Prep School

Well hello, world; long time no blog. I wish I could say I’ve been ignoring you because I’ve been doing all kinds of fantastically cool stuff, but that’d be a lie. If I had been doing all kinds of fantastically cool stuff, the blog wouldn’t have lay (laid? lain? fuck it) fallow lo these many months.

I am, however, doing some moderately neat stuff, so may as well share.

Everybody has their thing; that certain something that just trips their trigger. For me, it’s camping gadgets. If you’ve read my stuff before, you know I like thinking about survival situations. Psychologists would say that it’s a reaction to the somewhat adverse situation I am now in, but they’d be wrong. I’ve been fascinated by tiny useful things ever since I saw my first combination salt & pepper shaker in the Boy Scout section of my local Sears.

Oh yeah…I was a Scout. I took the “Be Prepared” motto to heart. I carry a Swiss Army knife, and have used it for something every day since I got it, no exaggeration. I like reading blogs, sites, and Instructables concerning gear and prep supplies, and I’m constantly tinkering with my kits. Hence, today’s blog.

September is National Preparedness Month, and I’m in the process of putting together the Winter supplies to supplement the usual kit I keep in the car. I’m also going camping in October, so I had to start gathering stuff for that. I found that I was duplicating items with each group I created, making them all bulkier than they needed to be. Redundancy is all well and good, but you don’t really need five knives. At least, that’s what I have to keep telling myself.

So I sat down and really gave some thought as to what survival-type situations we were likely to encounter, and to what severity. Our main threat is a power outage brought on by severe weather. Secondly, a stuck car – whether by weather or accident. A distant third is my getting lost on a day hike, and fourth is being in a public or business setting and need some quick repair.

Once I had these identified, I listed the supplies I would want for each situation, then categorized them as essential or as nice-to-have-if-it-fits. I leaned heavily on the Rule of Threes and the Ten Essentials, plus guides such as FEMA’s Emergency Kit Checklist. Once those lists were complete, I removed duplicate items, keeping them on the lowest tier I could (more on the tiers below).

With my lists in hand, I began assembling kits. I conceptualized them as part of a tier system, where the smallest kit fit into the next larger, which fit into the next larger, etc. The somewhat crappy photos below illustrate this concept.

So, first tier, the Urban Survival Kit. Small enough to fit into a suit coat pocket, with those odds and ends useful for temporary repairs to prevent permanent embarrassment.

In this kit, I have (left to right): rubber bands and two sizes of cord, matches, post-its and pencil, sewing kit, a pouch with single doses of common OTC medications, safety pins and buttons, sticks for collar stays or splints, toothpicks, nail clippers, several sizes of band-aids, and alcohol wipes. In the unlikely event this was the only kit available to me in an emergency, I could use the safety pins and cord as a fishing rig, light a fire using the alcohol wipes and toothpicks as tinder, and cook in the Altoids tin. Ridiculous? Sure. But I wouldn’t just give up, either.

The next kit I consider a bare-minimum “crap-I’m-going-to-have-to-spend-the-night-out-here” kit.

Here’s the case:

Here’s everything in it:

That may be a little hard to make out, so here’s the breakdown:

Leatherman multi-tool with bit-driver and precision screwdrivers.

Light carabiner, snaplock ring, 12” airplane cable keyring, small measuring tape.

Thermal blanket.

My favorite ring o’ gear: 6” airplane cable ring, mini LED light, tweezers, P-51 can opener, mini pry bar, magnesium fire striker, pocket scalpel, pocket saw, pea-less rescue whistle.

Flexible key ring, magnifying glass, knife sharpener, signal mirror, OTC meds & sucrose tablets, compass.

The Altoids tin from above fits in the front pocket with the compass and mirror.

And that case can, in turn, be tossed into:

which contains:

No individual pics on this one, so, from left to right:

Tarp, work gloves, towel, poncho, LED flashlight, change of clothes, tent stakes, rope, food pouch with tuna, breakfast mix, hot chocolate, oatmeal and a few other odds and ends, emergency candles, canteen, cook kit with spork, various plastic bags, Velcro strips, crank-powered flashlight, Boy Scout handbook for reference, bag of dryer lint for tinder, pack of cards, pencils and notecards (one pencil has several yards of duct tape wrapped around it). Not shown is the first aid kit and cleanup supplies that stay in the car full-time, which will also fit in the bag if they need to be carried out.

The tier beyond this one includes all of the standard camping gear – tents, gas cookers, sleeping bags, etc – which we could either use inside if we lost power, or throw in the car if we had to evacuate. I’m in the process of making personal backpack kits for each of the pride, so everyone has what they need for a few days, and we won’t have to worry about forgetting anything if we have to boogie out fast.

So there we are. I like being prepared and having cool gadgets. Obviously, I hope I’m carrying all this stuff around for no reason, but it’s one less thing we have to worry about in case something does happen. At the very least, it keeps me in the garage and out of Mrs. Cat’s hair, and that’s good, too.

Raptured

Well, looks like we're both still here. Guess we're meant to be together or something.

Happy 19, Mrs. Cat.

Instructa-bull

I’ve been reading a lot of How-To and DIY sites lately, like Lifehacker and Instructables. I’ve always had a natural tendency toward being organized – approaching OCD levels in some circumstances – and I like finding new tips and tricks and gadgets to help streamline daily life.

The economy being the way it is, a lot of these articles involve repurposing things to solve specific problems without having to lay out a lot of cash. The folks at Lifehacker have a real fetish for binder clips, for example, using them for everything from cable management and cell phone holders to cuff links and tripod mounts. Occasionally, they even use them to hold sheets of paper together.

Generally, Instructables articles have titles like “How to turn an antique pipe organ into a Beowulf Cluster for $7” On reading that, I’ll think “Hey! I’d really like a Beowulf Cluster, and I can afford $7. I’ll check it out.” Then I find that the instructions run something like this:

Materials Required
Antique Pipe Organ
17 identical CPUs
Touch-Screen Monitor
3 spools, 12-gague wire (600’ ea)
6 large cooling fans
Uninterruptible Power Supply
2 power strips

Assembly
My uncle is a preacher, and when he renovated his church, he gave me the old pipe organ. I took it to my father’s custom carpentry shop and used his tools to gut it. Some of the burled walnut panels were damaged, but I stumbled across an exact match in my dad’s scrap pile and was able to replace them. Since I work at a Dell assembly plant, I had access to a bunch of CPUs that were going to be trashed. While my brother the professional electrician wired everything together, I asked a friend to write a custom UNIX program to cluster the CPUs. I mounted a small touch-screen monitor I found at the bus stop onto the sheet music shelf and it fit perfectly! My brother made a bunch of switches out of some parts he already had, and wired these into the existing keys and foot pedals so I don’t even need a keyboard! One of the keys was sticking and needed to be replaced. Luckily, my grandfather was a big game hunter and had a ton of trophies in his basement. I used a Dremel to cut down an African elephant tusk into a replacement key. Once everything was wired up, we built a custom bench out of the backseat of a ’57 Plymouth Fury, which I found behind my refrigerator when we moved into our new house. We didn’t have quite enough outlets, so I ran down to my local hardware store and bought 2 new power strips.

Total cost: $7!!!!!!!omg!!!

Asshole.

Suddenly, bedtime!

I recently had a block of free time all to myself.

WHAT I PLANNED ON DOING
Finish the laundry
Fix the latch on the attic window
Wash the dishes
Pick up the toys
Go out for a good lunch and read
Change the water in the fishbowl
Get a haircut
See a movie
Catch up on writing projects

WHAT I ACTUALLY DID
Ate an entire bag of Doritos while surfing YouTube

I could rationalize it and say that everyone deserves some “brain-in-neutral” downtime, but I really feel like an unproductive slug. I also have to add CLEAN DORITO SLUDGE OFF OF KEYBOARD/MOUSE to my list now.

Two-oh-double hockey sticks

There’s something cathartic about taking down the old calendar – overflowing with schedules, appointments, grocery lists, reminders and other scribbles – and putting up a new, blank one. The months stretch away, unfilled. There are no demands on our time yet, no urgent appointments circled in red, no bill due dates highlighted in yellow. The days are empty of everything but promise.

I’m looking forward to this year. To filling up that calendar not only with the minutia of daily life, but new opportunities and interesting projects. Because the Cats don’t make resolutions…we make schemes, plots, and machinations.

Happy New Year, y’all.

Techno (Hallo)Weenie

Carved the punkins for the litter today. Despite my complete lack of dexterity with the knife (no opposable thumbs, remember), they turned out okay:



And here is our forward-thinking, environmentally-concious, high-tech, high-output, 21st-century, multi-hyphenated lighting system:



And the result:



Boo, y'all.

Give them a Hand

"You never take me dancing," Mrs. Cat says.

"Who would you like to permanently alienate by asking them to watch the litter for a few hours?"

"Good point. Hmmm...we could dance here."

We look around at the swath of assorted kitty gear lurking on the floor, and envision crushed toys, twisted ankles, and broken furniture. "No," we say in unison.

"I have an idea," I offer.

Write This Down

Well here it is, as promised: the collected wisdom of a marginally grouchy cat. I hope that you find it useful, and appreciate the hard-won nature of some of this advice.

NOTE: The following list has been edited for content, censored to protect the children, politically corrected to avoid hurting anyone’s feelings, redacted for security purposes, trimmed to remove pirated copies, and formatted to fit your screen.

72. Sometimes it rains.

A Feline Looks at Forty

Tomorrow, gentle readers, I will hit the four decade milestone. Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been wondering what of my accumulated wisdom I would share.

Stop scoffing, Julie.

It seems to me that I should take the opportunity to offer the readers of my blog some sort of advice, as quite a few are younger, and may benefit from my experience.

Hush up, Linda.

It’s the least I can do, really. Rather than serve up whatever happens to be on my mind at the time, I should present a well-thought-out post towards a specific end.

Et tu, Mrs. Cat?

Here’s the deal:

In my 1,040 fortnights on this rock, I have lived in eleven cities (including an Indian Reservation) across four states. I’ve traveled through most of the US and visited six other countries, besides. I’ve been reading for 37 years – science fiction and fantasy, history and architecture, scholarly journals and entertainment rags, art and mythology, poetry and military strategy, classics and pulps. I have a huge music library and a Doctorate in pop culture. I’m educated – both formally and on my own. I’ve interviewed WW2 veterans and hung out with neo-hippies. I’ve worked for bootstrappy entrepreneurs and self-described Corporate animals. I am friends with people of opposite persuasions from me, and ask for their input. I’ve broken bones and come through without a scratch. I’ve gotten lucky and fallen on my face. I’ve won and lost, lost and found. I’ve blown the curve and blown the game. I’ve made people laugh, cry, pissed off, and horrified, and they have done it to me. I’ve lost fights. I’ve won fights. I’ve been tongue-tied and glib, reticent and prolix, brilliant and oh-so-stupid. I’ve broken laws. I’ve been published. I love technology and am afraid of spiders. I like to travel and stay at home. I’ve been a Boy Scout and a misanthrope. I write limericks, advertising copy, short stories, and collaborative fiction, but I can’t touch-type. I’m a father, husband, step-brother, brother-in-law, and an only child.

In short…I’ve been places, done things, and know stuff. Some of it I think is worth passing on. Stay tuned tomorrow for the accumulated wisdom of Sophistacat.

Our Kitchen is more Goth than Your Kitchen

When we moved back to North Carolina, we moved into my grandmother’s house since it was sitting empty – a target for Vandals and other Germanic tribes.

The house was built in 1947 – the first one on this street – and my family has been the only owner since it was built. Besides the architectural quirks you find in older houses, it was also decorated in Early Elderly. Not bad if you were born in 1913, as my grandmother was, but it’s a little staid for our wacky clowder o’ cats. With every room painted in shades of sage, butter, and white, we were craving some visual stimulation.

Hence our weekend project.







We started with our butter-colored metal pantry.


Mrs. Cat picked Cheerwine Red for the cabinet because hey…Cheerwine rocks. We also decided to do the doors in chalkboard paint so we could keep a running grocery list right there on the pantry. So…red cabinet and black doors.


We were originally going to leave the interior alone, but that was quickly abandoned when we saw what it looked like. So another paint run later and:


The handles really set the whole piece off. Great call, Mrs. Cat.


Here it is lurking in the kitchen.


We’re going to repaint the kitchen as soon as we can find a color scheme that works with the cabinet and won’t horrify potential buyers. I do know I want to do all the hardware in that same red. Maybe a 50s black and white scheme with the red as the accent color.

In the meantime, I’m off to get a case of TruBlood.

Read It or Beat It

I was driving home from work today when I was passed by one of our state’s mobile breathalyzer vehicles. I’d heard about them, but this was the first time I’d actually laid eyes on one. There are several that cruise around the state, assisting in checkpoints and high-profile operations around the holidays.

Of course, it was festooned with all manner of vinyl wraps and decals exhorting various highway safety campaign mottos: “Click It or Ticket”, “Booze It and Lose It”, “Cuff ‘Em and Stuff ‘Em”… uh… sorry, that last one was actually from “Dukes of Hazzard”.

As the bus passed me, I noted that the vehicle was officially known as the “Breath Alcohol Testing Mobile Unit." Of course I knew right away that everyone called them BATmobiles.

Here’s the logo:



Now, they’re obviously tapping into the whole Batman motif here, but I immediately thought of this logo:



Don’t recognize it? Here’s another version:



I chortled.

Just for fun, here’s a promotional piece/news story on the BATmobiles.

iSoul

I turned on my MP3 player the other day and asked it to Shuffle the playlist. The first nine songs it returned were:

Hell - Squirrel Nut Zippers
Devils & Angels - Toby Lightman
Christian Woman - Type O Negative
Devil Woman - Cliff Richard
Kyrie - Mr. Mister
Son of a Preacher Man - Dusty Springfield
If You Wanna get to Heaven - Ozark Mountain Daredevils
Sympathy for the Devil - The Rolling Stones
Rock and Roll Heaven - Alan O'Day

That can't be random.

Now I'm frightened of the AI that controls my player, and I can't decide if it believes in Free Will or Predestination.

I'm just relieved that Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven" didn't show up on the list, because I don't have a copy of that.

Maybe I shouldn't have bought the stupid thing at a crossroads.

intersted

The following e-mail was received in our office. All of the original formatting has been preserved.

From: [name redacted]

Sent: [date redacted]

To: [name redacted]

Subject: intersted

Hello im [name redacted] and i seen you were looking for help.I am going to colloge with [name redacted] for web desing.I whould like the experince in your field you can reach me at [number redacted] thank you

We are fucking doomed.

Talk Nerdy to Me

I love technology.

Yesterday I went through my vast music collection, comprised of songs I'd pulled from Napster or other torrents, copied from YouTube using a freeware program called Audacity, downloaded from friends' iPods, and ripped from CDs I purchased from various online retailers. I dumped all the songs I wanted onto a 1" long thumb drive that has sixty-four times the storage capacity of my first desktop.

Today, I placed a micro SD card into an adapter sleeve and inserted the rig into a reader connected to my work computer through one of six free USB ports. I transferred all the song files from the flash drive onto the card. I now have eight hours of music taking up only 1/16th of the storage space on a card that's smaller than my pinky nail. The card went into my cell phone, thus obviating the need for a separate mp3 player.

What I really geek out about in all of this is the fact that it's no big deal. Everybody is familiar with this sort of file exchanging, and everyone expects storage capacity to at least double every year. My phone is smarter and more powerful than the computers that put men on the moon, and I consider it a cheapie not-quite-a-throwaway-but-close.

I can't wait to buy a terabyte thumb drive.

Wanted: Animator

I have no artistic skills, but if I did, I'd do a cartoon short of this scene:

EXTERIOR: Early evening, just after sunset

WIDE SHOT - A jet flies low over the town, its lights flashing brightly in a sky where the stars are just starting to appear.

A FIREFLY enters the scene from the right, following the path of the jet. His tail is flashing in sync with the jet's lights. He is panting, but determined.

Firefly: You're mine, bitch!

How Urban Legends Get Started

The pride was on its way back from stuffing Cub and Kitten insensible on cheap buffet pizza, cruising down the back roads in Mrs. Cat’s homeschool bus. I don’t usually drive the battle wagon because it’s a pain in the tail to adjust the seats and mirrors from Midget to Normal from Diminutive to Ordinary from Wee to Regular from Hobbit to Human to fit me (sorry, dear; please stop smacking my head).

Since I didn’t have to steer, and as the tactical situation required no evasive maneuvers or manning of the cannon, I got to look at the scenery as we drove around. I noticed a box truck parked in front of a house about a mile from our local hospital. The truck had obviously seen a lot of use, as evidenced by the sun-cracked upholstery and the rust-streaked side panels. A heavy lock was hanging from the roll door at the back, much newer and shinier than anything else on the truck. On the door of the cab, a magnetic sign was placed almost as an afterthought. It read:

National Kidney Foundation

And in much smaller letters:

Pick-Up Service

I don’t even want to know what jingle that thing plays as it cruises through the neighborhoods.

Grocery Storm

One thing nobody’s mentioned about this whole “My kid is autistic” deal: shopping lists are determined by the current fixation.

Examples:

- We’ve bought Chef Boy-R-Dee minis and instant Mac-n-cheese every week for about a year now, because they’re about the only thing Cub will eat for supper. We can usually get something healthy in him for lunch, thank goodness.

- Mama Cat was recently forced to purchase an unneeded bottle of Surf detergent, because Cub wanted a beach party. I’m thrilled that he makes the connection between the two, but damn, that’s $3.78 that could have gone towards my Little Debbies and BBQ chips. What? I never said I eat healthy at lunch.

- We’ve had to abort some trips because Cub insisted that everything we buy be the same color. Do you have any idea how few blue foods there are? And how hard it is to make a decent meal out of the ones that do exist? Is a freezer pop considered a salad or a side dish?

If nothing else, having Cub around has given us lightning-fast reflexes when it comes to adapting to new situations. And we still laugh about it. You have to, because otherwise you’d go batshit insane.

Don't mess with the Mrs.

Eighteen years and counting, Mrs. Cat.

You keep the pride healthy, fed, clothed, mostly clean and reasonably happy, and sacrifice so much of yourself in doing so.

Even with our cumulative loss of sleep, solitude, and sanity, I'd do it all over again, because there's also been a hell of a lot of laughter, wonder, and fun.

Kitten and Cub get so much from you, and they will be a force to be reckoned with when they enter the world. (And not just because we weaponized them, either.)

You're my favoritest wife ever. You're an awesome partner and the perfect balance to my goofiness. You fucking rock.

We make a good team, and I can't wait to find out what the next eighteen years hold for us. Because we'll still be together, taking care of business.

And looking good while we're doing it.

Yes, readers. We ARE this cool.

Truth is Stranger than Fiction

And sometimes, it's more noir than fiction, too.




Woman's Body Found In Suitcase On SF Waterfront


SAN FRANCISCO -- A tourist walking along San Francisco’s scenic waterfront with his niece Tuesday made a shocking discovery on the rocks – a suitcase containing a young woman's body.



Lt. Mike Stasko, head of the San Francisco Police Department's homicide division, confirmed the discovery was being treated as a homicide or a questionable death.



“We have a body in a suitcase,” he told KTVU. “Right now, what we are doing is the body is being transported back to the medical examiner’s office....You never get used to something like this. Someone went ahead and … put the body in a suitcase and hoped that it was going to go down in the Bay.”


http://www.ktvu.com/news/23595753/detail.html

I'm kind of hesitant to admit it, but I'm more intrigued by this story than horrified. I really want to know the backstory and chain of events that led to this woman being stuffed in a samsonite and tossed off a bridge.

What I really want to do is write a series of detective novels and include this incident. You know how the more successful series are titled to revolve around a particular theme? I'd use airline travel terms as my hook: Early Departure, Terminal, Black Box, Missed Connection, etc.



This one would be called Carrion Luggage.

En garde

We recently had part of the yard fenced in so Kitten and Cub could play outside without wandering into the road. From the casual experiments I’ve run, we have a vehicle pass our house approximately every twelve seconds, so keeping them from becoming speed bumps has been a priority ever since we moved here.

They now have about a quarter-acre surrounded by shiny, five-foot chain-link, and it took all of one day for it to start filling up with toys, sports equipment, and other assorted childhood support mechanisms. We’re also planning to put out a grill, picnic table, hammock for Mrs. Cat, and just generally turn it into an outdoor room.

It’s nice to be able to let the kids run around and flame out without having to stay on their heels every step of the way so they don’t dash out in front of the city bus, and I’m glad we were able to do it. What I hadn’t counted on was the perturbed reaction from our neighbors, whose property abuts the fence. Seems that when our installer was laying out the stakes, he was questioned intently about whether he was sure that’s where the property line was. When this was conveyed to me, I was kind of surprised, because the property line had never been an issue when I went ahead and mowed all the way up to the edge of their house instead of stopping at the line, which would have left a two-foot strip of lawn untouched. There was also never a question about where the property line fell when they trimmed their bushes and left the pile of limbs on the corner of our lot instead of theirs. But now that there’s a physical barrier, there’s an issue all of a sudden?

The cause of the concern became clear a couple of days ago when they came home in the new van. Seems there’s not quite enough space for them to pull in beside the other car and still be able to open the doors.

Ah…I get it now. You were counting on being able to hang your Caravan over the property line a little bit, and now you can’t. This annoys you; I understand. I don’t care, but I understand. Hey, I’ve been there. You have to decide which vehicle you’re going to put at risk by parking it in the street. It’s not an easy question: Do we risk someone smashing into the vehicle we use the most, or the one that’s worth more?

Of course, you could scoot over and park on your own yard for a change. Just a thought.

And I thought installing a fence was supposed to make for good neighbors. Until then, we’ll just have to find a way to cope with all the sidelong glances and pursed lips. Maybe I can distract myself by grilling some burgers while the kids play on the swingset.

You want one? I have pickles.