Books Lying Open
¤ A Clash of Kings, George R. R. Martin
¤ Shelters of Stone, Jean M. Auel
¤ The Complete Tales and Poems, Edgar Allen Poe
¤ The Year's Best Horror and Fantasy, 2001, Editors: Terri Datlow and Ellen Windling
¤ A Game of Thrones, George R. R. Martin
¤ Abarat, Clive Barker
¤ Hearts in Atlantis, Steven King
¤ Everything's Eventual, Steven King

Soul-Devouring Worry
¤ Ten more minutes of blogging forever growing into an hour and a half.

Curse of the Day:
¤ May your kitten audition for the "tripod" nickname.

Phrase of the Moment:
¤ Phrase: "mostly".
¤ Usage: "They mostly come out at night.  Mostly."
¤ Synonyms: N/A
¤ Deviations: Most any qualifying word you can use in a sentence, and then repeat afterwards for extra emphasis.  Eg: "probably," "sometimes," and so on.
¤ Origin: Newt's famous line in Aliens.
¤ Notes: Cribbed from Cartman who cribbed it from Aliens, this word and its deviations spice up most any conversation.  Malaya and I have developed it to a science, where one of us will speak a viable sentence, and then after a momentary pause we'll both repeat the repeatable word in almost perfect harmony.  Yes, we realize how sickeningly cutesy this is. 

The best usage yet? When I said, after we saw the results of this boxing match: "Who kicked Oscar de la Hoya's ass tonight?
*pause*
*M and F speak together*
"Mosley." -- September 18, 2003

You don't even want to know what I did on Sunday while perfectly good football games were being shown on free TV. Not that I'll let that character shortcoming on your part stop me.

Sunday morning I woke up before Malaya, and since I was eager to get up (for no particular reason) I threw on some clothing (it's like 56 in here in the morning lately) and came into the living room, after letting Jinx out of the bathroom.  I sat down on the couch in front of the TV, put my feet up, and... read A Clash of Kings for about an hour until Malaya got up.

We talked a bit while she did some email stuff and figured what we wanted to do that day, and then after I got a shower we took off to get breakfast. She wanted waffles, something neither of us had had in many months, and who am I to deny my dieting/weight-losing sweetie an occasional waffle for brekkie?

Of course finding a place that was still serving breakfast was the hard part. We first tried a Marie Callendar's, but the sign on the door said they only served breakfast until 11, and it was past noon.  Also, we had pretty well lost out appetites on the way from the parking lot to the front door, since the outdoor seating at the coffee shop next door was mostly taken up by five men in brightly-colored spandex biking outfits. That's fine; the problem was one of them was about 35, and looked like he was smuggling a watermelon under his shirt.  I'm talking fifth trimester, and it was so well displayed in his canary yellow spandex shorts and top.  Spandex tops on men are almost never a good idea, but when you have a gut like a pregnant walrus, have a little consideration for the non-blind general public, eh?

He might have done us a service anyway, since we saw two old women coming out of Marie Calendar's, one of them bent over on a wheeled walker like she was facing Mecca on a prayer rug, and the other walking not much better.  The funny part was that they had two Styrofoam boxes of left over food balanced in the corners of the walker.

They were leaving; going in was another party of the over 60 crowd.  And as you've probably noticed from going out to eat anywhere your grandparents want to go; the quality of food in a restaurant is inversely-proportional to the number of really old people there eating it.  They're old, they want to eat something simple and easy and unhealthy, and they don't really give a shit if it's any good or not. They didn't storm the beach at Normandy and build this great nation to spend their 70's finding new restaurants or eating anything they haven't had at least once a week every week since 1952.

With our fate thus determined, Malaya and I got back into the car and headed for an IHOP. The only problem was that we'd come to the Marie Callendar's by knowing the address that Malaya had looked up in the phone book, and it was in a part of Concord we'd never been before. We had no idea where the IHOP was, and didn't even know the address for sure.  Ten minutes later we got the address from a phone book outside of a Long's Drugstore, five minutes later we found the street and realized were were going the wrong way on it, and ten minutes later we at last found the IHOP.

The waffles?  Mediocre and overpriced.  I don't feel like $6.50 for a plain waffle with a few crumbles of pecans and a dollop of whipped cream is much of a deal, not when it's just glorified pancake batter in a specially-shaped cooking apparatus that most people got for their wedding and have never since removed from the cabinet beneath the stove. Malaya's came with about 1/2 a scrambled egg on top, and we got a side order of hashbrowns that were edible, if undercooked in the middle.

It wasn't a bad breakfast, but it mostly made me realize how easily we could make far better than that, for much less money, at home.  The only thing we couldn't effortlessly reproduce?  The five-flavor array of syrups.  But since the blueberry, butter pecan, and strawberry were crap, and only the boysenberry and classic maple good enough to eat once the novelty wore off, we could even reproduce that part pretty easily.

A waffle iron can't be more than $20 at Target, can it? Since no, while it's tempting, we're not getting married just yet, not even for the gift-wrapped minor appliances.

After the IHOP, Malaya wanted to stop by the Halloween Party Store that we'd passed on the way there, and I was game.  We spend half an hour most every shopping trip in an art or crafts store, usually Michael's, and it's not bad.  I seldom get anything, but we enjoy seeing the silk foliage or Halloween stuff or cool crafts projects that we could use to fix up our condo.  This time was no different, except that we had to browse through pretty much the entire store, since there was like, Halloween stuff everywhere.  99% of it shit or junk, but hey, at least it's shit and junk that we haven't seen before.  At least not this year.

That store didn't really have what we wanted, but it had some cool stuff.  However there was a larger Halloween Superstore on the way home, and we hit that one and saw a bunch of stuff we almost bought, but nothing that was quite good enough to compel us to spend money.  Next door to that store was another arts/crafts store, and it had a good selection of Halloween loot.  It was at this time that I first began to appreciate some of the new Halloween things, namely the concept of the Halloween tree.

I have always liked Halloween, even though I never really do anything to celebrate it. I like horror and death and evil and witches and ghosts and all of that good stuff, but since I never really celebrate anything, my like has been pretty much an idle thing. Malaya is a lot more active in her love for the holiday season, and she's pulling me into it along with her.  Not that she buys a ton of stuff, but her enthusiasm is as infectious as a flesh-eating bacteria, and once I get to looking, and thinking about how I only have to pay 1/2 the price of stuff, a lot of the nifty Halloween decoration stuff seems much more interesting.  Hence the Halloween tree.

They are like Xmas trees, but either black metal, or a modeled dead tree, cemetery/full moon styled.  They come hung with ghosts or devils or witches, and usually with a bristling display of gravestones over their roots. Plus there are little packs of Halloween ornaments of every type, black cats, ghosts, demons, bats, etc, which you can hang on your tree or key ring or just tape to a wall.  I suppose I'd seen such objects in years past, but they had never penetrated my consciousness until now.

Unfortunately, the ones at both of those stores sucked, and then when we hit Michael's and Target later on the way home, they didn't have anything we wanted either, in terms of Halloween stuff.  The only trees we saw were very simple things all off metal, with snail-shell style spirals at the end of a dozen black twists of metal.  Basically they are low grade clothes hangers that have been painted black and formed in unimaginative fashion.

Malaya claims to have seen a really good tree for sale somewhere, possibly at the first store we hit by the IHOP, but I have no memory of seeing a good one yet.  I am tempted to make one, either by twisting up a dozen coat hangers into creepy dead tree-type designs, or by forming actual tree fragments.  Malaya says we could get a nice piece of the baked branches they sell at fish stores and mount that on one end and hang stuff from it, and that's not a bad idea either.  It's certainly less work.

I don't know what we're going to do, but I'm interested in getting or making something and then decorating it.  We've been eyeing Christmas ornaments and such as well, well in advance, though with our two kitties we have to take into account that pretty much anything we set up needs to be swat-proof.

All of the arts and crafts errands and driving around took far longer than expected, at least longer than I expected, and though we left around noon, we didn't get home until well after 5; over an hour after the late football games were done.  I had been somewhat interested in the SD vs. Oakland game, and looked for the score while watching some of the night game.  It was ironic; I saw some of the early game, which was SF @ Minnesota, and it was a laugher; Minn was up 28-3 or something like that, and appeared able to score on every possession if they wanted to.  Then we got home for the late game and it was even worse, Indy was just destroying the Saints, like 43-10.  So of course when the SD @ Oak score finally comes up it's 34-31 in Overtime.  And of course SD lost, after being ahead 31-17 with 5 minutes to play and getting two possessions in overtime.

I don't actually know if the Oakland game was on local TV here.  Like so many teams in the NFL, the Raiders are supposedly popular, but are so (intentionally) horrible at promotion that they can't sell out their games.  They have no need to, however, since like most NFL teams, they have some ridiculous deal with the city that owns the stadium that they play in, rent-free, and they probably make more money from ticket sales guarantees then they would in cutting prices a bit and running a bunch more TV ads.  The Chargers always did that in SD the last few years where they were guaranteed 60,000 tickets sold, even when the team was busy going 3-13.  Again.

It's sort of amusing to me how you have an area with 3 million people in it, and 8 home games a year for what is far and away the most popular sport in the US, and do such a poor job marketing it that you can't get anywhere near a sell out.  And that's in San Diego; in the Bay Area there are something like 7 million people, and there have been constant legal battles between the Raiders and Oakland over unsold tickets. True, Al Davis never met a lawyer he didn't want to employ, but it's just indicative of how horribly most owners do in marketing their own product, once they are guaranteed a profit by salary caps and collective bargaining agreements and ticket sales guarantees.

Speaking of crappy sports, the baseball season just ended, and my old employers, the SD Padres, lost most of their games the last two weeks of the season to finish with the worst record in the National League, and now the SD Chargers are off to an 0-4 start and have the worst defense in the NFL.  Looks like I moved just in time, eh?

The funniest moment of the day was when we were returning home, hungry and mostly empty-handed from our Halloween shopping mission, and saw another couple of guys riding bikes.  And you guessed it, the second one had on full spandex, and a gut that would make a sow jealous.  His improbable physique reminded Malaya and me of most of the joggers we've seen here lately.

On Saturday we went out to the Lafayette Reservoir and walked around it again, but up high, on the very hilly reservoir rim. While there we saw about half a dozen joggers, all men on their own, and every one of them was at least 30 pounds overweight, despite being out running a very difficult course and sweating profusely. We've seen the same thing every time we ride bikes or go for a hike, and I find it weird.  People in Northern California are much thinner than the average person in San Diego, at least based on my living down there for many years, and being up here for about 3 months.  A far higher percentage of the regular men/women I see walking around the Bay Area are fit, or perhaps just don't eat very often, but quite often Malaya and I see these guys who look fit from the feet to the knees, and chest to the head, but have a huge beer gut in the middle.  That's not unusual in life, but we see them here out jogging or biking, and working damn hard at it.

How do they stay so obviously fat when they are working out like that?  Do they jog 10 miles and stop for a triple cheese burger on the way home? Are they complete weekend warriors who have strong hearts and lungs due to intensive workouts on the weekends, while they live sedentary lives all week and eat too much?  It's a mystery.

I'm certainly not criticizing them; they're out there trying as hard as they can, and I'd rather be fat and fit than skinny and inactive. I just wonder what their diets and lifestyles are like to allow them to remain in that sort of shape despite such intensive exercise.

His name isn't actually Sidney, I just made that up with an alliterative bent.  He doesn't really have a name, though when I asked Malaya to give him a name a little while ago, she suggested "Pinocchio."  This makes no sense to you at this point, but you have to realize that the photos below are from a couple of days ago, and that since then Jinx has managed to mangle one of the feet, and tear off the pink nose, leaving the mangled Sidney/Pinocchio looking a good deal grimmer.

He doesn't actually look very grim at the best of times, since he was manufactured with an absurdly-wide smile and happy eyes. Why they put a big smile on a toy for a cat is unknown; I mean does anyone think that the cat really gives a shit about the facial expression of her toy/prey?

And come to think of it, he's not even really a spider, being as he has but six legs.  I'm not going to even get into trying to divine a reason behind that design decision.  You've probably already realized that I have an equally arbitrary reason for assuming the creature's gender is male, since there's certainly no external genitalia, being as kitty toys are well-known for their utter lack of sexual dimorphism.

So Sidney or Pinocchio, and spider or bug, or male or female... it's a kitty toy, it hangs from the side of our standing oscillating fan, and Jinxie has come to love it.  Initially she didn't know what to make of the creature, being as it's nearly as large as she is, and has a loud, jangling bell.  We'd drag it across the floor and she'd just stare at it, and might seem to consider raising a paw to bat at one of the dangling legs, but while she was immediately attracted to the string mousie, the sheer number of targets from this dangling spider thing seemed to put her off. Dusty would have nothing to do with it either, other than joining Jinx in staring at the odd creature, no matter how enticingly Malaya or I dragged or dangled or twitched it past the feline jury.

Despite her initial disinterest, I tied up the toy so it dangled from our fan.  There was no real reason to pick the fan, other than that it was standing in the corner of the living room, was heavy and stable enough to take kitty attack, and allowed me to hang the toy down from it and have it be a foot from the support post, thus giving kitty more room to attack.  We got the toy the day we got her, and she ignored it completely for several days, but sometime Thursday or Friday she grew bold enough to begin batting at it, and thanks to the lovely jingling sound and swinging motion and dangling legs, Jinx was soon engaged in a full on assault of the hapless spider.

She usually just bats and it and as she sets it to swinging she stand up and grabs it with her front feet when it comes back into range.  As she gets more vigorous she'll really get into it, biting, grabbing, occasionally holding onto it with her front paws while she lifts up her bag legs for some serious kicking action.  I've been hoping she'll get hyper enough to become a Tarzan-kitty and actually hang from it while it swings around.  No such luck yet.

The cutest is when she come running in and swats it, or gets really into batting at it and starts leaping after it as it swings away. She'll miss it and land and go back after it in a blink, or grab it and flip herself partway over, coming down on her back or side, but be back up again instantly.

Dusty is quite intimidated by the whole thing, and while he'll lie just a few feet away and watch Jinx go to war, he wants no part of the dangling toy himself, and is pretty put off by the speed and frenzy with which Jinx goes after it.  He's good for occasional mousie chasing, and he's been playing with Jinx quite often, as they chase each other around and play wrestle, but he can only manage that in short bursts, before he has to sprawl out and rest for a while, like a retiree huffing and puffing on the 13th green on a day when the carts were all already rented.

He doesn't catch her often.

She usually initiates it, and her technique is pretty simple; she just walks up to Dusty and starts fucking with him.  Swatting at his tail, or ears, or nose, standing on him, etc.   Despite him outweighing her by about a factor of 6, he's happy to play with her, when he's feeling energetic, and they roughhouse, but neither has given any injury to the other.  And yes, it's damn funny to watch them racing around, especially when Dusty is in the mood to run and Jinx is chasing him, looking about like a Chihuahua going after a St. Bernard.

They are about even on top speed, but Jinx is 10x more agile and can accelerate and corner in ways Dusty can only dream of, so she wins most every race, despite being so much smaller.

She's also a very lovely lap cat, and I have extensive images to prove that, most of them taken by Malaya a couple of days ago when she was doing some very cute basking on my lap.  She won't let you push her down upside down, but once she's slept for a bit, often on me, she will roll over onto her side or back as she stretches, and once she's upside down she's quite content to stay that way while you rub her belly, or just let her sleep unmolested.

As you can see:

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