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.