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Nightly Ramble: The Birds, the Cats, And Other Things

Bithead's Nightly Ramble

(Quick, an extra fifty points; What song is the title referring to?  )

When I left the last minute, sitting and listening to the birds peeping away.  My wife, you’ll recall, just picked up a couple.  They’ve become adjusted to the new environment, more Allies, though they’ve been eying Ray the cat rather suspiciously.  Ray, for his part, has been returning the favor , though with some what more enthusiasm.  They are well out of reach, however, so I’m not too worried about it for the moment. 

Their cage resides next to my wife’s desk.  Normal routine around the house is that when my wife gets up she goes out to her desk, fires up her computer and checks for e-mail and her normal web pages to see what’s going on in the world.  So, this morning, my wife got out of bed without waking me up and manage to get out to the desk in started her routine, and as soon as she did that, the bird started peeping.  So, that noise is what will be up this morning. 

I laid there in bed for a good five minutes trying to figure out what in the world the noise was.  I guess that one will take awhile to get used to. 

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I mentioned the cold last night as well, and boy, was it ever.  All three of the cats came back to spend the night on our bed. (A three cat night?) In one way, it’s nice, because you stay warm.  The trouble is, that you’re always worried about whether you’ll roll over on a cat. It’s a good thing and I heavy sleeper because their comings and goings would likely wake me up more often than they do. 

I am reminded, that when our oldest was born, the first week we had in home, we had an ice storm in the neighborhood.  That had power knocked out in our neighborhood for the better part of two weeks.  And what I say our neighborhood, I mean western New York.  Obviously, heat was in short supply.  We ended up sticking the baby in between us in the bed, joking that another man had come between us. I spent the night only half sleeping, worried that I’d roll over on the baby. This situation with the cats is much the same.

But we’re not without precedent, in terms of the cats waking us up.  When we first brought Sam, our oldest cat home, some years ago now, he had found a nice little nest to curl up in some place in the house, and we didn’t see much of him. At 7:00 the following morning, there was the feeling of heaviness on my chest .  As I woke up, Iraq began to realize that it was Sam.  Sam was standing all 4 feet, and 25lbs or so. on my chest.  His nose, was about halfway down my throat.  Apparently, he was trying to figure out where in the world all that noise was coming from.  I briefly considered creating the world’s first flying cat.  I then realized that it was probably not advantageous to a good working relationship with my wife.  So I stood him on top of HER, instead.  She woke up, got up, and fed him.

To this day, we’ve not needed an alarm clock;l he’s always trying to wake us at 6am. I swear he’s more accurate than the clocks, too. When Daylight savings shifted this last time, he was still on EDT, not EST, and tried waking us up at 5am, straight up.

For some reason, though, he’s never tried that standing on my chest thing, again.

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The Christmas light wars, are in full roar, this week. There were at least five neighborhoods, where every house on the street is very highly decorated with lights.  You can probably see these neighborhoods from space.  I can’t imagine what it’s doing to the neighborhood power grid.  It is nice to look at though, and I’ll be taking some pictures for you later this week. 

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I’m running into some problems with WordPress, and how it deals with inserted pictures.  I am not at all happy with how this works.  Anyone with some WordPress experience that knows how to get text to wrap around inline pictures, drop me a note.  What we’re getting right now, is a fairly small picture, inserted as a standalone line, not with text wrapped around it.  One of the minor problems we’ve had with this transition to WordPress.

One of the other problems that we’ve been having, is that the audience has not followed us, in large part.  It’s a cold fact that we were getting better than 50% of our page hits, off of Google searches.  Those Google Links, literally took us years to accumulate.  Sadly, I wasn’t able to transition all of the posts over to the new site.  That’s bad enough.  But we’re missing a large number of hits since the transition.

I do expect most of the spiders to have picked up on the new links by 1/1/07, though.

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I was sorry to see James Kim had died. Nasty way to go.
But his family was found, as he wished, so it wasn’t a total loss.  The situation does however raise a serious point; if you’re stranded like that, and you don’t know where you are, keep your backside in the car. 

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James Joyner, [1] tonight, made note of Dale Franks who, after a bout with the flu road a first article in defense of Paul Krugman, of all people.  James, apparently, finds the connection amusing.  So too wide, but I wasn’t going to say anything.  Frankly, I thought I was the only one in noticed it.
he also issues a backhand [2]to St Andrew, the Excitable, tonight. When James gets into a groove, he’s worth his weight in gold. 
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