Kitten Wars

This is Annie (a.k.a. "The Little Pretty Kitty"). I could fill a blog with pictures of her even though she rarely chooses to play to my camera. What a cutie!

What prompted me to post this picture was a site I ran across
(thanks to Gwen) called Kitten War. I know what you're thinking. That's what I thought too: Cockfighting for cats.

Fear not, gentle (and gentile) readers, Kitten War is perfectly harmless to kitties. However cat lovers -- and those, like me, who are merely good friends with one -- could fall fall prey to the overdose of kitty cuteness as the feline warriors battle it out to see which one can claim the crown (or the helmet?) of Cutest Kitten!

This Is Love

I heard this story on NPR recently. It's about a guy in Brooklyn who proposed to a woman on their first date. In 1978. And how they've been married since then. You can listen to it online if you want to hear an inspiring love story.

I can't fathom ever doing that. I'm far too cautious. I'm usually too cautious to ask for the first date itself! What struck me was that to decide to get married that suddenly and make it work, they both had to make up their minds beforehand that they were going to enjoy a happy marriage. Their attitude predetermined the outcome. It was not just a leap of faith. It was a conscious decision in advance. And it became a sulf-fulfilling prophecy.

It was also sweet simply to hear two people so obviously in love with each other. I'd like to believe in the possibility.

I want to feel like that someday. And have the feeling reciprocated. I
want to fall in true love. Just one time. Just for a little while, if that's
all I get. I can only imagine how wonderful that must feel. When you love someone else more than life itself. When you learn you're going to die and you're clear that you do not want it to end your partner's life too: "When I go, live again, love again. Your happiness is mine."

Good times.

iTunes for Eyeteeth

It used to be that you mailed in box tops to get prizes. Now you type in codes you read off the boxes and download them. A recent toothpaste purchase left me with three free music downloads from Sony.

Songs I chose:

1. Angel - Sarah McLachlan
2. Ready, Steady, Go - Paul Oakenfold
3. State Farm - Yaz

Angel might be the most beautiful song I've ever heard. May you find some comfort here, indeed. And here's a bit of trivia: Sarah McLachlan and I share the same birthday. We're Aquarius. What that has to do with anything, I don't know, but there you go.

You might not know its name but you've heard this song. It's featured in the Saab ad campaign about how Saab was born from jets. It also played in the movie Collateral as Tom Cruise shot up a bunch of people in a busy nightclub.

Yaz was a two person group in the early 1980s featuring Alison Moyet's androgynous vocals and the synthesizer work of Vince Clarke. A friend of mine gave me a cassette with this song on it and I thought this song had the coolest sound. Total 80s funky new wave.

Also Fitting

I pull into an Eyeglass World store last night and have trouble finding a parking place. Seems no one can correctly park in the spaces.

At least we know they really do need the glasses.

How Fitting

Apparently you can have your cake and screw it too.

Check out this story in the Salt Lake Tribune about a player for the NBA's Utah Jazz whose wife is either:

A. Unusually understanding

B. Plotting something

or, considering that it's Utah,

C. Just trying to fit in.

Andrei Kirilenko is a tall skinny white guy who plays professional basketball for a living. Even they are highly sought after by groupies, whose dogged pursuit, it seems, is too overwhelming for even the most virtuous husband to resist. And if Kirilenko's craving for unfaithful carnal knowledge creates a temptation so strong he wishes to give in, his wife Masha Lopatova has only one thought:

Let him.

Says she: hubby can bang one other woman per year with no penalty. She's not even asking for reciprocity. It's not cheating if she knows about it, see.

I guess Lopatova saw the story of Walter Steed, a Utah judge removed from the bench for having three wives (with whom he fathered 32 children, which is a lot even by NBA standards) and must have figured that this way she would only be sharing her husband with one other woman.

What's good for the judge is good for the gander, I guess.

The Office

This is the space in which I should probably tell you about my new job. It's outside of TV (my first since college), inside a cubicle and if anything exciting enough to keep your attention longer than 16 seconds ever happens there I'll tell you more about it.

Progress

There are guys on the roof. That means there is a roof, or at least parts of one, on top of what will someday be my townhome. "Someday" might soon have an actual date attached to it.


This is a shot of the back of the building. And if you look closely, you'll see that it offers more than one rear view. Oops! I hadn't noticed that at the time.

Duffer

Golf was not the usual exercise in frustration today. My dad, my brother Jim and I went out and I, for reasons still unknown, absolutely hammered the ball at times. I hit the green on a par 5 in only two shots, the second a mere 5-iron after blasting a mammoth drive. Facing a treacherous 12-foot downhill put for eagle, I managed not to roll it too far past the hole and I made the 5-footer coming back for birdie, my first ever on a par 5. The 5-iron felt even better than the drive because I got to see it. If I hit a good drive it goes out of my sight, which is more of a comment on my visual acuity than it is the strength of my golf swing.


The 5-iron shot pictured above, unfortunately, was not the one worth remembering. Officials are still trying to determine if the ball landed in a neighbor's yard or in a neighboring area code to the one in which we were playing. Still love the follow through, though. Nice balanced finish.

Which I am sure is tremendous consolation to the homeowner with the "golf course view" who realized too late that his abode would become a frequent, if inadvertent, target for golf shots whose authors thought they were aiming at the putting green. At least we think it was unintentional vandalism.


Now this shot -- again for reasons yet to be explained -- actually went in the direction I hoped it would. It landed on the green from where I two-putted for my par. Almost like I knew what I was doing.

The luck didn't last and I ended up shooting a 98. Sort of. I only broke 100 because of a charitable score on a hole on which I lost one ball in the water and hit two others out of bounds. With all the penalty strokes, I ran out of fingers trying to count up my score but Dad wrote an 8 on the official scorecard.

Hirsute

She liked my beard. Not a compliment I get often. Of course, I have rarely sported facial hair during my lifetime and grew it recently with the idea that it would be a temporary appearance change. It's not terribly attractive, despite this one woman's opinion to the contrary. Since growing the hair on my head only emphasizes the spaces where there isn't any, I grew the hair on my face instead. It chafes and scratches and generally doesn't look or feel like me.

Yet now that I have it I'm reluctant to shave it off. It's not a part of me the same way, say, my fingers are but I'm oddly reluctant to part with it even as I can't wait to feel the hair clipper buzz its way through the thicket.