No, I don't want a little cheese...

Can you believe the summer is almost over?Me, neither.

Part of it is because it's been crazy busy. And another is because it arrived late, so it only seems like we've had an actual month or so of summer.It's been strange, too, in that although I don't get the sense that my company is all that busy in terms of actual work coming through the door (we're still taking really small crappy jobs we would have passed on, for one thing) but I've been working crazy hours. Out at five, back at nine, that sort of thing. Lots of dirt-nannying, which pays great but can be absolutely insane. Let me give you an example.

We have a job in downtown Portland doing a four-story building (so the foundation loads are fairly respectable) and the site is a typical inner-urban Portland city block, meaning that it's been built and re-built over the past 100 years and most of the crap that came from the buildings that were demolished earlier was just hucked into whatever convenient hole the laborers could find. So there's anywhere from two to about seven or eight feet of really nasty fill on the top. Brick, concrete, glass, dimension lumber, fly ash, charcoal...you name it, it's in there. Plus the stuff has a nasty habit of hiding open voids underneath a veneer of soil, a perfect footing-trap designed to produce ugly post-construction settlement.We found all this junk when we did the soil investigation and my engineer, not surprisingly, recommended that the contractor hog it all out and build on the native.

The contractor, also not surprisingly, is being pushed by the owner to minimize the overexcavation, so his superintendent is trying to cut back on the amount of this jumky fill we take out.

Completely unsurprisingly this leads to a certain tension between the general contractor and me, even though we both supposedly work for the owner.So the other day the excavator dug out one of the foundation footings and there in the bottom of the hole, sticking out of what otherwise would be native-soil-looking yellow silt, is a head-sized chunk of asphalt. Unmistakeable, just-pried-out-of-your-driveway asphalt.

The super sort of looks sideways at it and says in as confident a tone as he can manage;

"That looks like native soil to me."

I actually think I goggled at him; I know I must have had en exceptionally odd look on my face.

"Well, in that case." I replied, "we're going to have to completely revise our estimate on when early humans started using asphalt paving..." He had the decency to look ashamed.

We dug it out. And the other three feet of assorted brick, lumber, fly ash, china plates, glass bottles and assorted shit that somebody had pushed into a hole back in 1946.

Honestly! I may have been born at night, but I wasn't born LAST night. I wasn't sure who to be more embarassed for, him for trying me on or me for looking foolish enough to make him think he could try that on me.What else?

We had a nice visit from the in-laws in July, who got their fill of their grandkiddos and, I suspect, perhaps a little more than their fill. Our house is barely large enough for us four, so when the grands turn up they usually find a hotel or motel, but this was a month and the cost would have been ridiculous. So Mojo found them a rental place up near Kenton. And the sad truth is that it is nicer than our home. The kids loved the hot tub; I liked having the hot tub to entice the kids to stay with the grandparents.

We did get to stay over there a few nights. Any more and I'd have been too tempted to ask the landlord for a straight-up swap.There's been a little bleakness, as there always is in any sort of life. Mojo's employment is getting precarious, and we're looking at various ideas for post-gas-company paycheck days. And something's going wrong with my hip.

I don't want to sound dramatic about this. I've spent a lifetime abusing my legs. I was born with something called patellar subluxation, in which your kneecaps are canted outwards rather than sit straight on the front of your legs.

The old orthopod I went to see ten years ago when they finally began to hurt enough to slow me below the minimum time for the APFT run told me that as a draft board physician in the Sixties he wouldn't have let me within a rifle's length of the infantry for the very reason I was seeing him that day. Plus I played ten years of soccer and twenty years of squash on them, not a very healthy idea for malformed kneecaps.

So over the past five years or so my run has degenerated a sort of an angry, jerky shuffle, and when I kicked the soccer ball about with my little guy it was with the painful knowledge that I would regret the playtime later.

The ortho had a very sensible attitude about my knees.

"The two options for you are a replacement or a repositioning surgery that has a high incidence of subsequent failure. The replacement will work, but if you have it today (and I was in my forties at the time) you'll need another in twenty years, and rehabilitating a bilateral knee replacement at sixty won't be much fun. If you wait until you're fifty or sixty the technology will have improved enough that they'll last long enough for you to take them with you to the grave."

So I've put off the knee replacements and, shy a few days where too much exercise ballooned them up and required an icebag and an acewrap, have never regretted it.

But this past autumn my right hip started binding up on me. At first that's all it was; just the loss of range of motion. I had a hard time trimming my toenails, or getting my foot into my skiboots. And I noticed a dragging sort of weakness when I wore my work boots; it was like my right leg had about half the strength of my left.

I assumed that it had something to do with my knee problems, and I would knock down some Motrin when it got bad, and in a day or so of light work it would go away.

But at some point this winter it stopped leaving.

Now it hurts, in some form or another, all the time. It varies from a dull ache to a biting little stab when I turn my leg the wrong way. I have developed a visible limp, and whatever's wrong with the hip joint causes me to walk in some off-kilter way that puts strain on the right knee, which has noticeably worsened, and on the muscles of my right upper leg and butt. By the time I come home from work they're hard as an iron bar and ache like a sunofabitch.

I really hate talking about this. It doesn't do any good, for one thing, and it sounds like I'm whining and asking for sympathy, for the other. And I'm not, really; this is just a thing. It's not leukemia, it's not COPD, it's not a brain injury. It's just pain, and people live with pain all the time. It's not crippling, and I go to see another orthopedist in a week that will tell me that I need to either get opened up so that they can remove the arthritic calcium or whatever is marring the hip joint can be scraped off, or I will need a hip replacement.And that's fine. I don't like either the surgery or the rehabilitation afterwards, but if it means that I can walk again without pain? That's a good thing.

I just thought I should mention it, being as that it is sort of hard to escape. Chronic pain, like a hanging, concentrates the mind wonderfully - but only on the pain. And I have a fairly high threshold of pain; I can't imagine what this is like for people who cringe at papercuts.

So...am I whining? Maybe so.

But it's a fine whine, and I like to think I served it up in an pretty glass.

The Lament of the Frontier Guard

By the North Gate, the wind blows full of sand,
Lonely from the beginning of time until now!
Trees fall, the grass goes yellow with autumn.
I climb the towers and towers
to watch out the barbarous land:

My friend jim recently posted an extended rumination about the combat loss of a CH-47 and the embarked team of Navy SEALs. In this post he uses President Obama's term "sacrifice" to compare the way these men died to the offerings presented to the gods; in this case, the twin gods of War and Hubris that have ruled lately in the East. He asks "How can a nation sacrifice the best that we have to offer in such a blithe manner?" and suggests that these dead men were sacrifices for our national sins of arrogance and foolishness.Now I have no end of respect for jim's opinions on things military. He's been there and done that and got the O.D. T-shirt. He's probably forgotten more about soldiering than I'll ever know.

But in this case, I think he's looking at this as an American and a citizen-soldier, and that's the wrong way to look at this.

Desolate castle, the sky, the wide desert.
There is no wall left to this village.
Bones white with a thousand frosts,
High heaps, covered with trees and grass;
Who brought this to pass?
Who has brought the flaming imperial anger?
Who has brought the army with drums and with kettle-drums?
Barbarous kings.

For most of these guys the Saturday in Wardak Province was just another day at work. They are long-service professionals - imperial troops in all but name - and they are doing what imperial troops have done since Augustus' day; carrying our imperial policy in the far reaches of the imperial frontiers.

This was no army of liberation storming ashore on the beaches of Normandy or Italy, no army of vengeance pouring gasoline into the caves of Iwo Jima and Okinawa. This wasn't even "Lafayette, we are here" or "Remember the Maine". While I'm sure that one or two of the guys who augered in somewhere in the Tangi Valley comforted themselves with the fiction that they were avenging 9/11 I'll bet most of them thought about their mission as imperials have always thought about the mission of civilizing the savages with a rifle.Long, tiring work, typically boring, occasionally terrifying, often fruitless. Pitied and ignored by the civilians safe at home, feared or swindled by the natives nearby, tasked by the uninformed higher-ups to perform everything from the pointless to the dangerous, taking successes wherever and however possible, accepting failures as part of the game.

A gracious spring, turned to blood-ravenous autumn,
A turmoil of wars - men, spread over the middle kingdom,
Three hundred and sixty thousand,
And sorrow, sorrow like rain.
Sorrow to go, and sorrow, sorrow returning,
Desolate, desolate fields,
And no children of warfare upon them,
No longer the men for offence and defence.

And I believe we do them a disservice when we use the language of popular mass wars for what they do and how they die. The President, of course, well, it's his job to drape the charred bits of meat and bone - all that remain after JP-4 and airframe aluminum combine to combust human bodies - in patriotic bunting. He is, after all, both our national mourner and national cheerleader, saying the correct and solemn words over the caskets filled with sand, fanning the fire in the faint hearts to continue the fight that will bring more dead men home to more bereft hearts.

But we should be big enough to overlook these public platitudes and see these men for what they are; imperial legionaries of a most unimperial empire, manning the milecastles we build for them with our taxes, our reflexive rage, our incurious sloth, and our ignorance of the world and the people in it.

Those dead men, could they reassemble themselves, could they pull the poncho-liner of whole flesh back on so as not to frighten us with the gibbering horror of their deaths in a rage of fire and metal, might tell us of the people in those far places who killed them and whom they killed, the broken places and the broken tribes within them, whose ferocities and griefs they and we will never understand. They might tell us about the meaningless strobing of parachute flares in the night sky, of little villages with yesterday's bulletholes in walls that Alexander's troops passed by, of walking over the same ground they walked yesterday and finding new death buried by the roadside.

But, then again, they might not.

Because there is no way we in the soft lands and the quiet places could understand what it means to try and defeat the 14th Century with the weapons of the 20th.

Ah, how shall you know the dreary sorrow at the North Gate,
With Rihoku's name forgotten,
And we guardsmen fed to the tigers.

Because they are atop the milecastles, peering out to the barbarous lands, and we are peacefully asleep in the fat lands within the walls. Because they know war and we do not. Because they are not our sacrifices; they are our proxies. Because, although we have never seen a tiger or know what it does...

...we feed them to the tigers.And then go home to our dinners.

Anarchy in the U.K.

“You’ve got that eternal idiotic idea that if anarchy came it would come from the poor. Why should it? The poor have been rebels, but they have never been anarchists; they have more interest than anyone else in there being some decent government. The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn’t; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all. Aristocrats were always anarchists.”

G.K. Chesterton

(h/t to slacktivist)

Funny Papers 2: It Came From South Florida

This little comic adventure stemmed from the week back in 1986 I was detailed to provide medical support for an ARNG infantry brigade from Florida. For some reason they deployed to Panama for their Annual Training and requested - and got - a GAMA Goat ambulance, driver and medic (which was me) from the 2nd Battalion (ABN)(LT) 187th Infantry, my then-unit of assignment.They were an interesting crew - lots of Cuban-Americans - and provided a certain amount of amusement but also a hell of a lot of irritation. Their officers were...shambolic, to put it kindly. They had very little in the way of military skills - I think that their weekend drills were a sort of Cuban-American social club. And they were in terrible physical shape and the Panamanian jungle just flat wore them out.I actually started this in the field, and included a full page (Page 6) detailing a long and pointless bit of foolery that, on reflection, adds nothing to the story and is omitted here. The second and third pages were an extended and juvenile bitch about how fucked up the Guards were, which I now regret (having been in the Guard myself now and seen the other side of the hill) and have also used my aeditorial powers to delete.

The one thing I should mention is that at the end of page 3 I draw a little scene wherein we had something like a stray round go overhead (the 105s were firing on the nearby FA impact area). The Guard had a bit of a panic, assuming they were taking friendly fire. It turned out to be one of the base-ejecting illumination round canisters (that hold the flare inside the shell). We lost a lot of sleep over that, though, and that's where you come in on Page 4.I think the story largely stands on its own but I should perhaps add some notes to explain some otherwise in-joke images.Notes: (The page numbers are from the original pagination - look in the lower right corner; pages 2, 3, and 6 are omitted)

Page 1, top: The teeny little picture right below the caption is supposed to be the Panamanian DMV - "D.N.T.T.", a notorious hive of scum and villainy (and bribery) where you got your Panamanian tags and licenses. I had a motorcycle, which the "inspectors" seemed to find all sorts of wrong and fine-able with until I slipped them all a sawbuck after which they were my best pals and passed me out most quick smart.

Page 2, bottom: My medical platoon sergeant was a "fixer" of the Bilko breed and had managed to scrounge a M151 quarter-ton jeep which was supposed to have been turned in as excess when the battalion converted from the 3/5th Infantry (straight-leg) to the airborne/light MTO&E.; It was strictly off-the-books and for his own driving pleasure. Well, the Florida Guard borrowed it on a hand-receipt and wrecked the fuck out of it. I have no idea how. I really did roll up to our Motor Pool and find it sitting sadly, looking just like that, right outside the main gate. I heard later that my platoon daddy actually cried when he saw it. He really did love that quarter-ton.Page 5, top: The Guard chain never bothered to give me their challenge/password - probably assuming that as a "notional" part of the exercise I didn't need it - but never told their gate guards to let me pass without challenge, either. We spent some fun playing word games at their trains gate while someone went up to the the TOC and then the battle captain waddled down and sprung me. Good times.

Page 7, middle: Our mortar platoon was live-firing on Empire Range during the Guard field problem, and they really did shoot out of the impact area and blew some nice holes in K-15 road, which was the main road through that section of the range. I found the shell holes, so I got to be the one to inform the mortar platoon leader, who wasn't half as amused by it as I was.

Page 7, bottom: I really did have a guardsman that practically assaulted me trying to climb into the ambulance to be evacuated for being a heat casualty. Liveliest case of heat exhaustion I've ever seen. And the other guy wouldn't say what his problem was (I couldn't find anything, either, which didn't help) other than he was "woozy". I think he was woozy at the idea of trying the fire-and-movement course with his buddies shooting around him, since their idea of fire discipline would have made a pack of savage Shiite militiamen on the roof of the Ramadi Holiday Inn gulp with disbelief.

Last page, center: I really need to write a post about the old M792 ambulance. It really was a horrible idea of a truck, but it was unique and a bit of Army history. Maybe in a bit. Maybe as a cartoon.

But GAMA Goats or no, that's the tale of what happened in Panama in December, 1986. Hope you enjoyed it.

Queen's Peace

I used this picture to close the preceding post.Because it's rather a powerful image and let me explain why I think so.

The police officer has all the accoutrements of First World riot control circa 2011; helmet, facemask, radio, riot shield, baton, all in police blue, all very modern and urban down to her mascara.

But look at her.

Take the club out of her hand and shove a sword in it and she's 1211, not 2011, facing down Welsh rebels for King John. Or 711, fighting the Moors at Tours. Or 511BC, chasing helots out of Sparta. All our complex learning hasn't changed the simple understanding of one human standing ready to deal out brutal force against another.

For all our inventiveness, and gadgets, and indoor plumbing, for all our "civilization" and "wisdom" and "learning"...Constable Nameless with her club and shield reminds us that we haven't come all THAT far from when we were some damn pithecanthropus scratching our ass wondering whether that thing under that bush is something to eat or something that's going to eat us.

The Red Flag

The recent failure of the U.S. governing class to understand that the immediate (i.e. next decade's) problems are not those of debts and deficits but of jobs and joblessness make the recent news from London something of a nasty reminder of what happens when a substantial portion of your working-age population ends up jobless for long periods of time.I think we need to remember that we are not Japan. Young American men (and women) without a job are not going to behave well for long. Why bother? What is there to lose? In the U.S. you ARE your job. And if you have no job, how much do you have? Freedom? You have the freedom to lay about, eat junk food, and do squat. As much as that might have appealed to me at age 14 for about three weeks, spending the bulk of my twenties or thirties...or fifties...doing that?

I'd probably go out and loot a 7-11, too.No question that we will have to grapple with the question of how much the U.S. governments need to take in and how much they need to spend. But before we do that we need to get through the next stage of the Great Recession (can we start calling it a Depression yet?) without finding a sizeable chunk of our population out of work and on the dole. Because that's not a good thing for them, it's not a good thing for us, and it's not a good thing for the country.There's a reason that that crafty old patrician FDR and his New Deal pals didn't just push through stuff like Social Security and unemployment insurance but created a bunch of make-work agencies; things like the CCC and WPA and the big government construction projects were a smart reaction from people who were watching what the Soviets and Italian Fascists were doing with their young people - stuffing them into armies and "labor corps" and other make-work jobs. Things like the Bonneville Dam and the CCC kept idle hands from becoming devils' playgrounds...and idle brains from getting stuffed with fascist or communist ideas. Those New Deal guys knew that having a bunch of working - i.e. military - age guys just hanging around with nothing to do was a hell of a good way to start trouble.

I'm not sure if we need a new CCC. But I'm hella sure that we don't need a bunch of stuffed hairbags in DC gassing on about the Terror of Deficits when 10% and probably more of the U.S. public is out of work and stands to be for a long, long time, at this rate.

Because despite what they tell you on TV; were not that much smarter, or better behaved, than we were in 1932. And now, as then, as the London Council is finding out...if we don't figure out how to get those guys back to work or find something for them to do, they'll find it themselves, and the rest of us might not like it."I'm out of work and on the dole,
You can stuff the red flag up your hole."

Lesson Unlearned

So I had an incredible evening at the Portland v. LA match last Wednesday. You can read about it here, but, trust me, the words alone don't do it justice. I think we all showed up expecting just to do our parts as good supporters and were surprised (and delighted) by the win.But before the match I was involved in an odd incident and I thought I'd mention it just...well, just to see what you thought.

First let me explain how the seating works at Civic Stadium (a.k.a. "Jeld-Wen Field"). The North End - what we call "The Shed" - is where the Timbers Army stands. In the old soccer tradition this would be "the terraces", home of the hoi-polloi, the rabble, the working class yobbos, where the penny-ticket supporters would be herded to stand all match long. Portland has made good changes to this tradition, so the Army is made up of both men and women, young and old, and in my obviously biased opinion marries the best of the old British terrace traditions to the best of American sports fandom AND the best of Portland's happy anarchic spirit. We call ourselves the "People's Republic of Portland " for good reasons, and some of the best are on display in the Shed End on a matchday.The Army has always had open seating - since we don't use the seats - and sections 101 through 108 are "general admission"; first come, first stand.

I sit in the next section over. Well, actually, we don't sit - we stand in front of our reserved seats. I like to call us the "Timbers Army Reserves"; we're too staid for festival seating but too raucous to sit down.

Occasionally we get people with general admission tickets who sneak down before the match. We usually warn them that our section is "reserved", and that if the ticket holders show up they will get chased off, and they usually grin and admit to taking their chances. A couple of youngish guys showed up for the Toronto match and were nearly immediately evicted when the people who had the seats showed up, but they just stepped down to the front of the adjacent aisle and stood in front of the capo stand all match. Nobody had any problem with that.

But this week I ran into something a bit different. We arrived to find a woman and her daughter standing in front of our seats. I informed her that they WERE our seats, and she replied that we were wrong and that our section was general admission.

Now I'm a fairly peaceable guy; not VERY peaceable, but enough to keep me out of casual brawls. But this woman was visibly not interested in discussion. She was a bulbous, tattooed sort of Southeast Portland gal. The uncharitable description would be "trashy" and I'm inclined to be uncharitable, since when I informed her that she was wrong and that she was in a reserved section she loudly informed me that I was full of shit and that she was damn well not moving.

I suggested that she look at the number of the seat she was standing in front of and the number on my ticket, at which point she said she didn't care what was on my damn ticket, ripped it out of my hand, and repeated that she wasn't moving.

At that point I stopped being peaceable.

Now while she was an obnoxious fat slag she was also a woman who had not offered physical violence, so I held back on my initial impulse to step in and pop her one. Instead I stepped up and put myself right up against her, well inside her personal space, chest-to-chest, and suggested pretty sternly that she move her fat slag ass to another place.She started protesting loudly that I was threatening her and that she had a twelve-year-old daughter with her. I repeated that I didn't care if she had a chimpanzee monkey with her and that she and her daughter needed to go find their seats. She moved, cursing and loud, and I sat down and went about my business.

And then came the odd part. About ten minutes later along comes one of the staff who informs me that the woman has reported me to the ushers as threatening her, that the woman was misinformed by the stadium staff about the seating so she was not "at fault", that her daughter was crying because of what happend, and that I needed to go to the ushers if I was confronted by another similar "misunderstanding" in the future rather than confronting the offender.

My first reaction was just surprise; that the woman, who must have found out from the ushers that she was wrong about the seating, would have been indignant rather than ashamed and have tried to set the ushers on me rather than slink away quietly. But on reflection I recognized that shame is a rare quality in 2011.

But my second reaction was irritation with the officialdom. The ushers had not bothered to find out what had happened, and, having done their job poorly to begin with, were upset with me because I corrected their error in a way that caused a rude and stupid woman's child some distress. I informed the usher that I was perfectly capable of corrective training for both present and future Gresham hootchies and that, while I had not so much as raised a hand to the woman, that she had obviously been looking for trouble, picked the wrong person, and found it. And that I had no intention of deputizing other people to stand up for me; I was perfectly capable of that myself, being over the age of consent and all that.

The usher repeated her warning, I repeated my position, and we parted in mutual dissatisfaction.

My final opinion on the whole ridiculous business is that the worst part of it is that the woman whose aggressive ignorance was the cause of the entire mess is still out there, still convinced that she was hard done by and browbeaten by the mean nasty man, still ready to jump up in the next unsuspecting chump's face with the same rough insistence of her own rights - whether she's right or not.

She learned nothing from the entire mess, other than perhaps to feel more grieved, more put-upon than before; nothing about the evening, other than perhaps my ferocity, gave her a moment's pause.Reasoning did not touch her, reflection or self-doubt was not in her, civility was useless against her...nothing moved her but raw, naked force. And even when she was exposed as a misinformed fool her reaction was not shame or remorse but self-righteous anger.

What the hell can you do with someone like that?

Friday Jukebox: Mercenary Memories Edition

Warren seems to be confused between the "Simba Rebellion" of 1964 and the Nigerian Civil War of 1967-1970.Mind you...is there anyone now who really remembers either one?Or Patty Hearst and the SLA?

No matter. Great song, and it serves to remind us that our nation, our government, and our world in general is stuffed with people who would make Roland post-decapitation a candidate for fucking MENSA.

Rude Awakening

I'm not sure if I've ever actually given you a full MTO&E; of the personnel here at the Fire Direction Center, but one of the senior troops is Miss Lily, the little calico cat.She is a veteran of my first marriage, a rescue-cat from the animal shelter in Astoria, Oregon, where she nabbed my rain-slick sleeve one December day and has been with me ever since. Here's a tale of one of her adventures from some years ago. She is really a very personable cat.

She's also a very self-contained little soul, as with most cats; the only time she will admit to the weakness of need is in the night hours, when she likes to climb on sleeping people (me, typically, because, I think, I am bulkier than my bride and hence a better observation post). She then cuddles down on my chest and falls asleep, and since she's a tiny mite of a cat - less than 6 pounds - it's not really unpleasant. She never bites or claws if I move in my sleep, but she's very persistent, and will reclimb Mount Niitaka after I settle back down.

She is now very, very old in cat-years, probably more than sixteen depending on her age when I brought her home from Astoria. She sleeps most of the day, and she has stopped catching the small birds and mice that used to entertain her and annoy me. She has also become very thin, and her stomach is causing her trouble; she has difficulty keeping her meals down, and she is always ravenous. It doesn't help her that she shares her food bowl with Francesca Cypress Nittaneous III (a.k.a "Fat Nitty"), a feline stomach with legs, so she often has to bolt the vile canned concoction to prevent it disappearing inside the Nitteous One before she can get a taste of delicious by-products.

I am the only other troop in the entire unit who really likes her as something other than furniture. Mojo has little or no patience for either cat and will touch them only on sufferance, whilst the kids will alternately ignore or annoy her depending on their mood; Little Miss is slightly fearful only because Fat Nitty once ran her claws through the girl's blanket - just to get purchase rather than in fear or anger - and Missy has been wary of her ever since. I am the only human who will invite them onto my lap, or pet them for no other reason than tactile pleasure or simple companionship.Her one enduring fault is that by early morning - and I do mean early - her gyppy tummy is troubling her and she begins to caterwaul for her breakfast.

This morning she was doing her usual sand-dance over my prone body and singing her "Feed Me, Seymour" cat-song (which Mojo and I have learned to ignore until we're ready to get up) when she suddenly stopped.

Hunched over in the blanket-valley between us.

And shat the bed.

If you live with one of these little creatures you probably know that there is nothing more pungent than cat shit. Within seconds both humans AND the cat had lept from the bed. It fell to me to bundle up the beshat bedclothes and drag them downstairs to the washing machine; if left for even moments the penetrating pong of used catfood will permeate the very paint on the walls of a room. My bride - who if allowed will drowse into the early forenoon - mumped disconsolately into the kitchen, a surly dryad in an ultramarine Hello Kitty T-shirt, made a pot of coffee and then retired to an armchair in the front room looking like...a woman who had been awakened at 6:30 am by a cat fouling her bed.

Our daughter found the entire incident hilariously disgusting (or disgustingly hilarious) when she emerged a bit later. And the guilty party herself seemed more interested in her catfood than apologizing, although she spent a suspiciously long time cleaning herself up afterward before going back to sleep.

In most respects this would be just another tiny fragment of domestic excitement. The sheets are cleaned, the bed re-made, the cat asleep, the humans all gone about their business.

Except...our little cat has always been a very fastidious creature. This was VERY unlike her...and disturbing all the more for that. Like humans, animals entering the final stages of life tend to begin to deteriorate mentally as well as physically. I hope this was just a noxious accident, because if there are more to come it suggests that our small companion has begun the steeper slope of the descent we all eventually make towards the Big Sleep.And for all that she is nothing more than a rather smallish, aged calico cat her time on Earth is short enough as it is. I will miss her cat-look, the feeling of her gentle bones on my lap, and the shirr of her soft fur under my hands.

Spiceworld

I keep meaning to post something but life keeps getting in the way. Last night, though, it was a good sort of getting in the way; went to the Timbers vs. L.A. Galaxy match - dirty, hot, tired from a long day and, sadly, expecting just to be doing my duty as a supporter and singing the Boys on to do their best against the league leaders - and was delighted to be there for a 3-nil pasting of the Spice Boys.So I'm whacked, but the starry blaze of night still rings with song. True glory comes not in the victory but in the love - for the game, for the team, for each other and our beloved Rose City.

But I have to admit; winning is nicer.Especially when it's Posh Spice who sucks her thumb and weeps.

More blogging tomorrow, I promise.