Anthony Van Dyck (June 01, 2009 – July 02, 2009)

I think that I may have promised to no longer blog about kittens. Unfortunately, today I will break that promise.

As you may or may not know, our second batch of kittens consisted of three males that were abandoned by their mother, Piper. From day one my wonderful and amazing wife took it upon herself to become a surrogate mother to these babies. She bottle fed them every four hours (supplemented by the sister-in-law while we were at work), she bathed them, she medicated them, she played with them, she taught them how to use a litter box and she loved them. Not having any biological children of her own, she has taken to these baby kittens almost like they were her actual kids. This process has been ongoing since the first of June.

Fast forwarding to yesterday, my wife only had to work half of a day. It was her intentions to bring these kittens to the veterinarian in order to get them a check up and make sure that all was right with the world as far as being a kitty goes. After waiting an inordinate amount of time and spending $80.00, the kittens were pronounced healthy and sent home with a bottle of antibiotic. The vet said that there was a chance that they may have a slight bacterial infection and we should give them this medication as a precaution.

My initial plan for the evening last night was to mess on the internet for a few minutes then head off to bed quite early as I have been exceptionally tired for the last few weeks. Around 6 o’clock pm we gave the kittens their dosage of antibiotics. Shortly thereafter, they went to sleep, I began surfing the web and my wife was fiddling with her scrapbooking gear. The two black kittens had climbed up to the sofa to nap while the black/white mixed kitten, known as Anthony Van Dyck, crawled away to their make-shift bed inside of a clothes basket.

Around 7:45 pm, little Anthony woke with a start and began to cry lightly. I figured that he may just be prematurely hungry. I watched him out of the corner of my eye as he had begun to walk drunkenly and stumbled across the floor. He stopped and began to hack and managed to vomit on the carpet. I lifted him slowly to the tiny baking tin that was being used as a temporary baby litter box in case he needed to continue vomiting. At this point I noticed that he was shaking a little bit. I placed him back safely on the floor and watched him for a minute as he kept walking then falling, walking then falling, all the while crying lightly. I called for my wife.

She immediately began to hold and stroke and love on poor little Anthony. As she spoke sweetly to this adorable mass of fur, she decided that maybe he was shaky due to dehydration so she attempted to feed him a bottle of water. He barely drank. He cried and shook. He did this for anywhere between 15 to 20 minutes. As his cries became more intense and his pupils became dilated we decided he must go to the emergency veterinary clinic. Unfortunately, this was approximately 40 miles away in Columbia.

We jumped in the car and sped towards Columbia at as accelerated a rate of speed as I could justify. After about 2 minutes into our car ride, little Anthony’s breathing became more and more shallow and overall he became less responsive. He was dying and fast. Five minutes later, an attempt at feline mouth-to-mouth was actually attempted. At this point the tears flowed. They welled up in my own eyes as well and my wife knew that it was over. His eyes were completely dilated, his nose and tongue were blue and there were no more breathing movements.

The ride home was brutally sad as we both cruised down the road rubbing this poor kitten. I hated to think how odd his short life was: abandoned by his mother, drinking from a bottle, the only mother he knew was human; he went from feeling great to deathly sick in the matter of hours only to die one short month later in a car in rural Tennessee. Hopefully, the little guy had some contentment in the fact, as I do, that the true mother who loved him held and petted him and emitted her love in his last moments in this cruel world.

We were blessed to have had even a short time to share our home and lives with this little guy. Hopefully, all kitties go to heaven, too.

Introducing The Newest Member Of Our Family

The other day I became an uncle again to this beautiful baby girl.

I love getting to update the ol’ family tree. Congrats to the new parents. We are all so proud and cannot wait until our trip up to Washington to meet her for the first time.

Smooth Criminal

Michael Jackson died yesterday. He was 50 years old. I wondered how I would feel when this day came. I honestly didn’t think it would happen quite so soon. The relationship that I have had with Michael has been a very strange one indeed.

As a child of the 80s I was not familiar with his work as a part of the Jackson 5 until a little bit later in life. I was, however, privileged to be a spectator to the phenomenon that was Thriller. If my math is correct, I was 8 years old when that record hit the streets. As that young, impressionable boy I too fell in love with the music of Michael Jackson. I remember listening to my vinyl copy ad nauseum while flipping through one of several full color glossy picture books of the man. I couldn’t get enough. I thought him to be a musical genius.

As I neared and entered my teenage years I found that not only were my musical tastes growing but I also found his music to be less interesting and less interesting. Eventually I began to loathe his music. I would tolerate Thriller but I assumed that to be out of nostalgia. I am not so sure that is true now.

As I became an adult and a father and watched the deconstruction of what some people called a musical icon, I became more disgusted with him: the over doing of the plastic surgery; the amusement park in his back yard; the sissy way that he acted while portraying being a tough guy; the way that his music became less edgy & watered-down. These were all reasons to scoff and make jokes at his expense.

The final straw was the little boys. You can say the word “alleged”; you can say “acquitted”; I say “wake the hell up”. The man lay in bed with under-aged boys, he served them alcohol and (no I have no proof but I am not stupid) he molested them. People argue that he was a little off due to his childhood. I don’t care. As terrible as most of you will think this is to say: I am a little glad that he died. The world is a better place for it.

Further adding to my disgust were the discussions on the television about him. First, Al Sharpton referring to him as a hero and making comparisons to Muhammad Ali then mentioning that Jackson’s death was a tragedy. A tragedy? What the hell? The Washington, DC train derailment resulting in nine deaths is a tragedy; the state trooper that was senselessly shot in his cruiser during a routine traffic stop is a tragedy. All this was is a 50 year old pedophile that couldn’t outrun karma. How many 50-ish year old men died yesterday due to a heart attack? How many of them had to provide for their families but can no longer do so? Why aren’t we celebrating them?

What about the Larry King Show last night? King was prepared to dedicate his show to actress Farrah Fawcett who also past away yesterday. He announced that since Jackson died he was changing his show. I guess since King knew Jackson personally as a friend that takes precedence. How rude for the family and fans of Farrah Fawcett. That was a reprehensible, no class act. Period. All of this praise for a man who fondled little boys and was rich enough to get away with it.

Maybe my opinion is not a popular one but I can’t imagine that you would have allowed your small children to stay unsupervised with a man like him. I know I wouldn’t. The deification of this man yesterday, today and in the days to follow is putrescent and horrendous. I, for one, will not be a party to it.

** As an aside, maybe this is the opportunity for Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and/or the relatives of the other Beatles to legally own the music that truly is great and rightfully theirs to own. **

Feel Good Friday?

Is it really a Feel Good Friday if I do not provide any musical stylings? Well, it will have to be as I am currently at my place of employment without access to YouTube. They are a bunch of fascists over here, I apologize.

Anyway, as I was perusing my feed reader working diligently, I was stopped dead in my tracks. I was visiting the blog of good buddy Chez Bez and saw the recent post of his photographs from the other day’s lightning storm. Go look here, I’ll wait.

Great, you’re back! Pretty amazing stuff right? Told you so. Well, I enjoyed it so much I decided to steal one of his pictures and use it as my background on my work computer:

Hey, Mike! Can I borrow one of your pics? I hope you don’t mind.

Only a few more hours left until I can scram from this place. Keep your fingers crossed that I don’t smash up the joint in the interim. Oh, and just in case I keep up with my writer’s block thing and do not post anything this weekend: I hope all of you fathers, grandfathers, uncles, step-fathers, and anyone that is fatherly or a mentor to someone younger, have a great Father’s Day!

Melancholy Monday: Childhood’s End

I haven’t done one of these Monday posts in a bit and felt the need to share a little song that has been stuck in my brain since I forced The School Girl to listen to it the other day. It is a track I absolutely adore from one of the greatest bands in rock history, Pink Floyd.

This pre-Dark Side of the Moon track shows some of the band’s best sound content coupled with intense and deep lyrics. David Gilmour’s guitar playing hints at the virtuosic talent that he would become.

Check out these lyrics:

You shout in your sleep
Perhaps the price was just too steep
Is your conscience at rest
If once put to the test
You awake with a start
To just the beating of your heart
Just one man beneath the sky
Just two ears just two eyes

You set sail across the sea
Of long past thoughts and memories
Childhood’s end your fantasies
Merge with harsh realities
And then as the sail is hoist
You find your eyes are growing moist
And all the fears never voiced
Say you have to make the final choice

Who are you and who am I
To say we know the reason why
Some are born some men die
Beneath one infinite sky
There’ll be war and there’ll be peace
But everything one day will cease
All the iron turned to rust
All the proud men turned to dust
So all things time will mend
So this song will end…

Wal-Mart Graffiti

While we tried to peddle our kitties yesterday at Wal-Mart, I noticed some markings on the ground. Someone had spray painted in the parking lot near our spot:

I don’t think it was very nice to be cursed at in that way but what can you do?

Lewisburg Pimp

I am considering renaming this blog Presto Chang-O! Version 2.0. Cats and kittens have pretty much taken over my life lately so I must share it all with you…again. To recap: one of our cats, Paige, got pregnant and had a litter of six kittens:

(l. to r. : Clint Eastwood, Teddy Roosevelt, Bagheera, Harry Potter, Paul Stanley & Dr. Evil)

A few weeks into her pregnancy our other cat, Piper, became pregnant as well. Oh boy, right? Well Paige had her six and everything seemed okay. She mothered them properly and they seemed to make progress. As Piper inched closer to dropping her litter she began to mother Paige’s kittens. We came home one day to find three newborns that had been left out in the middle of the dining room to die. Piper would have nothing to do with them.

Not wanting the new babies to die my wife ran out and bought kitten formula and began the ritual of bottle feeding, bathing and (worst of all) making them use the bathroom. With the help from Sister-in-Law, they have been taken care of just about religiously every four hours.

Throughout this whole kitten experience we have determined that due to his big personality we are considering keeping Harry Potter the kitty. He talks to us and likes to sit with us and is a pretty good cat.

So yesterday we traveled across town to the local Wal-Mart to peddle our kittens. We just had too many cats in this house; eleven to be exact.

(The School Girl looks thrilled to be sitting out in the parking lot.)

We caged up all of the original six kittens minus Harry Potter and hoped that people would come and take them.

Within the first hour a nice family with like six kids (I was thinking one for each kid here) came back and took home Teddy Roosevelt and Dr. Evil. About 45 minutes later a guy came by and snatched Bagheera. We had a few more looky-loos but it appeared we would have to take Clint Eastwood and Paul Stanley back home with us.

We did end up taking those two back home with us and now Harry Potter was happy that he no longer only had my slipper to play with.

I went through the process last night of setting up a Craigslist account to give away both of the remaining kittens and possibly Piper too. Apparently, however, they frown upon giving pets away for free on their site. It makes no sense to me and I am pretty sure that I have seen it in the past. So if anyone wants either Clint Eastwood:

or her sister Paul Stanley:

please let me know because they are cute and fun (as seen in this pic of Paul Stanley in a Tupperware bowl):

and could use a new home. Also, no need to worry about their brother Harry Potter as he has his favorite hobbies of reading and sleeping to keep him occupied!

I just don’t know how you can even resist these little cuties. By the way, I hope that this post will finally have exorcized the demon that is me blogging about cats.

100,000 Views

I just happen to be looking at my blog statistics this morning when something caught my eye. I know that on some blogs this isn’t much, but for my little lowly corner of the inter-web I find it absolutely astounding that since I moved to WordPress in January of 2007 over 100,000 visits (not including my own) have been made to this blog.

For those of you that regularly visit, as well as the ones who only stopped by once or twice, thanks for sharing in the convoluted thoughts and ramblings that is my life. I feel a little humbled today.

Are You Gonna Blog Or What?

Some of you (okay so maybe just that guy over there) have noticed my extreme lack of blogging lately. There are many factors that have led to this new hiatus. First of all, and I guess most importantly, I haven’t felt like doing it. I have things that I have been talking about in real conversations to actual people I want to blog about but they just haven’t carried over to this written format. Secondly, I am damned tired. A typical day for me is as follows:

- wake up around 4:45am
- get breakfast, put lunches together, shower, etc
- help The School Girl with the feeding of the 3 newest kittens
- leave for work (hopefully) around 6:00am
- drive the 47 miles to drop my wife off at work
- drive the additional 15 miles to my job near the airport
- slave away at my job from 7:30am until 4:00pm
- pick up my wife at work & drive home through terrible traffic
- arrive home around 5:00pm – 5:30pm – 6:00pm (ish)
- change into ‘play clothes’, begin dinner
- trip over the inordinate number of kittens in the house
- watch/help the wife feed the 3 orphaned kittens
- eat dinner
- attempt to clean out the TiVo, surf the web
- feed the kittens again
- read, go to sleep around 10:30pm
- wake up at 2:00am to feed kittens yet again
- toss & turn, sometimes actually finding sleep until 4:45am
- repeat

What an inane existence I lead. Okay, to continue…

I have also gotten into this Farm Town game thing on Facebook. I spend time messing with that, updating my status on my Facebook & my Twitter pages way too much (go ahead and add me on both, I’ll wait while you do). I have also been going through all of my mother’s photographs to categorize and scan for posterity. There are other things that I am forgetting right now but dangit, I am just too tired to attempt to tax my feeble brain.

Anyway, I promise to begin writing a post or two on the newest (and previously rambled on) subject: the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame.

Thanks for staying awake for this post. Hello? **crickets**

Sometimes God Gives Gifts You Never Thought To Ask For

I am sitting here at work researching old check copies for our legal department. This can be a boring, tedious task. It does free me up to write or surf the web from time to time. I like to scan through Google Maps and the street view to look at places I know or landmarks and such. In the past, though, the street view was not available for my home area. Living in a small town like Lewisburg I always figured that we weren’t important enough to be imaged.

Today I decided to check once again in hopes that maybe our street was finally imaged. I was surprised to see that they had indeed uploaded the street view of my road. It is creepy to me that they have this for anyone to view but find it neat that I can pull up an image of my place. I noticed that the photo was from last fall or so as my neighbor’s fence was still standing and we have leaves all over the front yard.

Suddenly, I noticed that my little pooch, Fandango, was traipsing through the yard in the picture. It seemed pretty cool to have my dog on the street view, right? Well, I zoomed in a bit to notice that my little canine was imaged in the process of taking a dump!

This has made my entire day. There is nothing funnier than having the Google people driving past my house while my pooch salutes them in full squat!

New Momma Kitty

As lots of you know one of our kitties, Paige, gave birth to six little kittens several weeks back. They are the cutest things ever and Paige has been a very loving mommy. Our other cat, Piper, had gotten pregnant maybe a month later as well. (Before everyone starts in, yes I know we should get them fixed and we will as soon as the nursing process is over. Chill-ax!) About a week or two ago Piper had begun to mother Paige’s kittens, I guess in preparation for having her own. It’s instinct, right? She was moving them around and cleaning them and even was nursing them. We figured that she just could not wait to be a mommy.

Today when we got home everyone was asleep and hiding. We noticed that in one of the normal nursing spots was a decent amount of blood. That meant to me that Piper had finally birthed her kittens but moved them to a more secure spot. Well we couldn’t find them immediately. Why? Well because the worthless damn cat had just left them out underneath our dining room table. I almost stepped on one that had pulled itself out in the open. It was the saddest thing seeing these kittens, only hours old, cold and hungry and all alone.

Let me tell you where there momma was…she was trying to nurse Paige’s kittens! We just could not get her to pay any attention to her own kittens and they really needed her. The School Girl decided to run to the store and get some kitten formula and the tiniest little baby bottles ever. Throughout this process Paige, the mother of the older kittens, has been trying to split her time between her six and Piper’s three. Mostly, however, it has been my wonderful wife pulling momma duty.

Neither of us wants to see these three babies die but I get the feeling all this work is going to be for nothing. We have moved them into the den and placed them in a clothes basket with towels and a small heating pad for warmth. Maybe that coupled with my wife’s diligence to keep these critters alive will be enough to save them.

She has pooped out sitting in one of our video game chairs just worrying over these kitties. I also think it is time for me to find a new home for their momma, Piper. I am really disgusted over how she has treated them. I know some of you will say it’s just some natural phenomena and she can’t help it. Well, that’s just fine; she can just not help it somewhere else.

Don’t Let The Stars Get In Your Eyes

Holy crap it’s June! This year is flying by and I for one am not happy about it. This is definitely a sign that I am rapidly getting older. Anyway, since May has bitten the dust for ’09 it is time to travel back through my blog feed reader of items that I have starred. Those of you (yes, both of you) who read this blog know that I do this every month. I choose a random number of blog posts from my compatriots that are interesting, well-written, thought-provoking, hilarious or even may have ticked me off. (No, I will not tell you which any of the following are for me.) Without further ado, here they are:

Student Wins Suit Against Anti-Creationism Teacher – EricLee.US

Thank You Jason Bay – 38 Pitches

Dear REI, – JimVoorhies.com

My Grandfather & ”The Only Thing Missing…” – Chez Beziat

Things You May Or May Not Know – Newscoma

The Return Of Will Hoge – The Screen Door

The Angina Monologues – Chapter 1 – Salem’s Lots

I told you that you should be reading these blogs. I wouldn’t lie. Be sure to comment on them and let them know they are being heard.

Shopping List

This afternoon we ran to the local Walgreen’s to get our passport photos done. While waiting for them to develop I snuck away to the discount book bin. The aisle that the bin is in contains several summery type wares.

In this aisle with me was one other person. It was a lady, maybe in her mid to late 30s (*sigh* like me *sigh*) wearing a tube top dress. She had a body to wear it so no problem there. I am guessing that she had made at least a mental shopping list and it may have looked like this:

Tanning Lotion
Flip-Flops
Sunglasses
Panties

Uhmm, yeah. She bent over at the waist wearing that incredibly short dress to look at some of the flip-flops on the bottom shelf and **BOOM** she showed me the “kibble & bits”!

Honey, please wear underwear to the store. Also, note to self: learn to reach for your camera phone quicker!

Hang In There

From time to time this blog just needs a major cuteness kick in the pants. This is one of those times.

As we were heading out the door towards the drudgery of work this morning, something of interest caught my eye.

Yikes, one of the kittens has decided that he would test out his claws and climb brick! It almost looked like a kind of kitty jail break.

Never look down! Someone noticed that they had made pretty good progress.

Don’t just stand there taking my picture SAVE ME!!!!

Now that is some cuteness overload.

Before And After

Today I left work a little early. I had to run down to the DMV to renew my driver’s license. The last time I renewed I just walked in, kept the old photograph just like I always have and was out in seconds flat. This year, however, I received notice in the mail that they required a picture. The picture that was on my license up until today was originally taken back when I was 21 years old, about 1995.

What I notice most about this picture is that first of all I was thin. Secondly, my beard, if you can even legally call it that, was unable to connect to my moustache. It was extremely pitiful. Now compare it to my brand new license from this afternoon:

What is different? Well, I have glasses, my hair is much shorter. Also, I seem to be much hairier and about a billion pounds heavier. Plus there is something else. It is barely noticeable but it is there. Yep, a hint of a smile. I look happier. It took about 15 years but the guy in the new picture is a more pleasant and happier guy. The kid in the first picture may be skinnier, but he was a miserable douche. I think I like the older, wiser, blinder, fatter, greyer guy.