We've Got Letters #2: Toys for Tots fundraiser

Almost by coincidence, we got another letter this week. This time it's from Lisa of coupon blog CouponMountain.com, one of the longtime blogs listed in the blogroll for my old blog Tales from the "Liberry."

Lisa writes in with word about a good cause:

The holidays are coming to a close, and hopefully the season was very merry for you. But for some kids, Santa doesn’t make a stop at their house. Which is where Toys for Tots comes in – helping provide thousands of toys for families in need. It’s really a wonderful program.

To help this great cause, CouponMountain.com (an online coupon code site) has pledged togive up to $50,000. But it’s up to you how much Toys for Tots will get. Because they’re going to give $1 for every Facebook Fan they have on Dec. 31.

So please – take a minute to log on and “Like” CouponMountain. Then pass it on.

How You Can Give $1 to Toys for Tots:

· Go to: www.Facebook.com/CouponMountain
· Select “Like”
· CouponMountain will donate $1
· Spread the word to your friends

We've Got Letters (a.k.a. "Where the EFF have you been, Juice?")

A reader named Chris has sent in an email inquiry. Chris writes...

I see we are past the 5 month mark on the last time you posted. Aside from some new home improvement project I can only think of 2 things that would keep a long time blogger away from their blog.

1. You have had a new baby.

2. You have discovered the joys of World of Warcraft.

If it's # 1 congratulations, if it's #2 tell me what server you play on so we can meet up sometime. lol

Seriously though where have you been? I miss your blog and I still check once a week to see if anything new has been posted.

Thank you for the letter, Chris. It made my day and gave me the kick in the butt to finally post something. Believe me, I'm well aware that it's been five months and it's really been bothering me. I've taught blogging workshops on two occasions and one of the major things I tried to impart to future potential bloggers was never EVER to abandon their blogs. I told them "If you want to stop blogging, be a man and say `I'm taking a break and maybe won't come back.' Don't just leave folks hanging." But that's precisely what I've done and which has been the guilty weight hanging over me for months now.

First things first: I'm not abandoning the blog and as of now will begin posting far more often. I have some material built up and it's time to get it out, not to mention several pretty major events in my life over the past couple of months.

To answer your specific questions: 1) Yes, we do have a baby. In fact, we have two. However, they're not human, so that's not a reason for failure to blog. And, 2), no, I've not yet joined WOW. I've avoided all the MMORPGs and video games in general precisely because I dearly love that sort of thing but it eats huge chunks of time. I used to be a big MUDder back in the early 90s, but eventually gave that up not only because the MUDs I played kept dying, but also because it was just killing my schoolwork. (Any DeathMud or HeroMud folks out there still? Lizard? Thundrcheez? Anyone?) However, the wife recently became addicted to OBLIVION IV for the PC, so barring a home gaming system purchase, it's not inconceivable that we could make the leap to WOW down the line.

As to where the EFF I've been... eh, mostly here. I've been doing more fiction and dramatic writing, which has led to an anthology publication as well as a couple of produced plays in 2010.

I think, though, that my blogging absence boils down to one major thing: the continuing MIA status of our cat Avie. When she first vanished in April, I was certain that we would find her soon enough. Either we'd find her during our searches of the neighborhood in which she vanished, or she'd get captured and taken to the pound where I was a daily visitor, or she would exhibit that pet-homing sense you hear about on occasion and her little kitty radar would guide her back home. And when she returned, I'd be able to post about it here and all would be right with the world. But, she never turned up and every time I thought to write a blog post the lingering question of Avie's status just depressed the hell out of me and sapped all energy for writing anything light, potentially funny or of importance to our lives. Her absence was just a dark hole and I didn't want to publicly get near the edge. This is not to say I've not written anything bloggy in the five months of down time. I've actually penned drafts of a few entries, but could never find my way to post them because of the kitty malaise. Which has been a shame, because the past few months have been pretty full of life-altering events, even beyond the two non-human babies we adopted. We've had health scares, health crises, automobile scares and crises, ongoing pet breed mysteries, and other stuff I'm sure I'll remember. Hell, I never got to tell the tale of our vacation in Florida, which is where we were when Avie escaped her cat-sitters. (I probably still won't tell that one, cause other than the ending that you already know, the trip was spectacular, nearly without incident, and therefore not all that dramatic.)

So, in addition to the ongoing current events of Borderland (including an impending home renovation project that I promise not to drag out as long as the last one), I've got five months of Lost Tales to mine. Which, I guess, means my new year's resolution is to spend more time blogging.

I'm back.

We apologize for the inconvenience.

Actual Telephone Conversations Heard at My House #6

*RING*

ME-- (ANSWERS PHONE) Hello?

(SILENCE)

ME-- Hello?

MATT THE STONER TELEMARKETER-- Hello?

(PAUSE)

ME-- Hello?

MATT THE STONER TELEMARKETER-- Um, yeah. MR. AARON?

ME-- That's me.

MATT THE STONER TELEMARKETER-- Hi. This is Matt, with API.

ME-- Uh huh.

MATT THE STONER TELEMARKETER-- We just wanted to call to tell you we'd like to send you a $1000 online gift certificate.

ME-- I'm sorry, but I'm afraid I have a strict policy here of accepting no solicitation over the phone.

MATT THE STONER TELEMARKETER-- (PAUSE) Um... This isn't soliciting. (ANOTHER PAUSE) Um... what's soliciting?

ME-- Selling things over the phone.

MATT THE STONER TELEMARKETER-- Oh, no. We're not selling anything. I thought for a minute there you meant soliciting, like on TV shows... you know, like, with hookers.

(SILENCE AS I ALLOW THIS TO SINK IN)

MATT THE STONER TELEMARKETER-- Uh, hello?

ME-- Yeah, um, listen, this still sounds like something I'm not going to be interested in.

MATT THE STONER TELEMARKETER-- Oh, no, it's really great! It's...

ME-- You have a nice day, Matt.

*CLICK*

(Still not sure who API is. Maybe the American Petroleum Institute offering a bribe for a survey?)

Magic Keys to Satisfaction

I've had my Subaru Forester since February and have enjoyed it quite a bit--particularly its allowing-me-to-traverse-my-icy-hilly-blind-curve-filled-neighborhood-in-the-winter feature. It's a nice roomy car that can haul lots of stuff, such as heavy, enormous dogs and is plenty comfy. It also came factory-equipped with an Oh Shit-handle above the driver’s side door, which is an innovation that gives me far more comfort than any unseen airbag ever could. One of the only drawbacks to my ownership of it, though, is that since February I have only had one key for it.

When we purchased the car, four months back, we were given two key fobs and one actual key. We were told at the time that the previous owners of the car had not returned both of the keys, but were assured by our salesman—let's call him Stan—that he would be in touch with the previous owners shortly and they would return the second key within a very short period of time. Having two keys for our vehicles is pretty important in my family, as I'm married to a kind and wonderful lady who has been known on more than one occasion to lock herself out of her own vehicle. The two key fobs would certainly help in unlocking the car in such a time of need, but the wife doesn't even carry her own fob, let alone be willing to carry mine. Hell, I only started carrying mine after a series of embarrassing incidents involving the Subaru's tendency to blast the horn in alarm whenever the door is unlocked using the actual key alone. There is a way to tell it to stop doing that, but you have to tell it every single time and I can never remember the steps, so I just carry the fob.

Jump ahead to late April. We happened to be driving by the dealership, which prompted the wife to inquire if her key had ever arrived. It had not, so we stopped and I went in to ask Stan about it. I had to reintroduce myself and explain the lack of a second key thing. At the time, though, he was in the middle of a sale and asked if I could call him back about it some other time. He said was sure he had it somewhere.

Jump ahead to June. I never heard from Stan, nor did I call him back as requested, mostly because I sensed that there was no way he actually had my other key and that getting a new one was going to be a tremendous hassle. Eventually, though, the topic of the key came up again when I had to borrow the wife’s car to haul a larger amount of stuff than my car could handle and we had to trade keys. I decided it was time to get this key business straightened out.

I returned to the dealership, found Stan, reintroduced myself and told him I was still in need of the second key. He wasn't in the middle of a sale this time, but another salesperson was and had commandeered his office for it. Stan assured me that he thought he had it in his desk somewhere, but couldn’t exactly get in there during a sale. He asked if I could return later in the day.

"Well, either today or tomorrow," I offered.

It was at this point that Stan should have piped up to alert me to the fact that the following day was his day off and that he would not be there. Stan, however, is a salesman and sends off similar vibes to a particular weaselly sales guy I once worked with in radio, who’s nickname was, in fact, The Weasel. This is not to say that I think Stan is a weasel, necessarily, but like many of his erminey ilk he's all about the sale and not doing anything to mess that up, such as telling people things they might not want to hear. Clearly, he did not want to be the bearer of bad news and instead chose to have me return two days later pissed off. Come to think of it, that's pretty weaselly. So let’s put another check on the Shitfer Weasel Chart for Stan.

So after returning on his day off to find Stan absent and his even more openly weasel-like fellow salesman unwilling to help me for fear of screwing up something Stan might conceivably have in the works, I returned again two days later. I was determined that while I would not be openly hostile, I would also do nothing to disguise my annoyance with all involved.

Stan saw me coming, perhaps noted my expression, and immediately put down his pizza to go riffle in his desk before I could even open the door. Spouting apologies, he began pulling fistfuls of key fobs out of the desk in his search, looked in all the drawers, looked in his filing cabinet, and made more nervous small talk. Failing to find any Subaru keys, he apologized again and then disappeared into the depths of this particular building of the dealership complex for a full ten minutes, leaving me to watch his more weaselly-looking fellow sales guy slink around in an attempt to look busy.

Stan eventually returned to announce that he’d spoken with someone with technical skills and they were even then printing instructions on how to program a "new one" for me. Soon enough, another fellow came out, instructions in hand and followed me out to my car. At his request, I handed him my keys and he had a seat behind my steering wheel. He was there for under a minute when he emerged, holding up my keys by the fob with one hand and a second fob in the other. The second fob was our extra fob that my wife had left in the car while driving it days before.

"Does this one work?" he asked.

"Yeah," I said.

"And yours works?" he asked, shaking the fob on my key chain.

"Yeah," I said.

"Then why do you need another one?"

Inwardly I smiled.

"I don't," I said. "We already have two key fobs. What we don't have are two physical keys."

The technician looked confused for a moment. "You don't have two keys?" he asked.

"Nope," I said. "That's why I've been coming in here asking for a second key for the past several days."

Wow that was a massively satisfying thing to be able to say. In fact, it was worth all the hassle so far just to be able to say it in a perfectly pitched tone of calm, polite, righteous indignation.

The technician turned a cold eye in Stan's direction then stalked off toward the building, wadding up his instructions and pitching them at the nearest trash can upon entry. Stan looked sheepish in the illumination from my blazing righteousness, then offered that he felt like a huge idiot. I said not a word to dissuade him of this feeling.

Stan leaped into action to right his wrong. He piled into a golf cart and asked me to follow him down to another of the buildings in the complex. I was then led on a merry chase from building to building, eventually just joining Stan in the golf cart. At each stop, Stan was treated to having employee after employee explain that he was in the wrong department and would need to go talk to so and so over in such and such other department. Half an hour later I was still waiting for a key, but was at least standing in line in the correct department with the correct employee, who had only moments before sent Stan on yet another trek to locate a blank key for him to cut.
Upon Stan's return with the blank, he announced that he was going to head back up to his own building, since I didn't really need him there for the rest of the process. At first I was tempted to explain to him that I'd already invested far more of my afternoon—nay, my MONTH—in this little venture, all of which was due to his inability to follow up on assurances he'd made to us four months previously, and that until I had a working key in my hand he was just going to have to suck it up and waste some of his time, in addition to wasting mine. I almost said that. However, I'd long since decided that I didn't really like Stan very much, nor did I care to listen to any more of his uncomfortable attempts at small talk, which I sensed would likely turn to his default topic of sports. I told him to begone and he vanished in a puff of weasel-smelling brimstone.

The guy with the key-cutter soon produced a replica key for me, but explained that it wouldn’t actually work with my car until they cast a few spells on the magic chip embedded in it. The wizard for this was located in one of the previous departments we'd visited, back up the hill. I made the journey only to be told that the wizard in question had been sent on a quest and would be back in a sec. They advised me to go wait in the sun by the wizard's mystical garage bay. So I waited. And I waited. After ten minutes and half a sunburn, I went back up to the desk to inquire if the wizard had been alerted to my presence.

“He’ll be back in just a minute, sir,” the man said.

I returned to the garage to find that the sorcerer’s apprentice had appeared and was working on another car. He asked who I was waiting for. I told him the wizard’s name. (Don’t say his name, it gives him power.)

The apprentice nodded, but said that the wizard's quest had involved taking a vehicle to one of the dealership’s other branches. He would, the apprentice assured me, be back. I did the math in my head, though, and knew that the branch in question was a good ten miles away. What choice did I have, though? I waited.

Eventually, the wizard did appear. He was heavily tattooed with arcane symbols, his skin baked further by the blazing sun above. He was also the least weaselly person I’d met the whole day. I found him instantly likable even beyond the fact that he held the power to set me free from my now hour plus trial.

The wizard asked what wish he could grant me. I gave him my magic keys. He then asked me to search my heart to determine whether I truly only wanted two keys, or if perhaps I might want more, because once he applied his magics on them no more keys could ever be produced. I told him I was true of heart in my desire for only the two. He then produced a flat brown creature—his familiar, I’m sure—and inserted my keys into its orifices. It squeaked as he massaged the scales on the creatures back. A few moments later, he passed my keys back into my grateful hands with a hearty "There you go, big guy."

I climbed into my vehicle and found that both of the keys worked as promised. I waved to the wizard and sped from the parking lot, not even bothering to return to the office of the wizard’s supervisor for fear he would pass me a bill for all their work, and I would be unable to restrain myself from calling down furious wrath upon one and all. So far, they haven’t called to tell me otherwise, though one of their minions did call and leave a message asking if my experience was satisfactory. I have yet to phone her back.

Nerd Confessional

I have a nerd confession I have to make and, perhaps, an apology to Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis.

Over the past few weeks, there's been a lot of talk in nerd news circles and even in straight up regular media about the prospect of a Ghostbusters 3, a potential film possibly starring all the original cast. Don't know if it will happen, but there's a big part of me that would LOVE to see a really good Ghostbusters movie again, because Ghostbusters 2 just didn't cut it for me, despite and maybe even because of Peter McNichol's best efforts. Reading the various stories about it, along with Murray's appearance talking about it on Letterman, got me thinking about the original. It's a film I loved as a kid, saw at least four times in the theater and watched our VHS copy of it countless times over the years following. I think it may have even been the second VHS movie we ever bought, following Michael Keaton's Batman. Thinking back on the film, though, from my perspective 26 years later, I decided I'd found a flaw in the storytelling that stuck in my craw.

In my memory--having not seen the film as a whole in probably 10 years, at this point--the first time we ever see or hear about the Stay Puft Marshmallow man in the film was when he turns up at the end and stomps through the city. While the 400 foot marshmallow man is trashing his way to Central Park West, Aykroyd's character Ray Stantz tells the other Ghostbusters that he remembers the character from roasting that brand of marshmallows at Camp Cucamonga and knew it could never ever harm them. To me, though, this seemed like a plot point that should have been set up earlier. If I'd made the film, I reasoned, I would have had Stay Puft Marshmallows prominently product-placed throughout the movie and might have even included a Stay Puft TV commercial cut to the Ghostbuster's TV commercial, just to build up the product and character in the audience's collective mind.

Cut to last weekend. We were watching the 10-year-old son of some friends of ours and were grasping for something to entertain him with other than 8 solid hours of playing the Arkham Asylum game for his Playstation 3. (Don't get me wrong, I loved watching and playing that, too, but the kid beat it, so what are ya gonna do?) Flipping through the channels, I spied Ghostbusters on AMC, instantly realized it was going to be the edited-for-television version and thought nothing more about it.

"Hey, that was Ghostbusters," the kids said.

"Yeah?" I asked. "You want to watch that?"

"Yeah."

"Have you seen it before?"

"Some of it," he said. "I've never seen the end of it. There's a lot of talking and I fall asleep and all I want to see is the ghosts," he added.

"Okay. Sure," I said.

So we flipped it on and, being 10 at night, I hit record on the DVR, cause I know he's never gonna make it through. Sure enough, we get to the talky part, shortly after the Ghostbusters have established themselves and the first half of the movie's special effects budget has been exhausted, and he's asleep. But before all that, not too long into the film, the kid spotted something I'd never EVER noticed before in all my viewings of Ghostbusters, which true Ghostbusters fans reading this will likely already know and be insulted that someone who claims to be brethren is only picking up on it now, which is: in the scene where Sigourney Weaver's Dana comes home to her apartment, but just before shit starts going nutty, she walks into her kitchen, sets down her groceries, unpacks a carton of eggs and some other random baggy looking thing and she turns to fiddle with something in the background scenery, leaving the egg carton to pop open and start spattering eggs that instantly fry on the countertop, when the kid pipes up with "Hey, there's the Staypuft Marshmallow Man."

"Where?" I asked.

"Right there," he said. And, a second look later, I realized with equal parts dawning horror and respect that the random baggy thing beyond the eggs, that I've heretofore been too distracted by the eggs and the creepy music to notice, is a bag of Stay Puft Marshmallows complete with a marshmallow man logo. This was when I told the kid how I'd only recently been thinking that the movie needed more of that kind of product placement and here it was in front of me the whole time.

This was all the challenge the kid needed. His eagle eyes spotted another Stay Puft logo appearance, painted on the side of a building during the sequence following the grid shutdown at Ghostbusters' Central. I wouldn't doubt there are other such placements in the film, but those two were enough to qualify for setting up the character--although I still argue there were too many distracting elements in each scene for anyone but the most eagle-eyed spotters to notice on the first viewing, but they're there.

So, to Mssrs Aykroyd and Ramis, writers of the film, an apology for doubting you. Now, if the both of you would kindly rewatch Ghostbusters 2 and then go somewhere and think about what you did and start concentrating very hard on ways to ensure you never ever do THAT again, especially in any third installments, we can call it even.

*sniff*

Still no kitty.

We've only had one call about her since the last post I made and that was a second call from someone working at the nursing home that called about the cat that looked nothing like Avie two weeks ago. This was evidently someone other than the two ladies we met and talked to there before. They called to say they thought they might have our cat there, only they hadn't seen him in a little while and he actually looked a bit different than the cat in the picture. Yep. They said all that. I assured them that he wasn't our cat, but neglected to mention that I thought I'd seen him at the pound.

Speaking of orange cats, the other night before bed I went into the garage to close the garage doors and otherwise secure the house. Before doing so, I thought back to the number of times that Avie had gotten herself trapped in the garage by sneaking in there before I shut the doors for the evening and then not coming out of hiding and making herself known before I managed to get back in the house. We'd find her in there the following morning, no worse for wear but certainly annoyed that she had no soft place to sleep. She did this with such frequency that we just started keeping a litter box out there. So, as I went to enter the garage, I thought to myself how wonderful it would be if I opened the garage door and found Avie waiting on the top step. She wasn't there when I opened the door, but when I triggered one of the garage doors to close, I saw another cat come flying from around my car and flee the garage through my car's bay door. It was another orange one. That was last week.

Last night, I was awakened at 3 a.m. by the sound of a meowing cat from outside. I was instantly awake and my first thought was that it was Avie, come home to us and crying in the rainy night. Then I realized the cries were coming from the direction of our next door neighbor's house, or perhaps further down the hill, and not from our back door. Still, I got up and went out on the back deck to make sure. I listened for a while, but didn't call out to the cat for fear of waking the wife and causing her to freak out that Avie might be home if I was up calling to her in the night. As I returned to the inside of the house, though, I saw the wife come down the hall.

"Did you hear the cat?" she said.

"Yep. I don't think it was Avie," I said.

"It sounded like her," she said.

So, wife already awake, I went back on the deck and called out to her for a few minutes. No kitty turned up, though. I imagine it was the orange one.

The other day, while driving near the area where Avie disappeared, we had the depressing realization that even if she was trying to get home, we have a small river running through our town which she would have to ford. The mental image of the cat running up and down the western bank, looking for a way to cross, but finding none, brought tears to our eyes.

Meanwhile, more serious drama has been afoot Our friends who were keeping Avie for us are now splitting up. Not over Avie, of course, but due to unrelated, ongoing troubles. It's very sad. I've had a handful of friends divorce before, but this is probably the first ongoing, active, friends in the same town you live in divorce I'll probably be a witness to.

In fantastic news, though, my brother-in-law has returned safely from Afghanistan. We'd been trying to time our trip to Key Largo to coincide with his return, but he assured us that any plans we made to that effect would nehehehever come to pass, cause that's just how the Army works. And, indeed, his return wound up being a week later than originally scheduled, though that was due mostly to the Icelandic volcano. We're headed down this weekend to do a mother's day/brother-in-law's day combo celebration, with many biscuits and much chipped beef gravy scheduled to be consumed by all.

Kitty Search, the Disappointment Continues

Yesterday afternoon, I was preparing dinner when the phone rang. The caller mentioned that her neighbor had told her that I was looking for a calico cat and a female calico had been hanging around their house for the past week or so.

"Where do you live?" I asked.

Turned out they lived next door to the very first person I had given a flier to when I began distributing them April 12. This was a location only a block away from our friends' house, from which Avie had disappeared. Instantly, I knew it had to be her.

"Can you catch her?" I asked.

"Well... she's on the back porch right now."

"Can I come over right now?" I asked. They said sure.

I immediately tried calling the wife, but she didn't answer.

On my way across town, I was elated. At last our search for Avie "Kissy" Kitty was finished. There was no doubt in my mind that this wasn't our cat. I envisioned bringing her home, feeding her and then allowing the wife to come home to find Avie curled up on the back of the chair where she likes to sleep and just watching the wife's face when she saw her. That would be magic! Crap! Did we even have cat food in the house? We'd left Avie's bag with our friend. Maybe I could pop by and pick it up from her and give her the good news too.

My surprise was ruined then when, a few blocks from the house, the wife called to tell me she was done with work. I told her of my mission. Excited, she said she'd meet me at a nearby grocery store and then we drove over together, still in separate cars.

I pulled into the driveway of the house to find the neighbor lady I'd given the flier to there as well as the man whose wife had phoned me earlier. He was crouched by the bushes surrounding his house, trying to coax a cat from within them. And then my eyes fell upon the cat's face and I knew it wasn't Avie. There was nearly black fur on top of its head. I put the car in park and got out.

"Aww, no," I said.

"It's not her?" the neighbor lady said.

"Nope."

We chatted until the wife could park. She had pretty much the same reaction as I did upon seeing the cat.

Once again, the home owner tried to convince us that we should take this cat off their hands, as it was very nice. And, as tempting as that has been, we just cant' do it. After watching our kitten Milo Soulpatch die from panleukopenia, we can't risk bringing another cat into the house unless it is vaccinated in advance--and that's an 8 week process. The only reason we were able to bring in Avie is because my mother-in-law kept her in North Carolina for those 8 weeks.

The neighbor lady said she hoped we eventually found Avie and noted that sometimes pets do find their way home. The house owner also said that he thought there were two calicos that had been visiting and hoped the other turned out to be Avie. We do too.

Kitty Search: One Week Later

The search/wait continues, sans kitty.

I went by the local humane society every day last week, except for Thursday, but Avie wasn't there. By Wednesday the staff all knew me and just waved me on back to the cat room whenever I walked through the door. And when I emerged from the room, hopes dashed, they told me how sorry they were and encouraged me to keep looking. When I went in Friday afternoon, a staff member I hadn't met yet was at the front desk. After I'd explained my cat search to her, she asked what kind of cat Avie is.

"She's a low calico," I said, parroting what I'd been told earlier in the week was likely to be Avie's specific breed. "She's white with gray and orange blotches."

The woman paused. "Long tail or short tail?" she asked.

"Long."

I saw something perk up behind her eyes. "You should go on back there," she said.

Suddenly my heart was thumping with hope. Her manner suggested that a cat matching Avie's description was back there. In the cat room, I turned to the first of the stacked cage units lining the left hand wall and felt immediately disheartened. Inside the middle cage was a male cat with Avie's coloration. This was one I'd seen on Monday and knew was male due to his size, but by Tuesday was willing to give him a second look just in case and had gone so far as to poke my finger in the cage to jostle the litterbox and make the guy up so he would look at me. Nope. Giant, male cat head with the wrong color pattern to begin with. This was probably the cat the lady was thinking of.

As I made my way down, though, there was another cat with Avie's color scheme, if not exact pattern. Then, in the last column of cages, there was a tiny kitten who looked very similar to Avie, nursing at its orange mother.

Hope brimming, I turned to the opposite wall to find two more cats with Avie's coloration, one of which was actually female and had her back to the cage door so that I had to call "Kissy kitty?" until she turned around to reveal a mostly dark face. No Avie.

The lady at the desk looked at me with raised eyebrows of anticipation as I exited. I shook my head, but did note for her the five kitties with similar color scheme. She encouraged me to continue coming back, as they got new kitties in every day.

On Sunday we a lady from a local nursing home phoned to say she had seen my MISSING CAT poster in Kroger and thought she might have found Avie. We were overjoyed and began taking down the address so we could rush right over.

"It's a beautiful cat," she said. "He's just very, very friendly."

"Um... `he?'" I said.

"Yes."

"You're sure he's male?"

"He's, uh... Yes, I'm pretty sure he's male," she said.

"It's probably not our cat. She's female."

"Oh," she said. We decided to go over anyway, though, on the off chance that the woman was somehow unable to properly identify if a cat had junk or not. What we found when we arrived was an orange and white cat that resembled Avie not in the slightest, particularly in the fact that his junk was large and prominent. He was indeed very friendly and had, we were told, been hanging around outside the place for the past month. If they'd told us that part, we probably wouldn't have come at all. Since we had come, though, they tried to get us to take him off their hands and kept emphasizing how nice and friendly he was. We declined. We're just not ready to take in strange kitties when we still have hope that ours will return to us.

Today, I returned to the humane society. Avie still wasn't there, but I believe I recognized our friendly, junk-equipped cat friend from Sunday afternoon.

Dammit. Now I feel guilty for two cats.

Kitty Crisis Day Two

The fliers we distributed had some response, but still no kitty has manifested.

Mostly people called to suggest to us that we check the humane society, as there is an infamous, though still semi-anonymous person in the area known for capturing stray cats in a live trap and taking them there. He's also been known to trap non stray cats as well, though, as evidenced by the number of neighbors who are pissed off at him for having to go get their cats out of hock. We'd already heard this rumor, though, and had actually gone right to the house of the alleged cat-trapper the night we found out about Avie being missing to ask if they might have her. The man's wife denied that they trapped cats at all and suggested that the large, wire-frame cage in their side yard was for carrying their beagles around. Some of the people who called asked us to phone them back if we are able to determine the identity of the trapper because they want to go over and have words with them. We don't know for sure that the people we talked to are the trappers, but other neighbors have confirmed that theirs is the house the trapping is getting done at. I don't really care about the trapping, so long as it nets my cat in the process and she gets returned to me, but there are quite a few people upset with them.

The major leads we had came from a person I met on the street while distributing fliers, who said she had seen a cat matching the description following a mother and child as they walked. Someone had asked the mother if it was her cat and she said no. This behavior at least matches Avie's to some degree, as she has been known to follow me and the dogs when we go on walks and once followed the whole family as we went walking around the neighborhood. Later, a man phoned to say he'd seen a similar sight and that the cat was last seen headed north on his street. At this news, I returned to his street and knocked on every door, passing out fliers to everyone and leaving them behind for those not at home.

When I returned home, there was another message from a lady who said she'd spotted the cat just down the street from our friend's house, lingering in a yard there. So the wife and I piled back in the car and drove across town to check this out. No cat--or, at least, not ours. This was, however, the same area in which I'd earlier met a lady I'd determined was probably crazy, but who had at least given me a sighting tip. I'd seen her on her porch, smoking a cigarette, and had walked up to give her a flier. She'd barely taken a look at it when she said, "Oh, yes. I saw this cat across the road the other day. She was running and playing and running and playing." The sing-song nature of her voice when saying "running and playing" made me certain she had never seen my cat. Not that Avie doesn't play, but she doesn't play to any degree that would fall under such a sing-song description.

No calls so far today.

As one of the comments for yesterday's post stated, it's not uncommon for cats to find their way home. As kids, my sister's cat (my former cat Winston's mother) used to disappear for months at a time only to show up at our door pregnant. She'd hang around us until she'd had her kittens. Once they were gone, she'd be off into the world again, no doubt with another family in another neighborhood. Then, months later, she'd turn up pregnant again. After the second litter, we got her fixed, after which we never saw her again. We always wondered if her other family ever tried to take her in to get her fixed only to be told the job had already been done.

One of that cat's kittens, my sister's cat Cleo, decided she didn't like my sister's new apartment and walked home. Granted, my parents lived less than a mile away as the cat walks, but the homing instinct was still not to be scoffed at.

And then, in college, one of my roommates brought one of his family cats from home into the house we were renting. The cat was miserable with us and was constantly trying to escape. He frequently escaped through a dryer vent hole in the laundry room floor, which we took to covering with heavier and heavier items, because he was very strong. Finally, he muscled his way around two full 24 can flats of Cokes and a tuba case and was gone for good. A week or so later, he turned up back at the roommate's parents' house across town.

We're hoping that Avie will have a similar homing instinct and will turn up at the back door in a week or so. She's got a good walk ahead of her, though, if she does, cause she disappeared clear across town and there's some pretty major traffic, including an Interstate between there and here.

Meanwhile, I have visited the humane society twice. They had posted the picture of my cat in their cat-housing room, so their staff can check it, but they took me back further into the building to show me a calico that had come in from this morning. I hoped and prayed all the way back that it would be mine, as one of the rumors I'd heard yesterday was that the cat-trapper had caught him another one and was planning to take it in today. It wasn't Avie, though. The humane society lady--who looks like she's worn to about a frazzle--told me I was welcome to look through the cats in their cat room to double check that Avie wasn't there. She wasn't but the plaintive meows from the cats who were there were enough to break your heart.

After leaving there, I spent an hour driving around in the neighborhood she disappeared in, calling her name. Not that the little beast has ever been seen to be active in daylight before, or anything, but she didn't come out of hiding if she was around at all.

Life in flux

No, I haven't died.

No, I haven't forgotten that there's a part remaining of the anniversary adventure from two months back. It was threatening to get longer than was wieldy, so I truncated it and posted it retroactively. Nyah.

In the meantime, however, things have become very busy for us around Chez Juice. After many months of planning and scheduling and rescheduling, we finally managed to take a family vacation to Key Largo, Florida, which is where the wife and I went for our very first vacation together in October of 2000. We loved snorkeling there so much then that we swore we'd return with family at some point, and this we did. We even did it in spite of the fact that the house we'd first rented, which we'd been given a confirmation number for but were never sent a contract, got rented out from under us and we had to scramble for a new place two weeks before the event. Got one and it was even better than the first. We also took this vacation road trip with our dogs, which proved much easier than it could have.

At the moment, though, I don't have the energy or time to detail any of it in writing because we now have a new crisis on our hands. We left our kitty Avie at the home of some friends here in Borderlands who had offered to cat sit. Unfortunately, Avie is an escape artist and managed to get away from their house while we were gone and has not returned. So now we're fluctuating between blind panic that we'll never see her again, conjuring all sorts of awful fates that might have befallen her, and trying to remain calm, remembering that she's a tough and resourceful kitty in daily life so she's probably all right and will hopefully wander up at any given point. We're also being proactive about finding her. I spent the morning canvassing the area, distributing 102 fliers to the surrounding streets. I've just printed some more to head back for another round. We've also contacted local vets and the humane society to alert them and will continue checking back.

If you're of a praying mind, though, we could sure use some here. We've seen the power of it when it comes to our animals in the past (not to mention some humans).

Anniversary Adventures (Part 7)

Nothing terribly exciting happened on Sunday. Oh, we got up and ate more flapjacks, then drove around the circle of artisans that dotted a particular stretch of road in the area, and we lunched on fish and chips at an English pub (though not the English pub we'd been assured was more authentic in both food and dankness, but the brighter friendlier one that was in need of changing its frying oil). Other than that, we basically chilled out and enjoyed one another's company in our cozy cabin. We even whiled away an hour watching the VH1 Soul Train retrospective, which was an education for the wife who'd never seen an episode in her life, having grown up in the electricity-free wilds of Alaska. (It's always fun to play Stump the Wife with 80s Pop Culture. You win every time!)

At some point that afternoon, the vet called but I didn't hear my phone. He had news that yet again Sadie had developed a bladder infection. She's developed such an infection almost every time we've had her boarded and the only time she didn't was the time she got kennel cough instead. She's such a neurotic little thing and can't stand it when her pack is away for any length of time. We'd hoped Moose's presence would be a calming one, but he was probably more of a nuisance, due to his habit of constantly biting her on the neck. So we knew we'd have a antibiotic bill when we returned.

We saw very little snow for most of the trip home; certainly not what had been called for. About the time we hit Bristol, though, we could see it starting to pile up and it only got thicker the further we went. From that point until a couple of weeks ago, we saw a tremendous amount of snow, as far as my snow-seeing experience is concerned. I know there were places who had it far worse, but there were days when I couldn't get home due to my little front-wheel-drive car's inability to make it up the twisty, windy, steep-blind-curve-filled neighborhood's icy roads, and I was forced to park on the main road outside of the neighborhood and hoof it in.

"We need to get you a new car," the wife kept saying.

"Ahh, it'll thaw soon," I would say.

Then one day, after I was able to get up the first major hill of my neighborhood, but then got trapped on the blind curve (which was impervious to any amount of cat litter I cared to throw at it) and then had to reverse my way slowly back down the hill, my tires' footing slipping the whole way down and threatening to hurl me off the steep embankment and into the creek, waiting for the moment when some a-hole with four wheel drive plowed into the back of me, I decided it was time to start looking for a new car. I knew I'd need something with all wheel drive which could also hold a couple of good sized dogs comfortably and, hopefully, get good gas mileage and which was probably going to need to be lightly used. In my search, I mainly stuck to the U.S. News & World Report consumer ratings guides, which average the ratings from consumer publications across the nation. They basically liked the Honda CRV and the Subaru Forester as far as the class of vehicles I was looking for were concerned. I scanned the websites of local dealerships and was able to find examples of each of these, but the color of one of the more ideal ones, a 2009 Forester, appeared to have been painted an inadvisable shade of baby blue. On a whim, I drove by the dealership to see if it was as hideous in person and discovered that either I was looking at an entirely different car than the one online, or it wasn't nearly as blue or hideous in person. In fact, it was kind of greenish blue, which worked out pretty good.

Later that afternoon, the wife and I returned and did a test drive of the Subaru and of a CRV. Between the two of them, we liked the Subaru better. It felt roomier inside and, frankly, looked better on the outside. It also only had 20k miles on it and was not nearly as expensive as we expected based on some of the pricing we'd seen online. And, most importantly, it had an Oh Shit Handle on the driver's side. I've always wanted one of those and didn't think anyone made automobiles in which the driver can opt to bail on his responsibilities at the wheel and just hold on for dear life. We decided to get it.

The Forester fits me nicely, as it also does the dogs. Just have to fold down the back seats, put their water dish in and they have plenty of room to ride. And it can get up snowy hills just fine. Naturally, though, as soon as we'd bought it, the weather warmed up and we only had one major snow since. Will have to wait til next year for more hillside fun.

Anniversary Adventures (Part 6)

On Saturday, we'd had a very nice morning already, with flapjacks from a different flapjack restaurant where the `jacks were thick and tasty and the bacon salty. (Afterwards, we were already plotting how best to persuade the new place to crumble the salty bacon into the actual pancake batter for our Sunday morning trip.) We had then browsed around downtown Gatlinburg, looking in shops once in a while, but not really buying anything. We'd been planning to hit the Ripley's Aquarium, but kind of balked at the $40 price for the two of us to get in there. So, instead, we wound up blowing nearly $20 on EARTHQUAKE: THE RIDE.

That's right, we were somehow suckered in (*COUGH*COUGH *THEWIFEWANTEDTOGO *COUGH*) to forking over good money for Earthquake: The Ride. Let me just tell you something about Earthquake: The Ride. If you're an adult human being, or above the age of, say, 14, you're not going to enjoy Earthquake: the Ride unless someone else is paying for it. Not to spoil the experience, but there's no actual earthquake during Earthquake: The Ride. Instead, you're ushered into a mini-subway car, with maybe eight seats all told--and you know the ride is for children at this point because while your ass can fit in the seats, the seat belt will NOT buckle around an average-sized adult waist, let alone mine--the doors close and you're "off."

You know those rides at Disney World, where you're stapped into the little car, or miniature pirate ship, and you're led around on a track through a maze of adventure, color and wonderment? This wasn't one of those. Oh, there was a track, all right, but it went in a straight line. This meant that as the mini-subway car could only move forward and backward, therefore all the storytelling of the ride had to be done via the subway intercom system, which featured a paniced person screaming about how there had been a massive earthquake and chaos was about to ensue. There were a few other visual storytelling clues as well, such as the large crate through the slats of which could be glimpsed some sort of large ape. Hmm, wonder if that'll come back later? Then there was the matter of the ceiling of the tunnel ahead of you collapsing, causing the mini-subway car to stop just shy of destruction, back up a bit, then move forward anyway, the back of it tilting up perilously close to a 4 degree angle, which was just enough to nearly dislodge me from my unbelted seat and nearly made me spill my coffee. But it was okay. The car righted itself and began pulling backward, only to be suddenly and viciously attacked from the front by a giant rubber anaconda that had sprung out of the hole in the tunnel floor! The car then backed through the tunnel--with the announcer announcing some aftershocks all the way--passing the now well-escaped and menacing gorilla in the crate and some chunks of reinforced concrete that seemed to be swinging from pivots, and then back to the starting point, where some large and rubbery creature loomed into the window just as you thought your ride was done and all was safe. All told, it probably took less than two minutes.

"Wow, let's do that again," we said as we walked out, past the line of children and their harried and lighter-of-wallet parents. At least the kids would probably get a kick out of it.

That was far from my only fateful decision of the day, though. In fact, I still had the consequences of my fateful decision from Friday to attend to. After the temperature had soaked into our bones, we decided to head back to the cabin to soak those cold bones in the hottub. And this we did.

After a while I got out, dried off and very shortly found myself wrapped up in my robe, standing on the back deck of the cabin, a Blue Moon beer in hand and the beautiful, snow-flecked landscape of the Smokies spread before me. Seemed a perfect time to light up my stogie.

I fetched my cigar, lit it, puffed away at it until it took. It was very smooth and quite pleasant, as I had been assured at the tobacconist's that the Baccarat Dolce Far Niente would be. I continued to puff on it, taking in the surrounding vista, my mp3 player softly playing an interview with John Hodgman, while, a few feet away, the wife soaked in the hottub upwind.

The thing about smoking a cigar, though, is that it takes a long time. They're meant for chewing on while playing poker with the guys, or savoring in front of a roaring fire, in some kind of Minnesotan hunting lodge, while sipping cognac from a Riedel Vinum crystal cognac glass. And while I was certainly enjoying mine, it was taking a lot longer to finish than I really wanted to spend cold, robed and partially wet on the back of a chilly cabin. However, I was determined to make it through to the bitter end. Oh, how bitter that end was to be.

"Are you sick yet?" the wife asked a few minutes later.

"No," I said, defensively. But within a few minutes more, I began feeling a bit off. Between the cigar's taste, the smoke and the beer, my stomach was starting to feel less than stable. And still I puffed away, cause the damn thing wasn't done yet. Then, quite suddenly, it became apparent to me that not only was I definitely going to throw up if I took even one more puff, I was likely going to throw up regardless. I dropped the cigar into my beer bottle and rushed to the bathroom to wash my face, hoping to get the smell of smoke off of me before its overwhelming sweet and smooth stench put the hurt on my stomach even more. Didn't work. I could still taste cigar. Before I could even attempt to brush my teeth, the levies gave way and I took a lengthy stroll down the streets of Hurl City.

"Mmmm hmm," the wife said, once I returned, green-faced to the deck.

For the next two days, I could smell cigar smoke at almost all times even three days later could still pick up the occasional whiff of it. Oh, yeah, that's why I don't smoke regularly.

Though we were already two days into our trip, we'd still not really gone out for a nice anniversary dinner. Our Friday night meal was takeout pizza from a local pizzeria and mostly we'd otherwise eaten flapjacks. So out we went into the night to try and find a restaurant.

I'd seen a Cuban place in town that I thought might be fun. I've always been told Cuban food is some of the best tasting stuff ever, but have never had any. Unfortunately, I took a wrong turn and wound up driving back through the more touristy section, littered with chain restaurants. I kept driving, hoping to come to something nicer, or to Pigeon Forge, whichever came first. Then, we spied it... a great big log structure that looked very much like the sort of hunting lodge one might be able to enjoy a fine cigar within had one not already been put off of them for at least a year. It was called the Park Grill Steakhouse and it looked like salvation.

Inside we were greeted by very friendly hosts, who led us past a massive double-sided salad bar to a waiting table in this massive establishment. It was busy, but not too busy. Our waiter was friendly, but not overly in-your-face friendly. The piano music was pleasant and not too loud, played by a man who was a very skilled pianist, but who could have doubled for a gold-panning miner if not for his suit. The bread was fantastic! The prices on the menu scared us at first, but it was our anniversary weekend, when you're supposed to splurge a little on the finer things. We both ordered steaks, which were cooked to perfection and garnished with love. They were some of the best tasting steaks we'd ever had.

Now, both the wife and I have experience as wait staff in restaurants--the wife in a high-traffic seaside, tourist magnet restaurant, me at a busy Pizza Hut--and we were both quietly observing the staff of this one. No one seemed to be stressed out. Everyone seemed to be pitching in to help one another out. Someone who wasn't even our waiter asked if we needed refills without prompting. The place just seemed to run like a well-oiled machine, burning high octane clean fuel. It was amazing. On our way out, we noticed that near the foyer of the restaurant were hung pictures of all the staff. Most of them had been working there for over five years, and some since the place had opened in 1995. Apparently the owners treated their people right to the point that some were making careers out of their jobs there. Knowing this somehow made the dining experience all that much better.

(TO BE CONCLUDED...)

Anniversary Adventures (Part 5)

We went into Pigeon Forge on Saturday to see what there was to see. Most of it didn't really appeal to us, or wasn't yet open for whichever shows the theaters were performing, but we found a few things to interest us. It was raining, though, so the one thing we'd intended to do in Pigeon Forge wasn't exactly convenient to do.

During our honeymoon in 2000, we went panning for gems. It was probably four days into our trip and we'd done everything we had a desire to do in Gatlinburg itself. (Well, the stuff that was open, at least, which wasn't much. In fact, about the only folks doing major business were the time-share sales people who lurked on every corner, leaping out to offer you riches beyond imagining if only you would consent to spending three scant hours of your time listening to their sales pitch. After one particularly aggressive sales guy kept after us, I had to explain to him that it was the final day of our honeymoon trip and there was no way in hell we were spending any more if it with him, so he needed to back off. Reluctantly, he did.) So we'd headed to pigeon forge and decided to stop at the gem-panning place. It was a pretty simple setup, in which the gem-panning clerk, dressed in overalls, brought us each a sieve and poured a box of rocks and bits into a long trough of running water and we got to sift through it to look for crystals and precious stones, probably none of which were native to the area, but what do I know? This trough was located outside, but under an awning, surrounded by parking spaces. Our car still had all of the wedding decoration my groomsmen had bestowed upon it, including the traditional cans tied to the bumper and shoe-polish painted windows that read "PORTRAIT OF A MARRIED COUPLE" on the windshield and "DONE GOT HITCHED" across the back window...

DIGRESSION: Some of my friends are infamous for truly heinous wedding car-decoration, to the point that when my friend John was married, his parents hid the car they would be journeying to the honeymoon in at the home of friends of friends of people they were pretty sure none of us knew for fear that we would do something horrible to it involving inflated condoms. So, instead, we just did those things to the vehicle in which they were leaving the church--which was all the same to us. Oh, and while his parents were asleep, we also rearranged all of their living room furniture so that each piece was 180 degrees from it's usual position--as if the room itself was on a giant turntable. This wasn't actually done out of any kind of revenge against them, but more to screw with the head of John's cousin Mike, who'd passed out drunk on one of their sofas and who we thought would completely lose his shit when he woke up in the middle of the night and nothing looked familiar. To say John's mother was "not pleased" is probably putting it lightly, because every stick of furniture was back in its original location and an icy stare was turned in our direction for the rest of the following day. Having heard some of these tales, my wife had instructed my best man, Joe, that he was welcome to do whatever he wanted to my car, but if anything they did made her grandmother cry, she would find all responsible parties and her revenge would be long and unpleasant. We therefore got off light.

While we were panning for gravel, another couple arrived to do so, saw our car and asked us if we were newlyweds. We said we were and it turned out they, too, were newlyweds. Naturally, the subject of our respective weddings came up and we asked them how many days ago they had been married. They replied that they'd been wed just the previous day.

"And when did you get married?" they asked us, smiles beaming.

"Oh, about four days ago," we said.

At this, their faces fell into a state of appalled disbelief, particularly the girl's. She cast a glance back at our still fully decorated car and curtly explained that they had washed all of the decorations from their car immediately after the wedding. They'd not even made it out of the city limits of their home town, let alone all the way to Gatlinburg with so much as a single can still affixed. After this revelation, we could tell that their estimation of us had clearly been dialed down to about a 2, for they didn't seem to have much more to say to us. Meanwhile, the wife and I both quietly thought their offense at our aged decorations was quite funny and we could hardly contain our mirth until we were finally able to bust up laughing once we'd finished our panning and returned to the confines of our offensive car.

We not only kept the decorations on for the rest of our honeymoon, but made it back to Charlotte with one surviving can tied to the bumper and it was another full week after our return before I bothered to wash off the shoe-polish.

(TO BE CONTINUED...)

Anniversary Adventures (Part 4)

Beyond all the changes to Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge, we already knew this trip was going to be different for us in another major respect: cash.

During our actual honeymoon, in February of 2000, I was only doing weekend work in radio in Charlotte (not precisely lucrative) while my wife was in transition as a retail clothing store assistant manager and was only then about to start in a new position in Charlotte, though not at the good store she'd been promised when she agreed to stay on as manager for a store that had closed in Shelby, but instead the assy store, where the customers regularly let their kids shit in the dressing rooms. We didn't have a lot of dough going into our marriage. (In fact, we didn't have a lot of food for that trip, either, because while our family had quite thoughtfully assembled for us an enormous sampler pack of the grub from our wedding reception--none of which we'd been able to get more than a bite of during the actual reception because we kept getting shuffled around to cut cakes and open presents and pose for pictures--they'd also quite thoughtfully put it in the wrong car. I still have a craving for Lil' Smokies to this day.) So while we had splurged a bit on our honeymoon cabin (or so it seemed at the time), we were still trying to keep to a budget for the rest of the trip were very careful when it came to actually buying anything while we were there. Within a year and a half after our marriage, the wife was accepted into med school here in WV and we were soon living even poorer than before, in a depressed job market in an already financially depressed state and my job at the "liberry" was, again, not exactly lucrative. However, for the past year and a half, the wife has been a practicing physician. And while that's certainly not as lucrative a job as most people think it is, (one word of advice to future docs whose goal it is to make a buttload of money: specialize) vacation impulse purchases are not so much of a problem.

Probably the best example of this, for me, was when we came to a shop in the mall selling cigar box guitars. I'd seen the tiny shop earlier during my solo run and thought it was interesting, but it was closed. And it had remained closed even when the wife and I passed by again. Then, while browsing a different store two shop spaces down, I heard the most wonderful music and followed it back to the shop where the proprietor was playing away on one of the cigar box guitars. The method he was using was to rest the guitar on the table in front of him, its neck nestled in a cloth-lined notch cut into a block of wood, then strum the strings with his right hand while his left hand held a three-inch section of copper pipe, which he used as a slide, moving up and down the strings to change the notes in the chord. For a three stringed instrument, there was a lot of complex sound pouring out of this one, cigar-box or not. He also clearly had a lot of skill at it.

I stood and listened for a bit, then went and fetched the wife. After he'd finished playing, we struck up a conversation with the man and soon learned that the shop was kind of a side project to another job he and his wife had running a candy store in the mall itself. He made all the guitars himself, buying his cigar boxes from a lady in another state whose house was apparently filled floor to ceiling with boxes. I suggested that this seemed to be a case of a positive hoarder, though this is just my theory.

Now, I'd seen cigar box guitars before, but had never given them much thought. But the shop owner explained their significance in early blues in the Mississippi delta, as well as in Appalachia. Suddenly, owning such a historic and beautiful instrument (despite the fact that I can't yet play it) seemed a no-brainer.

"Which one do you want?" the wife asked. I picked out a guitar with a glossy red neck, made from a gorgeous wooden Manolete cigar box. He pulled it from the wall and played it for me to show me how great it sounded. It certainly did.

"Happy anniversary," the wife said.

I still haven't learned to play it, of course, but thing it's all around awesome all the same.

(TO BE CONTINUED...)

Anniversary Adventures (Part 3)

A few days before we left for Gatlinburg, which would make it a few days before our anniversary, I surprised the wife with her anniversary present. Now you might think that the trip to Gatlinburg was the present. And, originally, that had been the intention. But, as I chronicled back in August, the wife, as usual, figured it out barely two weeks after I'd made the reservation, and without seeing the credit card statement. I was not to be outdone, though. Two weeks before our actual anniversary I ordered her something a little bit smaller than a trip to Gatlinburg, but something she'd wanted for YEARS, but which we'd not really been able to afford. It was, perhaps, the perfect gift, but I can't take complete credit for thinking of it.

Each year in a marriage is supposed to be marked by a traditional gift made from a certain material. We all know that the 50th anniversary is supposed to be gold and 25th is silver, but without research it gets a bit more murky below that. We used to joke that the 5th year anniversary was probably something like paper plates, and this is not too far off, as it's wood. The wife and I haven't really paid any attention to these gift categories, though, but I decided to see what the 10 year mark gift was in order to find inspiration. Turns out it's tin or aluminum. Being only 2 weeks from the anniversary day, though, I decided to shop exclusively locally or via Amazon.com where I have free Amazon Prime trial through March. I did a search for "tin" and immediately found the perfect gift: a magnetic spice rack.

Now, I know what you're thinking, "Dude, that's hardly a romantic gift. I mean, kitchenware? Really?" To this I say, "Is too! So, shut it!" See, the wife is a very good cook and knows from spices beyond salt and pepper, having been trained by some Indian friends in their use. This being the case, our spice cabinet has three full shelves that are constantly glutted with jars of spices, not to mention the others that are stored in the freezer. A few years ago, back when we lived in Tri-Metro, the wife saw a magnetic spice rack set on Food Network and fell in love with it. The concept is pretty simple, consisting of a stainless steel sheet on which magnet-backed stainless steel spice tins can be adhered, each opening with a twist to allow for easy spice sprinkling. Trouble is, they're not exactly cheap and, being poor college students for nigh on the past decade, we could never quite justify the expense. Seeing it come up when I searched for tin, though, seemed like a good sign. (Never mind that there's neither tin nor aluminum in them, but merely the presence of the word "tin" in the description--I think I win on a technicality.)

I ordered it, hid it upon its arrival and waited. I knew I wanted to surprise her with it before we left for our trip, but could never find a good time to install it. The day it arrived, I was going to be out of town until late. The following day the wife had off, except for having to pop in to work, but she made me take her, so I couldn't put it up then. That afternoon, I had to go pick up my parents and sister for their visit and then she was around us all for the rest of the weekend. Then, on Sunday night, the wife announced she was popping out to Wally World to pick up a few things and left the rest of us watching TV. She'd been gone for 10 minutes before I realized my opportunity.

"I think I'm going to put up the spice rack," I told my sister, the only other person who knew about the gift. "I'm going to need help."

"Go for it," she said.

At that point, though, I would be extremely pressed for time, as Wally World is really just down the road. I nearly broke my ass running down the garage steps to fetch the rack and the tools I'd need to put it up. While I measured, eyeballed, leveled and pencil-marked the proper place for it on the wall above the stove--a space that had been crying out for something like this since we moved in--the sister and my step-mother tore all the plastic off of the spice tins. It was not a perfect installation, because the screw anchors for two of the bottom screws wouldn't sink into the wall properly and then buckled under my attempt to hammer them in. I wound up just installing the rest of the screws, deciding to come back for the others later. In the end, it looked fine. We chunked the tins onto it arranged them pleasingly, then fled back to the living room to continue our movie.

The wife came home, groceries in hand. She walked into the kitchen to put them away and then paused. I crept behind her and watched as she stood and stared at the shining tins of the spice rack. It was perfect and, more importantly, a complete surprise.

"But I didn't get anything for you," she said.

"This is for us," I said.

"The trip is for us," she said.

"That, too."

She would, however, get me back.

(TO BE CONTINUED...)

Anniversary Adventures (Part 2)

Arriving in Gatlinburg on Thursday evening meant we pretty much had an extra day on our hands for Friday that we wouldn't have had if things gone to our original plan. We thought this was awesome and soon headed out into the rainy Friday weather to find ourselves some breakfast, choosing a flapjack establishment that had caught our eye the previous evening. I don't know if this was one we had eaten at during our trip 10 years back, but the food and service were good and soon we were filled with flapjacks and bacon.

We looked over a few of the pamphlets advertising some of the shows available to see in Pigeon Forge and began making a list of things we'd like to do and see. But because we had this "extra" day on our hands, we decided to just take things at a leisurely pace. So often vacations can be even more hectic than everyday life, with deadlines to meet if you want to fit in all the things you want to do. As far as we could tell, though, our only real deadline was getting back to Borderland by 2p on Monday, so the vet didn't charge us an extra day for jailing our dogs. Our philosophy became, as the wife says, "If you feel froggy, jump."

After breakfast, we drove closer to the downtown area where we spotted a bead shop in one of the store-clusters present throughout downtown Gburg. The wife is a jewelry-maker in her few spare moments and adores nothing more than spending hours in bead stores imagining the potential things she will create. She warned me that I might as well leave her there unless I too wanted to look at beads. I did not, so I fled, but no other shops in that particular store cluster were open. I hoped this didn't bode ill for the weekend. During our previous visit to Gatlinburg, we'd found a great many of the stores and restaurants to be closed for the off-season and those that were open (the flapjack establishments) often closed after lunch. We'd been forced to eat more than one Gatlinburg meal in what has become known in our household as "the shitty Shoney's." I don't know if the place is still shitty, but we didn't have a good time there 10 years ago and were in no hurry to return. Turned out, though, that this particular shut-down shop cluster was one of the only such ones we saw during the trip. It was located on the outer edge of the touristy area, and as you approached the center of said area the shops were all open (at least, after 11a) and seemingly doing decent business.

Through the semi-rainy, blustery cold, I made my way past Cooter's Dukes of Hazzard Museum (presumably owned or endorsed by Ben Jones, who played the character) then the Ripley's Aquarium until I came to a multi-leveled mall we'd visited 10 years back. I seemed to recall a decent music store there and I quickly found it on the first level. They even had Beirut's "Gulag Orkestar" CD I'd been looking for. Further up the levels, I came to a tobacconist where I decided it would be prudent to purchase a cigar. I explained to the man that I don't regularly smoke cigars, but do have one on special occasions and this weekend certainly qualified. He led me into the humidor and graciously did not attempt to get me buy anything obscenely expensive, but instead directed me to some of their milder, starter-cigars in the $6 range. I could just see myself back at the cabin, standing on the rear deck, cigar in mouth, beer in hand, a snow-covered Smoky Mountain tableau spread before me, hottub at the ready, warm wife of 10 years at my side. My purchase of said cigar, however, was to eventually prove a fateful decision.

My next and more immediately demonstrable fateful decision came after I'd picked up the wife at the bead store and returned with her to the mall to wander. We came to the Pepper Palace, purveyor of all things hot sauce. One of their sauces is called the Hottest Sauce in the Universe and Pepper Palace has a challenge for it whereby if you take a taste of it and survive, they'll take your picture and put you on the online Wall of Flame. Now, this sauce is rated at merely 3,500,000 Scoville units and allegedly the hottest sauce chemically possible is around 16 million, so it's technically a misnomer. However, I didn't know any of that going into it. I just knew that my historically evil wife had challenged me to the task and I figured "How bad could it be?"

At first, I wasn't even interested in the photo part of it and was about to have a taste without alerting the clerk, but the wife insisted I let her know first. I'm glad of it, because let me tell you after downing a corn chip one corner of which was liberally dunked in the Hottest Sauce in the Universe, I deserve every bit of that picture. Hell, I deserve a T-shirt! At first bite, the sauce wasn't all that impressive. It was spicy, sure, but didn't immediately kick you in the stomach. The clerk just grinned at me and said, "It's a grower." That's when I realized that the sauce didn't need to kick me in the stomach, because it had already kicked me in the nuts. Squar'. And, just like getting kicked squar' in the nuts, the pain wasn't going to hit all at once, but would grow and grow and grow over the course of several minutes. By the time the clerk snapped my picture, it was all I could do not to bolt for the coin fountain bubbling nearby.

The clerk grinned in the wife's direction and said, "Yep, he's gonna be feeling that for a half-hour, I'd say."

"I'm gonna need something. Quick," I told the wife.

Naturally, the Pepper Palace didn't have jugs of milk at the ready, so I booked it for a hotdog place where I ordered the largest fountain drink Diet Coke they had and supped deep. It was sort of like throwing water on a grease fire. There was the briefest of subsidences of pain as the cool liquid crossed it, but then it flared up even taller.

True to the clerk's prediction, it took about half an hour for the pain to go away, though it did diminish to a dull and kind of enjoyable level after only 15 minutes or so. It might not truly be the Hottest Sauce in the Universe, but it's about as hot as I want to get.

(TO BE CONTINUED...)

Anniversary Adventures (Part 1)

This past weekend, the wife and I made good on my formerly secret plan from last August to return to our honeymoon cabin in Gatlinburg, TN, for a mini-vacation in celebration of our 10th wedding anniversary. And while the weekend was largely an enjoyable one filled with great food and fine spirits (not to mention other typical honeymoon activity--AWW YEAHHHHHH!) it was not entirely without incident.

The plan as I'd conceived it was to pack the car up Friday morning, drop the dogs off at Doggie Jail, go eat a leisurely breakfast and then hit the road for G-burg, with the intent of arriving around the time of check-in for our cabin. The only major roadblock to this plan, however, was the impending blizzard that was scheduled to hit Borderland Friday morning and bury it under what was rumored to be a sheet of treacherous black ice. Thursday afternoon, the wife phoned to suggest that it might behoove us to depart a day early to avoid the risk that we might be trapped at home altogether. Sounded like a plan to me. I figured we could get as far as Bristol and get a hotel for the night, but she was all for going the full distance and checking into our cabin for an extra day. I got to packing and made arrangements for the dogs to head to Doggie Jail a day early.

We didn't leave town until after dark and didn't make it to Pigeon Forge until 10:30 or so, but I thought we'd made excellent time. The rainy weather for driving wasn't the greatest, but at least it wasn't icy.

The trouble with being away from a touristy spot such as the Gatlinburg area is that over the course of a decade they have a tendency to expand and shape-shift in the interim. This was especially true for Pigeon Forge, which had apparently decided that it no longer wanted to be a quaint little Appalachian town with Dollywood as its only major attraction, but instead aspired to be Myrtle Beach with every bit of the tourist trap crap that comes with it. Whereas 10 years ago there were some touristy places, such as gold and gem panning stations and a few miniature golf places, now there were seemingly dozens of sprawling theaters (one of which was impressively built upside down), gigantic prefab castles, and a full-size, building-in-progress replica of the Titanic. The place was almost unrecognizable.

We drove very slowly through the rain-soaked streets Pigeon Forge (average speed limit for the area is 35 mph, though it sometimes dips as low as 15), then slowly eased along the parkway at 45 mph (actually slower in some places, because the four lane had been reduced to two lanes because a chunk of a hillside had fallen and buried a section of the southbound side of it the day before) and on into Gatlinburg.

Our directions to the cabin led us through Gatlinburg and onto the outskirts of town along route 321. We noticed that this area had seen quite a bit more expansion in past 10 years as well, with more stores and businesses present. By then it was nearly 11:30 at night and we were ready to get to the cabin. Unfortunately, the directions for getting to the actual cabin had changed, taking us along a three mile stretch of road leading through the Arts and Crafts community before intersecting with Buckhorn road, the road off of which our cabin was supposed to be located. We could have reached Buckhorn via 321 directly, but we decided to take the suggested route instead. Unfortunately, we soon learned that the directions to the cabin, which had been written by the owners of the cabin, were factually incorrect. From the intersection with Buckhorn, the directions said it was 1.2 miles before we reached the road on which our cabin was located. In actuality, it was .5 miles, but because we were obediently following the readings of the odometer, we drove right past the road. And because we were coming at it from the opposite direction to a decade ago, we had no hope of recognizing it when we saw it--particularly since the road sign for that road was hidden in shadow, even beyond it being a dark and stormy night. We had to retrace our steps twice and finally go road by road by road looking at all the signs before we finally found it. And even when we found the correct road, I had trouble believing it led to "our" cabin, as in my memory "our" cabin had been located at the very end of a secluded, dirt road off of a scarcely-traveled rural route, with only one or two other cabins around. It was the very sort of place where you could walk around the exterior deck nekkid, as newlyweds are apt to do, with no fear of anyone seeing anything. The road as we found it that night, though, was paved, and lined with enough homes that we could see it was now practically a subdivision. Was this really the same cabin? Then we reached a familiar steep slope of road, one which my 1985 Chevy Caprice Classic automatic had been hard pressed to climb a decade back without manual down-shifting, and soon we were around the corner and there stood "our" little cabin--an A-frame tucked onto the side of the steep hill. Other than a new roof, its exterior looked pretty much as it had when we'd left it in 2000 and, other than some rearranged furniture, it looked pretty much the same within. Being nearly midnight, we soon tucked into the log-framed king-size bed, and snuggled up in the first bed we'd ever slept in as man and wife.

(TO BE CONTINUED...)

Laundrovations

Once again we've embarked upon a home improvement project. We actually have a handful of them planned, some which can wait `til summer. Among our scheduled upheavals are redoing the OTHER bathroom, redoing the auxiliary sink area for the bathroom we already redid last year, and doing some rock facing repair outside. But the one we chose to tackle over the past week was a fairly quick one in which we would redo the laundry room. While not the ugliest room in the house (the title of which still belongs to the guest bedroom with its hideous wallpaper--oops, there's another project for the list) it could be a close second due to its sky blue painted walls and peeling vinyl floor. The plan was to get the washer and dryer and storage shelves out, take out the floor, put down ceramic tile, repaint, and put all the stuff back in there before my parents show up next week or before the dirty laundry topples over and kills us.

As much as a pain in the ass as redoing our bathroom had been, almost every step of redoing the laundry room has gone very smoothly. We'd budgeted thrice as much time as we normally would have, because that tended to be how long everything took with last year's project, but we almost never had to use the other 2/3 of time. Neat. We even bought a tile wet saw to speed up the tile cutting process. (Actually, we bought two wet saws, but the first one, a Craftsman, broke before we even had a chance to turn it on. The plastic guide bar that is supposed to clamp across its surface proved to have a clampy bit that instantly shattered when the wife tried to install it. We decided paying that much for a power tool that would break before we could even use it was not something we were willing to put up with, so back the whole thing went.)

Once the tile was laid and grouted, we had to come up with a complimentary color to paint the walls. The tile was whiteish sandy colored (I can't recall the actual name of the color, but it had white in it somewhere), but also had faint hints of a brown and a mauvey sort of color veined into it.

"Seems like we could use mauve," the wife said. "Only lighter." I was skeptical, cause if you lighten mauve, you get another color entirely. Plus, the first "mauve" she picked out was really more of a brown almost exactly the shade of a Wendy's Frosty. The wife soon assigned the task of picking a color to me, as I'm the guy who's had impressive success with the last two color choices for our house. Even I had trouble with it, though, and wound up buying five test cans of paint from Lowes before landing back on Twilight Mauve. It's actually a lighter shade of mauve, which turns out to be possible to achieve after all. (I know, I know, it's still mauve, but I promise it works. Oh, and I know, I know, it has twilight in the title which is also irritating given the images from popular fiction and culture that name now conjures, but I promise it works.)

"Get a gallon of kitchen and bath enamel," the wife said, two nights ago, before I went to pick up our paint. And a gallon of white kitchen and bath was what I did pick out from the paint aisle at Lowes and then haul over to the counter where they mix the color. The kid walked over to me and I pushed the can in his direction, my paint chip lying on top of it.

"I need a gallon of Twilight Mauve," I said.

The kid picked up the paint chip, then looked up at me with an expression I interpreted as saying, "Twilight Mauve? Really?" However, what he actually said was, "What sort of finish do you want?"

This threw me, because I was under the impression that the finish was determined by the type of paint you were attempting to mix color into--in my case Kitchen and Bathroom enamel. I don't buy a lot of paint, though, so I usually have enough time to forget all I ever knew about buying paint by the time its time to buy more, so this could be some additional part of the process I had forgotten.

"What are my choices?" I asked. Kid listed a number of choices, none of which was kitchen and bathroom. I chose satin finish as that was what all the test paints had come in and was not too shiny. A warning bell still tingled in my head, though, and as I began walking away to go look at some other supplies, I looked back to make sure that the kid had indeed picked up my can of kitchen & bathroom enamel to use. He picked it up, so I turned off the warning bells and didn't give it a second thought when I took the gallon can he passed to me a few minutes later.

Of course, it wasn't until we painted the entire laundry room that the wife announced she didn't think it was kitchen & bath enamel paint in the first place.

"Well that's what I bought," I said.

"Are you sure?"

"Yes, I'm sure. I picked the can of kitchen & bath enamel from the shelf and took it to the dude to color."

"This is not kitchen & bath," she said. "It's not shiny enough."

"That's because it has a satin finish," I said.

"I don't think that's how it works. Where's the can?"

Now here's where I did myself a GIGANTIC favor and just kept my my damn mouth shut. My my impulse, you see, was to snottily and with tones of defensiveness, reply, "It's in the garage. It'll be the can that says `kitchen & bath enamel' on it."

This I did not do, A) because it's an asshole kind of statement to make, designed to chastise my wife for seemingly doubting my word, and which would definitely have escalated into a fight; and B) there was always the possibility that I was wrong. Being wrong would have been far FAR worse than a mere fight, because an unbelievably asshole statement like that followed up with such a colossal failure of accuracy would live long in everyone's memory, be recounted in family stories for YEARS to come, and haunt my every step, perhaps even beyond death. So instead of shaking the asshole stick, I wisely went to fetch the can itself to see what it really was. The label on it read "interior satin finish."

"You're right, babe, it's not kitchen and bath," I said.

Despite it being completely the wrong paint finish, it still looks great, as does the floor. And, fortunately, I got the major part of the painting done in an afternoon, so we were able to move the washer and dryer back in and tackle some of the mountain of laundry that had piled up in the intervening days.

All right, no one is to stone ANYONE until I blow this whistle. Even... and I want to make this absolutely clear... even if they do say, "Jehovah. "

I left the house to run a few errands, yesterday, and left the dogs outside to their own devices. I didn't even bother to put Sadie's "shock" collar on her, because she knows well her boundaries and only rarely ventures past them. (Plus, if she's not wearing it, I can hardly forget to take it off of her and shock her on the way down the driveway.) Moose, for the most part, orbits her and has not been seen to stray far from her side, unless it's to go hide in the mud beneath the back deck.

Upon my return, I found both dogs waiting for me at the top of the driveway, as though they'd been sitting there the whole time planning my welcome. I gathered up my grocery bags and we all went into the house through the interior door of the garage.

Around 20 minutes later, I noticed something odd with the back door of the house, the one leading out onto the deck. Crammed behind the handle of the door were two rolled up mini-magazine-sized pamphlets. I opened the door, already knowing full well what they would be.

"What are these?" I asked Sadie, holding up the November issue of The Watchtower and October's Awake! Sadie saw what I held and then looked away with a guilty air. "What Are These?" I repeated. Again, she dropped her head in shame.

"You let Jehovah's Witnesses get to the back door," I said sternly. "Moosey, I can understand, because he's new and he likes everybody. But YOU..." I said, waving the magazines at her, "YOU let them get all the way to the back door."

Then I noticed that I'd actually left the back door unlocked when I went out. I gasped.

"Jehovah's Witnesses could be in this house right now!" I said. "They could be lurking in the house right now, waiting to jump out and... and witness to me!"

Sadie lay down on the floor and looked suitably wracked with guilt. She was probably regretting not simply pulling the magazines out of the door and letting Moose chew them up.

"For shame," I added.

That the visitors at my back door were Jehovah's Witnesses was not actually the issue. I was mainly putting on a show for the dog's benefit because it struck me as funny for their appearance to BE a problem. The fact is, though, I don't so much mind visits from Jehovah's Witnesses or most other religions, but I also don't tend to invite them in to discuss religion either. My own religious views often conflict with theirs so the discussions I've entertained in the past have quickly degenerated into the three of us (there are always two of them) just conflicting at one another and moving no one's view even a smidge'.

No, the real issue here was that Sadie had allowed strangers to reach my unlocked BACK door. The front door would have been fine, as that's the door that strangers to a home SHOULD be visiting in the first place. I mean, really, isn't it a bit rude to just walk around to the rear door of someone's home uninvited? I would have been pissed off about it if I'd been home to meet them and would likely have pointed this out to them. But to the back door they had gone and Sadie had, apparently, not even attempted to eat them.

Now, I'm not suggesting that she should have attempted to eat them. However, she is an imposing enough dog at 80 plus pounds, with a bark twice as powerful as most male dogs her size, so she could have at least stood in the strangers' path and given them pause to consider whether or not she might eat them. Nope, they'd made it from my driveway, across the 30 feet of boardwalk leading to the back deck (as opposed to the 35 feet of nice clean boardwalk leading to the front door), had time to carefully deposit their magazines behind the handle of the back door, and, presumably, made it safely back to their vehicle. I didn't even see any scraps of clothing that might have indicated a hasty retreat with canine in hot, slavering pursuit.

Oh, I'm sure she barked at them, as she barks at everyone, but I rather expected more of a defensive front from her. Then again, maybe she had guarded the walk to the front door after all, and left Moose to guard the back one where he would have been completely ineffective. Or, maybe one of the Jehovah's Witnesses had cornered her in the front while the other snuck around the back. I don't know.

Regardless, it appears our fearless guard dog, who is impressively brave when it comes to defending us from the ever-present threat of vicious, rabid deer, isn't so good when it comes to smiling, peaceful strangers. Not sure if that's a good thing or bad thing. I guess, instead, what I should really be thankful for is that I don't have a lawsuit on my hands, filed by a mauled Jehovah's Witness or two.

He doesn't know he's cute or anything.

Anna Tolien? I think I went out with her once.

The wife and I have determined for ourselves that our puppy Moose (at right) is not a "damn little chow chow" as has been suggested. The chow features have failed to manifest, beyond a slight spotting at the tip of his tongue. However, we've still been doubtful as to his alleged status as a Leonberger/St. Bernard mix. While he has some Leonberger features, he also has some definite German shepherdy features too, though his flopped forward ears would seem to indicate he wasn't full blooded German shepherd.

At some point while watching TV, a breed of dog called an Anatolian Shepherd flashed across our screen and it struck us that it looked an awful lot like an adult version of Moose might. We quickly dashed to the innanet and looked it up.

Check it.

This is a picture from an Anatolian site. Same black face, same coloration, same curly tail, same love of sticks. The more we read, the more this breed (or a mixture therewith) was the better fit for Moose's ancestry. And from everything we've been reading, like Leonbergers, Anatolian Shepherds are supposed to be great dogs, not to mention exceptional guard dogs. They're also about as enormous as Leonbergers, which makes the wife happy, and with no drooling to speak of, which makes me happy.

Meanwhile, he's really come a long way as far as his potty training is concerned. I think we had at least three consecutive weeks without any piddling in the house and only one or two poop incidents. Mostly, when he needs to go, he either goes to the back door and looks at us until we notice him there, or he comes and finds us and barks at us until we ask him if he needs to go potty at which point he barks louder and/or tries to bite us in the face. The later is discouraged, the former encouraged. However, his efforts don't always work so well when we're asleep.

We've been encouraging both dogs to stay off of our bed. This is not easy, because they LOVE our bed and are fond of sleeping in it with us, if they can get away with it. However, beyond the matter of shedded dog hair and stank residue in the bed, there's the matter of massive and soon to be massive dogs hogging up all the leg room in our bed while we're trying to sleep. We could banish Sadie from the bed fairly well, but without a working crate (due to the fact that Moose destroyed the zipper in his "nite nite" collapsible crate) it was more difficult to keep moose out of it.

So not long after Christmas, we bought them both dog beds stuffed with recycled memory foam shredding. These we've stationed beside our bed and have been enforcing their use. So far this has worked surprisingly well. And the timing of Moose's potty training success finally kicking in around the same time was good. This way, we could sleep through the night with the dogs on their beds and didn't have to worry about puddles in the morning.

Two nights ago, Moose drank a lot of water before bed. At some point in the wee hours, he woke up, had to go potty and began trying to wake one of us up to let him out. Unfortunately, we were solidly asleep and the first we heard of any of this activity was when Sadie snarled after Moose crawled too close to her bed. We snuggled in and were on our way back to sleep when I heard a disturbing sound.

"Why do I hear running water?" I said. And, sure enough, it sounded exactly as if someone had left a faucet on in a steady pour. Immediately, we both thought of the pipes. With night time temps hovering between zero and ten for the past few days, it wasn't inconceivable that we'd had a pipe burst. I thought, Oh, please, let it just be Moosey peeing on the floor.

I leaned up and looked over the edge of the bed. In the low light from the night light in the hall, I could see Moose's little brown body directly beside the bed.

"Moose? Are you pottying on the floor?" I asked him. As I swung my legs out of the bed, Moose turned of his "faucet" and hauled ass for the back door. I followed and let him outside then went back to clean up the mess. I couldn't even be mad at him, because I knew he had probably tried to wake us up before succumbing to the pressure. And from the amount on the floor, his bladder had probably been at capacity.

We're pretty sure this was a one off event. Mostly, he's been sleeping through the night, so we think the days of having to get up with him three times are, at last, done.