Say hello to the latest addition to the menagerie. She is a ten week old boxer puppy named Lilli. Truffles the Lab is still deciding if getting her was a good idea.
Instead of waxing poetic about all the really cool things I got for x-mas, I thought I'd collect all the stuff sitting in my office that used to be really cool. Remember, eventually that iPhone's going to join this little montage:We got here on top, the Ultimate Doom, which needed 5 whole disks to install. We have the first iPod, pre-windows, with 5 gigs of storage and a firewire connection that will fit no current iPod accessories. In the middle there we have two flash drives 32MB and 128MB. On the right there we have one of the first smart phones, a Nokia 3650, with a Symbian OS that had a Commodore 64 emulator on it before it died. On the bottom there we have the last word in 20th Century unreliable mass storage, a couple of Iomega Zip disks that hold a whole 100 Megs.
Now, some breaking news from those wacky Korean scientists:
This homeless waif accosted us while we were unloading groceries a couple of weeks ago, rubbing our legs and mewing incessantly. Since there're coyotes in the neighborhood (I had seen two crossing the street earlier that evening) we took the creature in and placed her on the sun porch, segregated from "our" cats. We posted flyers all about advertising "FOUND CAT" knowing in our hearts that a creature this sweet and friendly had to be missed by her owners. (Anyone who read my eulogy to Lil Dog knows where this is headed.)No response after the fliers and Craig's List postings and we spent another week in denial ("but we don't want another cat") even as we paid a vet $125 for Feline Leukemia/AIDS tests, as well as getting vaccinations and testing for parasites. After all, the poor thing couldn't stay on the sun porch forever, and we had to give her a clean bill of health before she interacted with our other cats. Of course, we told ourselves that if we adopted her out, (by now we'd given up on her old owner showing up to claim her) her new owner would reimburse us for the vet bill.Then a friend of my wife sees the flyer and gives us a call. She knew where the little vagabond lived. So we could finally take her to her rightful owner, right. Ah, sort of.It seems that the old woman with a horse stable two houses down from us had kept this little creature as a barn cat. Two months ago, this old woman passed away, the trainers came and took the horses, and this poor thing was left to its own devices. So, now we have a new cat.
Wo hoo! I won Scalzi’s LOLCreation contest with the following entry:
And now presenting cats, and a bag.Please make up your own joke.
Yes, our cute little kitten has a name now, Zoë. Here are two obligatory kitten pictures.
As promised, new kitten pictures. No, she doesn't have a name yet.
This is a picture of Little Dog.We found her running in the street seven years ago. We were driving though our neighborhood when we used to live in Cleveland Heights, and my wife stopped the car yelling, look at that dog. There was a small brown Beagle/Dachshund mix strolling through the intersection, oblivious to traffic. We got out and tried to catch her, but the poor thing was terrified and ran right under another car sitting at a stop sign. She wedged herself in front of the rear tire of the car. So, while my wife yelled at the person in the car not to move, I tried to retrieve her. Every attempt I made was met with terrified growling and snapping. The standoff lasted about ten minutes until some guy in a pickup pulled over. He had heavy leather work gloves and was able to reach under the car and remove her, placing her on a tree lawn where me and my wife could check her for injuries. Fortunately, by then she had calmed down and stopped snapping, and we were able to tell she was all right. By that time, both the woman driving the car and the guy with the work gloves had both vanished, and we were left with a dog.We called her "little dog" because we were certain that someone loved her and her owner would turn up. We went door to door, called shelters and posted signs, but her owner never claimed her. By the time we realized she was ours, she was answering to "little dog."She was already somewhere between eight and twelve years old when we found her, but she was always in good spirits, if somewhat cranky with our Labrador. But today, after a long series of health problems that came and went, we had to put her down.This was especially hard, as two months ago we had to make the same decision with our cat Mu. Mu was another rescue case. My prior cat had died, and we went to the Geuaga County Humane Society to look at cats. While my wife filled out the adoption paperwork, I sat down and this large black and white cat with an underbite decided to jump on my shoulders. When she draped herself across my shoulders and started purring, I knew we had found a cat. Despite my wife's protests, "That funny looking thing, no, you're kidding. . ." she was eventually convinced that Mu was the best cat ever.I know we were happier for having both of them in our lives. Its also nice to think that their lives had been much better for being with us.The ironic thing about all of this, in a circle of life sort of way, is that we had been planning since last week to get a kitten tomorrow. We had already set things to pick her up before Little Dog took her bad turn last night. . . So, to make up for this depressing post, I'll be giving you some kitten pictures by Friday.
I’ve been gone for a while. Me and my wife combined our 10th wedding anniversary trip with the trip my wife’s German brass band was making to play around Germany and Austria. We rented a car, and drove around Bavaria and points south: Munich, Nuremberg, Vienna, Salzberg, Innsbruck, Füssen, and then back to Munich. While driving around we met up with the band so my wife could play gigs. All in all, it turned out to be a great trip; the weather cooperated with all our sightseeing and we got to see some spectacular alpine scenery. Here are a couple of highlight pictures— of the 800 I took during the trip.
I've decided to stop being coy and post an actual picture of my introverted self, with cute dog to lessen the impact. . .Actually, Eleanor, my new agent, needs a picture for the author section of the Spectrum site. So, if I'm going to be pictured there, might as well have one on my blog, right?
Tastes like chicken. . .
Been too busy for the Blog lately, so we're going the cheap and easy route with a cute cat picture.
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