And then they struck turkey

So there we were, tending to the garden, when all of a sudden this guy drives up on this bike. Naturally we stopped everything and drank beer. So glad he stopped by!

In other news, we've been taking to sneaking the brand of wet food they don't like, in with the brand they do. This morning they were chowing down, then simultaneously stopped and looked over their shoulders at me to say, "there's been a terrible mistake!" I laughed. Another eternity in cat hell, I know.

The secret organization

One of my private goals is to volunteer once for every race I'm in. Not necessarily the same race. I'm still behind on volunteering, but slowly realized I could be catching up while I'm not racing.

When they changed the Calgary 70.3 course less than a month before the race, and put out a call for volunteers at the start, I signed up. That lake isn't far from my place at all, and since the lakes in Calgary are private, I figured it might be my only chance to see it.

After a 4am wake up, I ended up on traffic control on the front gate so I didn't see much of the lake. The athlete parking filled up pretty quick and then it was on street parking. Later it was helping take down bike racks and pack the athlete bags onto buses. It went very quickly. Many hands and all.

Then home for a bit of a stretch and breakfast, then off to a book club meeting. My buddy is making covers for his rain barrels. Very cool. We are going to go looking to see if there are any nice barrels we like, but I'm not fussed about it. I could build nice covers too. In my copious free time.

While I was puttering with laundry I was amused with Curtis playing in the sink. He doesn't seem to mind water so much. Even if I turn on the tap, he will sniff and lick the water, and play with it a bit.

Yes, that's the sink I clean up after doing wine making stuff. Having a big sink like this is extremely handy some days. Even if I do have to clean it with comet before cleaning wine stuff after bottling next week.

During a good core and stretch session I discovered a very unhappy muscle on the inside of my left thigh, just above the knee. I think it's the Vastus Medialus, or maybe the one that wraps around from the inside of the knee to the outside of the hip. Rolling that was a big owie!

Normally at work I try to get up and walk around regularly, but I was right into a query today, and didn't move hardly at all. Just as well I had a good stretch yesterday. Another good stretch and core tonight.

Lately I've been thinking about secret organizations. We've all seen the movies. I used to enjoy them, now I think they're kind of stupid, and all the same, really. The good guy has to penetrate the lair of the bad guy. There are stupid evil henchmen, all sorts of gadgets, and invariably an escape system for the bad guy.

Let's start there. The escape system. Here you have a meglo-maniac bad guy constructing his lair and an organization, and he takes the time to engineer and build an escape route. Putting the same effort into training his staff would go a lot further. But if you are the kind of person that builds such an organization for world domination, or something, you aren't likely to spend any time considering what happens if your plans fail.

Or maybe the organization is the good guys. There is usually a sequence of them going through some fluffy high tech entry procedure, usually alone, and they enter an office that is just full of people scuttling about doing their thing. One of which is to bring that person their coffee, some papers, and an all important briefing. How did all those people get in? Same procedure? Why does the hero get to sleep in? And does the leader of the good guy organization have a secret escape route?

Unless there's a dorm somewhere, where do all these underlings live, and park? Is there as much security for the cars? What do these people tell their families about their work day?

These organizations seem to have endless fleets of black vehicles. Helicopters, SUV's or other automobiles, ships, submarines, and various aircraft. That's not even counting the more exotic stuff, the hybrid car submarine, or invisible cars, and people that know how to use them. Then there are the gadgets. Good Lord, the gadgets. I couldn't even begin to enumerate them.

There is usually a secret genius turning them out, but I often wonder if there is an uber-secret organization that churns out all this stuff for the ordinary secret organizations. You'd think the organization supplying the rent-a-henchman would go bankrupt from supplying such poor quality workers. And how does the evil bad guy afford all these people until world domination happens? Is there an uber-secret organization providing accounting and legal services for aspiring evil overlords? Who does the catering? Even henchmen working out of fear for nothing need to be fed.

There is much attention paid to covering up the tracks and hiding the existence of the secret organization. That lasts until the movie or book reaches about the middle of the first act, then they start to reveal their secrets. Usually spectacularly. Sometimes this includes a scene where the president is briefed on it. Maybe this is why world leaders go grey and look so old, so quickly, worrying about some secret boffin organization going rogue.

But mostly it's the over the top elaborate safeguards that have some fatal flaw that can be exploited by the other side. A fatal flaw that a smart 12 year old can usually figure out how to mitigate. Usually by better training the staff. Unfortunately this line from one movie completely describes the quality of henchmen these aspiring overlords attract - "Benson, you are so mercifully free from the ravages of intelligence!"

The thing I really wonder, is if these people are all really so smart, why don't they just take over a country? Really. If they're that good at organization, they ought to be able to take over some corrupt kleptocracy through sheer competence. Once people realized they were good at running things, like providing food, clean water, and other necessities of life, reliably and inexpensively, they'd be voted into government by a landslide. Once they got the economy going they'd be able to skim a bit off the top for themselves in perpetuity. A bit off the top on a country scale can lead to an enormous amount of money on a personal scale. As long as you don't go over the top on jets and boats and castles, you can live very, very well. No reason it couldn't last your entire life.

But no, there's an ego in the way. The one that just makes you go out and buy that huge yacht and flaunt it in front of the poor. That just makes for social unrest and upsets your nice little scheme. But I guess if they had that level of maturity, they wouldn't be megla-manical aspiring evil overlords using their secret organization for world dominance.

When I look at the USA, I sometimes wonder if a secret organization really is running things, and the middle managers are getting a bit power drunk over the last few years. That flaunting thing, guys? It usually leads to trouble sooner or later.

B&A shots

So here we are. Friday afternoon the guys came with the picker truck and took away all the pallets of left over tiles, and the rubble. There's still some siding to go. There was a 5 car collision on NB Deerfoot that backed traffic all the way past Douglasdale, which is a very long way. The only way they can get from the shop to here is NB Deerfoot. I hope they had the sense to realize the traffic wasn't getting better, and not to try.

So without further ado, here's a Before shot, noting the blue siding, naked flower boxes, and a matted surface that could be called a lawn only by the generous, the blind, or the flatterers.

Here is the After. Note the complete lack of blue. There is the privacy lattice and flowers in the boxes. The roses and climatis are doing really well, growing and blooming like mad. The transpanted day lilies are blooming as well. The lawn still isn't all that green with grass; there's lots of other stuff growing in there too, but I've never been fussed by that. Something that is a bit harder to see is the copper rain chain hanging just beside the chimney. We are pricing out doing the evestroughing, and will get the chain properly hung.

Here's one of the day lilies.

Here is Curtis supervising my post run stretching, coming over to tell me I'm doing something wrong. Or to pet him.

RunMeter was out to lunch during my run. It said that the 30 minute run was 6.4 K. NOT! I was running very easy, maybe 4.5 K or so at best. Here's a screen shot of part of the run, which explains why it thinks I ran so far.

I felt a little heavy during the run, with slow feet. Stretched well after, although later in the day my left calf isn't all that happy with me. Maybe it's all the gravel shoveling trying to raise up some sidewalk slabs that had settled.

Fair warning! There is only my feeble attempt at ornate flowery shit after this. Stop reading, unless you're into that. During our writers and bloggers meet up we were asked the part of writing that we hated. Mine is doing the ornate flowery descriptive stuff, with allusions, similes, and adjectives, or maybe it's adverbs. Whatever it is that describes nouns. Bah. See? I don't even remember what little grammar I once knew.

One has to know that 5 out of the 6 ends are sharp, but when they're amiable you'd never know. The soft rumbly purr is very soothing when they sit on your lap. Sometimes when I'm lying down stretching I like to grab them if they're nearby and give them a forcible cuddle. Sometimes they pad away, other times they sniff the sweat and start rasping away. That alone would convince anyone they have no taste buds in their tongue.

When we rescued Curtis from MEOW he'd been on the street for most of his life, perhaps all of it. It was obvious where some matts had been cut out. More remained in the coarse and greasy feeling fur. He loves being combed, even as we were pulling on the knots and matts. We'd do a little and stop, to show him that we would stop when it got to be too much for him.

The fur on his head, neck, and chest was cleaned up fairly quickly, and he would work on that. However his back and flanks stayed coarse and somewhat greasy, even after we'd had him 6 or 7 months. Steady combing with a bit of judicious snipping had removed fur clumps that gradually filled in again. Then he started working on it too. I don't think he had known where to start, or maybe he thought there was no point.

The big change happened as summer began. We call it the Big Shed. A few strokes of the comb would produce a cloud of fur. Static made it cling to the furniture and our clothing. We went through several lint rollers. They weren't designed for cat fur, I don't think. Certainly not long, fine, orange fur. We combed every day for weeks, sometimes twice a day, working especially on his gradually rotunding flanks, back, and the very soft and fluffy tail.

Working on his tail is a bit tricky, since he likes to have us work on his other end. He squirms around, making it difficult. Almost suddenly we noticed his fur changed. I think we combed out all the old tired fur, leaving just the fresh new growth, unstressed by life on the street, nourished by love, and the good food that he is so ungrateful about. What cat turns down salmon? What cats get lamb, venison, turkey?

Now you feel fur all aligned the way it should be, glistening with a silky softness that does not disguise the muscle underneath. The orange stripes have come in to provide a beautiful background to his deep, intent, double amber eyes. Warm cat fur is one of the smells of summer for me, evoking a memory of flying a kite while lying on my back, looking up into an infinite blue sky. A gray and white cat named Fuzz on my chest or looking for prey nearby. Listening to the sound of a big old radial airplane engine.

Flowery sh!t warning

Hello again. Busy. Working regularly on core, though no running or biking since the weekend.

Tonight was the writer's and bloggers group, and our "assignment" is to do the writing we hate the most. For me that's the flowery ornate shit. I'm not an ornate writer at all. I try to use the smallest number of words to do what needs to be done.

One of my main writing rules is straight out of Strunk and White. 

Omit needless words!

He said it three times, but I'll only say it once, and loud. 

Much of the flowery shit in many books leaves me saying, let's get to the point here. But sometimes the point is the flowery shit, to evoke an emotion. That's fine for those that like that kind of thing, and they wash their hands afterward.

I'm going to try to practice some flowery ornate writing here. This is just to warn you so you don't think I've been putting drugs in my coffee, or some of the wine has gone bad, or I've been kidnapped by aliens who've sucked my brain.

Cats and paint don't mix

One of the final steps in the recent housework has been to get in a painter for all the touch ups. You may remember we had him in late last year to refresh the paint throughout most of the house to remove the rubs, scratches, and other imperfections that paint accumulates in an active house, and to follow up with replacing some windows and doors.

After the window installation we knew there would be follow up painting there, and had tentatively engaged him. As we got closer we noticed a bunch of other work that needed to get done, both inside and outside. He gave us a really nice price and he's been at it this week. We didn't bother getting other estimates. He does meticulous work with astonishing attention to detail. He leaves the work area immaculate. He's been held up a bit by rain and wanting to get a better surface in one place, so he needed a couple more layers of filler before he's happy.

While he's been working we have to round up the cats and put them in the basement. They are so eager to offer their superior supervisory skills that they get right into the action. I know from experience that's not a good idea. The painter says they were pretty quiet today. They've been pretty spooked over the last week with all the concrete cutting and banging that was happening.

The only work remaining on the exterior is to install the house number above the garage, and have the picker truck take away the rubble. It's neatly piled rubble, but still. There are a couple rain chains to hang, and maybe redoing the evestroughing and downspouts.

I was a workout slacker last night, going to bed early. Once supper settles a bit more I'll go do a stretch and core session.

Here's a picture of a pretty flower, just because.

A twofor

If you missed it this morning, first thing, there were some nice photos of flower blooming and cats supervising. That was while enjoying this morning on the patio, quietly reading and drinking coffee. You also might have missed the post before that, which includes a novel snippet, wherein Dwen ends up being taken to a strip bar for a work lunch.

After a while I stirred myself into action and ran a whole 5 K! I haven't done that since Bermuda in February. Today felt nice and relaxed, mostly running easily, legs feeling good. The last half K was starting to fall apart a bit as I tried to maintain my pace. Overall it was 32 minutes and a few seconds for a 6:27 per K pace. Very nice for me. Stretched after. Legs are a bit tired.

The graph looks a bit weird because I didn't change it from cycle to run. The blue line is a speed, not a pace, so a higher line is better.

We had friends drop in for a social afternoon, drinking wine and chatting. Scoping out the exterior of the house too, of course. I'm quite happy to let things on my to do list age a little bit more when the choice is doing them, or chatting with friends.

BBQ bison and sitting on the patio finished up another weekend disappearing in a blur.

morning photos, just because