Category: Cats

Beans ‘n’ booze

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 24 Comments

Herself and I dined out this evening with a neighbor and some of her out-of-town family, with whom we have become friendly over the years.

There was wine afterward on our back deck, and as it was getting dark nobody noticed (I hope) the half-assed mowing job I did yesterday. Miss Mia Sopaipilla and Buddy the Wonder Dog made brief appearances to rave reviews, but Turkish refused to leave his dressing room, citing obscure union regs about dogs and cats and never the twain shall meet outside the Thunderdome, and certainly not while the party of the first part is wearing a ridiculous purple harness and leash, which is the only way the big galoot gets outside since collecting a nasty and expensive abscess while at large and unfettered.

All in all, it was a pleasant way to end a day of making bricks without straw at PharaohNews. A casual glance at the interwebs at midshift unearthed a few small-helmet types aghast at our lack of investigative journalism. This is not unlike complaining that the free blowjob you just got from the unemployed barmaid didn’t include a free shot of top-shelf tequila with an artisan-beer back.

No, that’s not the debt ceiling being raised

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 9 Comments
Afternoon rainbow
Just think, if we could find the pot of gold at the end of that rascal, we could solve our national debt "crisis" ... by imprisoning the House GOP caucus for treason.

Just a rainbow, courtesy of the afternoon monsoons, which have returned for a while. They sure do cool things down at night.

Meanwhile, in DeeCee, Weepy John Boehner is still leading from the rear, frantically trying to figure out which brand of tinfoil his Tea Bagger buddies want for their beanies. The gang at Talking Points Memo is on top of things as they happen, and for high-quality analysis and snark you can check with Steve Benen at Political Animal and Kevin Drum at Mother Jones.

Suffice it to say that the news is all bad. At least Kevin supplies cat-blogging on Fridays to lighten the mood.

Here in Dog Country we’ll engage in a bit of dog-blogging as a counterpoint. We’ve been crate-training Buddy and so far, so good. He’s (mostly) sleeping through the night and has had no more accidents in the crate since we pulled the bedding out of it. He’s getting at least one longish walk daily and plenty of backyard time. And today he even romped a bit with Herself, gamboling about the DogHaus like a happy pup and even barking a couple of times, just for the hell of it.

The Feline Caucus, of course, finds this incomprehensible. But so far they haven’t tried any nihilistic shenanigans, which goes to show you that pretty much any old four-legged furball is smarter than the average House Repuglicant.

Every dog has his day

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 29 Comments
The dog formerly known as Sweetpea
Oh, sure, yeah, right, now he sleeps. ...

Chapeau to Cadel Evans for finally making it onto the top step of the podium in Paris. He was not spectacular, but he was as strong as an onion-and-horseradish sandwich in a very tough Tour, and when it got down to the leg-breaking he was serving up pain by the plateful.

Things got a bit hectic around here the past few days. I made a quick trip to Boulder on Friday to say adieu to Ben Delaney, who stepped down as editor in chief of VeloNews. Then yesterday it was back to the VeloBarrel for the time trial that saw Cuddles clock the Schleck sisters.

And finally Herself decided that Chez Dog required an actual dog, so we paid a visit to the Humane Society of the Pikes Peak Region, where she volunteers a couple days a week, and bailed out a 6-year-old Japanese Chin she’d had her eye on.

The shelter people were calling him Sweetpea, and I was calling him Motherfucker when he woke us up at 4 a.m. today, but at the moment he remains nameless, though I’m leaning casually toward Buddy — an anglicization of Budai, the laughing Buddha — because the Japanese Chin appears to be smiling all the time.

When they’re awake, anyway. I think I’ll sneak back into the kitchen and wake the sonofabitch up, see if he’s grinning when I give him a taste of the old cowbell.

Massif, but not decisif

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 9 Comments
Rest and rehabilitation
Mighty Whitey bags some Zs on his Turkintowel while recovering from a nasty abscess.

There was a little fencing but no fireworks today at Le Tour, a stage in which nearly everyone seemed to be thinking, “Don’t fuck up.”

Super Spaniard flexed his quads a bit in the uphill finale, to no particular purpose, and pronounced himself content, though he had the Schlecks stuck to him like a couple of cheap tattoos.

Given the misfortune that has been plaguing the homeboys in this go-round it was nice to see Tejay Van Garderen ride strongly — until the final few kilometers, anyway — en route to the polka-dot jersey and the most-combative prize. And it was even more impressive to see big ol’ Thor Hushovd hang onto that yellow jersey on a hilly course, day one of two in the Massif Central. But right now Cadel Evans is looking like the man to beat.

All in all, it was a long day in the old VeloBarrel, and by the time I finally broke free for a short ride it proved very short indeed. The skies looked blacker than the Republic’s future under President Bachmann, and I wasn’t out a half-hour before the rumbling started, and then the rain. I just barely beat it home, for the second consecutive day.

The Turk’ was camped out on my drawing board, where he has spent much of the last week while being treated for an abscess under his right jaw. The big galoot is not exactly cuddly and we thought he was just being pissier than usual until he popped the damn’ thing. Talk about nasty. So off to the vet we went, and now we are both poorer and wiser.

Cats are strange beasts. If I had had that thing on me the Atlantis crew would have been able to hear me yowling from the International Space Station.

Continuing education

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 11 Comments

Herself had a video-production class the other day and so we screwed around shooting footage of Miss Mia Sopaipilla and Turkish. She used a bunch of Mia clips, so I decided to give equal time to the Turk (a.k.a. Big Pussy, Mighty Whitey, the Turkinator, Turkenstein, et al.).

Using my little Flip HD makes the process pretty much a no-brainer — why Cisco croaked this product is a mystery to me — but I’d kind of like to try one of the newer Canon HD digital camcorders. I have a Canon ZR500 that records to Mini DV cassettes, but it’s kind of clunky, doesn’t do HD and spazzed out when Herself tried to add some of its clips to a collection for her class. Strictly stone knives and bearskins — I mean, jeez, the thing is 5 years old! If it were in Maine, it could have a job.

In unrelated feline news, do cats dream (if only of Hollywood superstardom)? National Geographic wondered that, too, and here’s what they found out, via Discoblog and Kevin Drum of Mother Jones, a dude who has his own feline issues. Plus he’s a Trekkie to boot. I wonder whether the old “Star Trek” episode the Drums and their cats were watching happened to be “Assignment: Earth.”