Okay, one funny cat story - Cordelia likes barbecue potato chips. The cats have never really shown an interest in human food, which is good. I don't encourage it. They are not given human food so they don't know what it tastes like. On the occasions that I've offered them something for my own amusement, they just sniff it and then walk away. But not this time. Apparently Cordy really likes barbecue potato chips. She only got one little bit of one and Doug let her lick the seasoning off his fingers, but it she was very excited about it! Strange.

Now I want to post this which is one of the funniest stories I've ever heard *and* it's true. It's from the book Salmon of Doubt by Douglas Adams (compiled and published after his death). It's a story from a speech to Embedded Systems in 2001.

COOKIES

"This actually did happen to a real person, and the real person is me. I had gone to catch a train. This was April 1976, in Cambridge, U.K. I was a bit early for the train. I'd gotten the time of the train wrong. I went to get myself a newspaper to do the crossword, and a cup of coffee and a packet of cookies. I went and sat at a table. I want you to picture the scene. It's very important that you get this very clear in your mind. Here's the table, newspaper, cup of coffee, packet of cookies. There's a guy sitting opposite me, perfectly ordinary-looking guy wearing a business suit, carrying a briefcase. It didn't look like he was going to do anything weird. What he did was this: he suddenly leaned across, picked up the packet of cookies, tore it open, took one out, and ate it.

"Now this, I have to say, is the sort of thing the British are very bad at dealing with. There's nothing in our background, upbringing, or education that teaches you how to deal with someone who in broad daylight has just stolen your cookies. You know what would happen if this had been South Central Los Angeles. There would have very quickly been gunfire, helicopters coming in, CNN, you know . . . But in the end, I did what any red-blooded Englishman would do: I ignored it. And I stared at the newspaper, took a sip of coffee, tried to do a clue in the newspaper, couldn't do anything, and thought, What am I going to do?

"In the end I thought, Nothing for it, I'll just have to go for it, and I tried very hard not to notice the fact that the packet was already mysteriously opened. I took out a cookie for myself. I thought, That settled him. But it hadn't because a moment or two later he did it again. He took another cookie. Having not mentioned it the first time, it was somehow even harder to raise the subject the second time around. 'Excuse me, I couldn't help but notice . . .' I mean, it doesn't really work.

"We went through the whole packet like this. When I say the whole packet, I mean there were only about eight cookies, but it felt like a lifetime. He took one, I took one, he took one, I took one. Finally, when we got to the end, he stood up and walked away. Well, we exchanged meaningful looks, then he walked away, and I breathed a sigh of relief and sat back.

"A moment or two later the train was coming in, so I tossed back the rest of my coffee, stood up, picked up the newspaper, and underneath the newspaper were my cookies. The thing I like particularly about this story is the sensation that somewhere in England there has been wandering around for the last quarter-century a perfectly ordinary guy who's had the same exact story, only he doesn't have the punch line."

Mmmm... not much to say today. It was a full and pleasant weekend that involved a lot of food. For anyone interested:

Branch BBQ on Wells Branch - pretty good. no atmosphere really and there is a tv on that is very distracting, but the food is good. nothing spectacular, but tasty inexpensive barbecue.

Peony Aisan Cuisine on Balcones Dr - quite yummy! we ate family style so i got to try a few different dishes and they were all good! they also offer some different hot teas. we had the jasimine tea and it was delicious! my favorite dish was the vegetable lo mein. it was simple, but tasted wonderful!

Taco Bell - figure it out for yourself. i did try something new though. i had the cheesy gordita crunch (or whatever it's called). it tastes like pretty much everything else on the menu, which (if you like taco bell) means it was pretty good. i did like the combination of pita and hard taco shell. it's kind of like sticking tortilla chips in your sandwich... :)

Last night we had grilled steaks, but that was not a restaurant. I'm really looking forward to cooking for myself tonight!

Ephesians 2:14 - "For [Jesus] himself is our peace, who has made the two one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility..."

"Don't miss the one fact we're told about Joseph in Luke's introductory account--he was a descendant of David. How awesome of God to purpose that Christ's royal lineage would come through His adoptive father. We shouldn't be surprised at the profound significance with which God views adoption." -- Beth Moore, "Jesus the One and Only"

Well, I'm still sick, but I'm feeling a lot better today! WooHoo! So, the kitties were, once again, doing something funny a little while ago There is a snake climbing our sliding glass door for some reason. It's out of reach now, but when it was still near the ground, the kitties were trying to attack it through the glass. Charlie kept waving his paw around like, "I'm gonna smack it! I'm gonna smack it!" And occasionally he would smack the glass. The snake (about 1.5 feet long and skinny) was just looking at them through the glass like, "What are you doing?"

Birds are so pretty to look at! Unfortunately, it seems that most are... not so intelligent. For several months now, we've had doves flying into our sliding glass door on a regular basis. Like, more than once per week at some points. Well, today it got nasty. One of them flew into the door so hard that it died! I was extremely traumatized! I called Doug in tears and he was sweet enough to come home and take care of it for me. I wouldn't have asked him to do that, but since he volunteered...

I guess I'm going to have to move our birdfeeder so that it's in front of one of the windows that has screens. We could put a screen on the sliding glass door, but it cuts out a lot of sunlight and I enjoy having such a large, unobstructed view of the backyard and its unintelligent wildlife. I could also attach some flash tape to the door (reflective and scares birds away), but that might scare them away from the feeder as well. The only other option would be bird netting, but it would be a major annoyance to have our patio half netted off! So... I'll move the feeder.

Darn birds! It's only the doves! The pretty cardinals don't do that! The doves also like to bully the other birds and hog the feeder. Grrr...

Our cats have totally lost their minds. I mean, all animals are crazy, but ours seem to be getting more so by the day. Last night is a good example. It started out with me irritating them by setting up a massage table in the middle of the living room and then refusing to let them lay on it. To make matters worse, when Doug came home, he layed on that table and I gave him a massage and neither of us paid the least bit of attention to the cats until we decided it was bedtime.

At that point, we finally fed them a bit of canned food, which didn't really make them happy because they felt we were very tardy in doing so. Then Doug and I got ready and got in bed. It has now become the nightly routine for the two of us to play a game with Cordy and a paper ball for a little while before we go to sleep. We throw the ball and she makes wild leaps into the air to catch it or bat it back at us. It's very entertaining for all three of us, but Charlie finds it detestable.

So, when we started up the game last night, the first throw of the ball ended up in the floor. Charlie darted over and started viciously attacking it. This is extremely out of character. Normally he just lies in the floor and looks at us disdainfully. Since he was actually participating, we tried throwing the ball between them to see who would go after it. This, apparently, pissed Cordelia off.

We threw the ball and it landed in the bathroom doorway. Doug and Charlie and I were all sitting and staring at it when Cordy suddenly threw herself off of the bed and attacked Charlie. After she felt she'd done a decent job of roughing him up, she placed herself between him and us so that she could intercept any further throws. From this point on, the game went on somewhat normally because Charlie quickly lost interest anyway.

After we turned out the lights, I made the mistake of moving. Now, back when Charlie was a "kitten", he was very good at killing monsters. When I went to bed, he would hang out by my feet and keep an eye out for anything dangerous that might be coming to harm me. The problem with this was that he tended to mistake my feet for one of these dangerous beasts. Nothing that moved under the covers was safe.

As he got older, his need for sleep increased to 23 hours per day and hasn't been nearly as useful at killing monsters for the past few years. However, within the past couple of weeks he seems to have found new inspiration. And, as I said before, last night I made the mistake of moving. I stretched out my legs and encountered something that I thought was Doug's foot near the end of the bed.

I quickly discovered that it was not Doug however because it was very sharp. It was, in fact, Charlie the Monster Killer. I pulled my foot back up a few feet and he dove across the bed and attacked it. I could not move my feet for about five minutes because he would grab them and bite them if I did. On the positive side, neither of us was bothered by dangerous beasts while we tried to sleep.

So, apparently, sap never dies. A couple of the boards in our wooden deck (the ones near things that i tend to often, of course) have a yearly habit of oozing sap. Whenever the weather gets above 80 degrees (as it now has) they get all goopy and stay that way until the weather cools down again.

Now, this is not just a minor annoyance if you happen to step in it. It's like an industrial adhesive. You *cannot* get it off. It laughs at soap and water. It goes on nice and thick, so it looks like you should be able to pick it off - especially after it's picked up some dirt and cat hair. However, if you make the mistake of touching it, you will then have some of the stuff permanently attached to your fingers.

It also stinks. It has a very strong outdoorsy odor. I've smelled worse things, but it's not really an odor that I want attached to my body. You might think that after so many years it would run out of sap, but no. I just keeps oozing more and more. I pity the poor squirrel or bird who wanders through it. Did I mention that it's also green (possibly because of paint)...?

Hey guys! Sorry for my long silences - I've been short on time lately. It's not that I've been extra busy, but I've been sleeping later in the mornings and therefore have less time for *frivolous* things like my blog! :oI~

So... we watched All About Eve on Sunday. Have you seen that? It's a Bette Davis and Anne Baxter movie from 1950 that won multiple Academy Awards. It's good! It's over two hours long, but it's entertaining enough that it didn't feel extra long. And I didn't know it before, but that's where the following classic line is from:

"Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy night!"

It also contains this quote, which is not famous but I rather like it:

"Margo Channing is a star of the theater. She made her stage debut at the age of four in 'Midsummer Night's Dream,' playing a fairy. She entered, quite unexpectedly, stark naked. She has been a star ever since."

Anyway, if you at all enjoy classic movies, I recommend this one.

Angela's lessons for the day:

1. When buying meat that the butcher has to go to the back and cut (because it's not commonly found in the market of your grocery store), be sure to ask how much it costs first!

2. When enthusiastically slicing carrots, keep your fingers out of the way!

3. It is very difficult to type with a bandaid on your finger!