Returned

Remember when my scarf disappeared? And I was super pissed off at the universe? I am not kidding, I looked EVERYWHERE for that thing. I looked especially hard in my closet, because I figured that was the most likely place for it to be, unless it was purloined to construct a robot kitty army or similar (also fairly likely). I looked on the shelves, under my purses, in all the corners. I even crawled around with a flashlight in case it slipped down behind the shoes or under my possibly-too-large collection of coats. So you can imagine my surprise this morning when I found it folded on a shelf IN MY CLOSET, almost in plain sight. I took a picture of it in case the universe decides to yank my chain again and I need to put up flyers. Notice how the back and front are different? I love that about it because I can dial down the orange if I want. I tried to take a picture of myself wearing it so you know what it looks like on. You know, so if it disappears again and you see someone wearing it you can kick some scarf-stealing ass. Unfortunately, I am not very good at taking pictures of myself, apparently, as I made approximately eight thousand attempts and ended up with not one publishable photo for my trouble. So you will just have to use your imagination when you are trying to decide whether you should attack someone to get my scarf back for me.

Anyway, you might surmise that the scarf was in my closet all along and I just didn't see it, but you would be dead wrong. The scarf was not in the closet. It disappeared and then it came back. I don't know why, and I don't especially care. My friend Sarah thinks I earned some karma points after the poker chips yesterday and the spaghetti mess this morning. See, I dropped a giant steaming plate of pasta and sauce as I was heating up leftovers for breakfast. It landed all over the microwave, the stove, the floor and me. The clean-up was pretty daunting; I was thinking of just moving out. To a clothing-free community. So maybe she's right, because that WAS pretty bad and definitely deserving of some redistribution of spiritual wealth.

The scarf is back, and that's good, but I like to plan ahead a little. Just a little, mind you, mostly I'm a flying-by-the-seat-of-my-pants kind of girl. At least until my pants rip and I crash and burn in a bloody heap, but that almost never happens. Right now, though, I'm thinking I should stock up on scarves so I always have a couple of spares for the next time the universe gets all smart with me. This one came from Qatar, so if you know someone at The Deid that wants to go can tolerate scarf shopping for me, let me know!

And on an unrelated note, I have a minor correction and also a comment about yesterday's post. I have been informed that what I described as a hole to China in the lawn is actually a hole to Africa. Presumably it makes a sharp turn down there somewhere, perhaps around the Mohorovicic Discontinuity. And finally, I feel I was unfairly accused of whining in the comments, when in fact I was not whining at all, but merely stating facts.

That's all, my friends; catch you next week! If you have time, check out Doraville for some new entries from my mother's book. My beloved Helen has been working like crazy posting them; isn't she the best?!?!?!!? Of course, if you know Helen, you already know that. But a reminder doesn't hurt- love you, Helen!

Elk Poop. Oh, Honey, You Shouldn't Have. Really.

Merry Christmas Eve, my sweet friends! What did you do today? Whatever it was, I bet you didn't get to see elk poop. It was a beautiful day here in the Pacific Northwest after raining all night. I know this because the cats woke me up at least thirteen times by rolling around in the wrapping paper I left on the floor and I could hear the rain pounding the roof every single time.

The clouds started to lift about mid-morning and we packed up and headed to Elkville. Lloyd mocked me for toting along a huge backpack filled with food, water, antibiotics, rappelling gear and a rubber raft, but I've been out in the woods with him before. I'll write about it someday, after I'm over the PTSD, but for now just remember that if we are ever out triangulating together and I tell you to move your compass away from the truck before you get your bearing because the needle is pointing straight at the engine block, you should listen to me.

Moving on, because I'm starting to twitch and my medication is in the backpack: check out the pictures! We traversed some twisty logging roads that went high, high into some steep terrain. In fact, it was so twisty, high and steep that Shane commented, 'I would be damn scared if I had to walk all the way up here.' Four, people. He is FOUR. My mother is rolling over in her handcrafted artisan urn right this very second. There were no actual elk, but Lloyd was thrilled to see the piles of droppings. Personally, when it comes to elk poop, I can take it or leave it, but live and let live, I always say! There were also tons of birds and some very cool rocks.

I hope you all have a fantastic Christmas! As for me, I can hardly wait for Lloyd to plunge his hand into his stocking on Christmas morning.

The Vegemattress

Boy, have I had a busy week! What with teaching the new guy how to do all my crappy projects, parsing the news for my friends, and re-netting the trampoline, phew! And OH, YEAH.... I invented something and this time it's actually useful! As an aside, I did not have a category labeled 'brilliant' until today. I regret the oversight.

I'm a little bit of a levee geek, I bet you didn't know that. It's because I hide it well and never, ever wear a plaid shirt. You also may not know that levee vegetation is a very complicated and political issue, and it's especially difficult here in the Pacific Northwest where we have multiple species of salmon on the Endangered Species list. The fish people demand trees and shrubs, because that's better for the fish, and the levee people demand lots of bare rock and grassed slopes, because that makes safer, stronger levees. Trees and shrubs are sub-optimal for levees because the roots can tear them up and falling trees can gouge out big holes. Overgrown vegetation also impedes inspection and encourages colonization by burrowing creatures. Both the fish people and the levee people have excellent points, and the law on their side. This leaves people who need to build or repair flood control structures in a very difficult position, between a rock and a hard fish, you might say. If you are someone who makes bad puns, that is. Which I am. And right now I am one of these unfortunate people who has competing Federal mandates to produce a project with no vegetation in the levee structure AND with plenty of plants to shade the fishies.

Behold, I give you the Dead Cat Vegemattress! It's essentially a mattress of vegetation that's designed to break away in a flood without damaging the levee structure itself. As you can clearly see from my not-to-scale drawing, a layer of non-permeable geotextile fabric, possibly combined with a layer of chain link fencing, protects the levee prism and rock face from the roots of the plantings and burrowing animals. A hefty lift of soil placed on the fabric provides plenty of room for lots of whatever plants the fish people want, and everybody wins!

You probably know I have been frustrated in the past by people stealing my brilliant ideas. The breastmilk factory, the diapers that look like clothes and the clothes that have drinking pockets spring immediately to mind. Not this time, though! You heard it here first: I invented the vegemattress (vegemat for short) today, September 15, 2011.

Happy Quakiversary!

You might not know this, but today is the 10th anniversary of the Nisqually Earthquake. This would be an excellent time to make sure you're prepared. I know you have plenty of Skittles and wine. If not, don't bother coming to camp out on my trampoline. But one thing you might not have considered for your earthquake kit is extra husbands. As you probably do know, I work for an employer that is sometimes concerned with emergency management. We have staff meetings every Monday, which are usually EXTREMELY torturous. Today, though, our staff meeting was the best EVER, and it was suggested that extra husbands could come in very handy for certain things. So you might want to try it. Just an idea. Or maybe just do a trade-in, whichever.

A few other quick items to note, mostly because having pictures of my dead cat at the top of my dead cat blog is just too, too depressing:

-In coming attractions, a trip report and hare-brained scheme from my recent trip to Vegas with the fantastic Helen; and

-In the book department, I cannot recommend 'Walter the Farting Dog', because drawings of Walter, when he was extra rotund and distended with gas, reminded Shane that I have a humungous tummy, so clearly this book sucks, and probably the endless sequels are equally revolting.

-In other book news, I can definitely recommend 'Paradise Built in Hell' by Rebecca Solnit. It is fascinating, and you should read it. Also, it will inspire you to buy more wine and Skittles, and then I will inspire you to come to my house.

Happy Quakiversary!

Public Service Announcement: Earthquake Preparedness

The Dead Cat family takes preparedness very, very seriously. I know you all think Lloyd is crazy. And, well, he is! Only not about that. But I want you guys to be ready, too, so you don't have to come crying to me when something happens and you've only got one day's worth of wine and no slugs in your garden to eat. I would totally share, though, so if you DO have to come crying to me, there's plenty of room. I have a trampoline in the yard that will sleep ten in a pinch, and plenty of varmints for protein rich snacks.

You might not know this, but today is the 199th anniversary of the first New Madrid (Missouri) quake in recorded U.S. history. You can read about the series of massive quakes in 1811-1812 at the USGS site here. The Mississippi River ran backwards, and reportedly, church bells rang on the East Coast. You can click here to see how likely your state is to be affected by an earthquake. Look here if you're not in the United States. As you can see, pretty much everyone has a decent chance of getting negatively impacted by a quake. And there's plenty of other disasters that can hose you over good, too.

So what do you do, besides stock up on wine? Drop, Cover and Hold On: get down on your hands and knees and get under a sturdy table or desk. Read about it, and tell everyone in your family what to do. You may have seen an email that talks about a 'Triangle of Life' and tells you, pretty convincingly, to get next to a couch or other large object instead of getting underneath something. This technique has been thoroughly debunked for most situations, and the writer is well-known in the emergency management community to be a major crackpot. You can read about the controversy here, if you want, or a quick search will give you tons of articles.

What else should you do? I don't want to bore you with a big long list of gibberish, so check out these links for what you should have and do to be ready:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/earthquakes/archive/ready.dtl

http://72hours.org/

http://www.ready.gov/america/getakit/

Maybe an emergency kit would be a super gift for some of your hard to shop for friends and family, hmmm? And here are some sites for kids:

http://www.ready.gov/kids/home.html

http://www.fema.gov/kids/

http://www.sesameworkshop.org/initiatives/emotion/ready

http://www.gobagforkids.com/

And start getting ready now for February- It's Earthquake Awareness Month! I don't know about you guys but I love an occasion when a hardhat would be a perfect gift.

Exercise, exercise, exercise

You guys all know Lloyd is just the teeniest bit nuts, right? What, you thought I was the crazy one all this time? Oh, you naive, sheltered little BABIES!

First off, I hope the title doesn't give any of my Osan friends PTSD. If I NEVER hear the words 'MOPP 4, Alarm Black' again, it will be too soon.

So what zaniness is Lloyd up to now, you ask? Well, as we all know, Lloyd requires a LOT of action. Because he is not flying very often and he is so efficient in managing routine household tasks, he has way too much free time on his hands. He is quite resourceful and luckily for all of us, he mostly he uses his powers for good instead of evil. Except for the puppy, of course, but that's a topic for another day.

He spends a fair amount of time tinkering in the garage, doing who knows what. I stopped going in there when I saw that he had the corpse-stashing cooler staged by the big roll-up door along with a mop and some bleach. I had no idea what was up when he came out with a grave look on his face and an announcement to share. I thought maybe he had constructed a cold fusion device or isolated the gene that causes an incessant need for continuous frenzied activity.

But no, sadly, it was neither of those things. Instead he informed us we were about to have an earthquake exercise. If you don't live in an earthquake prone area, you might think this is a little wacko, but the Pacific Northwest is earthquake country and believe you me, I don't want to be stranded with no wine and Excedrin when the big one hits.

Lloyd doesn't mess around, people. He switched off the electricity and the water, fired up the generator and cooked us dinner on his eleventy jillion dollar four burner propane camp stove. He hooked up the lights, the television, the fridge and the computer to the generator. Then, while the kids were watching the 'Magic School Bus' episode about alternative energy sources with the kinetic energy powered Ferris Wheel, he hauled in water from his simulated rain barrel, heated it up on the stove and pumped it into the sink with a battery powered shower head (EVERYONE needs one of these, for real) to do the dishes in style. He took just a short break to enjoy some high quality reading material while lounging in front of the infamous painting and then it was back to the salt mines.

It was starting to get a little chilly after dinner, so he lit a fire and shoved the couch out of the way to build the sleeping area. After the boys mined the carpet under the couch for snacks, toys and books, we read some books and hit the sack, wind-up flashlights and radios close at hand for the inevitable aftershocks.

All in all, it was a rousing success, and you guys can just head on over when your house crumples into a pile and all you have to eat is slugs and grass. I know I hardly even need to mention this, but BRING WINE.

The Blame Game

I used to live in Pensacola, and there is no more beautiful place than the Gulf Coast. Weston was born there, and this picture was taken in our house there on his first Christmas. We really liked it there- the beaches were gorgeous- white sands, turquoise waters and pale green sea grasses. The oil spill makes me sick, but what makes me sicker is the disingenuous placement of blame solely on BP.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not defending them; they are a bunch of greedy bastards for sure. This morning, though, I heard someone say that the executives should be lined up and shot, as if they exist in a vacuum created by their own selfishness, and sadly that's just not true. If it was true, we COULD prevent future spills by shooting them. But the truth is, we ALL did this. BP is just the middleman. A dirty, slimy one, obviously, but still just a middleman. BP is only drilling risky wells because there is an insatiable market for cheap oil. They're just going after the money. Gotta keep the shareholders happy, right? What's good for business is good for America, after all. And what's good for business is fast profits. And BP's not the only one: the other companies aren't any better, they just haven't been caught yet.

Yep, we all did this. Every time you take a plastic bag home from the grocery store, you might as well toss a few tar balls on the sand. When you order takeout and end up with a bag of styrofoam leftovers big enough to choke a T-Rex, it's just the same as dipping a pelican in a barrel of crude. Driving alone to work instead of carpooling or taking the bus equals hucking a few water balloons full of diesel at a sea turtle nest.

Now, if we were willing to acknowledge the obvious truth that drilling for oil is environmentally risky, and unsafe (don't forget that eleven workers died on the Deepwater Horizon), and were willing to pay the true cost of our lifestyle up front, say around $10 a gallon for gas, maybe we would have a leg to stand on when an oil conglomerate bungles and/or underfunds a cleanup, because we would have a legitimate right to expect that safety and cleanup costs had been accounted for in the pricing of the product. But to keep sucking up oil at the going rate and demanding Government subsidies to keep the prices down, then heaping blame on oil companies after the inevitable catastrophe is hypocritical in the extreme.

This kind of mess is just going to happen again and again, if we don't change our ways. And we probably won't, but that's okay too. Eventually the oil reserves will be depleted, the oceans will be wastelands and most of the people will be dead, because much of our food supply and almost all of our oxygen depends on healthy oceans. Then the survivors will have to devise alternate energy sources. Maybe they can capture the methane from all those decomposing corpses.

Back

I know, I know! I've been gone a lot. But now I'm back. We just got back from a family adventure to Eastern Washington. We stayed at the Sun Lakes Resort near Dry Falls, a spectacular spot to check out some of the most interesting geology on the planet. If you are ever in the area, you should definitely stop.

I can also highly recommend the small town of Ephrata. I'm not really sure what it's known for, but it has at least five thrift stores and two used bookstores right on the main drag. I got some awesome cowboy boots to replace the motorcycle boots I lost in the great Osan mold epidemic and some crystal glasses. Of course, I already have water stains on the boots and one of the glasses broke, but that just means I need to schedule another trip really soon.

And, I was really surprised to see the Wild Horse Wind Farm right off I-90. The turbines are HUGE, taller than the Statue of Liberty. They are still under construction and we saw several trucks hauling one superlong blade each. I used to drive that route a lot but I guess it's been ten years or so since I've been there and I had no idea the wind farm existed. It supplies power to 55,000 homes, isn't that great? I know some people think they're ugly but I thought it was gorgeous.

We are still working on figuring out what we're doing so I might be sporadic for a while. We're moving house sometime this week to another temporary location but are hoping we will have a real plan soon. We are getting a little weary of living out of suitcases but we are big fans of retirement; I don't want to scare anyone off. More soon, I have tons of deep thoughts to share!