Cat Fight

Blacky's claw

Heard some screeching in the backyard the other day. It sounded like a couple of cats, which wouldn't worry me too much. They'll take a couple of swipes at each other but they don't usually persist. All normal and expected. However, we lost a cat to a raccoon a few years ago, so there is always the possibility that our cat has gotten tangled up with a raccoon, and that's not good. So I stepped outside. Our cat, Gus, sweet lovable orange fur-ball Gus, was mixing it up with a mostly black cat, also long haired. They were pretty intent on impressing each other with how bad-ass they were, I had to holler at them twice before they broke off. Gus ran off, blacky ran off when I clapped my hands.
    There is a crawl space under the basement floor with vents through the foundation. There are small wells outside these vents with galvanized steel retaining "walls", maybe 18 by 9 inches by 6 inches deep. Not very big. Both cats were holding their war inside this little well. I would say that they were nuts, but that would be redundant, wouldn't it?
    Later on older son was inspecting Mr. Gus for damage and found a claw stuck in the top of his head. That's not good, but who got the better side of that deal? Gus, who got stabbed in the head? Or blacky, who lost a claw? Since hard-headed Gus doesn't seem any the worse for wear and Blacky is now short one claw I'm gonna declare Gus the victor.

Walking the Cat

Originally posted January 16, now with pictures!

Iggy

Took the cat for a walk, or should I say, the cat took me. During the summer I will open a window for them. They like nothing better than sitting on the window sill and watching the birds. During the winter it is too cold to leave a window open, and no one has offered to build my "cat window box", so they are denied this privilege. The little female, Iggy, does not complain, but the big male, Gus, squawks continuously, which leads to him getting booted out to the garage.

Gus

Why aren't they outside cats, you might ask? Well, our previous cat met an untimely death at the paws of a raccoon. My daughter, fearful of the new cats' safety, has prohibited their going out of doors, and me, the big softy, has acceded to her demands.

Still, the outdoors is their native habitat. Being cooped up in a house, especially a house without any mice, is as unnatural an environment as you could ask for. To alleviate this situation I have taken to letting Gus outside for a few minutes during the day, supervised, of course. The only door he is happy going out is the front door. I suspect this is because, unlike the side and back doors, there is cover in the form of shrubbery within a couple of feet of this door. So far he has just been content to crouch in the shadows and observe. I spend the time walking back and forth on the sidewalk in front of the house. I suppose I make an odd sight, if there were anyone around to see me, but being as this is suburbia, there isn't. Everyone is at work.

I am supposed to be getting some exercise, walking a mile each day is my goal. It is the easiest thing to do. I do not have to drive anywhere or change clothes or talk another shower. Walk out the door and once around the neighborhood and back inside. Twenty five minutes and I am good.

So today I tried just walking back and forth in front of the house for 25 minutes while Gus crouched in the bushes. You might think it was a little tedious, but so is walking around the neighborhood. It does give the old gray matter time to percolate. I may have to start carrying a tape recorder to make notes about all the great ideas I come up with while I am walking. I sure don't remember them all.

Occasionally I remember to try and work on my posture, but I quickly revert to form and walk with my head down, watching the ground where I am walking. Now walking around the neighborhood, this posture occasionally results in finding a stray airsoft pellet or a loose nut or screw. Walking back and forth in front of my house is going to reduce my findings considerably. Perhaps if I exhaust the ground quickly, I will work a little more on my posture.

Update March 2016 replaced missing pictures.

Electric Gus

Gus on Vimeo.
Sweetie went on the Electric Run Saturday Night with 10,000 of her closest friends. She brought home a basket full of electricalness which she turned over to Gus. You can tell he is really thrilled.
    I've started using Vimeo because YouTube now requires that I convert to the new format for Picasa, and I don't want to do that.

Update May 2023 replaced missing video.

The Advantage of Having a Thick Fur Coat

is that no matter how many times your enemy swipes at you, all they get is a little fur. Our cat Gus got into it with Buzz (the neighbors cat) this morning. Growling, hissing & spitting to beat the band, so I went outside to put the fear of Chuck-a-doodle in these two miscreants. Buzz was not intimidated. Gus slunk inside, but he left a big circle of bits of fur on the lawn. Mom inspected him when he came in and he did not seem to have suffered any real injuries. Actually couldn't even tell that he had lost any fur, but then he has always been a very furry cat. Gus is the only one who ever mixes it up with Buzz. Never hear diddly from Iggy.

Fleas & Bees

Our standard practice was to shut the cats in the garage at night so they wouldn't be waking people up in the middle of the night. Sleep is next to sacred in our house. A couple of months ago when we started working on the car, we started leaving them in the house at night. Didn't want them getting into trouble amongst all the greasy, sharp, heavy bits of engine lying around. Figured if they had the run of the house, they were less likely to go looking for trouble in the garage.

That worked okay, but Gus strarted showing up with wet spots on his fur. I figured he had inadvertantly run into some petrochemical, and he would eventually learn to avoid that stuff.

But it didn't stop. Every time I saw him he had one, two or more wet spots. What's going on? Do greasy engine parts hold some kind of mystical attraction for this cat? On top of this I never saw any difference in his behavior. He slept, groomed, and prowled just like always.

Then about a week ago I started getting bit. Fleas. Turns out the wet marks on Gus's fur were from him trying to bite the fleas. Hard to do, I imagine, if all your teeth are sharp as needles. Problem was, I never saw him chewing on himself. I only saw him doing his normal, endless licking. Monday wife and son applied a dollop of Frontline between his shoulder blades. That should clear up the problem.

Up until this week I was sure the wet marks in Gus's fur were from oil he picked up in the garage. Odd how I got my signals crossed.

I just did a little checking on anti-flea stuff, and I found this in an article on Fipronil (the active ingredient in Frontline) in Wikipedia:

Colony collapse disorder

Fipronil is one of the main chemical causes blamed for the spread of colony collapse disorder among bees. It has been found by the Minutes-Association for Technical Coordination Fund in France that even at very low nonlethal doses for bees, the pesticide still impairs their ability to locate their hive, resulting in large numbers of forager bees lost with every pollen-finding expedition.^[11]

Fipronil is insecticide with applications in agriculture as well as flea killing. I don't think the flea-killing products are contributing to the bee problem. But I could be wrong. There is no mention of how long the stuff lasts in the environment. It might be like teflon and never go away.

That Darn Cat

Gus surveying his handiwork.

The big dead tree supporting the tree house platform has lost it's second big limb, this time to kitty cat hi-jinks. Gus is naturally very proud of his accomplishment. It's hard to see in this picture, but the tree house platform is covered with sawdust from woodpeckers hollowing out nests in the remaining trunk.

The plastic bucket is covering a steel surveyor's stake. Ten years ago we had rope hanging from this tree and the swinging path took the munchkins very near this post. I put the bucket over it to mitigate any damage should someone fall on it. Kids fell, the rope broke, but the bucket was never tested. As far as I know.

Update February 2017 replaced missing picture.

Congratulations

Dutiful daughter has finished her last term of school, so we decided she needed a picture of Gus wearing a mortarboard. Gus did not like this idea. It was all I could do to restrain him while the camera went about its business of taking a picture. 30 nanoseconds after the camera clicked he was on his way out the door.

Summer's Coming

Me & Gus

It was 80 degrees yesterday, so I broke out a Hawaiian shirt and shorts. That's me & Gus on the couch settling in for an evening with Netflix. The mark on my arm is where I burned myself with the blade from the sawzall a month ago when we were breaking down the old kitchen in the new house. I was using the sawzall to cut through the silicon sealer that had been used to fasten the granite counter tops to the kitchen cabinets and it was slow going, the blade got really hot and I was careless.

That was then. Today it's supposed to be in the 60's and rainy.

A Visit To The Pet Store

As part of our continuing WAR ON FLEAS, we took Gus the cat into the local pet mega-mart for a bath and trim. Walk by this bird cage and they're all dead looking. What's the deal?

Oh, it's morning and they're still asleep. Never seen such a sight before. Must have been up late partying.

Pick up a different kind of flea goop. Notice this display case by the cash register. Geez this stuff is expensive. Last time I dealt with this it was a couple of bucks (showing my age I suppose). They were several different brands, but they all basically used the same poison. Now they are all different and cost a small fortune for like a half a teaspoon.

Unit 42

Unité 42 - Trailer - Netflix
Carolina

Produced by Casa Kafka, so you know it's going to have some odd bits, like they start off mentioning that 42 is Douglas Adams' answer to everything. It's a pretty standard European crime show. We've got Sam, the middle aged white guy, whose in charge of the murder squad. His wife recently died. Then there is the crew:

• Billie, an attractive young woman, recent graduate of the police academy and computer whiz. Her boyfriend also recently died under mysterious circumstances, so mysterious there was no body. I smell a resurrection in the offing. Billie rides a high power motorcycle. My kind of gal.
• Bob, another middle aged white guy. Seems to be a solid cop, but he's the coffee and donut guy. Sometimes he decides it's your birthday and bakes a cake. I like cake. Bob also does sign language interpreting for 
• the coroner, an attractive, deaf mute, young woman.
• Nassim, a young, gay Arab, technically astute. I'm not sure what his role is. This last episode he was busy being an Arab, talking to other Arabs.
• Helen, Sam's boss, a middle aged white woman. She makes a couple of brief appearances each episode.
• Louis Vermeer, the head of counter terrorism group, or some such. Another middle-aged white guy. I think we've seen this guy exactly once, and we just finished episode 2.

Seems like there should be more people on the squad, but that's all that I can bring to mind.

The first episode was pure tittleation. It starts with Billie jumping up and down trying to get into her jeans. That was funny, but this is a crime show, so on with the crime. The bad guy hacks into young women's computers and spies on them, and then he sneaks up behind them while they are watching themselves on the computer and screen and too late they realize the killer has snuck up behind them and dropped a cord around their throat. Billie figures out who the killer is and Sam gets in his car and races to the victims apartment just in time to clonk the bad guy in the head with his gun and rescue the girl. Good job, Sam.

Never say Never Again, 1983, James Bond /Free Radicals 720p
Eddiesfedora77

Episode 2 takes on the issue of Muslim radicals. There is a disagreement among the radicals and the knives come out leaving three guys dead and two teenage girls arrested. Radicalism is a problem. Even a solitary free radical can wreak havoc in a peaceful society. That's why people keep cats, to get rid of the vermin. At least it used be. Maybe not so much in the new housing developments. I think we did have a mouse here once. As I recall, Gus (our cat) was not effective. I'm not sure how we got rid of him. Or maybe that was an escaped hamster. It's been a while. I should ask my wife.

Google Unit 42 and the Unit 42 website turns up. Seems to be all about computer security threats. What a coincidence since computer hacking seems to be the our squad's method of choice.

Netflix 18(!) Episodes, about 50 minutes each.

Rubicon Trail

I had all kinds of posts in mind, but I'm draggin', so here's this video:

Trying to keep all WHEELS on the ground at the Historic RUBICON Trail -- Part 1
Fab Rats
Marc and I drove the Rubicon Trail in his Isuzu Trooper umpteen zillion years ago. I've been watching Matt's Off Road Recovery videos for a while now. Paul from Fab Rats shows up there occasionally and I've seen a couple of his videos. I enjoyed watching Matt and his crew build the Morevair.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I have been abandoned. Daughter has moved to days shifts after working nights for 2 or 3 years. Same sort of erratic schedule though,  3 days on, 2 days off, 3 days on, 6 days off maybe? 12 hour days. So Osmany has adopted the same schedule. Wife is off to whoop it up with her girlfriends and I have the house to myself, except for Gus (the cat), and he can pretty much keep himself amused. By sleeping, the lying dog. (Look at him lying there like a dog. Sleeping.)

I got a supply of Coors in the fridge, I merged the engineer's PDF with the extract from the kitchen designer's plans and sent them to Mr. Wood at the Portland Building Department, which was my chore for the week. Aside from getting my second shot of Pfizer and being miserable for 3 days.

'

Where was I going with this? Ah! The video! I might be a redneck. I really enjoyed this video, long as it is (30 odd minutes). I figure that these guys, running their own businesses, need to be grossing between $300 and $500K a year. They also need a lot of energy and it's apparent that they have it. I suspect that the big difference between them and me is that I never learned, of liked, to deal with people. Is that innate or because of my experience with people? Great, another question that has no answer. Not good for someone who thinks of thoughts as data.

Back to the video. Sorry, I keep getting distracted. Around about the 17 minute mark, Paul drags the rear differential of his SUV (heh) on a big rock, not once but several times. It was most distressing. These guys, being as they built these rigs, are probably thinking about how much strain the axle can take and whether all the supporting components can handle the stress. Me, I just shuddered.

Fab Rats Journey to the Rubicon

Here's Google's driving route from Hurricane, Utah to the beginning of the trail in Tanoma, California.

Rubicon Trail

Scale is 40:1 larger compared to above map. I'm posting the maps because I went to the trouble to look them up, and just in case anyone else wants to see where this is. The Rubicon Trail link takes you to a page that shows the elevation of every stinking bit of the trail. It ranges from like 6,000 feet to a shade over 7,000 feet.

Double Blast From The Past

Rooftop Singers - I've Been Working On The Railroad (Live) You might need to turn the volume up, it's pretty low.
Tam's singing "'♫♪Someone's in the kitchen with Dinah, stronger than the Old Man Joe!♫♪'. She's got the words wrong, but I know that tune, though I haven't heard it in about a zillion years, so I go looking for copy. YouTube has got about a zillion versions and while most of them are for little kids there are a few 'real' versions. There's one by Johnny Cash, one by Liberace (?!?!) and one by Paul Tremaine & His Orchestra. Then I come across this one by The Rooftop Singers, which causes Walk Right In to pop up:



The Rooftop Singers "Walk Right In"
Another tune I haven't heard in about a zillion years. This one I remember being popular on the radio, not just in my parents kitchen.

Walk Right In written by Gus Cannon in 1929 was recorded by folk trio, The Rooftop Singers, in 1962 for Vanguard Records. Released it as a single, it spent two weeks at #1 on both the Billboard Hot 100 and the Easy Listening charts, #4 on the R&B chart, and #23 on the country music chart in 1963. The Rooftop Singers were Erik Darling , Bill Svanoe, and Lynne Taylor. - catman916

Looks like zillion is my new favorite word.

Wikipedia has articles about I've Been Working on the Railroad and Walk Right In.

Threshold

We have a cat. We've had him for a while, five or ten years or so. Everyone in my family loves him except me. Maybe I love him too, hard to say. It has fallen to me to feed and water him and clean his litter box. He has me well trained, he squeaks (meows) when he wants to go outside, and I open the door for him. He comes to my office window and bats at the screen or the glass when he want to come in, and I get up and go open the door for him and then walk up the basement stairs to open the door for him so he can gain access to his food and water. I try and remember to pet him at least once a day. I read something about how cats need to be petted, so I do my duty. Sometimes I will stroke him, sometimes I ruffle his fur, sometimes rub him vigorously. But I only spend a few seconds at it and then I'm back to whatever it is that fills my days. He will sometimes sit with my wife and I when we watch TV, but he is just as liable to get up in the middle of the show and wander off, or bolt. I don't know how I would feel if something happened to him. I might be relieved that I don't have to cope with him anymore. On the other hand I might miss him. I dunno.
    I have a bad habit of losing my temper: I yell and curse loud and long, and occasionally throw things. I like to think it happens less often now than it used to, but I don't really know. What I have noticed is that it is more likely to happen when I am tired, and moreover there seems to be a limit below which I am more likely to go off. When I am well rested, I am well behaved. As the day goes on and/or I exert myself, I become more tired, and if I am worn down because of previous exertions or illness, I am more likely to slip over the edge.

   Two days ago I had a migraine headache, the second one in a month, the second one in my life, or at least that I remember. I say "migraine" because the pain was bad enough to make me nauseous. I took a Zyrtec (anti-hay-fever medicine) and in a couple of hours it had gone away. Connection? Cause and effect? Sure. Maybe. Anyway, that episode drained me and next day I laid low. Yesterday evening, Gus, the cat, started squawking, making his little meowing noises, wanting something, I lost my temper and hollered at the little twerp. I made so much noise that older son came to see what the problem was. Fortunately he is mature enough to face down his father-the-jerk and tell me to cool it.
    So my mission, should I choose to accept it, is to recognize when I have reached the limits of my endurance and to stop before something happens that triggers an outburst of insanity. This is hard to do when I am tired. Perhaps now that I have identified the circumstances I might be better able to avoid these situations.

Kittyman

Trailer Park Boys - The Kittyman Sea Shanty
Trailer Park Boys

This is how a sea shanty should be sung. I mean, if you were singing sea shanties. In memory of Gus who left us yesterday.

Plastic Drinking Glasses

We still have some glass drinking glasses in our house, but I hardly ever use them. Given a choice I will almost always use a plastic drinking glass, mostly because they are lighter. Also, you don't have to worry about them breaking if you drop one. You still have to clean up the spilled liquid, but you don't have to worry about picking up all the little shards of broken glass. A Correll cereal bowl broke in our house the other day. Correll ware is a practically unbreakable ceramic, but occasionally they do break, and when they do they shatter much like glass. I swept up the broken pieces, and then wiped up the area with a damp paper towel. Lastly I used my foot to sweep the floor to see if I could detect any little fragments. I heard a scraping noise, and when I checked the bottom of my foot I found a minute spec of broken ceramic. I did not feel it with my foot, but I was able to hear it being dragged across the vinyl floor. At this point I said good enough and left it.

Later on I come into the kitchen and there are series of red blotches on the floor. Looks like blood. Somebody found another piece of broken cereal bowl, but who? Gus, the cat, that's who. He had left little bloody paw prints across the kitchen and half way across the family room carpet. Bad kitty! It wasn't a bad cut. We checked to see if the shard was still stuck in his foot. It wasn't, so we banned him to the garage until he decided to quit bleeding.

But back to the plastics. They do have a couple of problems. We had some crystal clear plastic glasses that looked very nice for a couple of months, but then they started developing cracks. The cracks did not leak, but they proliferated and sort of detracted from their appearance. Now we have some softer, cloudier plastics and they have not changed their appearance at all.

The other problem has to do with dishwashers. Most glass glasses have a flat bottom. Most plastic glasses have a rim around the bottom edge. When they are washed in the dishwasher, the glass glasses drain dry, but the rim on the bottom of the plastic glasses holds a little pool of water. This means either: A) extra fooling around to get them dry, or B) putting them away wet, neither of which is really a satisfactory option.

I think the plastic glasses have this rim so they will not slide when you set them on the table. They are so light that even a small amount of water will enable them to slide. Glass glasses are heavy enough to penetrate a film of water. The rim on the plastic glasses enables them to penetrate the film of liquid to make contact with the table and not go sliding into your lap.

Boy Swallows Universe

Boy Swallows Universe | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix
2024 Phoebe Tonkin, Travis Fimmel

 

Life and times of a couple of teenage boys and their dysfunctional parents. Pretty great stuff. Cast of characters:

• Eli, a precocious 13-year-old boy,
• Gus Bell, his silent older brother
• Frances 'Frankie' Bell, their mum, a recovering heroin addict, separated from their father
• Robert Bell, an alcoholic.
• Lyle, who has taken up with Frankie and is providing a home for her and the boys. He has a steady job, but he's dealing heroin at a wholesale level to make some extra scratch. He works in a prosthetics factory run by
• Tytus Broz who throws a party for his employees at a restaurant run by 
• Bich Dang who is also wholesaling heroin to people like Lyle. Her son
• Darren Dang, a wanna-be samurai, goes to school with Eli.
• Slim Halliday, an ex-con and friend of Lyle and his family. Lives in a trailer down by the river.
• Alex Bermuda, a convict in prison and Eli's pen pal.
• Ivan Kroll, villain, suffered damage to his face from a shotgun blast and wears a prosthetic from Broz's prosthetics factory.

We watched three episodes tonight and mistakes have been made and bad things are starting to happen. Corruption is pervasive in the police force, Tytus is beginning to look shady.

P. S. Soundtrack here. There were a couple of tunes that caught my ear. Most of it I've never heard. Some of it might be okay.

Update November 2025 replaced missing video.

Random Joke

Yesterday, I was buying 2 large bags of Purina dog chow at Walmart for my dogs; Winston, Chief, Gus, and Maximus. I was about to check out when a woman behind me asked if I had a dog. What did she think, that I had an elephant?

Since I had little else to do, on impulse, I told her that no, I didn’t have a dog and that I was starting the Purina Diet again, although I probably shouldn’t because I ended up in the hospital the last time.

On the bright side though, I’d lost 50 pounds before I awakened in an intensive care ward with tubes coming out of every hole in my body and IV’s in both arms. I told her that it was essentially a perfect diet and that the way it works is to load your pockets with Purina nuggets and simply eat one or two every time you feel hungry and that the food is nutritionally complete so I was going to try it again. (I have to mention here that practically everyone in the line was enthralled with my story by now.)

Horrified, she asked if I ended up in intensive care because the dog food had poisoned me. I told her no; I had stopped in the middle of the parking lot to lick my butt and a car hit me.

I thought the guy behind her was going to have a heart attack, he was laughing so hard!

Wal-Mart won’t let me shop there anymore.

Stolen from Dutty's Blog. Via Dustbury.

What, me racist? Part 2.

After breaking the bartender's nose on the bar Gus takes out his pistol and says:
Now if you'd care to turn around you can see how we looked when we were younger and the people around here wanted to make us senators. Now the thing we didn't put up then was dawdling service and as you can see we still don't put up with it.

Driving home past the local elementary school yesterday just when parents are collecting their chilluns. There are some people standing near the corner talking. About half the group is white and are standing on the sidewalk. The other half is black and they are standing in the crosswalk in the middle of the street. They were not blocking my path, that crosswalk crosses a side street that does not get much traffic, but still! Why are you holding a conversation in the middle of the street? To me this just smacks of stupidity, or rudeness. There is no reason to be standing in the street like that. You could just as easily have your conversation while standing on the sidewalk. Standing in the crosswalk means any traffic that does come along is going to have to look out for you, and anytime you depend on other people to do what they are supposed to do you run the risk of being disappointed. In this case fatally.
     A few years ago I was at the local community college and I come up behind some black kids sauntering down the road. They are crossing the road, but at such an extreme angle that they would be 200 feet farther down the road from where they started when they got to the other side. I wasn't in any hurry so I just sat and waited for them to complete their moseying, because it was moseying. Normal walking pace is about three miles an hour. This kids were barely making one. What I don't know is whether that was their normal pace or whether they were deliberately dawdling to piss off the old redneck in the pickup truck who was breathing down their neck. I don't understand slow walking. The reason you are walking is to get someplace. Do some people enjoy walking that slow? Or is it a form of rebellion? Or just lack of impetus?
      It might not be a race thing at all, it might just be city slicker versus country mouse. 25 years ago this was a sleepy farming community. If you saw someone you knew while you were driving, you could stop in the middle of the street and have a nice long conversation and be reasonably confident that no one would disturb you. I come from the suburbs where people have to be on the go constantly in order to feed the giant money machine, so no, you don't have time to stop and talk to people, and you sure don't stop in the middle of the street because some madman racing down the street will be running you down.