Sail On, Silver Girl

Thanks for all the Happy.

Thanks for all the Joy.

You will be missed, sis.

Victim Man!

About three months ago, my then-five-year old proudly showed me his new creation.  That’s it there on the left.  So, in this particular “bite-your-cheek-and-try-not-to-laugh” moment (there are lots) I needed to find out what Victim Man was all about.  I mean, there he is all splayed out with a look of utter anguish on his face and what appeared to me to be tire tread marks across his torso.

Worst…  Superhero…  Ever.

After careful questioning, however, it turns out that the boy was trying to make a crime fighter  that was a total badass.  He wasn’t 100% clear on the definition of the word “victim” but he knew the word kinda sorta meant “someone who is defeated by someone else”, therefore Victim Man defeats everyone he comes across.

Meh… makes sense.  

I like my interpretation better, though.  Enjoy!

Highly-Focused Yet Nearly-Baseless Hate

I write this short article to fill what I see as a glaring hole in the Internet.  I know I am not the first person to search for the words that ultimately brought you here.  You aren't alone, friend. I feel your pain all too well.  Here it is:

"I hate the Superkids".  There it is. The phrase that Google thinks no one has ever expressed before this moment, apparently.  Once the bots get here there should be no more of this "No results found" nonsense. 

If the last two paragraphs are just gibberish to you, consider yourself blessed and feel free to move on to the next article. The rest of us are just gonna hang here for a bit. 

Like most hate, it's not based in logic.   I mean, how can anyone legitimately hate a clearly effective phonics-based mechanism that is designed to help kids enjoy their path toward literacy?  I don't know.  There's just... something there. But if I had to rank the level of hatred, I would put it somewhere above my hatred of the CarFax fox but below that of the original USell guy. Maybe on par with that of Sid the Science Kid and his classmates at the Montessori School for the Hyperactive, Lumpy, and Oddly Hued. 

Yeah, that's about right. 

Jeez, I... I hate a lot of things. I'm sure that's a healthy sign...

With the Superkids it's a photo finish between what I hate most: the androgynous style of the art or the other-worldly naming conventions of the gang members. There are somewhere between, like, ten and fifteen hundred of these...um...kids and their pets every one of which is absolutely special, uniquely skilled, and yet totally interchangeable and forgettable. Kids apparently have no problem figuring it all out and keeping it straight but all of the parents I have talked to have at least some difficulty. Is this Tac or Toc? Is Ettabetta a girl? Is this kid seriously named Icky? Wait... "Fast Cat" is not the cat?

Definitely making it into the top ten of my grievances with these characters is the bipolar nature of their emotional responses to anything that happens to them. Every event is a cause for ticker-tape-parade-level celebration (finding a lost mitten) or bottomless grief (being the "rotten egg" because you are last to jump in the pond).  Cripes, find a center, would you? I mean, while I was writing this I discovered that the apple in my lunch was unexpectedly juicy and sweet but I also noticed a typo in a test procedure I wrote, but I'm not going to respond by doing a few cartwheels of joy immediately  followed by offing myself with my stapler in a fit of suicidal depression. 

Everything in their whole world is "fantastic" or it is a "flop" - there is no middle ground.  I mean, how can a small wooden desk be "fantastic"? In my life I have built a number of desks, and not one of them has ever been described as "fantastic".  "Well-built", sure. "Adequate", closer to the mark. "Interesting", uhh... nope. I'm pretty sure a desk would need to be crafted out of materials not normally found in this dimension or it would need to be known for its ability to slay dragons to earn the title "fantastic".  

And who besides movie critics describes something as a "flop" in normal conversation?  "Tac  tries a handstand. The handstand is a flop." Pfft. Frankly I would rather have my (then) five-year-old read "Tac tries a handstand. As you can see, Tac kind of sucks at handstands."

Finally are the after-the-book questions that don't test reading comprehension as much as they test my ability to resist reading them in the most sarcastic tone imaginable. For example, I try to not say things like "As if you could possibly give half a rat's behind, do you think the clubhouse is a good place for the stuffed lion?" Here's another: "(Heavy sigh) After what's-her-face gets a letter from whosits, how do you know she is happy? It couldn't possibly be the fact she is smiling rapturously and hugging her friend, so it must be something we're missing... (rolls eyes)".

But, hey, like I said, I can't argue with the method. Teaching a kid to do something "simple" like reading, riding a bike, swimming, tying a shoe or any of the other things we all "just do"  is really challenging. And maybe... Just maybe... if the Superkids were around when I was growing up people wouldn't have to deal with grammar and spelling errors littering every single thing I write like shattered cinder blocks strewn all over a bike path.  

Peaches

I was grilling out a few weeks back listening to iTunes Radio attempt to converge on a solution you the question "Who exactly are you, SnowUrchin, musically speaking?" I was about to get up and check on the burgers when all of a sudden a few chords transported me to a long since demolished college bar. There I stood with a fifty-cent Natural Light draft in one hand and a pool cue in the other. Just audible above the people noise of the crowded hole-in-the-wall were some cheap speakers blaring "Peaches" by The Presidents of the United States of America. 

A half-second later I poofed back to my deck and grinned. I grabbed my tongs and dealt with the food and I was shocked to discover I still remembered the music and most of the words - I mean it's not like I really liked the nonsensical song in any more than a vaguely ironic way.  After dinner I looked up the song and discovered (in the Content section) the most soberly written and thorough description of music lyrics I have ever seen.    

Other songs I have looked up - Sussudio, Iko Iko, Angela, Red Red Wine - have had your typical fuzzy artist-y non-answer "well, you know, it's sort of like this but maybe not..." feel to it.  That's what made this description so great... 

Well, to me, anyway...

If you know the song look it up and appreciate the care and complete lack of whimsy the author took in nailing down the details of the description. While you go off and do that, I’ll be completing my Master’s thesis outlining the 19th century historical origins of the animosity between Triangle Man and Particle Man.

FCOL Just Post Something!

I woke up this morning to discover that I had an email from a stranger in my inbox (fun!).  The person described the problems they were having reading some of the posts in my blog and posited that some browser-related issue could be causing the problem.  I thought about it for a moment and then I realized that OH MY GOD I HAVE A BLOG I TOTALLY FORGOT ABOUT THAT THINK THINK THINK WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME I PUT SOMETHING OUT THERE WITH SOME MEAT IN IT OH MY GOD ITS BEEN MONTHS OH MY GOD OH MY GOD!!!

Um, no.  That’s not what happened.  Not exactly.

At least once a week I would walk to (not actually into, mind you… just passin’ by, see) my office, stop, stare at the laptop for a bit, go “Meh.  Tomorrow, I’ll write something, I swear”, then continue on my merry way.  Same thing goes for my encounters with my tablet.  Also my phone. And my various journals and sketchpads I have scattered about the house. And the notebook I carry around with me at work.

It’s not like I don’t have anything that I could fill up a page with.  Heck, these last few paragraphs took me five minutes and basically say nothing but just look at how much space they take up!

And making clever use of white space fills up the page even faster!  Like this!

Look at me go!

“But where’s the beef?”, as the kids say nowadays.  

It’s been so long let’s just throw together a highlights reel of sorts and push it out there.  (Deep breath).  Humblebrag… Engage!

Fitness: Crossed over 25,000 calorie mark in YourShape Fitness Evolved 2012 for the Xbox a while back (not sure if I mentioned this or not in an earlier post).  I would probably be closer to 35,000 by now but I have been riding my bike in the mornings before work and switched to The Biggest Loser Ultimate Workout for a month just to mix it up a bit.  The Biggest Loser software is just about the worst exercise software I have ever used.  I had a huge article all outlined comparing these two and the Nike one but it just fell apart.  Short story: You want a good workout where you beg your TV to stop killing you, go with Nike.  If you want to burn calories and be guilt-rewarded into doing so, go with YourShape.  If you want to kick yourself for spending $13.49 on a pre-owned copy of The Biggest Loser instead of just setting fire to the cash in your driveway, go ahead and do that then.

Kid: He’s six!  He is taking tennis lessons, he has learned to roller skate, and he can swim the entire length of the neighborhood pool unassisted.  Full disclosure: the tennis balls are often (but not always) within one steradian of where he is aiming, his skating technique is defined mainly by a panicky and desperate grab at anything within arm’s length, and his dives into the pool would be immeasurably more graceful if I simply picked him up when he wasn't expecting it and chucked him in overhand.  After all, he’s six!

Travel: Took the family to the Bahamas, specifically to the Atlantis Resort.  It rocked.  As we approached the island and the sea turned from slate grey to translucent blue the boy asked if we were going to land on the beach or at the airport.  I said the airport because we have to go through customs and besides I didn’t feel like dealing with The Others anyway.  On the shuttle ride from the airport to the hotel my wife learned why I was so against her idea of “spending a day walking around outside the resort” (the shuttle’s windows were the fancy “seein’-through” kind, not the rose-colored kind, you dig?).   If you are wondering if I did that water-slide shark aquarium ride the answer is “Hell yeah!  Six times!  No lines, baby!” As long as you went to the rides when no cruise ships had just pulled in the only lines were those to have your swim trunks professionally extracted from your large intestine after “conquering” some of the more treacherous drops.  The food was awesome (I love conch!) but expensive, but the beach was even awesomer and totally free, so it’s all good.  

Music: I am still learning to play guitar but I really don’t fire up the Rocksmith software very often anymore except to play the practice games with the boy.  I bought him a 3/4 size electric (an all-black Laguna) a while back and he can play (slooowly) the first 36 notes of Welcome to the Black Parade from memory (read: from a sticky-note cheat sheet).   A co-worker asked me this week if I would be interested in a mini Strat Squire and I said I’d look at it.  It was a gross mess with broken strings and corrosion everywhere but it cleaned up nice and with the new strings i slapped on it sounds a little better than the Laguna.  It’s not perfect - it’s a little buzzy and the TONE knob seems to be there just for looks but at $40 with a strap and a cable I think I’ll take it.  It fits the boy’s hands better than the Laguna and the color matches my bass… Oh, yeah, speaking of that, this week I learned “Down on the Corner” by CCR.  Super easy and fun to play.

Books: Read William R. Forstchen’s Pillar to the Sky and Neve Maslakovic’s The Runestone Incident.  Pillars to the Sky was fine.  I found the first 133 pages a drag but then the story took off and it ended up being very exciting - I am glad I took a co-worker’s recommendation on this one.  It ended appropriately anchored in reality.  If you have a physics background pop some Eyerollsatol and just enjoy the ride.  I favor time travel stories so The Runestone Incident held no flaws for me…  But, hey, let me nit-pick to death the Pillar to the Sky book cuz of physics, right?  I kind of wish the female protagonist (Julia) in the series was a little more powerful and a little less self-deprecating.  I don't know… give her a gun or something.  Again, good book.  Give them both a go.

Booze: I bought a bottle of Laphroaig 10 about a month ago to congratulate myself on a job well done for… something… I don’t remember.  I throw myself so many ticker-tape parades they all kinda blur together, you know?  Anyway, to say that this Scotch is “smoky” doesn’t do the flavor justice.  I would say (and this is just my philistine opinion, mind you) that this is sort of like drinking a shot of Jack Daniels though a burning sofa cushion.  One time two decades ago (yikes!) I was in a bar and I accidentally took a swig from a half-beer that someone had put a cigarette out in.  I would rather finish that beer than have another glass of Laphroaig.  To repeat, this is just, like, my opinion, man.

Ok, then.  That should do it.  I've got two posts ready to go in the queue and according to the last 1,000 pics I have on my phone I have a lot more to say but let's call it a night for now.  Time to go watch Phineas and Ferb before the little one goes off to bed.  

Night, y’all!

Please Stand By

Normal transmissions will resume next week.

The Kind of Change I Can Believe In

A few years back I purged my library and donated everything I saw no future use for to CHKD.  I am glad I did it, the wife is glad I did it, and the load-bearing members of my home positively rejoiced that they needn't be troubled anymore by a literal ton (jeez…) of literary garbage pressing down on them.

I am even happier, though, that I had the foresight to keep my Calvin and Hobbes collection.  Over the past couple of months our five-year-old has been going through them and really enjoys the cartoons (well, the ones he can puzzle out, anyway), and he is over the moon that he and Calvin are nearly the same age.  He reads the books in the truck on the way in to school and he is finishing up the fourth one in the series now, I think.

One thing he loves is the Transmogrifier (oh, go to hell, spell-check… it’s a word) whether it was the cardboard box version or the portable gun version.  It was only a matter of time before he made his own.  His is cat sized, of course.

 

If you are stumped about the tag on the middle left hand side of the box, don’t feel bad - I had to phone a friend for that one, too.  I’m like “Why would he want to turn the cat into a Led Zeppelin album or that one gibberish-y mid-80s Phil Collins song I now have stuck in my head”?  I really don’t care if that last sentence means absolutely nothing to you.  It’s not all about you, you know.  The sentence stays.

Some people…

In any case, it’s supposed to say “zombie”.  The huge black dot at the end is his way of covering up a mistake with a period.

Please. Allow me.

I was thinking the other day about a phrase my father used to use when I was a kid.  When he was about to attempt something he thought was particularly amazing, he would say “you will notice that at no time does my hand leave my wrist”.  Since he was not one for coining phrases, I was curious as to where he got it.  I asked Google, and Google told me that Yahoo Answers had this unrelated entry:

Yikes! How do you answer that one? I came up with these five things.  I am open to further suggestions.

1. Consider setting up an appointment with your doctor. He/she may be able to give you advice on convenient fracture points. While you are there, a simple blood test will be able to tell if you suffer from acute X-manism whose symptoms include above normal bone density or rapid bioregeneration. 
2. What are you hitting it with? If you are trying to punch it or karate chop it broken, you might be doing it wrong.  In the past I have had to have a friend or neighbor shatter my stubborn ulna using the blunt end of a standard garden maul. Hope this helps!
3. This is not a forum for med students to get people to do their homework for them. Study harder!  :(
4. Have you tried reckless horseplay with friends on a trampoline even though your mom told to to be careful, like, a million times? That usually does it, but you might run the risk of cracking your skull wide open or putting out an eye as well.  
5. Go full-on After School Special. Win yourself a football scholarship to Stately State then brag to all your friends about how awesome of a quarterback you are. Allow your personality to change for the worse and really alienate all of your former buddies. When they complain, tell them they are just jealous and let them know that, while they are spending the rest of their lives pouring pig iron in the old mill, your picture will be plastered all over Wheaties boxes. After the universe breaks your throwing arm as payment for your hubris (losing you your one chance to make it big) you can crawl back to your old acquaintances and beg them for forgiveness... And maybe, just maybe, you’ll learn a job at the mill isn't such a bad life after all as long as you have friends.

Anyway, after a little more searching I found out the real answer was most likely from the movie Cat’s Eye.  Since that Stephen King flick came out in 1984 I must be misremembering the timeframe by a good five years or so or I am missing an earlier reference.  Hmph.  So it goes.  

I wish the arm-breaking guy the best in his endeavors.  Also, nice job on the ad placement, whoever.  Well done.

I Can See Clearly, Now.

I’ve always prided myself on the thickness of my corneas and I often try to work them into conversations whenever I can - job interviews, hitting on girls at the gym, etc.  During a routine exam my eye doctor told me that since my vision had remained stable for so long and my corneas were thick enough so I was deemed a good candidate for laser surgery.  My well-founded pride suddenly became something I could actually leverage without so many strange glances or restraining orders being shot my way.

So, after over three decades of having to deal with glasses and contact lenses I finally pulled the trigger and got my eyes done last week.  I couldn’t be happier.

Although I wanted to have perfect sight in both eyes my optometrist convinced me to leave my non-dominant eye slightly under-corrected to preserve my close-up vision for a longer stretch than would have been probable otherwise.  I know I will need reading glasses someday - it’s not a matter of “if” but “when” - so having less than flawless vision at a distance seemed like a reasonable tradeoff if I can push the “when” out five to ten more years.

The doctor gave me some lenses to simulate the effect of the proposed changes.  One contact had full (including astigmatism) correction and the other was a couple of notches under 20/20.  One reason for this was to “manage expectations” - I guess some folks think that laser surgery will grant them the same visual acuity as if they had been bitten by a radioactive eagle or something. It was also to see if I could adapt without headaches, vertigo, or other complaints. I wore them for a few days before deciding that this would definitely be the way to go.  

I had worn contacts for about 20 years so I was used to that bit.  I had never had contacts that corrected for astigmatism before, though, and I always asked the doc to keep both the lenses the same so I didn't have to deal with left-eye, right-eye hassles.  I wasn’t too sure what to expect. I wore these test contacts for a couple of days and it turned out everything was just fine.  The worst thing I could say about the intentional mismatch is that the world looked like I was viewing it through contacts that were a couple of days old instead of though ones that were fresh-out-of-the-box.  Maybe a better description for those of you who don’t wear contacts is that the effect was pretty much the same as the difference between looking out your car window with the glass rolled up and the glass rolled down.  You can tell there’s… something there… but that “something” is not really “there” unless you want it to be “there”.

The doctor set up the date for the procedure and I called to finalize the scheduling and the payment schedule.  The super-friendly and efficient lady on the phone giving me all of the info told me I would be getting an additional 20% off of the normal price of the procedure thanks to, and I’m not kidding here, their “March Madness Sales Event”.  I’m pretty sure they could have called this discount virtually anything else and it would have been infinitely less off-putting. “I’m Crazy Eddie, and the way I fire high-precision lasers into your eyeballs is INSANE!!” is the vibe that gives off, you know?

The pre-surgery package with all of the “SIGN HERE”s and “INITIAL HERE”s came in and it listed the usual terrifying disclaimer CYA stuff all medical paperwork comes with in this idiotically litigious world.  Side effects may include chronic diarrhea, persistent Tourette’s-like outbursts, acute skin failure, and catastrophic ocular explosions whenever it rains - stuff like that.

The documentation also advised eating lightly before the operation and to wear comfortable clothes like “a sweatshirt and pants”.  PANTS!?  What is this, Nazi Germany?  Here I am thinking I could get a vasectomy thrown in as a “twofer” (it IS March Madness, and they DO already have the laser warmed up, after all) and these fascists insist I wear pants.  This stupid country…

The day of the surgery came and we drove to the facility.  An army of smiling, pleasant, and efficient workers took my paperwork and did the stuff they needed to do with it.  After a short wait I had my eyes re-scanned and I met the surgeon.  He went over all the stuff that was going to happen and described the tools they were going to use and the sensations to expect (a slight pressure here, a buzzing sound indicating the laser was self-calibrating, a green blinking light there, etc.).  The speech was practiced - he had clearly done this a billion times.  The speech was NOT bored or arrogant. It was calming and friendly.

They gave me a little blue poofy hat and told me to put it on which I did unquestioningly.  I’m sure the cap serves a purpose but I really couldn’t tell you exactly what.  Hell, I suppose they could have told me to put on a rainbow wig, a red clown nose, and some big floppy shoes and I would have robotically complied as well.  

I removed my glasses for the very last time (wow…) and handed them to the doctor’s assistant. 

They led me into the brightly-lit and super-clean OR and it was a lot to take in.  The machine looks a bit like a cross between a massage table and an MRI scanner.  They took my info again to make sure I was the right person, told me once again what to expect, and they asked me to lie down.  They elevated my legs slightly and moved the table into position under the laser.  

As I was lying there allowing myself to come to grips with the fact that this was really, really, really going to happen it occurred to me that my optometrist wears glasses. I never really noticed before that instant…

A fan kicked on.  “Hold still for eight seconds,” I heard the surgeon say.

When someone tells you to “hold still for eight seconds” because they are about to cut into your eye, you obey to such a level that light switches appear wishy-washy by comparison.  I was a Zen… Freaking… Master. My autonomic nervous responses were willfully disengaged and a team of sadists armed with Tazers and branding irons could not have caused me to wiggle a fraction of a micron.

After the preparatory incisions (eight seconds per eye), the ablation work commenced. My role was to just stare straight ahead at a blurry green blinking light. Eight more seconds for one eye and twelve for the other (correcting for astigmatism takes a bit longer).  After each eye was corrected the cornea was “painted” closed and each brush stroke made the little green light clearer and clearer and clearer. I mentioned that the surgeon prepared me for all the sensations I would experience - what I would feel, what I would see, what I would hear.  He didn’t tell me about the smell.

You see, your cornea contains many layers of a transparent collagen.  Collagen is the same sort of material found in your fingernails and your hair.  So, as a laser is vaporizing tiny parts of your cornea some of that vapor escapes into the room.  The exhaust fan I heard kick on does double duty of preventing smoke from interfering with the optics and preventing everyone in the room from puking their guts out all day long.  

Of course, now you have this image of smoke billowing from my eye sockets and three or four techs standing at the ready with fire extinguishers in hand.  Yeah… at hilarious as that is, it’s a gross exaggeration.  I have a very sensitive nose and it was a barely perceptible whiff but it was there and, once smelled, it couldn’t be un-smelled.  

During my post-op exam I asked the doctor about it since at the time I didn’t know about the collagen thing.  He said “Oh, yeah.  I never told you about the smell.”  Frankly, I don’t care if this was an oversight or an intentional omission.  The surgery would probably not be as popular as it is now if “NOW WITH 30% LESS SMOLDERING HAMSTER ODOR” was the tagline in their ad campaign.

Immediately after leaving the OR and before my post-op exam I gave my new eyes a try.  I was told to expect things to be blurry and then gradually clear up over the day and finally stabilize over a few weeks.  Things were blurry but WAY better than my uncorrected pre-op eyes were.  By the time I reached the parking lot (45 minutes had passed at this point since my pre-op exam) my vision improved by an order of magnitude.  I “wowed” my wife by letting her know on a minute per minute basis which traffic signs I could read and which I could not read as she drove me home.  Not annoying at all, I’m sure.

By the time I got home 45 minutes later, far away street signs were clear enough - not perfect, but clear enough - to make out.  I took a nap and when I woke up it was though I had fallen asleep in my contact lenses.  During my follow-up exam the next day - which I drove to myself -  I scored better than 20/15 under ideal lighting conditions.  Mind you, this is with one eye slightly under-corrected.

I see better now than when I was nine.  There are no words.

I sleep with these foam and plastic goggles now to prevent myself from rubbing my eyes unconsciously at night.  They are shaped a bit like ski goggles and are a lot more comfortable than they look.  It sucks but its only for a little longer and it beats the alternative of one of them dog cone things I guess. I need to wear them for a just few more days, then that will be that.  Oh, I am also forbidden from doing anything dusty like yard work or cleaning the litter box for two weeks which is absolutely heartbreaking as you can well imagine.

I will even be allowed to go swimming with my son after a couple of weeks.  That is going to rock.  Before, I had the choice of a) feeling my contact lenses lift off my eyeballs and gently float away or b) not wearing contacts and hoping to God that the pink fuzzy thing I was reaching for was, in fact, my child and not someone else’s.

It’s been a few days and I still can’t believe I finally went through with this, even though the evidence is right there on the forever-to-be-unwatched DVD of the surgical procedure they gave me as I left the facility.  After I post this I am going to go through all of my old eye stuff and chucking what needs to be chucked and donating what can be donated.  It’s a chore I look forward to with relish.  

If you are on the fence getting this done, do it.  It is totally worth it.

So... It Has Come to This...

Yep.  We got a cat.  

Here's the situation.  The wife is allergic to pet hair and/or dander and her symptoms vary quite a bit depending on the duration and the dosage.  In a clean, open house for a couple of hours where there is a cat or dog - no worries.  A closed-off area with multiple animals (pet store, shelter, etc.) is more of a problem but OTC medication can handle that for a while.  However, if you own more furry animals than you have, say, soup spoons there isn't enough Claritin in the world where she can come within fifty yards of you... Not that your primary issue is "too many hangers-about", anyway. 

So the allergies were the "immovable object" in the way of getting a pet. All the other reasons, though valid, were negotiable in one way or another.

The "irresistible force" in this case were the relentlessly consistent requests from the boy to get a cat.  Oh, this wasn't a never-ending whiny pleasepleaseplease-fest - that would have resulted in no-cat-ever-ever-ever.  Since he turned two, he had requested a pet from any magical spirits who are known for their ability to grant wishes - Santa, coin-filled fountains, extinguished birthday candles, etc. Occasionally, he would insert his wish into mealtime or nighttime prayers. I’m guessing it averaged out to maybe one request every three months or so. 

The rarity of the requests combined with the constancy of them was tough to hear. The fact he had clearly made peace with the fact it was probably never going to happen was, frankly, heartbreaking. His demeanor was "I'm cool with never getting one, but it doesn't hurt to try". This is the same attitude most of us have when we go to buy lottery tickets. We know it's very nearly pointless... But maybe, just maybe it isn't. 

In this way the immovable object was completely obliterated. The wife was very accepting of this fact. 

She rocks.

So where to get one?  At first, I thought it would be pretty easy. I mean, it's a kitten, not a zebra or a dolphin or something. But it seems that boxes labeled "FREE KITTENS" have gone the way of the lemonade stand.  Dealing with the Crazy Cat Lady at work (there's always one) is a non-starter unless you relish the idea of enduring Torquemada-style Q&A sessions about your fitness as a pet owner, complete with site visits (yep...). Pet stores here don't carry non-specialty felines. 

So Animal Shelter it was. I went on a Saturday to do a little recon so I could get a good idea of what they had in stock (I had never been to one before).  Because I'm ever-so-wacky, I was toying with the idea of walking in, looking around, and answering the inevitable "Can I help you?" with "Well, the wife and I were thinking of grilling out tonight..." and letting the sentence simply hang there. 

I didn't do that. I could see immediately upon walking in that the people who work there are some dour, dour folks and would have had little to no appreciation for my unique brand of relentless zaniness. I can dig it. These people probably see some pretty screwed up stuff on a daily basis so they have every right in the world to regard anyone who walks through the door with a certain amount of suspicion.  They certainly didn't need this guy throwing confetti around and dousing them with seltzer water, as it were. 

The shelter was clean and spacious, the animals seemed healthy and friendly, and the people there were professional, courteous, and patient with my idiotic questions.   They told me all the animals were either spayed or neutered (that's good), the cats were all litterbox trained (even better!) and that most of the cats have had been checked for feline leukemia and AIDS (Jeebus!  Those are things!? Man, it's a miracle anything on this stupid planet is alive.).

I thanked them and told them I might be back the next day. 

The next day, after clearing it one last time with the wife, we all piled into the car. About ten minutes into the twenty-minute ride the five-year-old piped up and said "This isn't the way to Wal-Mart."

"Yeah, I know. We have to go to a different store first," I replied. 

"A toy store?" He asked hopefully. "No, dude. Just a different kind of store,” I replied.

We pulled up and got out. He stared at the sign for a bit and asked "Animal shelter? Why are we at an animal shelter?"  I said "C'mon... Let's go in."

The folks who worked there smiled in recognition as I came in and I put my finger to my lips. They nodded and the boy and I walked into the room with all the cats. He looked around with an expression I don't think I have ever seen on another person's face before just then. It was a combination of hopefulness, trepidation, shock, love, and a tiny bit of the special dread we all get the microsecond we realize our alarm clock is trying to shake us out of a wonderful, wonderful dream and dump us back into the real world.

"Ok. Choose." I said. 

"REALLY?!?!" he screeched, happy beyond measure. "I can really have one?"

"Yep. Any one you want."

"And I can bring him home today?", he added, unnecessarily suspiciously, in my opinion. 

I nodded. 

After a bit of walking from one cage to the next looking at his potential buddy-to-be he asked "Do you think..."

"No. Just one," I said, smiling.  He smiled back. We know each other well. 

Eventually he settled on a little 4-month-old orange and white one of absolutely no pedigree whatsoever.  Awesome. 

The lady behind the desk placed the cat into its carrier and started telling the boy about how to take care of a cat. "Remember, you need to feed him and give him fresh water once a day."  Our son nodded happily and said "Yeah! We don't want to happen to the cat what happened to the birds!"

My eyes popped and my jaw dropped and I just stared at him in horrified disbelief. All sound halted and the lady behind the desk locked eyes with me. After the longest two seconds ever she said "Oh. These were outdoor birds, right?"  I said "Oh, God, yes. Of course. We built a bird feeder a long time ago, you see. We ran out of seed eventually, and... And we just never refilled it.  I mean, he knows that outdoor birds get their food from all sorts of places..." All the while my brain is screaming "DUDE! What the hell is the matter with you!?!"

Satisfied our house wasn't replete with cages upon cages filled with the desiccated remains of a thousand luckless budgies,  we were allowed to leave with the cat.

We got it home and I retrieved the supplies I had hidden in the garage earlier that morning - food, scratching posts, toys, litter box... You know - cat stuff.  We opened the carrier slowly and it hopped out, utterly shocked. After I showed him where the litterbox was, he ran and hid under a recliner. 

We didn't see much of him over the next two days but the food dish was emptying as expected, and the litterbox was filling as prayed for. 

His shyness was eventually bribed away with treats and now Rocket (because he's fast like a rocket, see) has run of the place with the exception of the bedrooms on the second floor. He sits like a sphinx each night outside the closed hallway door, dutifully keeping watch over his new family ensuring we all sleep well...

Until about 4:45AM, that is, cuz, damn, people, enough's enough, come pet me or somethin' I'm boooooored!  MEOW MEOW MEEEOOOW MEOOWW Oh wow,… This foyer is super echo-y! Delightful! MEOOWWERR! MEOW! MEEOOOWWWW! yep any minute now I'll be rewarded with food and petting... MEOW! MEOOOWWW...