Mishap....

I recently learned that my cat, Kathman (short for Kathmandu), is part Bengal cat. This is a relatively new breed (about 20 years or so) that came about via mixing the small, wild, Asian Leopard cat with a domestic like the Burmese, Abyssinian, or, possibly, whatever seemed attractive at the time. They're the best of both worlds, in my opinion - intelligent, loving domestic cats that have an air of the exotic.

Bengal cats have all kinds of interesting traits, and researching this info gave me greater insight into the lovable quirks my own cat has, such as 'herding' me to the cupboard with the cat food when he's hungry, ambushing me when I walk by, splashing all the water out of his water bowl, once joining me in the tub, and often trying to enter the shower. Bengal cats have an affinity toward water, it appears.

In some of the reading I learned that a number of owners often will harness their cats and take them walking, because they've got an apparently insatiable appetite for exploration - especially when it comes to trees. This would explain why he likes to perch on the high steps going upstairs at home.

So, I prepared him with the topical anti-flea and tick stuff, and got a harness and one of those snazzy little self-recoiling leash things, and we set off to explore the backyard. Lately, he's been looking out of the window and coming to the door when I go in or out. When he first came to live with me, he was terrified of the outdoors. I thought his curiosity might be peaked by summertime and seeing all of the activity outside.

First off, I carried him out into the backyard. My thought was getting him and the leash thing all tangled up in the deck rails if he decided to take a route other than the stairs to get to the yard. I took him over to the giant old maple tree, and he slunk around a bit - climbed a bit - generally seemed happy to explore, if a bit timidly.

Then, something piqued his interest. There is a tomcat in the neighborhood that I desperately despise but can do nothing about. Apparently this skank has been spraying along the side of my deck, and Kathman picked up the scent. In a flash, it was like an entirely different personality erupted. He started bounding left and right, in and out of the viney undergrowth, howling, growling, and hissing. I had to unhook him because he'd tangled himself up in the leash, and figured I'd take him inside - enough excitement for the day.

When we got inside, I discovered the bonus to our adventure - he'd been hopping around in some sort of nettle-like undergrowth, and was covered with millions of little velcro-like seeds the size of bb's. I mean MILLIONS. He was also panting - audibly (loudly!), tongue out and all. So, I pushed my thoughts of taking evening strolls down the sidewalk with my perfectly mild-mannered cat into the back of my mind, and set to try and de-nettle Kathman.

He'd had enough of me by that time. Wouldn't let me come close to him for the rest of the evening. Ironically, I was also trying a new feeding routine with him that day. Since he came to live with me, he has literally inhaled his dinner. He's perfectly healthy, but maybe from causal factors predating entering my life, he literally opens his mouth like a snake unhinges his lower jaw and scoops up his food like a front-end loader. The problem is, he starts pleading for more food (and he's borderline beginning a weight problem). Then, probably because he ingests so much air by eating this way, he gets gassy after eating. Not the typical kind of pet gassy - but burpy! Which is pretty funny.

At any rate, I learned that by putting his food on a plate, instead of in a bowl, it causes him to pick up and eat each piece of food, and eliminates the scoopability factor.

So, from Kathman's perspective, it was a pretty horrible day.

"Yeah, a real winner. First, my woman tied me up in this horrible thing, and then actually carried me outside. Where the squirrels and rabbits, and for chrissakes, even the birds could see my human toting me like some newborn. Then I smelled that catbastard from next door and got really riled up, looking for a fight. Instead of letting me go take care of business, my human - dammit - picked me up again!! - and brought me inside. I had all these neat little prizes stuck to me. But, it was feeding time, so my human could redeem herself. Instead, she added insult to injury by putting my food on a goddam plate! I was so freakin' hungry - rage makes you that way - and here I had to eat my dinner piece by piece, like some raccoon!! Bad enough I wasn't eating that catbastard from next door instead of those little fake-prey-clumps. But to make me have to pick up each one was just too much. So I gave the human the cold shoulder all night. She kept trying to pick my prizes off my fur! Don't know what's with her, but I'm going to give her a wide berth for a few days. She needs a hobby.”

I've Decided. And the destination is......

Morocco!

I've been before so have a good idea for an itinerary, except this time I'll be routing through Paris, which will be a nice twist.

Will keep you posted....

Go to ___________!!

I have some vacation time in September blocked, but can't decide where to go. I've had several ideas, but they've been all over the map, literally. I want to go to a place with the following criteria:

• visually interesting - lots going on (photo frenzy opportunity)
• has cultural appeal
• has nature appeal
• has a touch of danger appeal (encountering a bear, falling off a mountain, encountering interesting/scary people)

So, I have a few places in mind that I'll list here, in no particular order. To make things interesting, I'll solicit ideas here and see what shakes out. Call it the purest form of potential adventure travel.......

1. Jackson, WY and Kalispell, MT: for hiking in the Tetons and checking out Glacier Nat'l Park
2. Rockies via Denver and visit with friends, gallery hopping
3. South-east Asia: Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos
4. Nepal: post-monsoon but still really hot (some difficulty getting to and from; would limit my days there)
5. Istanbul / Turkey, via London and a visit to a friend
6. Morocco, via London and a visit to a friend

Want to send a suggestion? Send a comment!

Notes from Migraine Madness

For approximately the last 10 days, I’ve been out of the picture – and enjoying a marathon migraine run. If you’ve never had one, consider yourself lucky. If you have, then you’ve got my empathy. This one was especially weird for two reasons: its length and its depth.

Length, or duration, is easily measurable…typically measured in hours, but this one would ebb and flow, never completely disseminating, until it had run a grueling 10 continuous days. The depth of it is a different story. It did ebb and flow, so it wasn’t constantly excruciating, but for anyone who’s wondered what having a migraine is like, read on.

It started off with the usual symptoms – visual weirdness – spots and loss of color on occasion – and then entered the aural arena, in which any sound was nearly enough to make me crazy. When they enter the aural level, typically it feels as though the best solution to end the pain of noise is to ram a railroad spike into your ear as far as it will go. I’ve never done this, but always want to. Then there is the sensitivity effect – bright lights or high or low temperatures do weird things to a body. I found myself going in a matter of minutes from a heat-induced cold-sweat to goose-bumps and chills over my entire body. The weird part is that this all feels………kind of nice. You feel so incredibly tuned in to a physical realm of perception – as though you interact with the world around you through your skin. It’s quite bizarre and not too unpleasant.

The silver lining behind a migraine, for me, is that I can always sleep and sleep and sleep some more. So, I spent the better part of 5 days on my couch in the dark. Sometimes I’d have the tv on, tuned to the history channel or cnn, because you can often find yourself drifting in and out of sleep. And, if you’ve got some sort of interesting material being discussed in the background, this weaves itself into your light-level dream state with all of the grace and none of the yuckiness of a hallucinogenic contribution. So, I would alternate between watching a special on North African archeology to incredible dream states.

The interesting thing was that, through the 5 days or so of on-again, off-again bizarre dream states, Denzel Washington played a consistent role throughout. Sometimes he would provide a narrative voice as a backdrop to the dream events; other times, he was either a central or a contributing character. Throughout them all, though, the character he played was unfailing – like that of a career coach. I found it incredibly funny that I was taking advice from Denzel on calculating a weighted front-end load of anticipated resource requirements to implement a new objective at work (something I was really thinking about working on for work). Why anyone would need to employ fourier integral level math on such a business-case type calculation is beyond me, though. I just thought it was funny as hell that he thought fourier integrals were required – all I remember about those is that they somehow apply to frequency calculations. Which doesn’t apply to my business case scenario at all!

…….or does it??????

At any rate, the universe seems to have returned to normal. At least in my no-longer screaming brain.

Experimentation

You ever do something just to see what happens? Sure you do. Everyone does, I suppose.

Today, I gave it a try in a completely new setting (for me). I was in a meeting (one of many today), and just for kicks, I wanted to see how easily the discussion could be derailed. I had my suspicions: I bet myself that it would take a full 5 minutes for the discussion to get back on track again. I calculated my risks: the group was engaged in the discussion, but I suspected easily distractible as we were approaching the end of the day. Similarly, I didn’t want to jeopardize our meeting run time or complications with any subsequent appointments anyone in the group may have had (hence the end of day tactic).

There is a basic assumption that meetings are rambling, tenacious beasts that we groan about prior to engaging in them, especially when they contain a large number of attendees. (Notice I didn’t use the word “participants”, because, more often than not, attendance and participation are mutually exclusive). We often refer to the meeting / discussion process as “herding cats” – hard to get a handle on. This one was different, though, because I was leading it. I figured I could throw a diversion topic out, see what happened, and wrangle the discussion back on point after my 5 minute experiment was up.

The interesting thing about the diversion tactic: it failed! Even though we were at the end of the day, nearing the end of the meeting, an interesting dynamic occurred – tangential bridge-building to return to the topic, by each member of the group, in turn. It was like a little verbal ballet – a pirouette here, a pivot there, a swirl there, and voila – back on point! Quite an interesting thing to observe. Even if it wasn’t quite efficient. But it did take less than 5 minutes.