Time to move on

I have seen the future, and it's not here.

WelshPixie led the efx community in a new direction recently when she gave birth (figuratively) to [URL="http://www.efx3.com"]www.efx3.com[/URL]. I started a blog there in less than a day, and that's where I will be posting from now on.

If you have been paying attention, you know that this site may not be long for this world. They have to renew the domain name, the guy who can do that isn't around any more or doesn't want to get involved. That's a problem. And if you have been around for a while, you remember the long, long outages and other times when efx2 or efx2blogs was just barely working.

It appears that efx3 has thought a lot about some of the major problems that plagued efx2 and efx2bliogs. The new site promises to be much more stable. Time will tell, of course, but they're off to a very good start.

So that's where I'll be. It's been fun here, but I'd better be moving on. Time to get out of the building before they tear it down.

I strongly recommend that you do the same.

A real Crackberry

Did it really have to happen this way?

A while ago, you learned that I had splurged for a new phone. A Blackberry Pearl, no less. So it's been riding around in its case in my pants pocket to various events recently. Like a thousand or so high school basketball games.

Umm, I guess I really have to be more careful when sitting down. At one gym, I sit on one end of the stage, lifting myself up by my hands and turning around to a sitting position. (Should someone my age really be doing that?) Evidently I wasn't as careful for my pricy new possession as I should have been. When I got home, I took it out to admire it ... and this is what I saw ...
[IMG]http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b289/drdog/Cats-crackberry-2-09.jpg[/IMG]

The phone still works normally. It just looks a little cracked. I'm sure you have heard of all those people addicted to their Blackberries, madly texting messages all day long. That's why they call them Crackberries. Well, I think I have the genuine article.

****
Recently I promised some new photos of the kitties. I've been taking them, just not posting them (or much of anything else). Well, what can I say? The weeks have been long and demanding for me, and I'm pretty worn out over weekends. My wife and I typically sit on the couch on weekend afternoons, after doing something like lunch or shopping, and it's time to relax. Really relax.

And we do. We doze off together. In winter, when the living room is a little cold, we have a quilt over our legs. She leans on my shoulder, and soon she is dozing. On this day, Charlie came around and invited herself up into my lap. Pretty soon she was taking a nap, too. So I had two sleepy females next to me ...
[IMG]http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b289/drdog/Cats-sleepyheads-2-09.jpg[/IMG]

You know that Charlie is very special to me. Over the last few months, Max and I have been getting to know each other better, too. When my wife goes to bed, Max is in the hallway ahead of me, meowing, and goes into a spare bedroom. I follow him, and we play Pet the Kitty. Max is all happy and purring loudly ... but he just can't sit still. We are sitting on the bed, where he usually sleeps, as I pet him, but soon he hops onto the floor and then up into the window. I get up to pet him in the window, he enjoys it, but then he hops on the floor and back on the bed. And then it's time for another round of Pet the Kitty. Sooner or later Max decides it's time for a wash, and I depart around then.

Max's favorite place seems to be sitting in windows, looking outside. Day or night, he likes his windows ...
[IMG]http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b289/drdog/Cats-Maxwindow-2-09.jpg[/IMG]

Charlie likes to visit me late at night, often settling in my lap as I pet her. Recently, though, I noticed that pens were disappearing from my desk. Was I absentmindedly pocketing them? Was my wife taking them?

One night, the real culprit struck ... and my camera was in reach ...
[IMG]http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b289/drdog/Cats-Charliepen-2-09.jpg[/IMG]

She pulled the pen down to the chair, grabbed it in the middle, hopped down to the floor and walked out the door with it. Carried it down the hall. At other times we have come across pencils with a host of tiny little toothmarks on them. Think we know who is doing that.

Sometimes when Charlie is visiting me late at night on the computer, Max enters the room. On this night, Charlie went behind the monitor--and Max followed, creating this coming-and-going shot ...
[IMG]http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b289/drdog/Catscoming-3-09.jpg[/IMG]

and this one, after Charlie turned around and walked back ...
[IMG]http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b289/drdog/Catsgoing-3-09.jpg[/IMG]

Back in early February, we saw a catnip mouse at the store. It was a larger and more realistic-looking mouse than usual, and we said what the heck. The cats will enjoy it. That's what we thought. Understand one thing: We're not cats.

We let Charlie get the first chance at it. She played with it for a while ...
[IMG]http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b289/drdog/Cats-Charliebigmouse-2-09.jpg[/IMG]

Then Max came around. Whatcha got now, Charlie? ...
[IMG]http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b289/drdog/Cats-2-1mouse-2-09.jpg[/IMG]

After a while, Charlie went back to her other mouse. It seemed more interesting ...
[IMG]http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b289/drdog/Cats-Charlietinymouse-2-09.jpg[/IMG]

And how about you, Max? Aren't you interested in the new mouse, either? ...
[IMG]http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b289/drdog/Cats-Maxyawn-2-09.jpg[/IMG]

Apparently not. Must be time for another nap.

****
Basketball season rolls on. On of my teams, the one that lost 10 straight games during the season and finished 5-15 after winning its final two regular season games, won both its district games and will be going to Houghton for the regionals next Monday. They beat a 16-4 squad last night. Hey, playoffs: You never know.

So that's where I'll be next Monday night. Let's hope the weather behaves. It was -10F this morning. But they're predicting highs in the 40s this weekend. I'm ready for it.

Left in the dark

I'm still in search of my blogging mojo. I know I can find it ... someday, somewhere.

For better or worse, I am blaming high school basketball season for the absent mojo. After all, since the start of the year I've been gone at games three and four nights a week after a regular day at work. So when I finally get to stay home for the final hours of the day, I'm tired and don't feel very creative. All the basketball doesn't leave a lot of time for other pursuits. Last week, I had games on four consecutive nights, and I was very stressed out. My back, my neck, my shoulders were so tight.

But pretty soon I'll have to find a new excuse. Basketball season is nearly over. The two girls teams I cover both lost during their district tournament last week. The two boys teams start district play Monday night, and I expect one to drop out right away. The other could go on a while, but we're getting pretty near the end. Soon, I'll have a little more time for creative pursuits.

The weather got a little warmer last week--even warm enough to melt some of the snow. Tonight we're going back down close to zero, and we have a couple days later this week forecast for highs below 20. But it will be easier to take with a lot of the snow melted. Why, you can even see patches of brown grass in parts of the back yard now!

We had our own adventure one night last week. The basketball game went long (last home game of the season), and I didn't leave for home until about 9 p.m. The trip home is along a highway that goes through some hills in a rural area, so I expected it to be dark. But the yellow flashing light at the first intersection after the hills was not working, and the bar at that corner was dark. Strange. I went further and saw that I wasn't seeing any lighted houses along the road. Strange. All the way into town--the plaza west of downtown, the McDonald's, the gas stations as you enter the downtown area--it was dark. Strange.

The house was just as dark as I got out of the car, and I thought of something to tell my wife when I came through the door: "Honey, we'd better get that motion-sensor light checked out again--it didn't come on!"

She reported the power had gone out at about 8:40 p.m. (cause unknown). "OK," I said, "but didn't you want to watch ER?" Several candles had been lighted upstairs and downstairs. We sat on the living room couch, and it was just bright enough for me to notice that the cats were walking around, acting puzzled. We talked for a while. Then I held a little flashlight while she got the cats' food ready, while she took her pills, and then we went upstairs. After all, what is there to do when the power is off and you can't watch TV or get on the computer and the house is only lit by candles? What can you do?

My wife came up with an idea.

And just as we were finishing up, the lights came back on. That didn't rush the post-coital cuddling, but after a while she drifted off to sleep, and I got up for a few minutes, to reset clocks and switch off the lights that were on.

Then, two nights later, I went through the house again, changing the clocks once again because of the arrival of daylight time.

I enjoy seeing the sun up longer in the evening. Of course, it will be darker in the morning, but the time change (whenever it happens) means brighter evenings and the promise of warmer weather ahead.

I have some new (well, relatively new; you haven't seen them, anyway) pictures of the cats, and I'll write something up for that pretty soon. I haven't felt very creative with the camera lately, but the arrival of warmer weather should encourage me to get out and around.

After all, there's more to life that the sound of a rubberized ball endlessly bouncing on a hardwood floor. Isn't there?

Like a bicycle?

Is blogging like riding a bicycle? In that once you learn how, you never forget?

I'm not sure. I wanted to write something this weekend, but I was having writer's block. Don't know how to start, what to say, which of my experiences are worth writing about and which aren't worth the bother.

There is news ... but I'll save that for another time. Hopefully, I'll be writing more often again in the days to come. But the wintertime blahs came over me pretty good this year. Good news is that I wasn't ill. Outside of being sick of winter.

That's because our brutal winter continues to be, well, brutal. We had snow a few days ago--just three inches, but it was accompanied by colder air and high winds. The winds died off, leaving behind conditions straight out of January. A couple days ago, we didn't get above +5F (-15C). Overnight, the predicted low was -23 F! That's, like, -30 C. Today, Sunday, we drove out of town to visit my mom. It was sunny, and the temperature was a balmy 15F. Tonight, the forecast calls for minus 26F, and we're at minus 20F already.

But they are promising highs in the 30s in a few day. Well, we'll see.

On Friday evening, one of those frigid evenings last week, I didn't have a basketball game, so my wife and I decided to go for a fish fry. This time we chose a place we hadn't visited before--a restaurant that was well-known way back when. As a gimmick, they had signs posted all over Wisconsin. "M------ Cafe. 154 miles."

But that was then. It's gone through several changes of ownership and new names. They're open just one night a week now--Fridays, for fish fries. We decided to give them a try.

Don't know if we will be back. Our table was in a back room that was halfway between cool and cold. I had a sweater on, but I still decided to put my coat over the back of my chair for insulation. The fish (we chose cod) was OK, but there were just two pieces of it per order. And to top it off, they didn't take credit/debit cards. (Yes, I had money for the bill.) The price was rather high for two fish fries and two sodas. So I think next time, we'll go somewhere else. If nothing else, the next fish fry should be a little warmer.

On Saturday, I had another first experience. I covered a biathlon. That's like the Olympic event that combines cross-country skiing and rifle shooting. I remembered seeing telephoto shots of a group of skiers bunched together on the trail, coming right towards the camera, and a line of marksmen lying prone on the ground, squeezing off shots at the target.

Ha! As it turned out, the competitors went out on the course whenever they wanted: There was no mass start. If you got there early, you went out early. If you arrived later, you started later. So there would be no mass of people competing for position--I'd get just one or (if I was lucky) two skiers at a time.

It was a lovely, sunny day, about 15 F. I decided to go by a shooting station anyway, but it was a little more than a quarter mile down the trail. So down the trail I trudged, trying not to mess up the Nordic skiers' tracks on the trail, sort of like a pair of railroad tracks. I got there, talked to the judge there and waited. And waited. And waited.

Finally we saw a skier coming down the trail towards us. Finally, a picture. He fired his shots at the metal targets mounted about 50 yards away. Bangplink! Bangplink! Bangplink! Bangplink! Bangplink! He hit the targets on all five shots. He gave me his name and left. OK. So far so good.

The next competitor was a woman. She fired at the target. Bang! Bang! Bang! Bangplink! Bang! One of five. She told me something as she left, something I hear a lot at such events: "Don't put me in the paper!"

Occupational hazard up here. Adults (especially) are horribly shy people, or so they would have you believe. You would think their toes would curl up and they'd die of embarrassment if they made the paper.

Later, another guy showed up. He had a fancy hat and a very expensive-looking gun. He fired. Bang. Bangplink. Bang. Bang. Bang. Costly equipment is only as good as the person using it.

We waited another 20 minutes or so. Finally, a man and a woman. The woman was one of those shrinking violets I just wrote about, but she was just along for the skiing, anyway--her husband was the competitor, and she gave me his name. OK, I'll settle for that.

Good enough for now--the walkie-talkies told us no more competitors were on course. So I started the long trudge back down the trail. When I finally reached the end, Mr. Fancy Gun was talking to another course worker there. He noticed me and walked over with a smile. "Just so you know," he said, "I'm in the Witness Protection Program. So you can't use my picture."

I bit my tongue. A few minutes later, as I was putting the camera bag in the car, he was walking past, towards the lodge building, and I muttered--just loud enough for him to hear--"Witness Protection Program!" I didn't add "my ass!" at the end, but I didn't have to.

****
Last time I wrote (I think), it seemed as if the basketball season would last forever. Now the girls regular season is over, and their playoffs start Monday. The boys schedule is one week behind. The end is in sight! Hallelujah!