. I figured Stingray would deal with it, which is why my curiosity deepened when the next sound I heard was him in complete hysterics of laughter. I finished my business and went to see what on earth was so… inspiring.

As it turned out, she was barking at this man:

Not in person, of course. (If it were, we’d already be having some Words with him about his failure to cover the subject of the special challenges of cooking at serious altitude. It plays merry hell with some of his recipes.) At a still image on the TV, which, it turned out, was the problem.

We watch plenty of Good Eats, so manic Alton Brown performances are something she already knows not to pay any mind to. She sometimes shows interest in the TV, although her attention span is insufficient to maintain attention for longer than five or ten minutes, and normally she’s pretty cool with it. However, when we had finished watching an episode on eggplant on one of our DVDs, we had both found other little tasks to attend to, and had thus let the credits dump back to the basic menu for the DVD, which have a still image of Alton in a similar pose with a set of measuring cups and spoons. With the size of our TV screen, that’s a not-insignificant amount of Alton. Alton holding totally still and silent while brandishing kitchen tools, unlike Alton veering around the screen with high-speed patter. Which apparently was enough to unhinge our little guardian. She had walked in the room while we were both elsewhere, taken in the leering image of the Good Eater, and just lost it.

Kodos was deeply confused by this entire phenomenon, and thus had rushed to the front windows to bark furiously himself at… whatever must be setting her off, because he certainly couldn’t find anything INSIDE to justify that sort of reaction. After realizing that there was nothing out there, he charged back into the living room, looking around frantically for the threat. He made a few laps around the room (while Stingray continued laughing and I buried my face in my hands- my baby is retarded!), then finally came to a halt in front of the TV with a look on his face that I think probably translates most closely to “You have got to be kidding me“.

Finally, I heaved a sigh and walked up to the television and tapped it, giving the happy “see-it’s-nothing-bad” speech. Kodos walked up and began sniffing thoroughly. Kang hung back at first, but once she saw Kodos checking it out with no ill effects, she came up to join us. Eventually, they finally were satisfied that the image smelled of nothing- in the dog world, probably a suspicious thing all on its own- and I was free to wipe the noseprints off the TV and retreat to the couch with my book while I waited for Stingray to finish whatever he was doing so we could settle on the evening’s entertainment. Kang followed and curled up in her customary place next to me. For ten or fifteen minutes, all was peaceful.

“….Rrrrrrrrrrrrrr….”

I looked over the edge of my book. Kang was glaring at Alton and growling softly.

“Oh for heaven’s sake.”

Quiet.

“RRRRRRRRRRRRR.”

“He’s not going to hurt you. We’ve been over this.”

She thought this over.

“Rrrrrrrrrrrr….”

I gave up and turned the TV back to the usual feed on mute. The distraction of the flickering images was not worth having to listen to Kang menace inappropriately still television personalities. That was enough to satisfy her, and she dropped off promptly to sleep.

I’m tempted to get a picture of Bobby Flay to focus her protective instincts on a more appropriate target. After all, he’s the one with the show about humiliating home cooks in their hometowns…

When last we checked on the exploits of Zydeco, he had just finished a brief stint impersonating Ceiling Cat. Zydeco apparently liked this taste of supreme power, and tried to one-up himself by becoming not just Ceiling Cat, but the obviously higher level Roof Cat.

A few years back, while we were still living in a duplex, summers were an interesting exercise. Given the layout of the building, there was only one place that was viable to house all the computers. Having a significant amount of processing power in one small bedroom is already a good recipe for a very hot room, and in the winter it offset the god-awful insulation a bit to help keep things more comfortable. In the summer though, the afternoon sun, combined with the computers, made the room nearly unbearable. To combat this, we picked up a window-mounted AC unit.

Unfortunately, the window in the room was a sideways-opening window, rather than the vertical opening required for proper mounting of the AC. Since the heat was bad enough to occasionally reboot the computers, something had to be done, so we pressed on and mounted it anyway. We covered the gap above the unit with a truly ghetto-tastic combination of cardboard, plywood, and duct tape. I wasn’t happy with it, but it did the job and made the room livable.

Around this same time, we picked up a spare sofa. Formerly my grandmother’s, and a rather sturdy (if slightly ugly) offering from Ethan Allen, we were loath to turn it away, even though we didn’t really have space for it. After some creative efforts, we managed to get it up the stairs and into the computer room, directly under the AC, reasoning it would be a good place to sit and read during the peak of the heat.

Zydeco had other plans.

One evening, the three of us merrily sequestered in the computer room (this being before we got Kodos), LabRat and I were playing Unreal or some other “Hah! Gotcha!” game with each other. A pause in the game rolled around, and for some strange reason there was a sound artifact during a loading screen. Sort of an angry “YAAAA!” noise. Thinking little of it, we continued blasting each other to kingdom come. A few minutes later during another pause, we heard the sound again. This time it was slightly farther away, yet more angry and more insistent. Since LabRat was closer to the window, she became curious and looked around.

Then she noticed that the makeshift window-blocker had come askew. Near where Zydeco had been napping on the sofa. Who was no longer on the sofa.

At this point, things got interesting. Pulling the blocking material the rest of the way down, we confirmed that Zydeco had indeed decided for a little suburban exploration, and was stalking around on the roof of our back porch. Because Zydeco considers himself the most supreme destructive force known to exist, simply leaving him there to come in through the back door after his wanderings was out of the question. Any run-in with a coyote or bear would result in Zydeco making a very credible effort to destroy his agressor, but likely ultimately losing the battle. Plans were made to retreive him.

Did I mention that it wasn’t a work night, and the deathmatches had been progressing along the lines of “Oooh, they’ll be picking up the pieces of you from that one for a while! Take a drink!”? Fortunately, I was winning.

Anyway, a sane person would’ve simply gone around the back and used a ladder to remedy the problem. The drawback there is that our ladder was on loan to someone a good ways away. We scratched our heads and worked up Plan B.

After a brief discussion, while one of us kept a head out the window to watch our idiot explorer, we came up with three options. One, I could climb the firewood pile, stacked next to a storage shed, and from there scale the shed roof and clamber to the porch roof. Two, we could try to climb out to the porch roof the same way Zydeco did, over the AC. Three, we could go out the bedroom window, which overlooked the same porch and did not have an AC unit hanging in the way. Amazingly, we took the third tack. Throughout the process, Zydeco, being Siamese, felt obliged to comment.
“Well, we could – ”
“YAAAAAAA!”
” – climb up the firewood -”
“ROOOOOOOOORRWWW!”

It was a difficult conversation.

A few minutes later, after wrestling with a screen retention system obviously designed by Rube Goldberg himself, I managed to gain a clear access to the roof. Zydeco, trying to either kill me and make it look like an accident, or be helpful – the jury’s still out on which – had come over to the bedroom window, where he deposited himself directly where I was trying to land. I managed to avoid squishing him only through some feat of gymnastics which I don’t think was strictly physically possible. My legs informed me that tomorrow There Would Be Words about my efforts. The cat, who assumed I was on to his scheme to kill me, scarpered.

At first, he ran down the far side of the porch, past our adjoining neighbor’s bedroom. Luckily for me, she had apparently not gone to bed yet. At least, no police showed up to ask why someone was running around on the porch roof. Just as I was drawing near, Zydeco must’ve assumed my intent was not to return him safely to his indoor lifestyle, but instead to exact my own revenge for his previous attempt on my life, and doubled back, going between my legs. My grab found me slightly off balance, though fortunately only my posterior was wounded, rather than risking potential damage to the concrete below from my head had I fallen.

Having decided I was a credible threat to life and limb, Zydeco turned up his efforts to escape, and leaped the small gap to the shed roof, which was made of corrugated sheet metal, and set at a fairly decent slope. It was also covered with dead twigs from a sickly elm tree hanging over it, the sort of twig that’s just big enough around to act like a long, slender ball bearing if you step on it. I prepared to cross the gap between porch and shed.

Finally, a spare neuron in my head looked in and realized it was living in the skull of an idiot. Alerting its fellow neurons to their imminent peril, it organized a plan of action which involved me stopping and saying to myself something along the lines of “Y’know, I rather like having my neck in the current configuration, rather than twisted and mangled.”

With Zydeco staring haughtily at me from the shed roof, I withdrew from the gap, sat down, and told LabRat to go downstairs and catch him if he tried to descend via the aforementioned wood pile. While she descended the stairs, I began quietly and calmly outlining exactly what I thought of this stunt, as well as Zydeco’s questionable ancestry, and even offered a few suggestions as to his viability as a winter hat. Apparently, this stream of quiet profanity was soothing, as at this point he flicked his tail once, got up, sauntered over, and promptly sat in my lap.

LabRat wasn’t terribly thrilled about making the trip down the stairs only to have to march back up to help get the cat and me back in, but was happy enough that the cat was safe.

The sofa went back the next day.

With apologies to the indispensable Skippy’s List. As with that list, all items were either actually perpetrated or strongly suggested at some point- nothing was invented strictly for purposes of this post.

1. Stingray is no longer allowed to sign for packages while wearing a pistol… and nothing else.
2. Stingray is no longer allowed anywhere near a liberal-cause rally of any kind. (Don’t ask*.)
3. Stingray is no longer allowed to use the cat to check for a ground circuit.
4. Stingray is no longer allowed to re-forge the fireplace tools.
5. Stingray is no longer allowed to imitate the lighter-and-spoon techniques of crack addicts to get his caffeine more directly.
6. Stingray is no longer allowed to use a blowtorch for personal grooming purposes of any kind.
7. Stingray is no longer allowed to vacuum any of the pets unless they tolerate it of their own volition. This will never happen.
8. Stingray is no longer allowed to illustrate the concept “she’s with me” by honking the wife’s breasts.
9. Stingray is no longer allowed to chase the dog with power tools of any sort.
10. Stingray is not allowed near liquid latex ever again. (REALLY: don’t ask!)
11. Stingray is no longer allowed to propose “more direct” routes into canyons that don’t involve a trail.
12. Stingray is no longer allowed to throw M-60s or any other thing designed to explode where the dogs might possibly think he is playing “fetch”.
13. Stingray is no longer allowed to propose the use of his straight razor for any of the wife’s personal grooming needs.
14. Stingray is no longer allowed to meld his hobbies when this means combining scotch with circular saws.
15. Stingray is no longer allowed to clean his guns without first making sure the dog that investigates everything by licking it does not have access.
16. Stingray is no longer to use the fireplace to play “thermodynamics and YOU” games.
17. Stingray is no longer to use the phrases “this shouldn’t take long” or “this should be pretty simple” when describing a proposed construction project.
18. Stingray is no longer to use ice cubes to exploit the wife’s tendency to hyper-focus simply because he is bored.
19. Stingray is not allowed to use surprise spiders to treat the wife’s arachnophobia.
20. Stingray is no longer allowed to use a blowtorch for weed control, either.
21. Stingray is no longer allowed to weld, braze, solder, or do anything involving fire and melting metal in a room that is carpeted.
22. Stingray is no longer to seriously countenance family project proposals that involve rocks in excess of five hundred pounds each.
23. Stingray is no longer allowed to consider himself the standard for “pleasantly spicy” when making pots of chili for the whole family.
24. Stingray is no longer allowed to leave items with names or titles like “Big Bob’s Gimp Grease” in open view when relatives are visiting.
25. Stingray is no longer to build campfires to the standards of signal fires used by people stranded on desert islands.
26. Stingray is no longer allowed to apply calculus to any part of the wife’s anatomy.
27. Stingray is not allowed to modify the muffler of any family vehicle intended for normal street use to become “push-button optional”.
28. Stingray is no longer allowed to employ duct tape in any aspect of personal grooming.
29. Stingray is no longer allowed to give the wife a drink intended as a “pick-me-up” without explicitly detailing its contents and method of preparation.
30. Stingray is not allowed to encourage relatives that enjoy golfing toward the edge of the canyon.
31. Stingray is no longer to ask the wife for directions and take the answer at face value.
32. Stingray is no longer to case-mod appliances other than computers.
33. Stingray is not allowed to resolve legal disputes through applied ballistics.
34. Stingray is not allowed to build a breeder reactor in the back yard. Yes, I really, really mean it!
35. Stingray is no longer allowed to exploit the Newtonian physics inherent in a situation involving an eighty-pound dog, a laser pointer, and a slick tile floor**.
36. Stingray is no longer allowed to use a flail as a “parking accessory”.
37. Stingray is not allowed to install the cat in the gun safe as a “security measure”, especially if he keeps balking at the air holes.
38. Stingray is no longer allowed to attempt mixing two yards of concrete by hand.
39. Stingray is no longer allowed to drive at 120 mph past the local police station.
40. Stingray is no longer allowed to use colleagues as boat anchors whilst at sea.
41. Stingray is no longer allowed to “play” with multiple sharks, even if they are “little ones”.
42. Stingray is no longer allowed to use Bondo for any sort of intimate purpose whatsoever.
43. Stingray is no longer allowed to rig the outcomes of charitable raffles.
44. Stingray is no longer allowed to electrocute people who annoy him, despite encouragement from dubious sources.
45. Stingray is no longer allowed to run up the street with a high-powered rifle, no matter how big the elk is.
46. Stingray is no longer allowed to laugh at the wife’s more spectacular incidences of clumsiness without at least checking for a pulse first.
47. Stingray is no longer allowed to use gasoline as an ant-control measure.

*Explanations will only be given, if ever, in person and over drinks.
**I’m pretty sure this one is violated basically every time I turn my back.

“Personally, I liked working for the university. They gave us money and facilities, we didn’t have to produce anything. I’ve worked in the private sector- they expect RESULTS.”
- Ray Stantz, Ghostbusters

Nowadays, when you put “astrology” and “astronomy” in close proximity, and you are not a dictionary, it’s usually because you’re meaning to compare occult nonsense with sober science. One of them is the study of the nature, movement, and behavior of heavenly bodies, and the other is fundamentally the assertion that the bits of bright light in the sky move in ways that directly translate to what *our* bodies and nature are going to be doing. If nothing else, they make handy root-word cousins for comparing science and pseudoscience. However, as some astrologers point out (thanks Chas), astronomy and astrology were close to being the same discipline for the bulk of human history so far.

Humanity has parlayed a few tricks into astonishing success as animals. One of these- a tactic known by most big-brained and long-lived mammals- is noticing and remembering patterns in the environment around them, and relating those patterns to one another. In its most basic form, this is how a species that doesn’t breed like a mayfly and needs its expensive offspring to survive through lean years stays healthy- in flush years, ripe fruit and dumb young animals (meat) might be everywhere, but remembering where they may STILL be found during lean ones is a useful skill. For a big, bright primate- like an orangutan- life is a layered map of resources cued by changes in the length of the day, the temperature, and all the other things that change with the seasons.

Humans became extremely good at this. Between the even bigger brain and even longer lives, and early advances in telling each other things beyond “we can probably still find palms in fruit over this way”, and some even further symbological advancements that let us write such things down, humanity began to pick up on even bigger patterns- like the specific *way* the sun moved through the sky, the patterns of light against the darkness moved over time, and the predictable way the moon changed. People in the tropics began with noticing the strange days on which they cast no shadow. Folks in more temperate climes were most intensely interested in the longest and shortest days of the year- when the light, the warmth, and the ability to grow things to eat was going to go away and when it was going to come back.

In order to start writing *enough* things down and start relating them to one another in consistent ways, let alone start building everything from the ancient equivalent of UNIVAC right on up to Roadrunner, big civilizations were necessary. Without one, every individual human is mostly occupied with keeping all his own resources organized; you need a surplus, and a way of organizing its distribution, before you can have excess citizens with nothing better to do than sit around watching the lights overhead and mapping them.

However advanced any given group of humans became at making sense of the timing and progression of the seasons, and the tides, and the way they all correlated to the way the stars and the planets (identified by being a lot more inclined to wander around the sky than the more fixed points of lights) moved, they were still thinking about them with exactly the same brain that they used to keep track of the fruit, the herds, and the wife’s monthlies. Specifically, the same brain whose instant followup question to “How do these things relate?” is always “what does this have to do with me?” If anything, the followup only becomes more pressing when your entire existence of painstakingly recording the nature and behavior of the lights in the sky rests on it- or at least on your ability to justify such pure knowledge as valuable to someone who has no knowledge of the processions of the heavens, but DOES have a lot of goats and wheat to spare.

There was certainly little enough reason to suspect that the earth was NOT at the center of the whole thing; earth is a fixed point of reference to anyone standing on it. There was even less reason to suspect that the complex, beautiful system of patterns that the heavens revolved through had no more relevance to humanity than a useful reference system for good times for planting and harvesting; even an illiterate farmer can figure THAT sort of thing out. Stars were the stuff of math, the purest marriage of abstract symbolism and concrete reality, and ultimately the most powerful tool the tool-using apes were ever to stumble across. It all had to mean something- and the same people who wrote everything else down wrote down what they suspected that might be, relating it to everything else they associated with the heavens, with true justification or without it- it can be hard to tell. Ultimately, the body of any contemporary state of knowledge lies in what’s been written down so far.

As it turns out, reality is usually far more preposterous than mere intuition leads us to suspect.

Eventually, the math led us far enough in the right direction that old assumptions based primarily on “makes the most sense of the time” began to crumble and new ones based on “this is the only way we can make the figures work” rose, eventually to the point where we could make such accurate predictions about the sky and the deeper space beyond it that we could stick a probe into a transient celestial object 429 million kilometers away.

Math is wonderful. It gave us astrology and astronomy in a single package born of human nature and solid observation, and then got us out of needing astrology as the most logical set of assumptions about our relationship to the stars. Math can do nearly anything.

It is always useful, however, to remember that math, being a pure tool for pattern-finding, will find the patterns in anything.

Be sure to swing by Matt’s, Marko’s, Tam’s, LawDog’s, and Ambulance Driver’s for everyone else’s take on this weeks’ theme.

Before we moved in to our current spacious abode and black hole of time, energy, and money, we were renters.

As I have explained in the past, the nature of Los Alamos’s structure- entirely centered around the national laboratory, having no other reason for existence and damned little room to expand beyond that reason- creates some strange local market effects. Just as the employment pool is highly polarized into “fast food worker” and “nuclear physicist” ends, so is the housing market. At one end, you have apartment complexes like “the Caves” and similar hovels, suitable for grad students and other vermin. At the other, you have houses you pay seven figures for because Enrico Fermi once lived there. What there is available in between tends to be clustered pretty close to the poles. One step above the Caves are the dilapidated duplexes the government built en masse when they realized that they were going to have to set up slightly more permanent nerd-cages when the Lab simply gained momentum in the postwar era rather than closing down when the Project ended. Like almost every other young couple with our income, we lived in iterations of these until we could afford to buy a house not held together with spackle and duct tape. The duplexes cover the vast majority of the residential areas of the city and are fundamentally identical.

As you might expect from fifties-era government housing, built quickly and indifferently, “home improvement” would not be an accurate description of our efforts. Staying ahead of the rate of deterioration was. The first one we rented was only barely insulated, featured a temperamental furnace, and had a rodent problem- mostly because the walls were beginning to separate from the floors at many points. The second one was quite a bit better maintained, although we still had to put a copper rod in the backyard to ground the electrical outlets in the computer room. It also, as we discovered, had some chronic plumbing problems in the bathroom that tended to express themselves by draining into the kitchen. Conveniently, there were access panels to this plumbing at floor level on the second floor and in the ceiling of the kitchen.

One afternoon after Stingray had finished exercising his profanity range while fixing the leak for the second or third time- which required opening up both panels- it occurred to us to wonder where the cat was. Things seemed suspiciously quiet and calm; normally he’d be busy sniffing us and yattering about the unforgivable disturbance to the daily routine. Naturally, the inevitable answer to this question loomed over us more or less at once.

“You don’t think he’s-”
“Of course he is.”

We trooped upstairs to call hopefully for the cat, and poked our heads into the second-floor panel.

“Zydeco!”
Faintly and from the bowels of the crawlspace… “….Yow.”
“Fuck.”

As he was not clinging to the pipes, it was quickly determined that he was not reachable from the second floor. We trooped back down to the kitchen and opened the ceiling panel.

“ZYDECO!”
“YOOOOOOOW!”

Stingray mounted the stepladder, disappeared partway into the ceiling, and opened negotiations. I think the “Here kitty, sweet kitty, come on kitty” lasted all of thirty seconds before “STUPID CAT!”, “JUST HOLD STILL!”, and “GODDAMN MOTHERFUCKING COCKROCKET MISERABLE LITTLE SACK OF SUCK!” started in. Stingray retreated and proposed leaving the cat in the ceiling until he was good and ready to leave the ceiling.

Normally, tender feminine sensibilities are something I don’t experience unless I’m on something mind-altering. I’m not a worrywart or a hand-wringer, and my supplies of sympathy are kept in a lockbox. If it had been Baby Jessica in that ceiling, I probably would have shrugged and said that she’d get bored chewing on the studs eventually and want to come down, and she could let us know then.

“We can’t leave him there! There are black widows in there! He can move around now; what if he steps or wedges himself in the wrong place and gets trapped?! We have to get him out while he can still move!”

“*sigh*”

Stingray re-mounted the stepladder and prepared to Take Charge of the situation: he stuffed his upper body as far into the ceiling as he could get it and tried to grab the cat. From the view from the ground, things suddenly became very animated as dust sifted down and the ladder began to vibrate and tip dangerously.

“C’MERE!”

“rrrrrrrAAAAAAAAAAAHHH!”

“SONOFABITCH!”

“RREEEEEEEOOOOOOOWWWWWWWWWWWWW!”

“OW, GODDAMMIT!”

As the soundtrack escalated into what sounded like a pitched battle between a drill instructor and a cobra in a blender, I tried to figure out whether I wanted to cry, laugh, call Animal Control, or call the police. Eventually, Stingray descended the ladder, covered in blood, dust, and insulation, and declared that the plan was now definitely leaving the cat there until either Zydeco was ready to leave, or he could get a shop-vac to apply to the problem, whichever came first. He stomped upstairs, and I engaged in some mid-level fretting and tried to figure out how, exactly, you wring your hands. Eventually it occurred to me that if the cat did not, actually, want down, there was no way in hell he would ever be close enough to the borders of the panel to be within clawing range. Obviously, my poor baby was just waiting to be saved, he just didn’t want to be grabbed. I climbed the stepladder.

“Hi, sweetie.”

*mournful howl*

Yep. Just out of reach, but constantly prowling around the opening. He’d had enough ceiling, but being seized and dragged down by some hominid oaf was obviously out of the question. Feeling silly but willing to try anything, I dismounted and grabbed the nearest appropriately-sized cardboard box. We always have a ton of cardboard around, since we buy nearly anything more esoteric than groceries by mail order, and the cat loves to nest in them. I climbed the stepladder and held the box up to the opening. To my everlasting shock, this was apparently just what he wanted: he squeaked gratefully and settled himself into the box, letting me carry him down in style. I carried my prize upstairs to show to Stingray.

For reasons I cannot fathom, he didn’t seem remotely pleased by my problem-solving skills, although he did threaten to let the cat sleep with the coyotes that night. And after all that blood shed on his behalf, too.

He did eventually forgive Zydeco, which was how he wound up on the roof trying to figure out how one lunges safely on shingles, but that’s a separate incident.

“A Scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent.”

Most days at camp, we managed to break every one of those before we even got out of our sleeping bags.

Like most kids, when I was younger I was occasionally packed off to some summer camp or another. Sometimes, this was utterly frickin’ awesome as hell (sorry about the auto-start clip there – might want to mute the speakers before heading over). Other times, it was somewhat less so. There are several Boy Scout camps in our general neck of the woods, and I don’t remember exactly which one the following occured at, so we’ll just call it Camp Wannaweep.

Before I press on, I should explain that my troop was not what you would call average. Mostly we were a daycare for some local brats, despite the best efforts of the four or five of us that gave a damn. One member left the troop in order to spend some quality time under supervision at juvie, for example. Between those of us who cared, and those of us with a more ambiguous moral bent, things were interesting, to put it mildly. Even though we weren’t quite in line with all the policies of the Boy Scouts of America (our troop didn’t care if you were an atheist, for example), I think we got the overall spirit of Improvise, Adapt, Overcome fairly well.

Meanwhile, back to Camp Wannaweep. This was the second summer our troop went there, despite the protests of the scouts who had gone the previous summer, myself included. While there before, the term “clusterfuck” would be the most accurate description, though it wouldn’t really do the situation justice. For example, when our troop got to the orienteering class, I wound up taking over for the camp counselor (several years older than I, despite that I was either a freshman or sophomore in high school at the time) who could not pronounce the word “declination,” let alone explain the concept. Who knew having a high school orienteering team would pay off?

Being of a crafty, if unscrupulous bent, we decided to make the best of a bad situation once word came from on high that we were stuck with Wannaweep. We pooled our memories from the previous summer, and came up with a plan. First up, we had to secure the proper campsite. The way everything was laid out, there was the obligatory meeting area, chow hall, and canteen at the bottom of a shallow valley. The campsites were all arrayed on one side of this valley, the other side being too steep to inhabit, and more importantly, there was one campsite on a chokepoint shortly before which every trail merged into the main path to the center of camp. The previous year, we were assigned that one site, and the sheer traffic through our area was a non-trivial factor in why the experience sucked. Boy Scouts are supposed to be clean and helpful and all that, but young boys are young boys no matter what. We were infested with litter not our own, and assailed by loud traffic from dawn to lights out. We may have had the shortest hike to chow and activities, but it was like camping in a fish bowl.

Needless to say, our scoutmasters were a bit flummoxed as to why we wanted the same site we complained so heartily about the previous year. Chalking it up simply to laziness and playing on the natural inclination of middle aged men to prefer not charging up and down hills all day, we managed to secure the site. The campsites were semi-permanant affairs, with rather spacious wall-tents set up on platforms. Had we been in cabins, things might have worked out for a little longer, but the setup was large and permanent enough to justify bringing several coolers for food, and many more supplies than we would have taken on any other sort of camping trip. This let us bring the other equipment and gear we needed with only minimal suspicion from the scout masters.

So being stuck in the middle of nowhere with adult supervision vastly outnumbered by the young and bored, how better to spend two weeks than by trying to drive the camp canteen out of business? The day after we arrived, Pancho Villa’s Cantina and Casino was open for business directly on the busiest path in camp. Having bought in bulk before we left, we sold sodas and candy at a huge profit and still undercut the official camp store. In the afternoons and evenings, we ran poker games, shot craps, and ran numbers rackets for candy. With a bit of creative explanation, we convinced our scoutmasters that the Cantina was the only business venture running, and were thus able to keep the casino under wraps for the first several days. Apparently they found our entrepreneurial spirit a welcome improvement from our usual MO of “burn it, tie it up, tease it, go find something else to burn.” After word about Pancho’s leaked, however, we started getting camp counselors looking for a hand of five-card draw.

We were of course happy to oblige, but in retrospect it was probably a mistake to take every last cent from the dork running the arts and crafts program. While it was not our fault he tried, repeatedly, to draw to an inside straight, the camp was scandalized, scandalized I tell you, to learn of our operation. The number of counselors quietly inspecting their shoes during the cease-and-desist lecture was impressive, however. Some of the less ethical members of our troop very quickly set up what remains in my memory as a surprisingly efficient money laundering operation, and we only wound up losing a small portion of our take from the casino. To this day, I’m not sure how they pulled it off. Our earnings from the cantina were grudgingly untouched, as no one wanted to punish honest capitalism too harshly. Never the less, we were still ordered to shut the cantina down as well. We were a rather credible threat to the camp store’s profits, and the operation wasn’t a charity camp after all. This worked out rather nicely since we underestimated the draw we would have, and were low on supplies.

With our camp-mandated “shut down,” we were able to quietly re-open the cantina and stretch our limited supplies the rest of the second week of camp under the guise of “sorry, can’t sell you anything. Ordered to close and all. Try around 5:40, wink wink.” We even managed to increase our profit margin to cover the risks of staying open and still be cheaper than the camp store. The last day of camp, rather than pack up our remaining stock, we took the entire remenants of our inventory and simply gorged ourselves at the tables in front of the camp canteen as a final raised middle finger to The Man. A friend in the camp staff dropped by and quietly informed me that thanks to our little stunt, this had been the first session in which the camp store had failed to break even.

We may not have been quite the moral pillars Robert Baden-Powell envisioned, but damn if the rest of the summer wasn’t surprisingly well funded.

Now that we’ve had a good serious run pointing out that Barack really is just the same political sleaze as everyone else in the race, and “enjoyed” a good shocking at how utterly fucked up radical feminists are (Hint: If your shrieks look like quotes from the Womynists in P.C.U., you’re doin’ it wrong), let’s lighten things up a bit, shall we?

Once when I was in high school, I wrecked the truck and convinced my dad it was his Christmas present.

As I can already hear the cries of “bullshit” wafting forth from the tubes, let me explain. To what I’m sure will be the shock of absolutely everybody, my teenage years contained a few moments of stupidity and poor judgement. In one of my fits of at-the-time genius, I was taking advantage of the mud created by a recent early and melted snowfall to do donuts and generally misbehave in the family’s (well, Dad’s) Blazer. With my teenage judgement skills working in peak condition, I misjudged my stopping power and the distance between the corner of a shed and the nose of the truck by about six inches. The shed came out the worse of it, but there was a rather noticable vertical line down the front of the hood on the blazer. It wasn’t huge, and didn’t buckle the hood, but there was no way to miss it looking at the front of the truck. My youthful mind had a sneaking suspicion that Dad would consider this a bad thing.

Thinking swiftly, I panicked. My dad and I were taking a welding class together at the local branch campus at the time, and working in my favor was the fact that it was dark out by the time we met there. Also in my favor was the fact that I was commander of our JROTC unit’s rifle team, and we practiced every morning, causing me to leave the house around 4:30 each day – well before he was up and about. Under cover of darkness, a solution occured to me.

The hood of the blazer was not in the most stellar shape to begin with. The thing was coming up on ten years of age by that point, and the small, vertical forward section of the hood had encountered more than a few flying rocks and such during its travels, and looked more than a little cratered. The rest of the hood was in good shape, but that leading edge had taken a beating, and didn’t look pretty. Now we reach my ace in the hole: at the time, my afterschool job was sanding and priming in the local paint and body shop.

Pulling into work the next afternoon, I explained the situation to the boss, who found the whole thing funny and agreed to help. We straightened out the crease, smoothed the craters, and managed to get the hood repainted and clear coated by just a little past quitting time. My dad is famously inattentive to certain details, and I was betting he probably wouldn’t notice the suddenly craterless condition of the hood until it had developed a few new ones. Unfortunatly, Murphy showed up during this process. While we were masking things off and preparing to shoot, the radio antenna decided to be a little bastard, and sheared off. That was something big enough to notice.

During the drive home, as I stayed carefully back from the other cars to make sure nothing damaged the still semi-fresh paint, I pondered my options. Eventually, I settled on the “wait and see” approach. If I was lucky, I could get out before sunup the next morning or two and install the replacement antenna when it came in without him noticing, then stick to the original plan. When I pulled up to the curb and he was working in the front yard on something or other, I realized that I was not going to be lucky.

“Hey, kiddo. Good day at wor — where’s the antenna?”
Y’know how in a cartoon a lightbulb will appear over someone’s head? I’m surprised he didn’t comment on the one over my head next.
“Damn. I was hoping you wouldn’t notice and ruin the surprise. Merry Christmas.”
“…huh?”
“Your Christmas present. I just finished it today, but the damn antenna had to go and foul things up.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“You know how you’re always complaining about the rock chips in the hood? Take a look at the nose of the truck.”
“…Wow! This came out great!”
“Thanks! It was a slow afternoon in the shop, so I floated the idea by for a way to learn how to work the paint instead of just primer. The guys thought it sounded cool, so here we are.”
“Man, that’s a great job, Tiger! Thanks!”
“Glad you like it! Sorry about the antenna. That sheared off when we were trying to pull it off to mask, but there’ll be a replacement in either tomorrow or Friday.”
“Eh, it happens and it’s easy to fix. Man, that really looks good! Hey, go get your Mom and tell her to come look at this!”

A few years later, he sold the Blazer, none the wiser still. Not being quite as dumb as I look, I still held off telling him. After I graduated college, LabRat and I were over at my parent’s home for some small get together with some of their friends, when Dad decided to start bragging.

“Yup. Stingray here made it all the way through high school without wrecking the car once! Surprised the hell out of everybody, but he was a pretty good kid.”
“Nah, you just didn’t find out about it when I did, Dad.”

His expression froze.

“Yeah, remember your ‘Christmas present’ when I repainted the hood? Guess why it suddenly needed repainting.”
“….the hell?”

At this point, I related the above story. When I got to the “Merry Christmas!” his friends started cracking up, while his expression gave me cause to wonder if I shouldn’t investigate a new career as a sprinter. Since he couldn’t kill me in public, he had time to calm down. Since then, he’s even managed to come to find the whole thing funny, so I suppose all in all things worked out.

Now that I’ve covered how getting on the boat sucked and how getting off the boat sucked, let’s take a look at what happens when you’re actually on the boat.

It’s not pretty.
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First, let me again remind you all that Norwegian Cruise Lines are a blight upon all that is good in the world, and should any of our readers at any point consider a vacation with them, I propose the following: Give me one half of whatever you would spend on airfare and the cruise itself, and I will come to your house, provide mild occasional beatings, surly contempt, and prevent you from leaving your home without levels of inconvenience last seen in the Spanish Inquisition. This way, you will save money and have roughly the same experience.

When last we left, LabRat and I had just survived the first full day at sea, and were preparing to arrive in our first port of call, Ketchikan.
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For most of the U.S., the weather is warming into spring. As the seasons change, many begin to look at taking a vacation. If you are one of these fun-seekers, I have some advice I wish to pass on in hopes of sparing you from the horror and disaster LabRat and I endured two years ago: stay the fuck away from Norwegian Cruise Lines.

The important information now established, let me explain why I feel NCL is an organization comprised of floating buckets of fail and suck.
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Sunny’s Campaign may have hit a slight bump while her campaign manager attempts to feel like something other than fermented ass, but Zydeco’s unstoppable surge to the office of VP continues unabated. Today we’re going to look at Zydeco’s relationships with bullies. You know, the type that say things like “meat is murder!” or “This cartoon is so offensive we must kill people” or “Fill out this form, pay us $200, get permission from your local chief of law enforcement…”. You know, the usually impotent little turds in the punch bowl that nobody likes. Well, Zydeco hates empty threats too. If you bring a threat to Zydeco or Zydeco’s allies, you’d better have your fightin’ boots on ’cause you’re gonna need ‘em.

Some time ago, we were forced into one of our ever joyous trips to Phoenix. All logistics worked out, it was to be that Zydeco (along with Kodos who doesn’t factor into this story) was going to stay with my parents for the duration. My parents have a cat of their own, a persnickety and generally snotty part-Siamese by the name of Ceilidh. This was the first time Zydeco was boarding at their house, so we introduced them gently and did all the normal “be civil you brats” routines. Everything seemed fine. Zydeco was making generous efforts to try to play with Ceilidh, and generally being a gentleman about things despite his natural state of chaotic evil alignment. Ceilidh, being snotty and persnickety, would have none of it and did the usual hiss-and-run routine. This did not concern Zydeco, who made himself at home on my dad’s lap (after teaching my mother that she was not of the Certain People allowed to pick him up). The rest of the visit went uneventfully.

We returned some days later, the scratch on Mom’s cheek healing nicely, and proceded to round up all the pets and pet related support gear. I had left a bag near the front door, in front of Ceilidh’s favorite chair. Zydeco, being delighted at our return, was doing his damndest to trip everyone in his efforts to rub against our legs and so forth. Ceilidh, presumably just wanting to ensure that he was leaving, slinked in and took up a post on her chair. Now it should be noted that while Ceilidh is generally an annoying little creature prone to hissing and growling at everything from stray air molecules to invading armies, she holds a special place of hatred for me specifically. Nobody is quite sure why, but to this day she hisses, growls, and runs as soon as she sees me.

I was about done gathering pet supplies, and went to fiddle with the bag I’d left near her chair. Zydeco was still on my heels about six feet back, coming to investigate and make sure I wasn’t planning on going anywhere without him again. As I approached Ceilidh, she did her usual routine and fired off a quick hiss at me. Zydeco ceased purring instantly and emitted a low growl, and dropped into pounce stance. I muttered something to the effect of “Oh shut up, Ceilidh,” and proceded to mess with my bag. Apparently the foot of her chair was too close for her liking, because she begain to swat at the air to warn me off.

This was unacceptable.

Zydeco covered the few feet fast enough that it could probably be considered teleportation. Claws were fully deployed, biting commenced, and were the growls and yowls translated into human, it would probably make the most inspired profanity I’ve ever shouted seem tame and suitable for church. Everybody (except apparently Ceilidh) had heard Zydeco’s warning growl, so we were all already aware that a problem could occur, and were quickly in motion to separate the two. The tangle of fur made two orbits around the room in about three seconds before anybody was able to block the orbital path. My Dad, the unlucky interceptor, managed to get an arm into the fracas and pull them appart. Zydeco attached himself to the damned nusiance preventing him from concluding his explanation to Ceilidh about how that had been a Dumb Move, and left some nice puncture wounds and gouges before his IFF kicked in and he realized who he was attacking. Hostilities ceased instantly, and he mustered quite a convincing “Who, me?” expression. Ceilidh used the opportunity to engage her own teleporters and vanished to some favored hiding spot until we left. Zydeco went into his crate, Dad’s wounds were dressed, and we departed with pets so my folks could coax Ceilidh out to check her wounds. She wound up with a few stitches to her hindquarters and had more than a little fur missing, Dad wound up with a tetanus shot. LabRat and I did our best to stifle the laughter until we were safely out of earshot, then promptly petted and praised the bejesus out of our new Attack Cat. Zydeco now lives in Dad’s garage (which by itself is bigger than the place we lived in before we bought our house, so he’s not exactly roughing it) when we go on travel.

Remember: If you threaten Zydeco, or Zydeco’s interests, you will receive the worst ass-whupping of your life.