Disjointed Digression

For those that might not know, I’m pretty lazy.  Many years ago, I bought an automatic litter box.  One that scoops that cat waste into a a little plastic box which is easy to throw away.  It’s not 100% perfect, but it does a good job.  When we got Moxie, we decided to get a second automatic litter box, since one of Candy’s co-workers had a slightly used one for cheap.  This past week one of them broke.  Just stopped scooping.  So we decided to replace it.  Of course they have a new model out, so we can’t get the same ones that have lasted quite a while.  This new model has a new feature “Sleep Timer for Nighttime Use.”  I can only guess that is for people who put their cats out at night.  To make this new feature work, the litter box has a clock on it.  A little red digital clock.

Now the cat’s can accurately record in their bathroom journal what time that took a shit!  Candy was bewildered. As she eloquently put it “There is a fucking clock on the cat’s shitter!?”

Why, yes, yes there is a clock on the cats shitter.  And I’m sure that Loki, Moxie, and Nellie will use it to the fullest to plan their day/night.  Since cats do everything on a strict schedule! Now they have a clock that is exclusively for them.

We have not made the switch over to Blu-ray yet.  I know that the Blu-ray/HD-DVD battle is very old news (especially in the technology race timeline), but for what it is worth I was rooting for Blu-ray back then.  Now that Blu-ray has come out on top, I just can’t seem to get motivated to go out and get a new Blu-ray player, or start replacing all the DVDs that I have amassed.  I began to wonder today, am I becoming one of those guys that stops caring about the tech advances?  In twenty years, will I still need to have an old barely running DVD player, while my friend’s children are setting up their latest home entertainment technology?  Or am I just a late adopter of some things?  I know that I didn’t get a DVD player until the price was down around $100, and DVD movies were on average $15.  I guess once Blu-ray players get into an affordable price range I’ll get one and start picking up Blu-ray movies.  Since I’ll still be able to watch my DVDs on a Blu-ray player, I don’t see any reason to replace all my DVDs with Blu-ray discs.   So I think that the answer to my question is no, I’m not yet one of those guys who stops caring about technology.  (And no, this is not me trying to tell Candy that I want a PS3 because it has a Blu-ray player built in.)

It was decided; nay decreed, that my old beard trimmer was to be re-purposed.  Now it will be used to trim tangles from cat bellies.  Or where ever the tangles we can’t comb/brush out are located on our long haired cats.  This has lead me to look for other beard trimmers, so I went to amazon.com and searched for beard trimmers.  On amazon, I read the reviews, and they send me on to different products. (i.e. “this one is not as good as product X”, so I look up product X) In this round about fashion I have come across a little gem… the Philips Norelco BG2030.   The product itself is not the gem, as it really looks like it is not just a beard trimmer but a body hair trimmer; the gem is in the first (as of now) review. 

“In the words of another reviewer, the “Bodygroom” is Shaft, Beanbag, and Starfish safe.”

I will admit that they have a disclaimer at the beginning of the review “If you are easily offended, stop reading this review now.”  But that cracked me up.

So I had to send it to Candy, which led to this exchange on IM:

me: this cracked me up in the first review “In the words of another reviewer, the “Bodygroom” is Shaft, Beanbag, and Starfish safe.”

Candy: is the starfish what i think it is

 Candy: do you have all 3 of those

Candy : lmao

me: yes

Candy: everyone was looking at me cuz that made me giggle

I’ll occasionally read some random entries at http://notalwaysright.com/.   Some of the wrong number ones remind me of the time when my phone number ended in 2000.  Shortly after I got the number I got a call where the caller wanted to know if they had reached the public library.  Pretty soon, I got lots of calls for businesses.  Wells Fargo, a hotel, a few others.  Once on Easter Sunday at about 8 am someone called wanting to know if they had reached Classic Toyota.  Why would they call classic Toyota on Easter?  Another time, I received a call from a hotel that went something like this:
Me: "Hello?"

Hotel desk clerk, sounding annoyed: "Is that how you are answering the phone over there?"

Me: "Uh, yeah"

Hotel desk clerk: "Whatever, I need to see if you guys have a room for someone."

Me: "You do know that this is my apartment, right?"

Hotel desk clerk: "What?"

Me: "The number you called, it’s my phone at my apartment, not a hotel."

Hotel desk clerk: "I’m so sorry, have a nice day."

I set a somewhat lengthy outgoing message on my answering machine:
"You have reached (phone number, I forget the whole thing) THIS IS NOT A BUSINESS.  If you are trying to reach a business, check the number and try again." I got a lot of hang ups after that.  About a month before I moved (and disconnected that number) I decided to change my outgoing message to "Speak".  This lead to me coming home to the same number of hang ups on my machine.  One day there were two were hang ups, then on the third message an older gentleman was saying "Hello?" and on the fourth it was the same gentleman saying "Listen, damnit, I just want to get a room there, stop playing games.  All I want is to rent a room!"

And to think when I got that phone number I figured it would be easy to remember!

Yesterday Candy and I had an IM conversation about the weather that went like this:
     candy: it is pouring here
     me: oh?
     me: have no idea if its raining here or not
     candy: your office doesn’t have a window?
     me: that is correct no window
     me: its like a man cave at work

It is somewhat like a man cave at work because my office mate and I don’t turn on the lights, unless we have visitors, or need them to do non computer work.

I checked on weather.com to see if it was raining where I work, and got the following information:

What the hell does that mean?  Are they using the magic 8 ball of meteorology or something? I was tempted to refresh (the digital equivalent of shaking the magic 8 ball) and see what it said.  I probably would have gotten “reply hazy, try again.”  It just struck me as funny that Showers were in the vicinity.

I think I had heard some of Carlin’s material before I bought Class Clown, but I hadn’t paid much attention to it.  I was a young college student, who pretended to be offended by how many times Carlin said fuck as a friend played one of Carlin’s tapes in in my friends mother’s van that we borrowed to go to Louisiana to see a comic book writer, but I digress.  A few months down the road from that fake offense, I decided I’d give ol’ George a try. My parents had mentioned “The Seven Words You Can’t Say on Television”  before, so I looked at all the Carlin comedy tapes in the music store in the mall and found one that had that on it.  Class Clown.  The copyright was from the year I was born.  I played the tape on the way home from the mall, and remember laughing out loud through most of it.  After that I bought many of his tapes, or borrowed them from friends (I was a poor college student).  One year, in the early 90’s for my birthday, a friend gave me front row tickets to see George when he came though my home town.  I remember that the next two days after that show that my face hurt from smiling and laughing so much.  I can’t say I was a rabid Carlin fan, but I really dug his work.  I thought he was great in Dogma, how ironic that someone who said “Religion is just mind control.” played a Catholic Cardinal.  I still need to watch Jersey Girl, I hear he is good in that too.  And there all those HBO gigs that he did.  I remember reading once that he performed something like 320 nights a year, and this was around 2000 or 2001.  In my opinion he was the hardest working comedian out there.

Carlin had, for lack of a better term, a way with words. He once said “I want to tell you something about words that I think is important. They’re my work, they’re my play, they’re my passion.” I believe that they were also his art.  He was a word artist of the highest caliber.  The way he thought and talked was amazing.  Sometimes he came across as coarse or possibly offensive, but he was always funny.  Using his words as a rapier to pierce thought the absurdness of life and point out the funny truth.

 A true comic legend, George Carlin will be sorely missed.

I’m sure he’s having some good laughs wherever he is.

R.I.P George

As you may have noted, there is a considerable gap in my blogging. While most of the you may have regarded this as Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) from me (SOB), there is actually a reason behind the lapse from November to January. Candy and I made a big commitment in December. We bought a house.

We closed on December 20th and moved in the 2nd week of January. The first week of January, Candy and her parents put down laminate floors. I had to work most of that week, and from what Candy says, it was a good thing I wasn’t around to see her have to deal with her mother. But as she said when I came home from work each day “No one is dead, in jail or even bleeding.” I did help some with the floor, but the credit goes to Candy and her parents, as they did 90% of the work. They put down laminate in every room except the kitchen, utility room and the two bathrooms. When all was finished, it looked great! When someone asks about doing it, we tell them “yes, it does look great! If you want to do it in your house, hire someone to do it!”
We decided that we would hire movers to only move “the big stuff” the couch, beds, bookshelves, etc. So we moved boxes and boxes and carload after carload to the house, and at the end of that, I think that next time (which I hope is many many years away) we will pay some one to move all of our stuff.

Now for my excuse on why I haven’t updated the blog (other than being lazy) since Jan 21… I started a new job Feb 11th. I’m now working at Texas State University in San Marcos. I really like it, the only problem is the 60 mile commute each way.

Listening to Pantera – I’ll Cast A Shadow on Far Beyond The Great Southern Cowboys’ Vulgar Hits! when I wrote this

I work in a fairly small office.  We have about thirty to forty people.  About ten of those, including myself are men. One of the things that was implemented a few months back was to turn off the lights in the men’s restroom when you leave.  Apparently this was discussed at a sustainability (recycle/reduce energy/save the world) meeting that I missed.  For the most part I abide by this.  If I go in and the lights are out, I turn them out when I leave.  If I go in and the lights are on I’ll leave them on, someone might be in the other stall (we only have 2 stalls) quietly doing the doo or something… 

So today, I was in the restroom, sitting in the second stall, when I hear someone come in.  I think nothing of it.  I will note that for the most part I’m not very loud when I’m on the toilet.   I don’t pay much attention to the guy whizzing or washing afterwards.  What gets my attention is that as he leaves there is a loud CLICK and I’m suddenly crapping in the dark.   Now I was about half way done when I was plunged into darkness.  When I say darkness, I mean it was dark.  The restroom has no windows, only that one light, and after a few minutes, I could vaguely make out a strip of light that was the bottom of the door. All I could do was sigh and finish my business, in the dark.  I was not about to try to get up and turn on the light, as that would require 1) stopping in the middle of what I was doing (not something I wanted to think about) 2) fumbling in the dark to open the stall door, 3) walking over to the light and turning it on, praying no one walks in and sees me with my pants around my ankles shuffling to or from the stall to turn on the lights.  So I finished in the dark and hit the lights before I washed my hands.  I wonder who had turned out the lights…  I’ll never know, and honestly it doesn’t matter, it was just an annoyance.

Rest in peace, you took part of my soul with you, Queue.

In our bedroom we have a bedroom suite that as a corner piece that stands about 3 feet tall with some drawers in it and a large flat top that overhangs the drawers (so that the top will fit with the other pieces of the suite). On top of that corner piece is a TV. Behind the corner piece is a window, but the corner piece does not completely but up against it so there is a small amount of room between the back of the corner piece and the window.

What we found out is that the small space is kitty sized. One night Loki jumped from the bed to another part of the bedroom suite and walked down to inspect the TV. We put him back on the floor, but he just did it again. Candy said “I just know he’s gonna fall back behind the TV.” Which meant behind the corner piece. The next day I walk into the bedroom to get something and I see a furry face peeking out from a crack between the corner piece and another chest of drawers in the bedroom suite. Loki had fallen back there. There was actually quite a bit of room for him to move about back there. I called Candy in to help me get the crazy little cat. I could almost reach him, but he did not want to be picked up. Candy had to jingle a cat toy to get Loki close enough for me to grab him.

As I was trying to get Loki close enough to pull him out from behind the furniture, I noticed that he had almost been completely devoured by dust bunnies. He had dust and cobwebs all over him! After we extracted him safely, Candy brushed off most of the dust and cobwebs with her hand, then asked me to hold him. “Where are you going?” I asked, holding a squirming cat.

“To get a lint roller” she told me.

I was afraid that the lint roller would wind up pulling most if not all the hair from the poor kitty. but I kept my mouth shut. Candy came in with held lint roller and began running it briskly over the cat. Loki was not happy about this, but I don’t think it actually pulled any hair out. After short but vigorous session with the lint roller we let Loki go. Loki is fine, but we think (and maybe hope) that he is too traumatized to get back there again.