Placating

I know the posting slowed down this week, but it really isn't my fault.  Work has been pretty busy and I've been too tired once I got home to post anything. But, because I love you, even though you don't exist, here is a recent doodle:

Happy Friday!

The Great Pumpkin

Having already espoused my love for the Fall season, it might come as no surprise to any of you (that would be all two of you if nobody else subscribes) that I have a love for pumpkin flavored....everything!  Pumpkin spice beer, pumpkin spice coffee, pumpkin rolls, pumpkin pie, pumpkin loaf....you name it; if it has pumpkin in it, I'll try it and probably like it.

I don't know what it is about the flavor, maybe it's because the pumpkin is the characteristic Fall vegetable (it is a vegetable, right), or maybe its that the flavor compliments so many different types of food from breakfast, to lunch, to dinner.  I don't know.  All I do know is that when Fall comes around, and the pumpkin flavored foods start hitting the shelves, I can't get enough.  I feel like I could eat pumpkin all year long and be a very happy person.

So when @ejacqui mentioned that there were "...Twitter rumors that the Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Latte is already back..." it was all I could do not to run down to Starbucks (which is literally ten feet from the office) and further drain my bank account on that magical fall elixir.

Pumpkin Spice Paradise

My wife and mother in law find the whole thing incredibly amusing, but I endure the ribbing because it usually means there is a pumpkin roll waiting for me every weekend that we decide to visit my wife's parents.  Sadly, I discovered that the rumors were probably only located in one area.  Starbucks held a contest to decide which city would start serving the pumpkin spice latte a whole week earlier than all other locations, which did not turn out to be Washington, DC.

Sigh...

I'll have to wait another week, just like everyone else.

My Weirdness and the Incoming Storm

Hurricane Irene is slated to slam into my neck of the woods come Sunday morning.  I've been tracking the storm for a few days now and, though it seems like it is continuing to lose energy, this might actually happen, we might actually get hit with a violent storm right at the tail end of the summer.  Most people are probably thinking something like this:

Sane People

I'm a little weird, here's what's going through my mind:

Crazy People

In my last post I talked about how Fall was my favorite season and I made mention of the sudden, intense storms that sometime come at you out of nowhere.  I mentioned them as part of the reason I like Fall because I happen to love interesting weather.  Day after day of nothing but sunshine or partial could cover can make life seem so boring.  I like weather that changes by the day and I like strong, unexpected storms most of all.

I don't know if it's the excitement of living on the edge of life and death (though let's be real about this, most storms we face down are merely an inconvenience because they knock out the power) or if it has something to do with experiencing a natural phenomenon first hand.  Maybe its a little of both (or a lot of both).  I just know that I get excited when I hear a heavy rain falling outside of the apartment or a clap of thunder in the distance.

Needless to say, the approaching hurricane has me all a tingle.  I realize that, classified as a natural disaster, any hurricane has the potential to cause untold amounts of damage and take the lives of scores of people.  I'm not callous, I feel for those people who lose their homes and their lives during natural disasters, but for myself, I just can't be scared about it.  I want to experience these things, to live through them, to know what it's like to come out the other side with a new appreciation for our short, mortal lives.

I'll be heading north this weekend to visit with my nephew and my in-laws who are positioned just far enough away from the coast where we'll probably see some heavy rain and high winds, but nothing truly awe inspiring.  My mother has decided to stay at her house with her dogs.  She lives in Delaware and has a hurricane warning hanging ominously over her town of residence.  I will keep trying to convince her to leave, because I'm nervous for her.  While I confess I want to see something amazing, I am comforted by the knowledge that my father is in Texas, my wife will be with me, and my brother is in the mountains.

To those who experience the hurricane full force, good luck.

Fall is Coming

I can definitely feel the change of the season coming.  Fall is quickly getting ready to usurp Summer's place as reigning king of the outdoors and I, for one, couldn't be happier.  Aside from the fact that the Fall season contains one of my favorite "holidays", it also holds the distinction, for me at least, of being one of the most beautiful times of year.

Summer, with all its wonderful heat, bright sun, green trees, and swimming, simply cannot beat the scent of trees, leaves, and grasses carried upon a gentle breeze, the cool weather that invites you to take a walk outside, the beautifully colored canopies of trees, and the sudden magnificent storms that come out of nowhere.  Summer is a bland stretch of monotony, Fall is a refreshingly short stride through ever changing days.

Summer was always more fun when we were kids anyway.

Summer as a Kid

Summer as an Adult

As a kid, you got the summer off from school and you had the whole day to get out there and just enjoy life.  You didn't care how hot it was because you could take your shirt off, sit in the shade under a tree, climb to the top of a hill, or ride your bike to the pool.  In most cases, Fall, like a fine wine, can only really be appreciated with age.  When you were a kid, fall signaled the start of the school year.  You had to wear a jacket when you went outside and there were precious few hours of daylight after school during which you could do the important work that comes with being a kid, like catching salamanders.

I have, however, always appreciated the Fall season.  I lived on a mountain in the woods while I was growing up and spent a lot of time outside, among the trees.  You really have to be in the forest to appreciate all the sounds, the smells, and the colors.  Living there, close to nature, that's where I developed my love for fall.  Summer was vibrant with life, but it was lazy, hot, and sluggish. Fall was the knife-edge before Winter where life didn't have the luxury of taking a nap.

The woods where I grew up have been mostly removed in order to put up cookie cutter homes for the newly affluent residents who live in my home region during the summer.  The left some of the trees, but mostly as a backdrop to the homes, so that they could say that the homes were located in a rustic area and charge an extra $250,000 for the opportunity to feel like you were roughing it out there in the boonies. I still remember them though.  I remember the names for all the little hidden places: the tree graveyard, the dark spot, deer tick hill, hunter's hideaway, and so many others.

Now as Fall approaches, I can't help but think that I'm not well positioned to experience it, and I haven't been for the last three years.  Living in the suburbs, even well planned out communities that utilize a lot of trees as cover for all the ugly buildings, has made it difficult to recapture the wonder that I experienced for over twenty years every time that fall came around.

Ride 'Em Horsewigs!

As kids, my brother and I spent a lot of time using our imaginations to keep us entertained.  This was due, in equal parts, to a lack of family funding, a love for the fantastic, over active creativity glands, popular culture, being kids, and also being a little (or a lot) bat-shit crazy.

We loved the Ninja Turtles, so we spent mornings fighting each other in the living room while our parents slept peacefully at the end of the hallway despite our loud hi-yahs, our jump kicks from the sofa, and our bodies hitting the ground full force in the way that only kids can survive.

Once we grew bored with the Ninja Turtles (you can only play as Leonardo and Donatello so many times) we started developing our own superheroes, which for me, admittedly, usually ended up being large, humanoid versions of my favorite animals.  I had heroes like Komodo Dragon, Echidna, and Flying Fox.  

My brother tended towards elongating his name: Super Josh, Super Mega Josh, Super Mega Ultra Josh (I went trick or treating one year as “Super Mega Rob”, it was not easy to explain what I was to each household we stopped at). Or he would come up with some kind of name out of nowhere (we both ended up being guilty of this) like Sinochastras (mine was Alerque).

After seeing Jurassic Park we used to go outside into the wooded lot behind our apartment complex and pretend that we were just two people against attacking velociraptors, dilophosaurs, and tyrannosaurs.  This was particularly entertaining in the snow.  We would migrate out of the woods and use snow plowed into ten foot piles to throw ourselves over the fence that separated Creekview Apartments from the seemingly more upscale apartment complex next door, all the while pretending that we were being chased by vicious man eating pseudo birds. 

I have to say, though, that the craziest thing that ever came out of our broken little minds were the Horsewigs.  Horsewigs, by our understanding (because we made them up), were giant, slug-like creatures with no eyes, very little sense of direction, and an insatiable appetite for people’s ankles. 

Playing as Horsewigs required each participant to climb head first into their sleeping bag (Ninja Turtle sleeping bags where my brother and I were concerned), rear up onto their knees, shout “Ride ‘Em Horsewigs”, and commence squinching (which is the only word I think describes the movement) around the house bumping into things, grabbing the cat, and attacking people’s ankles.

We almost never pulled out our superhero forms when company came around.  Our grandmothers never saw Super Mega M.A.J. fight it out against Raptor Rob and friends of our parents never saw Sinochastras take a hit from Golden Eagle without flinching (an infuriating thing my brother used to do was claim that most of his heroes “didn’t show pain”).  We didn’t make the same concessions where Horsewigs were involved, because we couldn’t see much more than shadows while in our Horsewig forms, so embarrassment was kept at bay and our secret identities were secure.

Ride ‘Em Horsewigs was, by far, one of our favorite activities while we lived at Creekview Apartments, and it was also the reason why our sleeping bags ended up paper thin when we never, ever went camping in them.  Nothing else compared to the sensory depravation that allowed us to imagine our own world where the Horsewigs roamed free, unbound by bed time, dinner time, bath time, or any other time.  As we grew older, and taller, we stopped crawling into our sleeping bags the wrong way and, sadly, used them for their intended purpose.  But sometimes, when a strange wind blows, I can hear the cry of “Ride ‘Em Horsewigs!” and my heart yearns for adventure.

Moar Doodles!

It's Friday, so here's a "doodle".  Hopefully it relieves all the pent up anger from today's earlier post.

Feeling better?  Good.

I'm an awful person, and I should die...well, she thinks so anyway.

I am, by default, and by nature, a pretty laid back, courteous person (that was a lot of commas).  I usually expect other people to act in manner similar to my own, especially when they are supposed to be service oriented.  Today's rude interaction came as some surprise, firstly because I was calling a place dedicated to rescuing cats from kill shelters, secondly because the woman I had talked to yesterday was three hundred times more amicable and understanding.  Here's a brief (no it's not) example of what the conversation was like:

I only mentioned that my wife was at her wits end with the cat and that the cat was keeping us up nights and ruining the house.  This lady was all piss and vinegar the moment she got on the phone.  While I did stay on the phone with her, trying to impress upon her the reason that I wanted to bring the cat to that shelter (they are a no kill facility) the lady continued to express her cat rage by contradicting me at every turn.  I had made it abundantly clear that I did not want the cat put down, which she answered with a smarmy "well, if you take the cat to one of THOSE shelters, she'll be dead before you leave the parking lot"to which I replied "I know...that's why I'm telling you that I want to bring her to your shelter." She finished this whole thing by telling me that they were completely booked on Saturday.

I'm sorry, did she say "booked"?  I'm dropping off a cat and her things.  I don't need an appointment or questions or an exit interview.  Send me some paperwork, I'll fill it out and hand it to you when I drop the cat off.

We love the cat, we've done everything we can to try and keep her, but she is slowly driving the both of us insane and has pretty much guaranteed the loss of our security deposit.

However, after speaking to this women...I'm not sure whether this shelter is the best place for kitty...

How I focus during meetings.

As much as I would love to make money while sitting at home in my pajamas and writing, drawing, designing...or even playing video games and eating ice cream, I am one of the millions of people forced to awake every day at some abominable time in the morning, catch a bus for an hour and a half commute, and sit in an office all day.  I'm a creative person and I need to be stimulated almost every minute of my life or I get...er...well I get really bored really quickly.

So when I have to sit through meetings where my input isn't really needed, or requested (seriously, sometimes I'm just there as a warm body to make the meeting look more important), then I have to focus my attention on something creative in order to force myself to pay attention to whats going on, otherwise the words start to blur together and I end up having to fight off sleep.  I thought maybe I would share a particular result of that focus:

The remark was made at one meeting that this was "quite the doodle".  I can understand calling it a doodle, I guess.  But I think there's some hidden expression there...maybe...or maybe I'm just making things up so that it doesn't seem like I'm drawing squiggly lines all day.  Who knows.

No room at the inn.

Sometimes people just don't understand that an additional phone call is not going to make the answer more positive than the one they already received.  This goes for a lot of things, but for the purpose of today's first post, it's meant for the act of securing a hotel room.  If you send an email to their sales department and they say there are no rooms, then you call them and they say there are no rooms, then there are probably no rooms.  When they say this:

These people interpret it like this:

So, when somebody asks me to call...which is the third contact with this hotel...I'm fairly certain I'm going to get the message from the first image with the face from the second image.

They don't have any rooms, you are on a waiting list.  It's time to wait.

Update: It went down exactly like I knew it would.

Looking at my clock right now.

I kind of pride myself on being one of those people who shows up exactly when he's supposed to.  Sure that may make me look like a stick in the mud, and it may be completely unfashionable to be everywhere on time, but I do it anyway.

When it comes to parties, family get togethers, and other social interactions that have a loose set of time constraints, I'm a little more relaxed about showing up on time, or others showing up on time.  I will usually try to be there on the dot, but I don't mind if others are not.

At work, it's a different story.  I have no less than four objects on my desk that tell me the time.  There is no excuse for me to be late to a meeting that is located two floors below the one I work on.  If I was going to be late for any reason, I would send a message or try to call.  But not some people, oh no, some people feel that if they set a meeting in my calendar and decide that, say, scratching their back takes priority over meeting me in the conference room and divulging whatever information necessitated the meeting, then they are completely within their rights to leave me sitting in a cavernous room, at a table, all by myself...wasting my time!

I think that's the point, too.  If you are not on time for the meeting, it may take you more than the allotted time to spew forth whatever inane information you thought I needed in the first place.  If you don't show up for that meeting at all, then I wasted ten minutes waiting for you and three minutes double checking the time and place to make sure that I wasn't the one in the wrong.

This has happened to me twice today.

Thanks for being on time...douchebag...

The cat that wasn't meant to be.

A few months ago, my then soon-to-be-wife and I were in the nearby Petsmart looking for a dog harness for our little mixed breed mutt, Jasper.  Both of us really love animals so we usually spend some time looking around at the different animals for sale whenever we visit a pet store.  This trip turned out to be a little different.

To preface the whole story, Meg doesn't particularly like cats...that is to say, they aren't her first choice for a furry companion.  However, on turning around and looking at the cats that were up for adoption at Petsmart, she instantly fell in love with one cat and simply had to have her.  Now, I love cats and I've owned cats since I was little, but we already had a dog who had never had experience with cats, we had a small apartment, and Meg had, before, been pretty adamant that we would never have a cat.  I was, needless to say, wary of entertaining this complete turnaround in her disposition.

But the cat was cute, and Meg really wanted her (along with saying that it would be something of a wedding gift for me since she knows I like cats) so I caved in and we brought the new kitty home and named her Reisling after one of our favorite types of wine.

Things went sour almost instantaneously.  The dog stuck his nose into the crate the minute we opened the door and got swatted across the nose, which sent Meg into defensive owner mode, swearing that if the cat hurt her baby she would kill the cat.  I tried to placate all parties involved by moving the cat away from the dog, who, despite the swat on the nose, was still curious as to what the small, weird smelling animal in his crate was, and making gentle cooing noises directed at Meg in order to calm her down.  She admitted that she didn't know how the dog and the cat would react to one another and I calmly explained that they wouldn't hurt each other (Jasper, while inquisitive, is a real sweetheart of a dog) they just needed time to get to know one another.

After the initial panic settled down, things became a lot easier.  We went a little crazy on the kitty provisions.  We bought her a litter box with a nice little weaved box that went over top of it, we bought her a kitty tower, toys, hiding places, a nice set of food and water bowls, and, of course, food to go with it.  After two weeks of living with kitty, Meg and I ran off to get married.  We asked people to look in on the cat, whom we had left in the bedroom with food and water and her cat box, since the bedroom seemed to be where she liked to spend the majority of her time.

One week later we came home to find that the litter box had gone uncleaned by those we asked to look after the cat, the cat had merrily ripped most of the carpeting out from under the door, and she had developed a taste for cat food that was rivaled only by the world's taste for oil.  We cleaned the cat box, spent a lot of time with the kitty, making sure that she knew we loved her and that we were back for good and then we went to bed.

It was from that night forward that kitty started meowing at all hours of the night, for no reason that we can possibly explain.  She would get loads of attention during the day and then she would spend all night meowing for more.  This calmed down after a little while so that she only meowed around 4am or 5am, mostly when she was expecting to be fed (which wasn't until 6:30am, but she's always hopeful that it will be sooner).  I tried everything to keep the cat away from the bedroom door.  Barricades she got around, spraying her with water only shooed her away momentarily, but finally, after reading online, I constructed a floor covered in tin foil.  Apparently tin foil is anathema to cats, either they don't like the crinkly reflection of themselves, or they find the sweet tin foil music to be something less than pleasing to their ears.

The meowing may have stopped, I don't know, she was too far from the room for us to tell.  But Meg soon grew tired of stepping over sheets of tinfoil, balled all of them up, and threw them away.  The cat's meowing persisted, but only around feeding time.

Then came the smell of cat urine.

Meg had been after me for some time about the smell, which I honestly thought was the smell of the cat litter, until we discovered that the cat seemed to be peeing on the carpet right next to the cat box.  Luckily, this coincided with a bad storm that flooded that corner of the room and necessitated a replacement of the floorboards, the padding, and a good steam cleaning of the carpet.  We bought a self cleaning litter box as a last resort, figuring that kitty had decided to pee outside of the litter box because it wasn't always fresh enough for her.

But now Meg can't seem to smell anything other than the faint traces of cat urine when she comes into the house and it is now looking as if kitty is going to be gone for good this time.  I can't really blame Meg for wanting to get rid of her.  The cat eats her food and the dogs food if he doesn't get to it, rips up the carpet, tore apart our brand new couch, bites our faces when we are trying to sleep, constantly meows in the middle of the night for no reason, eats q-tips, and generally makes life harder to live in that apartment.

But she's so damn cute!

Not the pencil, the keyboard!

It occurred to me recently that my writing skills may be diminishing simply for lack of use.  I find that sometimes there is a surge of activity over a very short period of time where I write write write write, and then I sit back and do nothing but read until I've forgotten that I love writing.

I'm going to try to utilize this blog...well...more like, I'm going to try to revive this blog in order to get myself writing again.  I need to do it on a daily basis, I need to write about something.  It used to be a necessary part of who I am, but work and life...well, things just happen to get in the way sometimes.  But I'm going to do it, and I trust all of you non-existent followers to keep me true to this goal.

Vestera Khai and Ben Skywalker

I don't really have any followers so I shouldn't have to apologize for not making a single, solitary post to my blog in...I don't even know how long.  So, without the need for an apology, I will not make one.  Okay, I will.  I'm sorry.  There, happy?

Anyway.

In case you weren't aware (and you probably aren't since you're not following me), I'm a huge fan of Star Wars, specifically the extended universe material.  After a long hiatus from reading anything withing the EU I decided to pick up the first book of the Fate of the Jedi series.  Big mistake, not because it was bad, but because I was hooked all over again.

Lightsabers notwithstanding, the series has a lot to offer.  A friend of mine argued that he won't read the EU material anymore because its basically the same thing over and over again.  He stopped reading somewhere in the middle of the Yuuzhan Vong series, which means he missed out on Jacen Solo's fall simply because he hated the idea of there always being some threat from outside of the galaxy that was all powerful.  I think he would have liked the Fate of the Jedi series a little more.  Yes Abeloth is a threat that came out of nowhere, but she's mysterious and only a single powerful being, much like Palpatine...but infinitely different. There is political intrigue, fantastic battles, more focus on the Skywalkers...and romance.

Romance, oh yes, I'm a sucker for a burgeoning romance, especially if I'm led to doubt that it will ever come to fruition, and Ascension just laid one of the biggest payoffs in my lap.  I won't go into detail, one, because you aren't reading this, and two, because if you did, I wouldn't want to spoil anything for you.