I drove through a brief downpour this afternoon on the way home from pick up Stretch’s water boarding supplies at the vet.

While I was mixing up Stretch’s “desert” tonight, I was thinking about how pet food companies make cat and dog foods in flavors we humans can deal with, but not necessarily the flavors kitties and doggies would really like.  I suppose people would have a hard time buying flavors like rat, mouse, bird, reptile, etc. for their cats. Maybe if they gave them names like rat salad, mouse mousse, parakeet parfait, lizard l’orange and snake surprise people might go for them, but I doubt it.

I’m not sure how dog food would go over — road kill ratatouille, dead duck delight, smashed squirrel saute, stinky skunk stew. It’s making me hungry just listing them.

When I got up at 4:15 this morning to irrigate, the raccoons were the only critters out. I haven’t seen the porcupines since I traumatized the baby by shining a flashlight on it a couple of weeks ago.

While I was getting ready to go out and get Stretch’s supplies, I heard Laurie out on the deck yelling. Turns out a horde of teenage raccoons came running toward the deck and then scrambled under it. She said the runt was tagging along several feet behind. We haven’t seen or heard from the mama coon. Apparently, the kids got away from her.

I worked out in the garden all morning thinning catnip, cutting dead branches out of the chitalpa, deadheading roses and making repairs on the drip system. I also got a series of photos flies and bees.

Thunderheads rolled over earlier in the evening, but it didn’t rain. From what I could see of the mountains they might have gotten a little rain, but I wouldn’t swear to it.

The coons were under our deck most of the day wrestling around, with the mama coon growling at Laurie moving around on the deck during the day, and both of us tonight. The hoard of coons finally ran off about 8:30 leaving the runt behind. It chirped and cooed under the deck for awhile before it came out and made a few attempts at trying to find its rotten family that abandoned it.

It would start to  walk out from under the deck and then run back under it. At one point it got up on the deck and acted very pitiful. I ran it off the deck, and it promptly ran back under it. Laurie and I watched it as it waddled out about 25 feet from the deck, questioning if it was okay, but then all of a sudden it came running back to the deck and shot under it, so we decided the issue with walking funny was psychological from being abandoned. It finally made it’s way of to the thicket of elms by the shed, but apparently mama didn’t come to get it after an hour or so, so now it’s taken refuge under the deck again. I’m tempted to offer it free counseling.

We have Lola taking up residence on the east side of the house and the mystery black cat taking up residence on the west side of the house, making five black cats on the property. I think Lola’s been sleeping on the roof under the trumpet vine. She’s come out off the roof and jumped off the top of the catio the past two mornings. The catio is 10 feet high from where she jumps down. It’s an impressive jump. She was attempting to loll around on the table tonight. Even though we call her a lol cat, she doesn’t know how to loll around like our cats, but she’s getting better.

Stretch seems to be doing much better. He resists a little bit when I get him for his treatment, but I think he knows it makes him feel better so he’s putting up with it. He was being down-right sassy a few minutes ago.

A year ago today I had my first treatment for lymphoma. A year goes by quickly these days, and a lot has happened during that time.

There’s an email going around that explains there are five Fridays, five Saturdays and five Sundays in July 2011 — that’s said to happen every 823 years. The email also notes that if you take the last two digits of your birth year, add your age you will be this year to it, the total will be 111 “for everyone in the world.”  Well not exactly. Only “everyone in the world” born in the 20th century will come out with 111 using this technique that I’ll call the “century trick”; however, anyone born in the 21st century will come out with 11, and anyone born in the 19th century will come out with 211. Actually, if you calculate the age of any famous person born in the past 2000 years, and run it through the century trick, the total will be some hundred eleven. Here’s a possible trick question: If you add the year Christ was born to how old he will be this year, what number do you get?

As interesting as the century trick is, I decided to take some arbitrary values together with 111 and see what I would come up with. First, I took the total number of friends I have on Face book, multiplied that number by 111, subtracted the date the Declaration of Independence was signed, then divided the total by the last two numbers in the year of my birth — lo and behold, the number came out to 111. How weird is that?

Wait! Wait! There’s more. I took the totals of our three black cats’ ages using the century trick above, multiplied that total by the product of the caliber of an AK-47, subtracted the year Queen Elizabeth signed Mary Stuart’s death sentence, then divided that total by 111. Guess what it came out to? The number of friends I have on Facebook. Who would have thought?

Now I know these apparently random outcomes seem arbitrary, but somehow the above results have something to do with the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Affairs, the Bilderberg Group, and Google. Notice how I wrote 111 six times. A coincidence?

 

 

While I was standing by the fence photographing the sun as it slowly fell through the clouds of smoke, Harry chicken was peeking at me through the fence. He had quite the do. I asked him if it was much trouble to keep his hair that way, but he just gave me a look like “what are you stupid or something?” and then gave me the sped gesture with its wing across its chest.

Our neighbor’s acacia is looking good, and a crow flew over cawing and cawing as he swooped by me for a photo as he flew south. I’m not sure what got him going. He was sitting on a dead cotton wood before he swooped by, startling the hummingbird I was sneaking up on. Maybe the crow was warning the hummingbird that a human with a great big lens was sneaking up on it.

I was sneaking up on the hummingbird a second time, when Puck started a fight with the neighbor’s tabby that was stalking me yesterday. In a flash, Rosencrantz and Lola joined the fight so all I could see was a ball of black cats with an occasional flash of tabby.  I got the cats separated, but didn’t see the hummingbird again.

The little bird on the post sits on a post or power line then flies out all of a sudden and nabs one of the dragon flies swarming about. If you look closely, you can see the dragon flies in the photo of the sun shining through the smoke.

We had an infestation of cats tonight. Both the neighbor’s cats were over, plus the other black cat that’s been hanging around. Lola, their little black cat, followed me around the garden tonight, and rubbed on me while I was doing photos, making it difficult to get anything in focus. When the neighbor’s tabby noticed I was photographing him, he started stalking me. He was confused because he doesn’t really trust me to get very close, but he could see Lola rubbing on me.

Then the other black cat that’s been hanging round, but keeping its distance from me, decided I was okay tonight and started rubbing on my legs, meowing at me and letting me pet it. It let me pet it once before, but I think that was a tactic to get Rosencrantz to accept it. Once, I’ve petted a strange cat, Rosencrantz accepts it and doesn’t run it off. After the initial petting some weeks ago, it kept it distance until tonight. There’s a photo of that kitty on the “Losing My Religion” blog. I don’t know who it belongs to, but it is healthy and well fed, but spends a lot of time around our house.

When I went out and called Puck tonight, Lola, the tabby and the mystery black cat all answered the call. So I had three cats that don’t belong to us and no sight of Puck. Puck eventually got up on the roof, and came in after Laurie came out to inquire about which kitty was on the roof while I was out photographing the sliver moon.

While I was making rounds in the garden in the midday heat, I found three of the cats lounging and Stretch hunting. We went to Tristan’s to celebrate the 4th and I got a photo of Pepik talking to her.

Just when we thought it was safe to go back to church, we had our intelligence insulted by screens in the “traditional” service this morning. Call me a snob, but I don’t think I need to be treated like a theological special ed case when I go to church. I can plainly see and hear that the choir is singing the anthem. When the pastor says “bow your heads” 99.99999% of the time a prayer will follow. I don’t need a set of screens telling me it’s “prayer time!”   I don’t know what compels churches to treat adherents like kindergarteners, but I find it offensive and I won’t be treated as such.

About ten years ago, I tried to go along the whole “contemporary” service thing. I even played in a Praise Band for awhile. However, it didn’t take long before I couldn’t deal with the vacuous words and idiotic gestures that went with praise songs — Imagine singing “Our God is an awesome God… He reigns from Heaven above…” with a bunch of teenagers wiggling their fingers and moving their hands up and down gesturing rain.

The choir performed a fabulous rendition of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” this morning, the whole time the screens blaring “Chancel Choir: Battle Hymn of the Republic” The problem with screens is that even if you try to ignore them, they are in your peripheral vision, which makes them even more annoying.

I don’t understand why people want to take a beautiful sanctuary with stained glass windows all-round and a grand pipe organ, and make it ugly with screens — I guess H.L. Menken’s  “Libido for the Ugly” is universal.

Stretch’s creatinine level is much better, but still double the high end of normal. He’s gained some weight, which is great, and he was all claws when I put him in the kitty restraint bag to water board him tonight. He also growled at us while we water boarded him, which is also a sign he’s improving.

I attempted to upgrade the hard drive in my Macbook Pro to a 750 GB drive today, but it didn’t like it.  I knew there was something not right about the drive when I got a kernel panic after I finished restoring the files to the drive from the backup and restarted the computer. I finally got it to boot, but it ran really slowly and the drive was really hot. I’m reluctant to try another 750 GB drive, because I found several other people had experienced the same issues, even though the drive is supposed to be compatible with this Macbook Pro. I’m returning the drive and looking at other options such as network area storage.

When I went out to look for Puck tonight, there was a baby porcupine hanging out by the deck. I ran back in, grabbed a flashlight and my camera, but it crawled under a rose bush before I could get in photo range, so all I got was a photo of its tail under the rose bush.

I left the office without my Macbook this afternoon and remembered I had left it when I was almost home. I went home, water boarded Stretch, grabbed both cameras and headed back downtown to get my Macbook.

I arrived shortly after sunset and set out with cameras in hand to see what was happening on Central between 3rd and 6th streets at dusk on a Friday. People filled the bars along Central, while others milled around waiting for more people to show up to party. Cars poked along Central with an occasional Harley rumbling along between them. A couple of guys asked me if I knew where any bars were, which seemed a little strange to me as I pointed out two bars and a strip joint within 100 feet in front, behind and across the street from where we were standing.

Three cool bikers hanging out at the library asked me to take a picture of them. I couldn’t refuse. I’ll be interested to see if they contact me for copy of the photo.

There were a couple of musicians playing for tips. The guitarist/singer with ARC on his guitar case was pretty good. The woman playing trombone for tips was at the level that you would pay her to stop playing rather than listen to her for any length of time. The young women sitting outside the smoke shop seemed too occupied with their cell phones and cigarettes to notice the trombonist.

The most interesting place was 405 Central. The DJs were setting up for an outside gig, playing loud music while the corner window displayed a variety of tantalizing images projected on it from inside. The woman walking up to the DJ checking his phone was sitting at a dial-a-ride booth in front of the homey in the lavender shirt when I walked by on that side before taking the photograph.

Vendors were set up on the corners of 3rd and Central and 4th and Central to provide normal fare to the bar hoppers. The lead photo was set up in front of Nick’s Restaurant at 4th and Central.