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.