Category: Cats

It never rains, but. …

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 3 Comments
Crossing over I-40 near Winrock Town Center aboard the Soma Saga (canti edition).

We’ve been enjoying the occasional sprinkle in late July, all told about a half-inch of moisture in our dusty little corner of the sandbox.

Sure helps keep the mercury on the down-low. The air conditioning gets to take five, as does the irrigation system.

Why, a fella can even wait until 9 in the a.m. to get out for a bike ride without risking spontaneous combustion. Luxury!

I’ve been logging more miles lately — 131 last week, 123 the week before, 130 the week before that — not just because the weather has been delightful, but because it gets me away from the MacBook Pro, which seems to have visited Taco Bell without me and has been shitting all over my desk.

I’ll spare you the links. You’ve seen them all anyway.

Now, I could take a claw hammer to that laptop, make it shut up. But the MacBook Pro is not the news; it’s just a delivery system. It’s not the Beast; it’s not even letting it in. It’s just making it available in case I want a peek.

“And now, here’s Ash with the weather!”

Remember Parker beating the tar out of Ash in “Alien” and all the good that did him? Ash was a grinning, disembodied head in a puddle of goo — literally a talking head, still bringing the news and analysis, like some interstellar anchorman for “The Weyland-Yutani Newshour” — and before long everyone on the Nostromo was Purina Alien Chow except for Ripley, Jonesy the cat, and the alien.

And Ripley was still getting nothing but bad news. Especially when, just as she was getting ready to back the escape pod out of the garage, up pops the alien with a solid impression of Jack Nicholson in “The Shining” — “Heeeere’s Johnny!” — and she had to have been thinking, “Goddamnit, all I wanted to do was take a little ride, get away from all this ‘Wet cleanup on Aisle 4’ shit for a while. …”

And Ripley didn’t even know about the next three movies in the queue. Talk about your long days in the office.

The bike is my escape pod. I check it for aliens before I hop aboard.

And while I bring a bot along, I keep that sumbitch locked down tight. If he manages to pop off somehow, well … he’s just a feeble old iPhone 13 Mini, and I’m pretty sure I can whup his ass in a fair fight.

The cat’s meow

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 7 Comments
Miss Mia Sopaipilla once again enjoys a full complement of servants.

We’re finally back to what passes for normal around here.

Herself has returned from Tennessee and Miss Mia Sopaipilla couldn’t be happier. I’m not the person you want to see first thing in the early morning hours, when the Voices are in full throat, roaring for coffee and news, the cacophony just a few decibels short of drowning out the clicking, popping, and squeaking of various OE bits from 1954 announcing their imminent failure. And with the factory warranty long since expired, too.

I lack a certain ruthless efficiency at stupid-thirty. Stack a few extra chores atop my tiny little pile and I am prone to mutter about Sisyphus as the rocks start rolling downhill.

I do manage to achieve some sort of spastic rhythm after a few days catching bad hops in the valley. But it’s not a pretty thing to watch.

Especially for Miss Mia. For openers, I like my coffee black, to match my aura, while Herself will share a dollop of frothy cream from her cuppa. I’ll pour Miss Mia a shot straight from the container, but it’s not the same. So off she goes, stalking from room to room, looking for Herself and that fat mug of cream with just a hint of coffee.

Never you mind that the litter box is cleaned and the water refreshed, food and meds served up, bedding shaken out. These are services, to be expected. It’s the little extras that make the difference between living and merely existing.

Eventually Miss Mia cycles through the Two Stages of Feline Grief: “I want something,” and “Fuck it, I’ll take a nap.”

And then I can finally have my coffee. Black.

‘We are not amused’

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 17 Comments
“Hey, I may be a Russian Blue, but I was born here, so lemme out!”

Nothing to see here, move along, move along. The ICEholes didn’t get Miss Mia Sopaipilla.

However, she was plucked from beneath the rumpled comforter in our bed, unceremoniously stuffed into a carrier, and whisked away via Scary Noisy Rattlebox to the vet yesterday for a vaccination, a mani-pedi, and a quick looksee because — like so many of us — Miss Mia is Of a Certain Age. In this case, 19, which means she’s pushing 90 in our years.

Ninety. Holy hell. I’m neither half as spry nor a quarter as cute as she is, and I’m barely 72. She’s got more hair, too, though our whiskers are about the same shade of white.

Mia’s no longer the champion jumper she once was, but then neither am I. Since breaking that second ankle I hop onto and off of things about as well as Mr. Hilltop in “Young Frankenstein.”

But she’s only on the one medication — methimazole, for an overactive thyroid — whereas I would be on an even half-dozen if I could get any of the fun ones without risking a longish stretch in the cage myself.

As we rolled into the parking lot I noticed one vehicle with a Trump sticker, and once inside I glanced around, trying to I.D. the owner. But I didn’t see anyone with an ailing turkey buzzard, desert warthog, or vampire bat, so I couldn’t in good conscience slip the doc a double sawski and recommend a candidate for euthanasia.

“Oh, sure, you’re all about a rabies vaccination for your three-legged pit bull but the rest of us should be ‘free’ to croak of the COVID Measles,” I mumbled to no one in particular.

Miss Mia just rolled her lovely green eyes, which is her way of saying: “Can we get on with it, please? You may win the war of words in here, but you’re gonna lose the fight in the parking lot afterwards, and I want to get home to finish my nap without a side trip to the ER and/or jail.”

Earth Day

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 28 Comments
One old fella snaps a pic of another.

The backyard maple is still with us, megadrought be damned.

The arborista with the tree service we use recently sent out a customer-tips newsletter about balancing responsible water use and tree care. Top of her list? “Plant better trees.”

The trend has been hotter and drier for many years. I don’t see drought conditions going away. There are plenty of shade trees that are not water-hogs and many desert trees that complement your landscapes. Cottonwood and maple are so out of fashion in drought conditions.

Sigh. Naturally, we’ve got this doddering old maple that endures an amputation or six every fall. And there’s a giant-ass cottonwood across the arroyo.

The Turk standing watch in 2008.

We had a beautiful maple in the front yard back in Bibleburg. Field Marshal Turkish von Turkenstein (commander, 1st Feline Defense Regiment) loved that tree, when he was still an indoor-outdoor cat. He’d take up a position in the crotch of it and make himself look even longer than he was, like a giant furry albino alligator.

Once a killer hailstorm hit that tree like Spooky working out with its Vulcan minigun. Maple-leaf salad all over the front yard and porch. Tree bounced right back, maybe even better than ever.

But it rains and snows in the B-burg. Or it used to, anyway. A tree can get a little love up there, whether it’s Earth Day or not.

Idiocracy 2026: Older but no wiser

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 24 Comments
“Ah, Jaysis, tell us he’s not at it again so. …”

What with having a drop taken and/or a mind wandering common on both branches of the family tree it behooves a fella from time to time to test-drive what remains of his wits, if any.

It struck me recently that for perfectly sound (har de har har) reasons I hadn’t done an episode of Radio Free Dogpatch since February 2025. But times pass and things change and people clearly aren’t getting any smarter, especially me.

So here we are so, dusting off what few of the mad skills I possessed only in theory not so very long ago and taking them for a spin around the old podcasting studio to see what falls off.

For openers, the 24-inch LG display that now supplements the 14-inch M4 MacBook Pro in my main office is no longer attached to the MacBook Pro in the studio, which is 10 years older and an inch smaller, displaywise, and I cannot recommend such a tiny stage for audio theater as senescence staggers forward, trying to remember where it left its spectacles (atop its head).

Auphonic is no longer a strictly free app, which failed to astonish me in this, the New Gilded Age, so creator and audience must deal with what they call a “Jingle” fore and aft. Jingle me bollocks, boys … I’ll be looking for some other way to give me chin music a tuneup before I next set it out on its street corner to busk for nothing.

Finally, Libsyn has gotten a makeover as well, but if you’re reading this you can be sure that I managed to negotiate their maze. An old ratoncito can still cut the cheese. Find the cheese! I meant find the cheese! Where the hell are my spectacles? Oh … never mind.

Could this be the start of something big? Probably not. Mostly I wanted to see if I could still get ’er done. Also, I was bored. Giving the old brain-box a wee scrape and a splash of paint is a fine way to stay out of the wind, which is full of allergens and other evil tidings. Extra credit to anyone who can find the Firesign Theatre reference in this mess.

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• Technical notes: RFD uses the Ethos mic from Earthworks Audio; Audio-Technica ATH-M50X headphones; Zoom H5 Handy Recorder; Rogue Amoeba’s Audio Hijack; Apple’s GarageBand, and Auphonic for a wash and brushup. Clip from Mike Judge’s “Idiocracy” lifted from YouTube. Booing crowd, kicked-in door, and Celtic tune from Freesound. “Out of Step,” which you’ve heard here before, comes from Audio Hero via Zapsplat. Special guest appearance from Miss Mia Sopaipilla, who despite a screechy meow is healthy as a horse as she approaches her 19th (!) birthday.