My kittens helped me to discover a major flaw in my computer hair removal routine, mostly by overloading the inside of my computer case with their astronomically high weight/hair ratio. Their hair, when combined with the vortices and air channels through my computer, knit a fine sweater for my processor.

Unfortunately, my processor is 100% grade-A American man, and he’s never once been too cold in a room. This is the sort of man that lives on steaks and when his girlfriend puts her cold hands on him she has to go to the hospital for that shit where you heat a frostbitten body part up too fast, and then when they get to the hospital he eats another steak, served to him by his cardiologist.

My friends, wife and I planted a garden this weekend. We put in two 6×10 plots and filled them with yellow onions, garlic, chard, sugar snap peas, and hot peppers of some description. According to a label written by a friend, we’re also growing hamburger trees.

And the fucker bought the hamburger tree seeds whose fruit has fresh onions, not grilled onions. I hate fresh onions on hamburgers. Joke’s on him, I’m not sharing the bounty of my french fry plant.

I also have a project in the works that, while it probably won’t titillate, might capture your attention for three or so seconds, and that’s enough time to implant a latent neuron-pulverizing hook for a pop song.

Like I just did.

I seem to have adhered to a bag-related theme for the last two Friday posts. Maybe because people’s bags are full of their most personal effects. What speaks more volumes about a person than what they choose to carry on their person? Like any other sartorial cue, a person’s bag tells us about themselves. A bag overflowing with muddy wrenches makes us think plumber. You follow fashion if you’ve got the latest couture purse. Artists have to carry those huge, flat bags.

Each trinket, whether it’s a wrench, a tube of lipstick, or a crusty vial of paint is a verb. It tells us what that person does. Nothing in a bag, even if they’re an artist, is meant to be held up and admired as a piece unto itself. Each object is functional.

Bags are often full of mysterious lint or awesome trinkets as well. Here’s a cell phone with a picture of the owner standing in front of the Eiffel Tower. Now you know that they traveled to France, assbag. But what contains the cell phone can say even more about the owner.

Bags say a lot about who we are and aren’t just important for what’s inside of them. They’ve destroyed shambling entities from dimensions most foul and eaten people on the metro.

They also hit me in the nuts because of a height mismatch between myself and my wife.

And that, my friends, is the story of why Coach bags can all go to hell.

Spent Christmas at the bed and breakfast that I mentioned in my previous post. We arrived a bit after seven on Christmas Eve and me, being the mastermind that I am, not only didn’t make reservations but also didn’t check to see if any restaurants were open. Luckily we not only found an open restaurant but they

• were open
• had several tables available
• were in walking distance and had a good beer selection
• were shockingly good

All in all, I feel like this experience validated my shitty planning skills.

On Christmas Day, which is also my wife’s birthday, we had an excellent breakfast and then farted around watching HGTV (I never want to see someone with a $500k budget for a vacation house complain about money ever again) and TLC (some sort of wedding dress shopping show). We intended to go see a movie that evening, but I’m brilliant and ALSO DIDN’T PRINT OUT A MAP TO THE THEATER. We ended up having a brief recap of our days living in the Northwest suburbs. We drove around on snowy streets and almost got rammed by tiny dicks steering big cars. We ended the evening by stopping at a 7-11 and getting some snacks to go along with our Christmas chocolates and wine.

Unfortunately, the big old house wasn’t haunted by anything other than some critter that skibbled through the ceilings in the middle of the night, but I did accidentally take a ghost picture of myself.

My ass is a ghost and it's haunting my ass

Tomorrow is Christmas and so I don’t feel like it will be a good day to give a Moral Example. If you’ve been bad, Santa and his CCT (Closed Circuit Telepathy) know it so there isn’t much to be done. Maybe next year if you actually use these Moral Examples as a guide to your behavior, you’ll get that set of Fondue forks that you’ve always wanted. Next year.

My wife and I are dodging the entire Christmas bullet and spending her birthday at a bed & breakfast. I have a pile of Christmas chocolates and she has a few bottles of wine. We each bring something to the table. I don’t believe the B&B has an internet connection available and I definitely don’t have a laptop. The plus side of not having an internet connection is that I’ll be able to catch up on some reading. I’m partways into Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth and Travis got me a copy of the Dragonlance Annotated Legends. I’m looking forward to it because I understand that there is very little Tanis involved.

Happy Holidays!

Two Sundays ago my wife and I attended the Feast of the Hunter’s Moon, a reenactment centered around Fort Ouiatenon near what is now West Lafayette, Indiana.

My wife is a fearsome seamstress. I’ve posted before about the brown linen suit that she hand sewed for me. I marveled and squealed with joy. It is without a doubt the finest piece of clothing that I own and, honestly, the most meaningful because she made it for me. Then I went ahead and ruined everything.

Getting farby with my bad self

I also took the opportunity to pose for a real picture. Rest assured, I don’t have my union-made Chuck Taylor knockoffs on in this photo, but rather undersized moccasins.

Look at how serious I can be

My wife, for whom accuracy is more important than sleep or sanity, made sure that we were correctly dressed for the period. Others do not share her priorities. There were some at the Feast who had unassailable vêtements, like a total badass Scottish officer and a handful of voyageurs. The fife and drum corps were generally okay, helped by the spats and mud covering their modern shit-kicker boots.

Another sector chose neither their everyday clothing or historically correct clothing, and instead opted for leather fringe. Lots and lots of leather fringe. I’d imagine that you could throw a herd of cattle into an industrial cheese grater and have less leather fringe on your hands than what I saw at the Feast. And that’s just what was visible.

I also was told that I looked like Heath Ledger again, which threw me because I figured that the 18th century costume would interfere with the resemblance. Then my wife pointed out that he was in The Patriot and it made more sense.

Overall, though, a terrific time was had by all. Especially by me, because by the Feast’s close one of the food merchants was selling bowls of ham & beans for a dollar and shit yeah I want some ham & beans for a dollar.

Over Labor Day weekend I visited my aunt’s farm out in north central Illinois. Helping with chores at a neighbor’s farm, she said that the neighbors didn’t take care of the barn cats that were running all over the place and that they thought that there were kittens up in the hay loft. They were tiny – when curled up, their bodies were smaller than my fist. My wife thought that the kittens were maybe a week old, their eyes not open yet. At first we weren’t going to take them because they were so young, but we’d already seen a gimpy young cat born earlier in the year who had been stepped on by a horse. Figuring that for good or ill at least they’d be warm, fed and not die at the hands of a raccoon attack, we scooped them into my hat (all three of them fit in it with a bit of elbow room) and my aunt showed us how to feed and take care of them.

What followed was a week or so of trying to get sleepy, weak kittens who could barely lift their heads to eat formula from a syringe every four hours (even during the night, inducing the sort of sleep-deprived madness that does a body good in short doses) and several trips to the pet store because I underestimated how fast their appetites would grow.

Molly's eyes are barely open but still she hates being so undignified.

Then they grew up a little bit and could move around, so we started to introduce them to Ricki, who is afraid of cats after hanging around with several standoffish felines.

Ricki meeting the kittens

We also noticed a small bunch of flea eggs that were appearing on the kittens. Cue more evening drives to the pet store for flea combs. After a few days of chasing the flea with the comb, I managed to catch it in between the tines and we washed the eggs off of the kittens. So far, we haven’t see any new fleas or eggs.

Now, of course, they’ve taken the compassion that my wife and I displayed and turned it into a powerful predatory instinct. Despite being only a bit more than a month old, they’re already capable of taking down human-sized prey.

From left: El Tigre, Voltairine, Pwned Greg, Molly

They’re mostly weaned off of the bottle, but they’re still not quite toilet trained. We’re at the point where we have to give them a rinse-off every evening and clean out their crate. On the plus side, Voltairine has mostly stopped sucking on El Tigre and Molly’s butts until they shit all over her face, so we’re making progress.

My Dear Wife has also suggested that the reason that I haven’t had more success as an author is that I haven’t had a cat. El Tigre tries to climb into my mouth if I’m not careful, so that oughta equate to a best seller list somewhere.