While I'm running out the clock at this job, I'm trying to use all the resources available to me while it lasts. One big issue is health insurance. Sure, there's some kind of Obama-subsidized COBRA thing but in all honesty I will probably forget to sign the forms or whatever when the time comes. So I'm trying to get some doctor-related stuff taken care of while I have full employer-backed coverage.

To that end, I just had my eyes checked and am happy to report that my vision has improved yet again! A few years ago I had my eyes checked and my scrip went down from -2.25 to -2.0. This time around I'm down to -1.75. At this rate by the time I retire my vision will be so strong I should be able to cut steel girder with a mere glance. In the meantime, I need new glasses!

I ordered some frames at the eye doctor that basically look like the ones I usually wear. But I just discovered this place that sells glasses, lenses and all, for $8. At first I thought they just meant frames for 8 bucks, which is not bad in of itself. But here it turns out you can get the whole kit 'n kaboodle for less than $10, not counting the 'shipping' charge. But which frames should I get?

I went through a bunch, the $8 frames as well as the more expensive types. I need to check with the optometrist to get the full prescription details before I order, but then I'm gonna go hog wild. I'll have glasses for every occasion! Cuz, you know, I have so many occasions to attend.

Labels: glasses, Good Stuff

If you thought this site was single-minded before, get ready for "All Job-Loss Talk." As usual, I'm about 18 months behind everybody else on the trends, so you're probably all full up with whining about losing one's job. So maybe I won't do that, even though I sure am thinking about it. I guess I would care more if I liked my job. But here at the flute end of things, I gotta say that the tedium had long won out over the interesting parts of this work. Ideally I'd like to get out of this business altogether and work in a field I actually care about. And I would ... if I hadn't bought this damn house!

The one big trade off of my lousy job was that it provided me with, literally, more money than I knew what to do with. I saved up enough to jointly buy a house, and then had enough left over I was able to let every cat in the neighborhood move in with us. It was the thing that allowed me to say Yes to stuff I would never have been able to otherwise; in some cases it became the thing that forced me to say Yes (would I have all these cats if I had the self-control that limited funds provides?).

So now I am guessing that whatever job I can finagle, it won't be as much as I've been making. I've been looking at my expenses and if I whittle it down to the bare necessities, I might be able to get by doing production art work for a temp agency, which was my very first job in this town, and still one of my favorite things to do (hours spent nudging graphics and tweaking layouts). But that's not a career, and maybe it's time I got one of those.

So I'm going to spend the next 3 months trying to really think of what I'd like to do with my time. Since I know I can scrape by for a while if I have to, I'll try not to let that little voice (who sounds just like my Dad) flare up too much with comments of "Hey! You! You have to get a new job RIGHT NOW. Don't wait for the severance!" I don't know if it will yield anything useful, maybe the best way I can serve humankind is through 6AM conference calls with testy Flash developers and belligerent middle managers.

Labels: Good Stuff, Job, Money

You people with cars won't understand this, but sometimes we sit around and discuss all the things we could do if we had one. How we could go to Ikea, to Costco, to the Catskills (I don't know why we bring that up, neither of us knows anything about the Catskills). The idea that we could have something to not only transport us around but also hold heavy items so that we may bring them to our door, well, let's just say we understand the allure.

Eventually these conversation descend into all the reasons we SHOULDN'T ever have a car: the costs, the worries about theft, the moving from one side of the street to the other all the time. So we end feeling pleased we are still reliant on mass transit. But this weekend we were able to tool around and block the box like all those SOBs who act like they don't see me jaywalking on 23rd St.

Empty Cages had put out a request for a washing machine, and a woman offered up her washer and dryer for free. Someone would need to go get them, but nearly every member of the group was working an adoption event scheduled for the same day. They needed a Transporter.

I saw this not only as an opportunity to help out the group but to turn the whole thing to my selfish advantage and take the van out shopping after my chores were done. So I picked up the van at my favorite Uhaul spot in East New York where the receptionist calls everybody "Honey" and your transactions are constantly interrupted by people buying bags of ice (their other business) and people yelling at each other loudly. I got the van and an appliance dolly and started up to the BQE. Before getting on the highway, I stopped off at a friend's house to finally pick up the air conditioner she said I could have months before. Originally I intended to use this AC myself, but somehow I promised it to Empty Cages along the way (maybe it's a cult). With the AC stowed, I was off to Bay Ridge.

I got there way faster than I thought (thank you Robert Moses), located the apartment and found the donators ready for me. The woman's burly son, along with his burly friend, were ready with the washer/dryer. These things were huge, front-loading machines, the washing machine itself weighing almost 250 pounds. With effort we got them into the van with millimeters to spare.

As I headed up to the shelter space, I was already doing the math: 2 Burly Guys + Me = Barely got it into the van, therefore me + [UNKNOWN] = spinal injury. I got up to the space and amassed a few people to help move them. It didn't look good, unfortunately it appears that cat rescue attracts few really muscular people. But lucky for us, some truly tough guys were right down the block.

There's been a big bus on the block for a while now, all painted and graffiti-covered, and big dudes are always around working on it. It's one of those biodiesel conversions, which is better for the environment (even better for it is the fact that it hasn't moved in weeks). We asked a couple of the guys if they would help and they agreed.

We tried to pitch in but they basically did all the work, strapping the machines to the dolly and lugging it up the narrow stairs. Their only remuneration: they wanted to meet the roosters (liberated from cockfighting dens in the Bronx). They said they hear them crowing all the time and had wondered where it came from. The rooster complied loudly.

With the machines dropped off, the job was essentially over. This gave me the perfect excuse to commandeer the van and use it to my own nefarious purposes. I drove home, picked up Jeannie and we drove to the Sunset Park Costco.

I haven't been in a wholesale store in years and Jeannie had never been. It's pretty overwhelming at first. We got memberships and ID card and waded through the enormous crowds with our oversize cart. We knew we wanted cat supplies but we didn't have a list or even a clear idea of what Costco carried. I was convinced they would have 'everything' from kitty litter to furniture, while Jeannie thought it would be far more limited. The truth was somewhere in the middle, an odd collection of stuff with no discernible theme. You could buy 20-packs of bar soap, but they didn't carry Ivory. You could select from a huge variety in brands of laundry detergent but no one brand had the oil-drum size I was searching for. However in some areas they had exactly what we were looking for.

I had been told by Lisacat that Costco carried a decent-quality cat food, and indeed, it is higher quality that it has any need to be. It's all chicken and rice, no wheat and no meat by-products. It's sold in 25-lb. bags, of which we bought 5. They also had cases of canned Friskies which we also picked up. But there wasn't much else in the way of cat supplies, just some Iams and 40-lb. buckets of Scoop Away litter (we bought one even though I find Scoop Away overly perfumey). I still can't figure out why the cat food was so premium when they don't appear to have much interest in cats beyond these few supplies, but I'll take it.

After getting that, everything else was gravy. The place is huge; at first I thought it was merely big until I realized there was a whole other floor to the place. We bought as much stuff as we could justify and by the time we got to the check-out, we both had to push the cart, it was so heavy. We lucked with a short check-out line and got back to the van in plenty of time (and oh yeah, we stopped at the liquor store next door and bought a couple of huge bottles of Jim Beam, just in case we need several gallons of whiskey soon).

We got the stuff home and dumped it off (the cats were very excited to see the cat food so it had to be stowed in the bathroom until we could deal with it). We got the van back before the office closed, so we didn't have to worry about getting up in the morning to return it. I can't believe it all went down without any mishaps, usually these vehicle encounters always result in some injury, however small. But I managed to drive without running into anything/anybody, and near as I can figure the equipment we transported suffered no real damage. Mission Accomplished.

So it was fun having an excuse to drive around and do stuff in a car, but by the end of the day I was happy to return it and walk away. There's just too many things to worry about when you own a car, and I got enough stuff to obsess over these days. But maybe I will sign up for that Zipcar thing, although I'm not sure it's worth it when the Uhaul van is closer and cheaper. And really, is there anything cooler than driving a cargo van that tells everyone how cheap you are?

Labels: Cats, Empty Cages Collective, Good Stuff, Mass Transit

The local falafel cart has several chefs, and they all suck, except for this one kid. Bad acne and indecipherable accent, for some reason he takes this stuff seriously, dressing up a standard falafel on rice with a ton of vegetables, both raw and grilled. While other guys are content to throw some iceberg lettuce on rice and toss in some dessicated falafel balls, he always fries the falafel at order, and jazzes up the salad with red cabbage, peppers, scallions, carrots and broccoli. Oh yeah, and french fries and eggplant! I skip the mysterious 'white sauce' and ask for liberal amounts of hot sauce, although he put so many jalapenos in already I have to towel off my head, I'm sweating so much.

The other guys who work there on other days merely toe the line to an indifferent lunch crowd, why does he give so much extra effort when he clearly doesn't have to? I dunno. I certainly can't imagine doing the same thing at my day job. Maybe he actually likes what he does for a living; what a foreign concept!

Labels: Food, Good Stuff, Job, Lunch, Vegan

In an effort to both clean up this site a little and cross-pollinate my stuff, I edited this home page slightly. I've added a list of cats we have up for adoption, which I assume I'll keep updated as needed. Now, normally we only advertise for cats who are currently under our roof, and several of these cats are not technically residents. But they live right outside among the ferals, but have proven themselves tame and friendly enough to warrant a mention. I've also included longtime holdouts Augie and Marbles; I don't really think they'll get adopted as they are really bad at selling themselves ... and we've sort of gotten attached to them in the meantime. But hey, if the right people come along, who knows? So that leaves Spike and Haley as 'classic' adoptable cats, living with us but with every intention to move them out once we find a decent home.

Spike is still with us, we've decided he can only go to a home as an only-cat. He just doesn't get along with other cats well enough. He's a real people-pleaser otherwise. Haley finally got spayed a few days ago, so she's all set. I'm having a hard time describing her personality since most of the time we had her she was in heat. She's very different now that she's not constantly rolling around yowling, holding her butt up in the air and running in place. Time will tell.

You may also note Ainslie on the adoption list, he's a recent TNR guy who just decided to reveal how tame he is as well. I kinda figured he was tame but I thought it would take months to win him over. Naw; just a plate of canned food did it. The number of tame cats around is setting a dangerous precedent (namely, our house full of tame cats) so we're trying to be more aggressive with the adoptions. If we can't find a good home for Spike, we're campaigning to get him in on an Empty Cages Collective Adoption Event, which have a great track record for finding homes. Haley will also get in on this, although there's a waiting list for getting in. How New York.

Labels: Adoption, Cat Fixin', Cats, Empty Cages Collective, Good Stuff, Strays

It's been 5 months since we last adopted out a cat. That was Shaolin, who actually wasn't in our home for very long at all, she was an easy adoption. But before and after Shaolin we had been experiencing a relative dry spell in adoptable cat turnover in Chez Legs. When we first started adopting out street cats, they went fairly easily. In those days we had many kittens; and when one would get adopted, more would show up to take its place. We even adopted out some of the adult cats, although it should be noted that cats like Gladys weren't even full grown themselves.

We worked on adopting the tame cats, and started in earnest with TNR, trapping as many of the feral cats around our block as possible, getting the fixed and vetted and returned to our yard. Things were going so well we started taking in cats that we knew weren't as appealing to the mass market. But we had found a home for cats like Baby-Bones, the Cat Who Hates People; we figured we could find a home for all the stray cats.

So we took in cats like Marbles, the tough street momma who likes to sit at the bottom of the stairs and hit each cat as it runs down. We also took in Bishop, who actually claimed his place indoors by showing up with a sprained leg, which took months to completely heal. And we took in Annabelle, the cat who had brought several of her kittens over to us, but who had always been too skittish to stay inside with us.

While we were trapping the ferals, Annabelle got caught in a trap. At the time we hadn't seen her for months and weren't sure what happened to her. Once we had her, we decided that we would try to tame her to make her into a house pet. It wouldn't be easy, not because she was violent or mean, it was because she was so paralyzingly shy. So we let her acclimate to the house and miraculously over time she started to come around. She let us pet her and soon she was coming up to the couch and staring at us until we reached down to rub her head. I started gingerly picking her up and placing her on my lap; the first few times weren't pretty. But she liked being petted so much she would allow this for brief periods. Then one day she jumped onto the couch with us. Soon she was sitting on our laps with such tenacity that she wouldn't get off until you literally stood up straight.

Finally, she started sleeping in the bed with us. Like most cats who experience beds with humans, she attacked our toes. It was interesting to note that it's mostly kittens who do the foot-attacking thing, and Annabelle is at least a couple years old. So I guess that's more of an experience thing. Who knows when her interest in this will run out.

We had Annabelle for almost 10 months. I honestly didn't think of her as an adoption cat. Although it's not like we hadn't tried. We had been advertising on Craig's List for months, for her, Marbles, Bishop and Augie (the newest cat to come indoors), all to no avail. CL has always been very good for us to find decent folks, but the combination of timing, having only adult cats and the fact that more and more people were advertising adoptables on CL resulted in no inquiries.

At some point about a month ago, I saw that the blog Gowanus Lounge was looking for adoptable cats to post on their site. I sent over bios and photos of all 4 cats, and they got posted on the site over 2 weekends. I didn't really think it would amount to anything, but I wanted to feel like I was touching as many bases as possible. By this time I had also put the 4 on Empty Cages Collective Petfinder site.

So the GL posts came and went and then Craigs List seemed to pay off: two people were interested in Annabelle. I started in with them but the situations weren't not ideal and nothing ended up happening. When these deals ended, I went back to thinking we'd never adopt out these cats (and this was not necessarily a negative thing). But then I got an email from a woman who was interested in 2 of our cats.

She had seen the posts on Gowanus Lounge and was looking for two adult cats to adopt. She and her family owned an entire house in Brooklyn and were partial to the adult cats, not just because they are less destructive than kittens, but also because they knew how hard it is for them to find homes. They came over to meet the cats and we tried to do our best to get Annabelle to perform. She did reasonably well (that is, she let them see her), but certainly wasn't getting into anybody's laps. Bishop also made a good impression, but he's pretty much comfortable wherever he is.

We agreed that they would make great cat owners, and last night they came back and picked up Annabelle and Bishop. I'm so happy they get to live together, if any two of our cats would go together it should be them. Ananbelle really likes other cats so I'm especially glad she won't be alone. I feel sort of bad (as I do in most of these adoption scenarios) that her last memory of our home is me grabbing her and throwing her into a cat carrier and handing her over to strangers. But I try to mitigate this with the knowledge that she's going to one of the best households we've encountered in all the 17 cats we've adopted out so far. In New York City, you can't expect people to have huge houses with staircases and spare closets to hide in. Usually they're lucky if they have enough room to run around in without running into stuff.

It may take time, although I hope it's less than the 10 months we had her, for Annabelle to adjust. I'm hoping that we laid the groundwork for her to appreciate human company, even if it's not us. I always thought she had been a house cat who was abandoned and just needed a refresher course on house living, but the longer we had her the more I believe she was a true wild-born feral cat, albeit one who had the capacity to believe that humans might be useful for something. Either way, she's come an amazing distance, and it was pretty hard to look around the house and know I wouldn't be seeing her around anymore.

So this means we technically have only 2 cats left to adopt out, and who know when that might happen. Yes, we have two other nonresident cats, the semi-feral kittens we took in, but they're still a long way off from being ready to adopt, if they ever will. It feels odd, then, to have so *few* cats to adopt out now. Of course just over the weekend a new cat was spied out the front window, so who knows how long this lean time might last.

Labels: Adoption, Cats, Good Stuff, Pets

I took an actual vacation from work, but now I am back and I am trying to determine if the time off has made any difference. So far today it seems that all the work I left before is still here, plus a bunch of stupid crap that has piled up in the mean time. I don't mind it so much since I can pull the "hey, I just got back from vacation and I am swamped" for the next week or so. I suppose the fact that I don't mind this means the vacation succeeded in relaxing me adequately. I blew off just enough steam to once again resume my cog-in-the-wheel status.

In two weeks my office moves downtown, which would be interesting if it didn't mean I will have to start dressing up for work. I think I have to start wearing ties and shirts that tuck in. Does anyone know if they make pre-tied neckties that can be buttoned in the back? Not a clip-on, which is pretty obvious, this would be something that would look like a real tie from the front but be easy to attach in the back (the clasp would be covered by the collar). I looked for this but I couldn't really find any; doesn't this seem odd? Why do people waste valuable time tying their ties every single day? I thought about just loosening the knot so I could put it back on, but this tends to rumple the tie. Is this a million-dollar idea the corporate world has been waiting for?

Anyway, I'm back. Our vacation consisted of a short jaunt to the Greater Cleveland Area, to visit some people up there and generally not do anything. The highlight of the trip was holing up in the lovely Super 8 motel, eating junk food and watching cable television. Of course after 3 days of this, we were both totally sick of junk food and agreed that even with 60 channels there was absolutely nothing to watch (although we could almost get by on just Bravo and Animal Planet). We hung out with my sister's family and finally got to see lifelong friend James' new house. We hit up Corky & Lenny's, Tommy's Diner (soy milkshakes!), Aladdin's (best baba ever), and drank free Starbucks the entire time using the gift cards our bosses had given us last Christmas. We ran through the endless aisles of Giant Eagle and the non-crowded Whole Foods, went to the mall and bought some clothes, and remembered to swing by Big Fun on the way to the airport to buy some crap (actually I bought some tin crickets to help train the cats to do my bidding). In short, we lived like Ohioans, if only for a short time.

There is something to be said for sequestering yourself away from your life. I kind of scoffed at that sort of thing in the past, but the older you get, the more necessary it may be. Even if we hadn't gone to Cleveland, we could have booked a room at some local fleabag motel to get out of our house for a couple days. The remainder of our vacation was spent at home, and although we got a lot of work done on the house, that's exactly the problem: you can't sit at home and do nothing. I've tried before but sooner or later I find myself weeding, or fixing something, or god forbid, cleaning. In that Super 8 with the uncomfortable headboard and nonexistent maid service, we were forced to actually do nothing, which is harder than it sounds.

Anyway, when we returned to Brooklyn we set about out our tasks, which included hitting the newish Ikea. We've been in our house for almost 2 years and we still haven't bought any furniture or anything. My night stand is a storage chest; Jeannie's is a chair. Our couch (a gift from our pal Sean M, who has basically outfitted our entire home with his hand-me-downs) once was an elegant fixture from the 50's, but it has been used to the point that it cuts off leg circulation when you sit on it for a while. I don't know that I ever had any political issue with the opening of the Brooklyn Ikea, but if I did, I forgot all about it when I realized we could outfit most of the house for less than one couch from Room and Board.

Ikea was nice enough, we picked out tons of stuff, then came home and bought it online. Annoyingly, a few items were not available online, so we'll still have to go back there at some point. The shipping costs were also outrageous, but we still came in several hundred bucks below my intended ceiling. Who knows when we actually will get the stuff, this doesn't seem to be their strong point.

Labels: Cleveland, Good Stuff, Job, Motel, Ohio, Vacation

One of the first times I took the J train out to the Halsey station, one of the many reasons I felt like I had stepped off the map was the station itself. All the stations prior to it (and after it if you get to Broadway Junction) have decorative colored glass panels adorning the platforms. Halsey had no such thing, favoring beige-painted solid walls, interrupted only by a small section of chain-link fencing at one end (and there's probably some code thing that insists on this). Because of this disparity, Halsey seemed especially forlorn, like the MTA just didn't care enough about our little stop.

Of course, now that I've lived here a couple years, I don't even notice the walls, unless somebody's tagged it. I've seen far more depressing stations than mine (several on the M line in mid-Bushwick are particularly uninspiring), and I would rather the MTA spent its money fixing the inside of the station (where water tends to pool deeply around the Metrocard vending machines when it rains) rather than give us something purely cosmetic.

But since none of that seems to be happening any time soon, I'm happy to see our station upgraded to the level of, say, the Kosciuszko station. The panels looks very lovely, and the other people on the platform seemed to be pleased by it as well. Is it a sign of increased gentrification here? Or did the MTA just have a lot of leftover panels lying around and they needed the storage space (I note that the panels are all different, unlike most other stations). Probably no special agenda here, I'll know gentrification has stuck on Halsey when the Rite Aid actually stocks things properly.

Labels: Bushwick, Good Stuff, Mass Transit

Did anybody else see this story about the tablet they found (albeit some 10 years ago), dating to BC times, that depicts a messianic figure who is sacrificed only to rise from the dead 3 days later? I don't know exactly if it will have any impact but I think it's pretty fascinating. But maybe it's just because I happened to watch The Last Temptation of Christ over the weekend, so I have Jesus on the brain.

I'm still rather fuzzy on Jesus and what he supposedly did (ie, if he died for everybody's sins, well, why do Catholics still need Confession?) and who he was, but the exploration of his history is pretty nifty, when it's not totally obscured by dogma. This new tidbit is interesting in that it predates the whole Jesus/Easter weekend thing, which could either be seen as proof that the Jesus thing is mostly myth, cobbled together from various, long-established traditions (along with all the pagan seasonal celebrations that coincidentally seem to happen on days also sacred to Christian, go figure). Or you can look at it and say it was prophesied long before it happened. Folks love that prophecy stuff! I suspect the anti-evolutionary, ultra-fundamentalists will see it that way. After all, these are the same people who claim god planted dinosaur bones to 'test' creationist beliefs.

So far my research indicates that Life of Brian is still the most accurate depiction of Jesus' life and times.

Labels: Good Stuff, History

The folks who provided us with so many cat-related services over the past few months need your help! Now that summer's upon us, all those cats that they didn't get to trap, neuter and release have had kittens, and a whole slew of them are shacked up at their recovery space in Williamsburg. Dubbed The Empty Cages Collective, they're housing some 45 cats in their warehouse, and they need to get some of these critters in some decent homes!

To that end, they are having the first of possibly several adoption events, this one at The Beehive Salon on N.7th Street. From 2-6pm on Sunday. Come meet the shining stars of their gaggle, from lil baby kittens to adult hard-luck stories. I'm hoping to stop by if I can, though I normally avoid shelters and related adoption centers, if only because I have such little willpower when it comes to taking in animals (I walk the long way around the Petco to avoid the homeless cat adoption area, which I'm sure makes me look like a dick to them).

Meanwhile, we're helping to lighten their cat burden by taking a displaced feral cat to our back yard; we'll be assimilating him into our ragtag colony over the next couple of weeks. But unlike last time, we ensured this cat is truly a feral and so he will not end up in our house.

I'm hoping to be able to advertise our foster cats on ECC's new Petfinder site, and of course if any of you are interested in a little (or not so little) bundle of joy, check out our own list of cats. But if you must have tiny kittens, head to the salon on Sunday.

Labels: Adoption, BARC, Cat Fixin', Cats, Good Stuff, kittens

After some 4 months, our last kittens have been adopted. Even though there's still a million cats here, it's noticeably quieter since they decamped for their new home in Cobble/Boerum Hill. The remaining cats don't exactly miss them, but they are acting differently, they seem to need more attention from us, where previously they had the kittens to distract them.

Roxy was the kitten who came the farthest. When she first came in, she was wild and freaked out by the indoors. She hid in the basement a lot of the time, and would dash out of the room any time a human came near. But after a while she realized we were no threat and started tolerating us. This eventually turned into actual affection, though it was almost always on her terms. IF she didn't feel like getting petted, zoom! She took off. But she became a lovely little cat, with a bit of that manic feral behavior.

Tumbleweed was our survivor. He didn't show up until a few weeks after Roxy (and their other brother Chester the Russian Blue). It was November, and he was scrawny and sick. We nursed him back to health; it was touch and go for a while. But he turned it around and before we knew it he went from being the runt to being the bigger than Roxy. At first we weren't even sure if he was from the same litter, but as he put on weight, his resemblance to his siblings was unmistakable, as was his rapport with the other kittens.

After a few false starts, we finally found a couple who wanted to take a pair of young cats. It's much more difficult to get people to take 2 cats at once, which is too bad since I think cats generally do better when they have pals around (that's the whole raison d'etre of this house!) We've previously only given one other pair away, two of Lucy's kittens. And in that case, the people hadn't planned on taking two, but were so charmed by them they ended up taking two so they wouldn't take three! But 2-month old kittens are a whole 'nother story compared to cats over 6 months.

Anyway, we have adopted out something like 11 cats so far, and have 4 more to go (one of which is more or less spoken for). If we're lucky we'll have them all out by the summer kitten season!

Labels: Adoption, Cats, Good Stuff, kittens, Pets

A total of 6 feral cats and one indoor cat are being fixed over at BARC right now. After Wednesday's bumper crop of 4 (Grumpus, George, Blue and Tuxedo), I set up the 3 remaining traps and by bedtime we had two more (Mugsy and Baxter)! This worked out well, as Jeannie had literally said she wanted to catch these very two cats for her birthday, which is today. It could only have worked out better if they had gift-wrapped their traps.

They were not happy campers; Mugsy, especially, was crazy, rolling around in his trap and generally making an embarrassing spectacle of himself. I put them in the cellar for the night and when I came back in the morning, both had calmed down quite a bit. It's like they accept their fate or something. Or maybe a night sleeping in a warm house far outweighed any resentment they might have felt.

I dropped them off with Tumbleweed at BARC, I'll be picking up the latter after work. The rest will go home on Saturday. I don't think they'll care, but I feel a little bad sticking them right back out in the yard after spending several days in a climate-controlled environment. but hey, maybe they'll actually use the cat condos with some frequency!

Through this all, Freddie the Outdoor Cat oversaw the process. Despite apparent hunger, however, she avoided all the traps, even though it meant waiting on getting fed. I don't know if this proves she's smarter than the other cats or what, but I'm glad we didn't have any false-positives by finding her in the traps.

There will be one more Spay Day on Sunday, so I'm gonna keep trying to trap cats. Off the top of my head I know Chauncey, BabyMomma and Marbles are still out there. Cauncey is owned by somebody, but they let him run around unfixed. Marbles also appears to be owned by some people across the street, she too is unaltered and has been pregnant twice in the past year, though her litters mysteriously disappear long before they should. So in any case, these cats ought to be fixed.

Pictured above is Tuxedo (never thought of a catchier name), the lone female we captured. Females are either smarter or naturally more suspicious, so we don't get many to the yard. But I'm glad we got her, as I'd seen her (from a distance) with child several times over the past year. Getting her spayed will put a real dent in the local cat population. I hope!

More photos of the SoBu TNR

Labels: BARC, Cat Fixin', Cats, Feral, Good Stuff, Mobile Spay Clinic, Photos, Strays

We are back from the Virgin Islands and dealing with all the shit that has been hitting the fan since we left. As they have been warning us for the past year, the parent company who owns my division has sold us out to some other company. This happened in the middle of my vacation and since nobody can be trusted to handle anything while I'm gone, I found myself at an internet cafe inside a tourist spot in Charlotte Amalie, posting boilerplate statements from the CEO and whatnot while people played pool and drank all around me (okay, I was drinking too).

Ultimately, this 'transition' as they constantly refer to it, probably won't be that big a deal, it sounds like everybody will get to keep their jobs, though they might just be telling us that so nobody freaks out prematurely. Other than this ground-shaking stuff, we have all the usual post-vacation blues of having to catch up on work and dealing with having to get up every morning in a sub-resort quality home full of cats who are not as accommodating as the ones we spent the week with.

Actually, the cats are fine. They all weathered the week well, it seems, even the outdoor ones. One of the kittens has already been by and there's even a new kid in town: a big orange tiger cat. We'd seen him around but in the past week he seems to have befriended the locals. He's fixed, so I think it's just the neighbor's cat (he was previously spotted darting into a window down the street). Jefe has a lovely new habit, however: he grabs the roll of toilet paper and just starts biting it, ripping out huge wads of paper which are all over the bathroom now. Jeannie noted that it resembled the act of rending meat from the bone, maybe he misses the chicken wings upon which he used to subsist on the streets.

Anyway, we took nearly 400 photos, which I am going through now (so far 50% seem to be of the little lizards which run all over the place there). So I'll soon have a whole album/write-up of the experience, but in short: the folks who put us up are now our favoriteist relatives ever and we intend to spend much more time with them in the foreseeable future. And I'm not just saying that since they let us stay in the super fancy deceptively large house in the middle of a subtropic island which contains those white beaches you see in postcards and the cheapest liquor I have ever seen (where else can you buy a liter of Bombay Sapphire for $13?) It was a great time all-around, in every way pretty much the polar opposite of New York City (in a good way on both sides).

Except for the stray cats! There were only a few, but each one corresponded to stray cats we have here, which was pretty strange (there was a calico whose markings matched Flossie's unusual patterns, AND is currently nursing a littler, just like she is). So we felt at home. Anyway, I gotta do all this stupid work now, I'll talk more about the trip shortly. Work sucks.

Labels: Cats, Good Stuff, Job, Vacation

If I may step away from kittens for a moment (okay I forgot to bring in the newest pictures), I want to do something actually blog-related for once, namely link to a couple sites that merit attention.

First up is Vice Magazine's blog. Vice's main site is blocked when I'm at work and generally I'm pretty sick of the magazine and the way its record label automatically ruins any band it touches. But its blog, which is just on a Typepad subdomain, often has good stuff. Case in point, brief interviews with Indians representing each caste of its society. The Indian Caste system is something that's always fascinated me, especially since in the US, we're not supposed to have such delineations. But of course, we totally do but we're not supposed to speak of it. Capitalism is supposed to smooth all of it over, but all it does is build resentment in my estimation. But India, with its rigidly defined classes (and many subclasses), whenever you ask somebody there how they feel about it, they're always like "Oh, it's great! Everybody loves it!"

Secondly is Cracked Magazine. You may know this magazine from your youth as mostly-lame ripoff of Mad Magazine (which was itself a lame ripoff of the Kurtzman-era Mad Magazine). But the web version (I dunno if there is a print version anymore) is replete with mildly amusing articles that appeal to the Baby-Bust generation. At least males from this generation. Some hit that pointless ranking gene that seems to be present in guys, ie, "The 7 Most Underrated Movie Henchmen" (including that "Kill Frogs" guy from The Muppet Movie). Some are actually pretty astute, despite their sophomoric inspiration, such as "The 5 Biggest Pricks in Congress."


For sheer day-wasting, Cracked is doing its darnedest to please (see Hateful Stereotypes Behind 5 Lovable Cereal Mascots). I prefer this to the reading-the-headline-only Onion. The content on Cracked is much more in line with my type of mind-wandering, where I'll be doing some vaguely work-related, say, editing PDF file names to match my arcane filing techniques and it'll occur to me, "I wonder how many other famous people are Scientologists that I don't even know about." Voila! The Top 10 Secret Celebrity Scientologists to the rescue!

Labels: Funny to Me, Good Stuff, Web

Ugh, the last few days have been miserable, and not just because of the rain. Sometime on Friday night, Decatur slipped out an open front window. We didn't realize it until the next afternoon. We started searching around the area, trying to apply some form of feline logic to the situation. It seemed to me she would have dashed across the street into the vacant lot/parking lot as it is easy to get into and hide. But the more we looked around, the more we realized how many places there are for a small animal to hide. Not the least of these is the church yard behind our house.

At this point we didn't know what window she went through, so we looked out in the back as well. The church has been out of commission for years and the lot (which contains both church, rectory house and driveway) is totally grown over and full of trash. So it's basically a stray cat's amusement park. I searched through it several times, rousting many other cats, but not the one I was looking for.

The circumstances surrounding Decatur's disappearance may shed some light on all this: see, on Friday night we let some cats into the house. One was that Russian Blue cat I spoke of earlier, the other was the Kool-Aid Kitten, who has an even better 'in' to our home: she's pregnant.

Last time Decatur was around a cat with kittens, she bolted and I didn't see much of her for over a month. I didn't know if this was the same situation or if she was really lost; she had never been out front before, and this weekend had been fraught with stuff to scare both cats and humans. Friday night there was some huge to-do down at the far end of the block; we heard what may have been shotgun blasts and soon the street was full of people, cops, ambulance, fire trucks. Not sure what the story was there but it was a bit unsettling. Saturday night as we were entertaining friends with discussions of how Bushwick is really much nicer than its reputation suggests, some dipshit started shooting a gun right outside our house. I'm still not sure what that one was about, I checked outside afterwards but saw no one in evidence, shooter or shootee (the next day the cops came and placed tiny orange cones next to each bullet casing; the bullets had shot out the rear window of an SUV).

So I thought Decatur might have been so spooked by the commotion that she had gotten herself really lost. Anyway, we kept up the searching and the fretting, I made flyers and posted to lost-pet web sites. But things wrapped up pretty much 20 minutes after I put up the flyers.

I noticed the parking lot gate was open, a guy from Luis Refrigeration was changing the tire of his company van, so I went in and asked if it would be okay to look around for the cat. I went to the back of the lot, which was covered with that bamboo-like stuff I so detested from my old back yard, shook a jar of cat treats and called her name. Like it was nothing, Decatur emerged from the underbrush. Just like that.

She was no worse for the wear, despite having been outdoors for all the huge storms of late. the tire-changing guy said that he had seen her sleeping in the cab of one of the trucks that park there. I brought her back inside and she seemed nonplussed to be home. In short, my sympathy levels dropped at light speed. Damn these cats!

Anyway, she's back home and she's being sweet again, so all is well. We have the house on lockdown so nobody's coming in or out for once. We're not sure what to do about the pregnant cat, I'm hoping to relocate her to the backyard, but she seems to be fine with living in the lot across the street. That may be the most ironic aspect of Decatur's sojourn: if she left because she didn't want to share space with the pregnant cat, why then did she move herself to that lot, where the very same cat spends most of her time? This is the logic you get from an animal with a brain the size of a walnut.

I'll have more stuff on the stray population, we have some real characters around here!

Labels: Bad Stuff, Brooklyn, Bushwick, Cats, Good Stuff, Pets, The Yard

It's already too hard. Nevertheless, here are some good things that came to pass over the weekend:

• Finished putting the drywall up in the basement, reinforced and rehung door, sealed joints
  
• Fixed faulty light switch in basement (no more unscrewing the bulbs to turn them off)
• Took a nap (a feat in of itself) and Freddie the Stray Cat stayed on the bed with me the whole time (normally she heads for zee hills when i get within eyesight)
• Key Food Onion Rings: 2 for $4
• Kick-ass show (Behold ... the Arctopus, Dysrhythmia, Ancient Wound) at new venue (Don Pedro) which is right off the J train
• Partially watched bizarre documentary at the bar about Afrobeat innovator Fela Kuti; sadly, Netflix does not yet have it.
• And this morning I put on some 'summer weight' pants and found $43 in the pocket!

Labels: Bands, Bars, Bushwick, Food, Good Stuff, Soundproofing