Beer snob

 

Finally the true sign of the times has arrived.  I wasn’t convinced that the economy was in trouble until I read the latest news.  Sure gas prices are on the rise.  Ok, food prices are increasing.  Some people are even considering public transportation to get to work. But the last straw for me was when I read that some people are willing to lower their standards in beer just to save money.

 

My jaw dropped.  This must be serious.  Screw a recession, there must be a down right depression to cause people to drink Bud, Miller, Coors, or heaven forbid, Pabst blue ribbon!

 

Can you imagine how strapped a person has to be for money to change from a good quality micro brew to miller light?  Can you imagine the depravity that would even initiate such a sacrifice? 

 

Let’s examine the circumstances behind such depravity.  For me to lower my standards in this way I would have to have already removed every luxury spending item in my budget.  No desert, no steak, no chicken, in fact I would have to be down to eating noodles and vegetables grown in my yard.  Fuel and driving in general would already be replaced with riding my bike to work 10 miles each way, up hill both ways, in the snow.  Then I would give up cable TV, and go back to a dialup for my internet access. Entertainment would be down to listening to the radio and picking up aluminum cans on the road sides. At home the water heater would be set for 98.6 degrees, and the home heater would be set to 50.  The AC would be disconnected all together.  All laundry would be dried on a line in the back yard.  Only then, would I conceder reducing my taste in beer. 

 

My coffee of course would not suffer in the least; coffee is at least as important as beer. They are after all two sides of the same coin.  Coffee and Beer are the yin and yang of the beverage world.

 

So people who claim to have changed their beer brands according to disposable income are not true beer drinkers.  They are at best being dishonest with themselves and at worst hypocrites who have no taste in beer and only drink quality micro brews for the appearance of having taste.  If someone likes the taste of Budweiser or Miller, that’s fine with me.  Just don’t say you love some micro brew then run home and drink a Bud light to save a buck.  You obviously haven’t sacrificed enough of your disposable income yet.

 

Even worse in a related story it appears that there may be a connection between cheap beer and STDs.  This is just another un-intended consequence of higher prices. 

 

When will this madness end?

 

Don’t even get me started on Whiskey.

Cat entertainment.

Cats entertain us, and we entertain cats.  Cats know exactly how to entertain us.  It’s we who seem to struggle to understand how to entertain cats. All the toys that they sell in pet stores are a waste of money. Don’t be fooled.  We are the ones who are entertained by cat toys.  All a cat has to do is make believe that a scrap of paper, or small mouse shaped toy is real and we are entertained for hours.  Do you really think that cats play with toys for their own amusement?  To them this is a deadly training simulation.  What cats find entertaining is almost beyond our understanding. 

 

Here are some examples of what I suspect to be entertaining for cats:  These are personal observations, but can be looked upon as examples of typical behavior.

 

• Staring at a wall until it drives me crazy, thus forcing me to react in some way, like throwing a pillow at the damn cat.  
• Laying on a stair step, posing as a tripping hazard, and then acting totally appalled when this actually causes me to trip.
• Cuddling in my lap during a movie then for no apparent reason, and with lightning speed, jumps off using my crotch as a springboard. 
• Bringing a giant humming bird moth to bed to play with at 3am, oops, it got away. 

 

The list goes on.  I believe that cats do this simply to watch our reactions; if cats could laugh they would immediately make the transition from pet to pest.  I believe that this is why monkeys make poor pets. 

 

So since turn about is fair play, here is what I find amusing about cat behavior.  This is partially for their benefit.  I believe that cats surf the internet when we are away, I hope they find this post.

           

We have an elderly cat named Ursula whose defining characteristic is sleeping, eating, and throwing up.  Rip-van-Bulimia.  She also has a disconcerting habit of using her claws to pull food from her dish and eat it off her paw.  If she drops any she lets it lie there on the ground and won’t attempt to pick it up or eat it. One of her favorite sports is throwing up and seeing if we can find the mess with out bare feet late at night.  But that’s her entertainment not mine.  I am obviously getting off track.

 

Ursula seems unable to get warm, so she has found that the best place to sleep is on one of our computer monitors.  Connors is the favorite since it puts out the most heat.  About once a week she falls asleep so deeply that she literally falls off the monitor onto my son’s keyboard tray.  I am sure that is the high point of Connors online gaming experience.  I am sorry to say that I have never witnessed this; if I had I would still be laughing.

Phoebe is out resident lap rocket.  Her second favorite sport is to climb inside the walls.

The wall where our TV and stereo equipment is located is hollow with an access hole in the side.  The cats discovered this space a while back and love to explore behind the wall.  After a while they found that they can climb up to the top of the wall where there is a hole that leads to the drop ceiling in the library. 

 

This kind of sounds uppity or like we are rich or something, but it’s just an average size room adjoining the guestroom where we keep a few bookshelves and computers.  That makes it even sound worse. 

 

Anyway periodically I hear one of our cats pussyfooting around inside the ceiling.  Phoebe has been gaining a little weight.  I didn’t really think about how fat she is getting until yesterday when directly over my head a ceiling tile split into about five pieces, raining down on my laptop and desk.  The tile pieces knocked over my glow in the dark zombie play set and tipped over my scale model 1967 VW bus.  I looked up and there was Phoebe trying to do a chin-up on the remaining T-bar to get up to the next ceiling tile.  I was surprised that a cat so heavy could do a chin up.  Her expression was priceless.  She managed to make it and disappear into the ceiling.  I called for her but all I got in return was a growl and a hiss if I got too close.  So I gave her some distance and hoped that more ceiling tiles don’t give way.  Time to ease back on the cat food.

 

 

The last one is Willow.  She is the youngest and least experienced cat in our household.  She is also the one that tries to be oh so cute most of the time.  This works on my wife, but I am not fooled.  She is the cat that I suspect nuked my fire suit.  Yes, my fire suit (Pyro safety protection) fell on to the ground from its normal hanging position in the garage right next to my torch, helmet, hearing protection, and fuse assortment.  Not five feet away are two litter boxes.  It’s always the cutest and most innocent cat that is guilty of the most devious actions.  She must have been the one.  I am not talking about a small amount.  What I saw doesn’t classify as a tinkle.  She hosed down my fire suit.  What did I do to deserve this kind abuse?  Was it all the laps up and down the stairs with the laser pointer?  Maybe the time when I waited for her sniff the sprinkler head before turning on the water?  Maybe it those dry nights where static electric sparks played a key role in saying good night?  I don’t know for sure, but I guess I deserve a little cat pee on my fire suit. 

 

One thing that I learned about washing a fire suit, it’s the drying that really gets you.  The noise is horrendous, like a skeleton throwing a fit on a tin roof.  Next was the untangling, everything on my fire suit is Velcro.  Strong Velcro, the entire thing was a wad of Velcro and metal clasps.

 

Willow followed me up the stairs, into the garage and watched me hang up the suit.  She doesn’t say Meow. She never says Meow.  She is, for some reason, limited to making a Moo or Meh sound. She looked up at my fire suit and made a little Mo sound.  It sounded like she was sorry, but I knew better, she was disappointed because she couldn’t pee that high off the ground.

 

Meh?

Moo?

 

I am sure she found this whole thing quite entertaining.

 

 

-pf

Changed the layout

 

Well, incase you haven’t noticed I changed the layout.  I am not sure if I like the new layout but I am sure that I needed a change.  I have had the same layout since I started this blog in October 2006.  The change was long over due.

 

While the look is changing the content, for better or worse, won’t change a hoot.  I will continue to write about things that I do, people I meet, and stuff that enters my brain.  “Be careful what you put in your head, as you will never ever get it out” I wish I knew who said that.  It applies to most of the things I do, and a lot of places I visit on the internet.

 

I guess you could say that my interests are eclectic, you could even say weird.  What you can’t say is that they are exaggerated.  I enjoy being absurd for the sake of proving a point, but I don’t tell fish stories.  Anyone who knows me personally knows that if I say “I flung a coconut 130 yards and almost hit a duck” that is exactly what happened.  I have witnesses.

 

I have tackled, or tickled the following subjects:

Cats, aliens, computers, zombies, movies, Volkswagens, controls, air conditioning, rockets, fireworks, guns, coffee cups, Steampunk, alcohol, NASA, sporks, monkeys, clowns, and D&D. 

 

I would like to explore over the next few months:

The Democrat convention in Denver, The libertarian convention in Denver, Pyrotechnic convention in Gillette Wyoming, Deep thoughts about why some people piss me off while others are nearly invisible.  Why machines are better than people.  Why people last longer than most machines.  Little known facts about flounders.  And why I feel compelled to keep writing this crap. 

 

And much, much more.

 

One of the things I really enjoy “Blogging” is the community that it generates.  In a virtual way, I have met people across the world who I would have never known about in any other medium.  It’s like having pen pals from everywhere at once.  I have found that a blogroll is kind of contagious.  I still get a thrill when I find myself on a stranger’s blogroll.  Its especially fun to navigate other blogrolls and find other people you know.  It’s like meeting someone you know while on vacation.  What are the odds? 

 

I get to post about anything I damn well please, yet I find myself constrained.  Not through any kind of censorship, but due to something I learned while taking a writing class.  I had an English teacher who really made an impact on me.  She is an interesting lady, irritating and quite daft but interesting.  I believe that all English teachers are a bit daft.  I blame it on the language.  Anyway the concept that really stuck with me was the idea that you have to write to be read.  Considering your audience is a major part of how to convey ideas.  This of course didn’t mean a thing to me at first.  I didn’t know who my audience was, so I started writing with my brother in mind.  This is a really scary concept if you knew my brother. Saying that he is a better writer than I am is like saying that Bill Gates makes more money than I do.

 

Then an interesting thing started to happen.  I found that a number of people started reading my blog.  So I wrote more.  This caused the quality slip in favor of quantity.  However at the same time I was taking English composition classes.  So it may be that I was actually improving while paying less attention, learning to write better while at the same time producing poor quality posts.  This probably doesn’t make much sense but a lot of things don’t. 

 

I find a modicum of comfort in that..

 

So to make a short post even longer, I changed the theme and removed a few widgets.  Let me know what you think. 

No not you. 

You comment enough, I am speaking to the other ones who read my blog but don’t post comments.  I know you’re out there.  Out of 21,000 hits and 200 comments I probably only have about 10 people who ever put out the energy to post a comment. 

 

You know who you are.

 

-pf