You Can't Do This With a Digital Camera

Remember when you used to be able to find a roll of film lying around, with no idea what pictures it might contain.  Yup.  Me too.  I got to revisit those days.  I dug out my Contax 139 Quartz SLR camera (Google It if you are under twenty).  I wanted to take some close-up pictures of the birds on my feeder and my digital camera doesn't have a big enough zoom.

Hey, check it out.  There's a roll of film inside.  Costco develops film.

Sadness at the subject of the pictures.  Happiness at what nice pictures they are.  Here are the best of the bunch.

We adopted Buster when he was about three years old.  He had been an outdoor cat (Really? An outdoor Himalayan Persian?  Who thinks that is a good idea?), and was not very socialized, in addition to being covered in serious knots.  We spent about eight hours cutting out the knots (didn't help with the socialization) but then, over the next couple years he really mellowed out and became a very cool cat.  He was a flame point Himalayan and he developed a wasting disease (probably developed while he was roaming the woods of Bellingham).  We couldn't figure out what it was or how to treat it and eventually he was wasting away so badly that we had to have him put to sleep.  I cried and T. couldn't go with me as she was too upset.

T got Simone as a kitten in Iowa. When T and I met Simone was staying with friends in Iowa while T got settled in California. When Simone and I first met T flew to Iowa and brought her back to California to live with us.  She was a wonderful cat.  Very social, wanted to be on your lap at all times, slept on your feet so you couldn't roll over in the night. She was a seal point Himalayan and made me fall in love with the Himalayan Persian breed.

Simone went into a coma at age fifteen and I had her put to sleep.  I cried again.

Dark glasses help when you visit the vet in these situations.

Both cats are buried in my garden.  I miss them both.

Cho Oyu is a blue point Himalayan and was not born when these pictures were taken.  She is happily living in my home and will be two years old in about three months.  Maybe someday I'll find a roll of undeveloped film and blog about how wonderful she was.

The Benefits of a Public Education

So my sister Alice goes to stay in our family cabin over in Point Roberts for a week. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Pacific Northwest, Point Roberts is a little spur of land that belongs to the US but, through an accident of geography and politics, is completely isolated from the rest of the United States (insert snide comment about Washington, DC here). To get there you either take a boat or drive through Canada. It is, however, a part of Whatcom County, the same county she in which she lives.

While in Point Roberts, her debit card gets put on hold/suspended/frozen. She makes it through the rest of the week, probably living on frozen peas or something, and then, upon her return to Bellingham, drops by to visit her friendly local banker (are they still called bankers if they work for a credit union? Anyway...)

The advice she is given is...

wait for it...

she should probably contact the credit union before she travels so they don't flag her credit card activity while she's gone.

What? Anyone read the part where Point Roberts is in the SAME COUNTY as Bellingham?

Really. Like the "sugar coated Satan sandwich", you just can't make this stuff up. It's great.

A Careful Karma Balancing Act

So the other day a really attractive doormat just appears on my front stoop.

I'm walking out to go to work and there it is. I'm racking my brain trying to figure out where this could have come from and why someone would randomly put a doormat by my door. Even more wondrously, it had an A on it, which, for those of you who know me, has significance.

(Now, you might think that the chances of a randomly selected doormat having the first letter of your last name should be 1:26 but if you thought that you would have to make certain assumptions. If you were trying to guess the first letter of a random person's last name, some letters are less likely to show up.)

Anyway, back to my uninteresting, except to me, story, I called my sister Alice to see if she knew anything about it. Deny, deny, deny. Even more strange. Until I mentioned that it was really nice, at which point she claimed responsibility. I assumed she was only claiming responsibility because I liked it, so our conversation pretty much went at cross purposes from there until I stopped, backed up about three minutes, and clarified her responses.

End result, I like the doormat, it looks good on my front step, and I got to use the word "stoop" in a blog.

Hijacked blogs

Now don't get me wrong. I love my sister. We talk all the time. But sometimes the expression "One of these days, Alice" pops to mind.

I have a food blog. It has recipes. So what does "Alice" do? She hijacks my ramblings blog and posts a recipe suggestion. My rambling blog now has recipes. It is ruined. Probably forever. I think I'll go back to just listening to the voices and not type them onto the interweb at all. Or maybe I'll just confuse the issue further and post up ramblings on the recipe blog. Choices, choices. Hmmph!

Useful Tool or Weapon of Mass Destruction?

Not for the first time I am struck by the differing attitudes between Canadians (at least some of my close relations) and Americans (at least most of my friends).

At a birthday party for my father (Happy 75th, once again, Dad), I hand him my pocket knife to open the packing tape on his birthday gift from Mum.

Here is is with a ruler included for size reference.

This knife is a high quality folding pocket knife manufactured by Camillus, back when they still made their knives in the United States. I bought it by mail when I was fifteen and thirty years later it is still as useful as it ever was. For the record, I have used this knife to: open packages; cut fruit, eat steak, turn screws, cut hoses for automotive repair jobs, whittle kindling, and other numerous and all legal actions over the course of thirty years.

About fifteen years ago I was pulled over at the Canadian border for a random check. They found the knife in my pocket and wanted to know "do you have any other weapons that you didn't declare". Canadian law does not define this or any other knife (with few limited exceptions) as a weapon unless carried or used with the intent to harm.

This weekend two members of my family referred to my knife as "the weapon" while it was out for the purpose of package opening.

What is it with Canadians and pocket knives? Apparently anything bigger than the little teeny Swiss Army knife blade is a weapon and anyone carrying it has some sort of issue. My American friends and acquaintances, otoh, would probably assume that if you had a pocket knife it would have a blade length of about 3" and be heavy enough duty to actually use.

Happy Mother's Day, Mother

What do you do for your mother when she doesn't like breakfast?

:)

Answer: You show up and help her cater a party that was scheduled before she broke her arm and before her youngest daughter, who was supposed to do the catering, hurt her arm becoming the next roller derby queen.