This is Eliza, the Cat with Chlamydia. Yeh, I’m not kidding: chlamydia. Don’t you hate it when doctors use names like that for pet diseases? She looked bad enough when she had a full-blown case of it, but then they had to think of an awful name for it, too? Do veterinarians try to out-do each other when naming diseases? “Geeze, Lenny, get a load of this cat! Looks like it’s gone ten rounds with the Swamp Thing and lost! What’ll we call whatever nasty bug she’s got?”
“How about amputation?”
“Gory, but not repulsive enough.”
“Leprosy?”
“I think you’re on the right track, but let’s throw a real curveball with it. How about chlamydia?”
“Ewww, nasty. You’ve got a real knack for this.”
“Thanks.”
Eliza’s been staying with us for about three weeks now and she looks one heck of a lot better now than when we took her in to look after her full-time. She used to look like ... well, like something the cat dragged in, actually. Dragged in from a ditch. A ditch full of trash. She looked awful. In fact, Barb named her “Eliza” after Eliza Doolittle, because she expected this cat would look so different after recovering from all her ills that nobody would be able to recognize her.
She stays in a kennel in the extra room where we can close the door to keep our cats away from her, and she doesn’t like the isolation much. I snapped this picture after she jumped up to the top of a pile of folded blankets, where she had a clear view of the whole room, up high above nearly everything else and not in the dark confines of her kennel. She was so satisfied with her airy perch I didn’t have the heart to make her get down, and anyway, she came down on her own after about a half-hour to sit in my lap and purr.
The windshield wipers on the van were so ragged they couldn’t wipe the slushy snow off the windshield any more. I tried to replace them at the garage on base, but the van is so old that they didn’t have wipers that fit, so I went off-base to “Go Motors,” a little hole in the wall stocked with car parts, where a lady that looked like an Asian version of my Mom huddled next to a kerosene space heater. There was nobody else in the place.
“Sumimasen,” I said, holding out my wiper blade, “do you have these?”
She took a long look at it, muttering to herself. “Your car is a Mitsubishi?”
How the heck did she know that from looking at the wiper blade? “Hai,” I said, pointing out the window at the van. She went out to the curb, peered at the wiper arm, examined the blade again, and came inside, where she dug through a box and came back to the counter with a new wiper blade and three plastic bags filled with small parts. While she was snapping bits together like her own little physics project, she gave me a pliers and told me to pry the ends off the wiper arms. After I got that done, she gave me the parts she tinkered together and a wiper blade and showed me how it all went together, then told me to try it on my car. I came back into the shop with a big smile on my face.
“It’s perfect,” I said. “How did you do that?”
Whatever magic she had, she did it again with the other wiper, and that’s how the lady at Go Motors fixed my car today.
I don’t know what all’s involved in making a latte, but it must be an awfully messy process because the first thing Barb does when she comes home from work is shower the syrup off herself. It’s not dripping from her arms or spattered across her face or anything like that, but she won’t sit down or even touch anything until after she’s had her shower. A long one.
Super Bowl Monday (we’re so far away from you guys that the signals coming from the States don’t reach us until Monday morning) is a semi-official federal holiday for your Fighting Forces of Freedom in the far east. The schools will be closed for a “teacher work day,” the commissary will be closed for “inventory,” and nearly every military unit on base will be allowed to report for duty no earlier than 1300 as part of a morale-building “family day,” if your family wants to stay home and watch the Patriots slaughter the Eagles.
I’ll be clocking some sack time at the kickoff, myself. It’s not that I mean to be ungrateful, but getting up at six to watch the Super Bowl isn’t going to build half the morale for me that I’ll get if I sleep in until eight.
A recording playing on the public address system in the BX today was yakking away about the new “manly fragrance” on sale in the cosmetics department. Now, how do you suppose the words “manly” and “fragrance” got paired up? Could there be two words that have less in common with one another? If our fighting men are buying and wearing a “manly fragrance” from the BX, what does that imply about the virility of our military might? And just what is a “manly fragrance,” anyway? If it were “manly,” then ...
I’m sorry, I know I’m obsessing on the phrasing, but any smell described by the word “manly” would be an “odor” or, at best, an “aroma.” It wouldn’t be “fragrant” in any sense. Flowers are “fragrant.” Some women are “fragrant.” But even after he was freshly washed and powdered and the tang of after-shave drifted over his head, my father was “aromatic,” and somehow I doubt Barb would ever describe me as “fragrant.” All men stink in their own way, no matter how some try to cover it up with Brut, and those of us who don’t waste money on a “manly fragrance” have learned to live with it.
A manly odor would smell – in fact, it would reek – like a cross between sweat-soaked gym shorts, a fart-filled sofa cushion, and beer breath. Somehow, I doubt they were selling anything in a bottle at the cosmetics counter in the BX that smelled anything like that. So what they were selling had to be either the watered-down gasoline that Mennen and similar corporations put in bottles, or some kind of frou-frou toilet water with a designer name on the label.
Our unit gives away a ton of awards each year, and it turns out I’m the guy who has to buy them. In all the other military units I’ve been to, they gave away a plaque with the unit crest and the recipient’s name engraved on a small brass plate, but because this unit’s in Japan, they give away swords and gongs and stuff.
They still need the engraved name plate, though, and I went to pick some up for the annual awards banquet, only to find that the name plate said “373rd Intelligent Group”. I checked the paper that was turned in to see what the awards guys had written down, and sure enough it said “Intelligent.”
I’m a member of the 373rd Intelligence Group. You could say we’re “intelligence,” but not “intelligent.”
Telling other people’s stories always seems to take some of the fun out of it, but a friend of mine told me one of his stories that I thought was so good, I’ve got to share it. I don’t think he’ll mind.
Al’s a Chief Master Sergeant, and the job he held up until last year required him to travel a lot, as much as three weeks out of every four. Besides going all over the world, he’s been through every major airport in the States.
A Chief Master Sergeant wears a very distinctive set of stripes on his arm; you can spot one a block away. Al always wore his uniform when traveling, because his job required him to be highly visible to the troops. You also need to know that, while every other NCO in the Air Force is casually addressed as “sergeant,” a Chief Master Sergeant is always addressed as “Chief.” It’s widely known that, after they’re promoted, they get so used to hearing “Chief” that they tend to forget they ever had a first name.
One of Al’s trips took him through Atlanta, a hub airport that an awful lot of military personnel pass through on their way to other assignments. As Al made his way across the terminal to his connecting flight, one military service member after another smiled or waved and greeted him with, “Hey, Chief,” “Good morning, Chief,” “Hello, Chief,” something like that, and Al answered every one of them with a smile and his own greeting.
When people get off a plane, they tend to move as a herd through the terminal, peeling off in ones or twos as they reach their gates. The woman walking alongside Al was apparently going at least as far as he was, because she got to hear a lot of these exchanges. Finally, she turned to Al and said in wonder, “You sure know a lot of people in Atlanta.”
Holy crap, did I get a workout today. Vehicle maintenance all day long; not really hard work, but a lot of running out and back, out and back to take the scooters to main base. Timing was everything, to make sure I had a ride back to work in case I couldn’t leapfrog from one vehicle to the other. Then I had to fetch supplies that included about a ton of printer paper, paper towels, and toilet paper in the economy-size boxes that are only at little smaller than your typical Wal-Mart Super Store. Try walking one of those through about a dozen doorways without losing the skin off all your knuckles. Also, I had to chase down orders for plaques and name plates, which, in the colorful language of the military, was like jumping through my own orifice, except they don’t usually say “orifice.” Finally, for the Big Finish, I ended the day in the north area gym for PT. I focused on low impact aerobic training for the very minimum time allowed. Call me a lazy slug if you must, but by the time I got home and fed myself, all I had energy left for was to take a long, hot shower, put on my pajamas and crawl into bed.
There’s almost nothing I can do at work that’s more fun than finding a reason to drive around in a scooter. We have six of these miniature trucks, really nothing more than go-carts with an open box on the back for carrying light loads around the base. I had to take all six of them to the garage for their annual safety inspection this week, and although it was a pain to try to figure out how to leapfrog one scooter after another down to main base from Security Hill, scooting around in them all week long was a blast.
For a start, every one of them has four-wheel drive, so they go just about anywhere. There’s been a winter storm parked over us for a week now that’s dumped about forty-seven hundred feet of snow all over Aomori prefecture. When the plows go out in the morning, they scrape the snow off the road and leave a sheet of polished ice that sends dozens of cars into the ditch. I’ve got four-wheel drive on my car, but when it’s like this, I’m lucky to find stretch when I can get up to twenty km/h — twelve mph.
The scooters are so small and light that you’d think they’d be all over the road, too, but they love the ice and snow. While everybody else is playing bumper cars on the freshly-plowed parking lots, I can swerve and dodge and just generally annoy the hell out of everyone with my smug agility. One of the scooters was left buried in about a foot of snow, and even though some guys in the shop offered to push me out, I put it in FWD and it clawed over the drifts almost as well as any Arctic Cat snowmobile.
The next coolest thing about scooters is that, just like go-karts, they’re so small that driving around in them feels a lot faster than it really is. I never drove any faster than fifty km/h all week — thirty miles an hour — but that feels exactly like the last time you were in your red wagon and got going way too fast down a hill.
Their tiny size, however, has got to be their biggest drawback. I’m only six feet tall, but I have to think very carefully when getting into any one of them; if I casually sit down and swing my legs in, like any other car, I’ll kneecap myself. The two Suzukis that I drove on Friday were so small that I couldn’t sit down and swing my legs in at all; I had to grab hold of the roof (there was no handle in the cab), step over the steering wheel with my left leg, corkscrew myself in around the steering column, sit down, and draw my right leg in after me. When I finally settled in, my right leg was up against the door, the steering column was clutched between my knees, and my left leg was up against the gear shifter. I couldn’t move my butt more than two inches in any direction.
I don’t usually drive anything smaller than the Hondas, and I like the Daihatsus the best; they’ve got a “stretch cab” with plenty of space for my knees and a little extra room in the back where I can stuff my coat and an ice scraper.
I went to an awards banquet last night where Ken, one of the guys in the office where I work, won the prize for super-duper senior non-commissioned officer of the year, and to commemorate the gravity of the event, I made a very loud comment about going to the toilet.
He wanted it that way. He’s a CE troop. I forget what CE stands for, but they’re the guys who build walls and fix pipes, paint floors and change bulbs. I’ve heard them say, “You don’t even think about us until the crapper’s not working; then we’re all kinds of important to you.”
It’s a very important morale-builder to whoop and hollar at awards ceremonies, and Ken likes to salute CE troops who win by shouting, “YOU CAN’T PEE WITHOUT CE!” It always makes them feel so proud. But there was some pretty heavy brass at our last awards ceremony, and Ken was, ah, ‘strongly discouraged’ from his usual celebration, which just about constipated him.
So when I spotted him at the awards ceremony last night, and I realized that he would almost certainly take the prize in his category, I knew what I had to do, even though my boss was sitting next to me. Heck, I’m going to retire in less than six months; who would be better for the job?
All I needed was the right moment. The MC announced Ken as the winner to thunderous applause, he marched to the podium, faced the commander to accept his plaque, and the moment that the mayhem fell to a dull roar, I made sure everybody knew the pride with which Ken does his job. He gave me a thumbs-up from across the room.
Let’s have a look at the schedule of what’s playing at The Bong movie theater this month: A Blowing Stuff Up Movie is playing on six dates, a Creature From Hell Doing Good movie is playing on five dates, there’s a Once-Popular Action Hero movie playing on five dates, a Children Committing Mayhem movie on six dates, and finally, near the bottom of the list, there’s a movie I’ve been waiting to see since it came out last August — it’s playing on one date. I’ll bet you a doughnut Barb’s working that night.
I wear a single sock on my right foot at night. Not only is this guaranteed to freak out my family, it keeps the salve I have to put on my dry skin from rubbing off all over the bed sheets. Then, in the morning, because the floor is cold, I grab one of the big wool socks that I use for slippers and wear that on the other foot, so that I’m walking around in one short, white sock and one long, thick, fuzzy gray sock.
Why this weirds out my wife and kid is beyond me. First of all, it’s not like they haven’t seen weird before, and second of all, it’s not that weird. So I’m wearing two different socks. So what? But apparently it’s a very big deal — you’d think it was Page One, above the fold, if you heard the way they can’t stop talking about it.
And any kind of criticism about the way I dress is especially strange coming from my son, who wears pants that are actually made to look like they’re falling off his butt. I used to go on about that, but I ran out of things to say many moons ago.
But Barb’s just as loony over it. I couldn’t get a more freaked-out reaction from her if I spiked my hair in a twirling gumdrop shape, painted it silver and sprinkled sequins on it — which, now I think of it, is a pretty interesting idea, just to see what she says. And do I ever mention her problem with sunglasses? No. So maybe I ought to get cut some slack here.
Movie Time: If you still haven’t seen The Forgotten but you want to, forget it. It’s about what you would expect from an episode of The X Files, but if you still want to waste five bucks or whatever Blockbuster will charge you to rent it, don’t read any further because I’m going to spoil it for you. This is the one where Julianne Moore had a little boy that was lost in a plane crash. She’s seeing a shrink, Gary Sinise, who’s helping her get a grip on life again until one day when all the pictures of her boy go missing and everybody insists she never had a son. It’s not a bad setup, but the movie quickly goes downhill after the spooks from NSA show up.
Naturally, they’re covering up abductions by indestructible space aliens who are so powerful they can subtly photoshop Moore’s son out of every picture in her possession and make her husband forget they ever had a son, but they make an NSA spook disappear by dramatically sucking him and most of the surrounding building into the sky, leaving behind a wallet filled with identification, so the subterfuge with the photographs was pretty much wasted.
Gary Sinise turned out to be “one of the few who knew” the awful truth about the aliens, and although he delivered this and other lines with a lot of gravity, he was pretty much wasted in this movie. And Anthony Edwards never got a chance to do any more than make desperate gestures or grin dumbly; I can imagine how disgusted he must have felt when he saw what was left of his part after the final edit of the movie was released.
This was a dumb movie in the most literal sense. I got the impression that the writers started with the idea of the woman who remembered her son when nobody else did ... and they never got any further than that, so they stole worn-out ideas from every old movie and television show about space invaders, and tacked-on an ending so bad that they should never be allowed to own any writing instrument again, not even so much as a pencil.
Tim and I tried to recover some of the time we lost watching that crappy movie by playing a football video game afterwards. It’s a Playstation game where the teams are real but the plays are a little, shall we say, unconventional. If they played real NFL football like this, everybody would have broken limbs after two plays, and the refs would take up most of the game throwing flags, and there wouldn’t be enough time in the day for them to call out all the fouls. Hint: If you push the triangle button, you can take a late hit. Tim and I team up to dogpile the receiver after the play’s over.
The electronic sign over the door at work blinked with this inspirational quote: “A champion is someone who gets up, even when he can’t.” Isn’t that at least a trifle stupid? I mean to say, if you can’t get up, then it doesn’t matter if you’re a champion, or Superman, or God himself — you won’t be getting up. That’s what can’t means. Am I being way too literal again?
It turns out Barb’s job at the café is mission-essential. That means if the winter storm that’s hanging over Misawa tonight kept dumping snow on us like a big, crazy snow-dumping thing, and the base commander authorized a two-hour delay in the morning to keep people from killing each other in the demolition-derby version of traffic we have here all winter long, then I wouldn’t have to begin defending freedom and democracy until ten o’clock, but Barb is so important to the round-the-clock function of the base that she would have to start serving up lattés at seven-thirty. Funny world, isn’t it?
Bonkers found a new place to camp out. Used to be he’d stretch himself along the top of the microwave and nap the day away, but Boo looked up at him, pictured herself on that lofty perch and began to plant her butt up there whenever Bonkers was getting a little too comfortable for her liking. Sometimes he’d fight back, but mostly he just wanted peace and quiet, so he traded the top of the clothes dryer for the microwave, and when it’s running, the dryer is a perfect cat-napping spot; I don’t know why they weren’t sleeping there all this time.
Bonkers and Boo cat-play quite a bit with each other, but when Boo wants to take over a spot that Bonkers has already warmed up, her technique is to simply move in and settle down. She doesn’t have to raise so much as a paw to swat him; she’s such a butterball that she only has to back up to Bonkers, spread herself as widely as possible, and crowd him off his perch. He tries to stroll away casually, as if he meant to leave, but Boo’s no fool. She knows what works. She’s had so much success with that move that she tried it on me to claim more of the bed for herself, but I outweigh her by one-hundred forty pounds, so no luck there.
Barb and I went out last night for a Chinese dinner at Old Miyaki’s. This is the place we were supposed to go to with our coupons last month, when we ended up at New Miyaki’s instead. The great thing about either Miyaki’s is that they’ll bring you something like eight or ten courses of Chinese food that are so absolutely delicious they very nearly force you to eat every morsel. There’s almost nothing I’ll miss more about Misawa than all the great food.
As we were waddling through the snow on the way home, Barb and I noticed that somebody was pointing a laser at us! This is not just a little annoying, but kind of creepy, too. The first time, we couldn’t see where it was coming from, but somebody was getting a great big jolly out of it because he just couldn’t stop, and we easily figured out it was coming from the darkened upstairs window of a house up the street, so we turned around and went back to ring the doorbell. No answer. I rang again, then knocked. Still no answer. So what do you want to bet it was a kid home alone with his dad’s laser pointer and too much time on his hands?
We got so much snow on Wednesday — or was it Thursday? — that I actually did end up getting that two-hour delay I was talking about. Barb wasn’t scheduled to work, so her mission-essential status never forced her to trudge through knee-deep snow to brew lattés for the pilots and maintainers on their delayed way to the flight line.
The snow kept on coming down all through the day — counting back, it was Thursday — which started some rampant rumors about getting out of work early, but that never happened, even though we ended up with eight or ten more inches and snow drifts up to your eyes in places. I ended up with not much to do, because what I usually do is run from work to supply to main base and back, and I couldn’t safely do any of that while the roads were snow-covered and icy, so mostly I shuffled papers and bothered my co-workers with stupid questions. I’ll bet they’re still wondering why I was so antsy.
Friday was so totally unlike Thursday that you would’ve wondered where all the snow came from if you hadn’t been there the day before to see it all come down. Tim got out of school at noon. I think he spent his free time spreading his big butt all over the sofa.
Eliza, the house-guest who is a cat, will be staying with us for a few more days, at least until she’s had her latest round of medication, and probably her next round, as well. It wouldn’t surprise me a bit if she didn’t eventually find her way into our luggage and ends up in Wisconsin with us. She’s such a sweet cat that I’m sure nobody would be surprised. “Just a few more days,” Barb will be saying, five years or so from now. Barb likes working in the shelter so much that she’s looking for jobs at shelters and vet clinics. And right after that, you’ll see her picture in the paper being led by police out of a house filled with 187 cats.
I made the mistake of jumping in the car to make a short trip to the exchange today, lulled into a false sense of security by the fact that it hadn’t snowed in two days. I’m so gullible. The drizzle that fell yesterday turned the parking lot at the exchange into an icy swamp, filled with jagged chunks of frozen snow and ice that tried to gouge the muffler out of the belly of my car. I wanted to slow down, but I was sure that if I did I’d never get going again, so I clenched my teeth and pressed on.
Nobody else in the parking lot seemed to think that driving through slush deep enough to cover your hub caps required any kind of caution at all, even though they were all fishtailing around the turns and ping-ponging off the snow banks. Not surprisingly, nearly every car on base has a dent or scrape in it. It’s one of the first things you notice.
I think I decided to escape with all my arms and legs at the point when a bulldozer the size of a blimp hangar tried to squeeze past me. It’s not that I didn’t think he could do it, it’s just that I didn’t particularly want to find out. Ever.
One of the handiest power tools ever made has got to be the rechargeable drill, but you know what? If you can’t find the recharger, it’s just a high-priced paperweight, and an inconveniently large one at that. I looked thought every closet and every drawer in the house, and although I turned up some other pretty nifty items that I didn’t realize I had any longer, I had no luck finding the recharger. I even looked around town for another one, because I’m pretty naïve that way. In the end, I bought a really cheap constant-speed drill with a good old-fashioned plug, because I never want to waste a day dodging bulldozers when I started it thinking about drilling a hole.
Barb picked up this coffee cup at a local dollar store, mostly because of the cute illustration on the side, but also because she discovered the label on the bottom of the cup says, “rubbery cat.”
Tim informed me that he would like to use the internet this morning at a certain time in order to message his friends, instead of, say, meeting them at the café or one of their houses to talk face-to-face. When I brought up the other possibilities, he said, “That’s cute, dad. It’s so quaint how old-fashioned you are,” or something equally complimentary.
I was washing clothes today and was absolutely boggled by the number of socks that Barb has collected. I’m not losing my mind – I said socks. She collects them everywhere we go. Some people collect coins, or spoons, or matchbook covers (honestly! Check it out yourself at James Lileks’ page, just to name one) – Barb collects socks. In the event you might be the slightest bit interested, I’ve posted a few of them on the picture page. And it occurred to me this very minute that she’ll probably have a cow when she finds out I’ve posted pictures of her socks on the internet. Better go out and buy some roses and wine right now.
Retirement News: Today I filled out the last leave form I will ever submit for the commander’s signature. Now the countdown is official: Terminal leave begins on the fourth of June, just 102 days from today. In a couple of days, I’ll be a double-digit midget!
I also went in for my final dental check-up this morning. The dentist found one cavity in one of my eye teeth. Figures I’d have to get drilled before I retire. Then again, I had a whole raft of x-ray slides shoved into my mouth by a dental technician whose throat was swollen up with what was probably some kind of mutant killer bird flu, so the cavity is the least of my worries right now.
I was supposed to let the lab techs draw some blood for whatever nefarious experiments they conduct in their lair, but when I reported to the lab he asked me the canned question, “Have you had anything to eat in the last twelve hours?”
“Yes,” I answered.
He blinked and looked up at me from his computer monitor. Apparently, he wasn’t expecting that answer. “Have you had anything to eat in the last twelve hours?” he repeated.
“Yes,” I said again, “I have. Breakfast. Oatmeal and OJ.”
“Oh,” he said. “You’re not supposed to eat for twelve hours before we draw blood. Somebody should’ve told you. I’m sorry.”
“No problem,” I said, as agreeably as possible. “Can I come back tomorrow morning?”
“Yes, that’d be okay. I’m really sorry, sir.”
“Don’t worry about it. Can I have anything to drink?”
“All the water you can hold. Sorry about that.”
Geeze, this guy apologized more than Sean ever did. “Okay, nothing but water, got it. See you in the morning.”
“See you. Sorry, sir.”
He was so genuinely, sincerely sorry that I wanted to say something like, “I’ll bring you a safety blanket or teddy bear or something.” I hope he’ll be all right until morning.
Here’s a weird little bit of trivia about our home: Our spoons disappear. Not all of them, just the tablespoons. The last time we bought a set of silverware, I think they started disappearing the day after Barb brought them home. And it’s not like any of us has a hobby like pottery where we have to mix up a tablespoonful of this with a tablespoonful of that — the only thing any of us ever use tablespoons for is eating. It’s an unsolved mystery.
Even weirder: we have about forty-seven grapefruit spoons, and none of us eats grapefruit. I think we started with two, and they’ve been breeding an army. It might even be possible they’re cannibalizing the tablespoons, now that I think of it.
While Barb and I were walking home from dinner at a restaurant in town, we stopped at a liquor store to pick up a couple beers an a bottle of the Chinese apricot wine that Barb loves so much, and while we were there I spotted this novelty jug on one of the shelves. It’s cast in the shape of Tohoku, the northern end of the Japanese main island Honshu, where we’re living, and it’s one of those souvenirs I knew I’d end up kicking myself for if I didn’t buy it. It cost all the rest of the yen I had in my wallet, but I told Barb, “I don’t even care what’s in that – I want it.”
Back at home, I was yanking the cork out almost as soon as I got my coat off to see if we could figure out what kind of liquor it was. If it turned out to be some cheap, crappy wine, I was going to simply pour it down the drain and put the bottle on display. But after we took a sip, we both realized at the same time that it was sake, and not just any sake, but the best sake either of us had ever tasted. Very dangerous.
We’d both tried sake before, in the States, and even in Europe, and it had always been pitifully bad – no body to it at all, and usually as caustic as a shot glass full of turpentine. The sake we had at a Christmas market in Belgium was the worst, and we decided right there never to bother with it again.
At our first skiing party in Japan, though, out came the sake, glasses were poured, and toasts were made. It would have been bad form to turn down hospitality, so Barb and I dutifully took a sip – and what the hell, it was mighty tasty. And that was sake out of a paper carton, the cheap stuff.
I’ve had much better sake at other parties, and now that I know what it’s supposed to taste like, I never turn it down. That gets me into a lot less trouble than you’d think – the Japanese like to drink, but I’ve never seen them get too carried away with sake.
The sake in the novelty jug was very smooth, almost buttery, and that’s why I said it was so dangerous. Most sake is about 75% alcohol, practically rocket fuel. It wasn’t hard to imagine how a guy could easily suck down a couple glasses of the stuff before he realized what kind of trouble he was getting into. So the jug, as you see it, is still nearly full; so far, I’ve treated myself to just a couple shots from it.
Retirement News: All my paperwork is turned in to get orders. When I’ve got orders, I can get a port call, and when I’ve got a port call, I can get a move-out date.
At the risk of driving you crazy with cat stories, here’s the latest on our feline visitor, Eliza:
Although Tim and I helped from time to time, Eliza’s near-complete recovery was almost entirely thanks to Barb’s tender and devoted care, who ran Eliza back and forth to the vet in town, forced medicine into her eyes and mouth, bathed her, and at one point was spoon-feeding her to try to get her weight up. Eliza is now starting to look like a normal cat again, BUT ...
As part of her examination, the vet drew some of her blood to see if she had any infections or chronic disease that would threaten her or other cats at the shelter. As it turned out, she popped positive for FIP, which means (I think) that she’s been exposed to a nasty virus or that she’s been inoculated against the nasty virus.
If she’s been exposed to the nasty virus, and some vets say that nearly all cats have been, either she’ll live a normal life – OR – she’ll be stricken by infection and die horribly. You’d think they could offer a prognosis that’s a little more middle-of-the-road, but they don’t. And the vet says the test can’t tell whether the positive hit comes from exposure or from inoculation. So I gotta ask: What do you suppose is the point of testing for it?
We made a trip to the planetarium in Hachinohe today to record the show in English. Unfortunately, we were scheduled to be there at eleven, and it was a very long script: fourteen pages and at least a dozen different characters, so it took quite a while to read through, and at the last minute we had to figure out how to swap one of Tim’s parts for one of Barb’s. One of Tim’s characters was a girl, which we were too thick to figure out from the text. Once we got over that minor hitch, and we were taping the show, my stomach realized it was past my lunch hour and began to complain. Barb said her stomach was growling, too, but mine was the only one the recording technician heard on tape.
Do you work in an office with a lot of computers? If you do, how many times a day to you hear somebody banging the keyboard and growling “Piece of crap!” so loudly that nobody in the room can avoid hearing it? What is it about a computer malfunction, even a really insignificant one, that turns ordinarily reasonable people into raving maniacs? One guy couldn’t get his computer to print a document because it turned out he’d forgotten to connect it to the printer. Instead of trying to figure it out, though, his first reaction was to bash the keyboard around a bit. Isn’t that a little like beating up a toaster for burning the bread?
I volunteered to be the master of ceremonies at the monthly promotion ceremony, something I don’t normally do because making a presentation in front of a room full of people makes me feel like I want to throw up or have a heart attack or both, but the guy who organized it came to my office and asked me to my face, and I find that saying no is even harder than overcoming stage fright, so there I was.
I don’t remember much about it. Several people congratulated me for doing a good job, and although I gamely pointed out where I flubbed the script or mispronounced a name, the ones who spoke to me said they couldn’t remember a single mistake. Little did they realize, however, that my brain carefully catalogues each and every goof I make, and later on it plays them back for me to squirm over. For the real howlers, it plays them back in slow-motion, from multiple angles, with subtitles.
Speaking of howlers, check this out: I ended up leading a room full of people in prayer. Talk about the last thing I expected to find myself doing. Just minutes before the ceremony began, the event organizer came up to the podium to tell me that the chaplain didn’t show and that I’d have to read the benediction. “Unless you know somebody who wants to do it,” he added.
I looked over at the sergeant who was going to hand out the certificates and asked if he’d like to do it, but he responded by looking around and pretending not to hear me.
“Okay, then,” I said, “but I’ll probably disappear in a puff of smoke and flame after the lightning strikes me, so you might want to have somebody standing by to take over.”
Barb came to the ceremony, partly to watch my performance and partly because I wanted her there to hold my hand in the event I fainted dead away. She’s the only one who mentioned a mistake she noticed. “Weren’t you supposed to say amen at the end of the invocation?” she asked, after the ceremony was over. Oh, sure, like I know.