Treason of Words

Living with cats brings with it many joys: a steady stream of vomit to clean up, little pink anuses in your face while you fall asleep and litterbox duty, to name a few of the more popular ones. Occasionally, though, I discover a new source of cat-related wonder. It is amazing, for example, just how many things around the house can easily be mistaken for a lurking feline. This is a phenomenon abetted by my poor eyesight, which is bad enough that without correction, this text resembles ant trails on my screen. Another accomplice are my glasses, which, in the name of a snappy look, sacrifice peripheral vision. Glancing down shifts my field of vision into the uncorrected area, which is why I move my whole head to glance at the keys while I hunt & peck. One common not-a-cat in our household is the stray pair of boots. I own a single pair, pictured here, but it's far more likely that the cat that won't answer in the half-light of the bedroom is one of Christina's many vastly

I'm not a music guy; I don't consume a lot of popular music, nor do I profess to be a connoisseur of the art. Mostly, I stick to artists and songs I know. The result of this is that my music collection consists primarily of country from before about 1990 (approximately the time middle school peer pressure drew me onto the sounds of the era), popular alternative rock from the early 1990s through the early 2000s (about the time the chief driver of my music acquisition departed), plus various and sundry pockets of music by groups that I've stumbled upon by chance and taken a shine to (influenced primarily by occasional splurges at Cheapo Discs ; Man or Astro-man , I'm looking at you). Nonetheless, even with such a heretofore circumscribed musical universe, although supplemented with Christina's collection replete with 1990s hip-hop and neo-soul, one of the driving factors in dragging our entertainment system into this century with the addition of a HDTV and an HTPC was

I've never been much for the outside. The woods, creeks, hills & mountains, even out on the porch and down on the street, sure, but not the plain ol' outdoors, where things that bite and disperse their reproductive effluvia are. As a sneezy, bookish lad, I had dreamed of how wonderful it would be to simply laminate the outside, preserving it for observation, but keeping its more unsavory bits from contacting me. This past Autumn, I got my chance. The long, parched summer, unlike 2007's long, saturated summer, was my accomplice. After a few rounds of watering on the prescribed evenings, I decided to be a friend to nature and cease the senseless sacrifice of our precious water resources and stopped watering the lawn entirely. Predictably, the ground cover yellowed, then browned, then gave up the ghost, setting the stage for my machinations. In the back yard , where we decided to test our mettle, Christina and I sketched out a plan. The south face of the house has a large