Back From the Grave

So, I have a this old ruby red iMac computer that has been sitting for a few years because it would no longer boot up. The other day, I was looking through a box of old software and found a Norton Utilities CD I forgot I had. I quickly took it along with my external CD drive and dug out my old iMac.

I fired it up and booted off the Norton CD and ran the disk repair tool. Lo and behold, it worked! My old friend was back from the grave. Not only did I regain access to my sorely missed Graphic Design software and files, I also had access to our old family pictures and videos. I felt stupid knowing the solution to fixing it had been within my grasp all along. Several years wasted wishing it had been working put me in a bad mood after just having had my spirits lifted by fixing it.

The re-discovery of the pictures and videos lifted my spirits again. The videos were by far the most interesting. Seeing and hearing my kids when they were little brought me a lot of smiles and laughter.

A while back I was telling my wife how glad I was that our kids were well out of diapers and all that other baby stuff. After seeing the videos from ten years ago, I felt sad in some way that they were older. I miss how cute they were and watching them learning to walk and talk. For me it made the feeling that they have grown up way too fast, that more prevalent. Or maybe it was the realization, and probably the more true reason, that I didn’t fully appreciate them and they joy they brought at the time we were living it, triggering thoughts that I wasn’t a very good parent.

I hope that I am the only one that has encountered this type of situation. I would hate to think that watching old videos and looking at old pictures of your children would illicit such a response in others. It is not a happy thought considering how happy watching them made me.

I guess fixing my old computer was both a blessing and a curse.


This post was written using an Alphasmart 3000

Crazy Cats

I think that cats are inherently crazy. Don't get me wrong. I love cats. I have owned cats for pretty much all my life and love them. But I think that having a crazy streak is built into cat DNA. It is what makes them interesting and fun.

For my first example, take papers. Just ordinary papers. They could be blank, be bills, school work, fliers, mail or anything as long as it is flat pieces of paper. My orange cat, Jackie Chan (aka Kitty Boy) will lay on any paper that is left on the table or the floor. My two youngest girls like to get out their colors and paper and draw on the kitchen floor. As soon as Kitty Boy sees this, the moseys on over and lays down on their paper. They fuss at him to no avail before seeking my assistance. I try and push him gently with my foot to get him to move, but he will have none of it and lets me know by biting at my foot. So, I have to pull out the spray bottle filed with  water and spray him a time or two before he will move. But, as soon as I go back to what I was doing before the commotion, he lays back down on their paper. This goes on for another round or two before he decides to stay away. Sometimes, he may even come back after twenty or thirty minutes to start the whole thing over again.

Another example is our cat Sandra D. We didn't name her that, the people at the Arizona Humane Society here were we live did. We just call her Kitty Girl. I know, a quite imaginative name. But hey, it works. Anyway, at night and sometimes in the day we will here a sound like a cat jumping off the counter in the kitchen followed by scratching sound that comes from a cat trying to get traction on a hard floor while running. Then this repeats several times. If we are lucky, we can catch Kitty Girl jumping straight up a few feet in the air then landing on the floor with a thud and running a few feet then waving her head back and forth while looking up at the ceiling. It is the funniest thing. We keep trying to catch this behavior on video tape and sending it in to that TV show that shows home videos. We are sure that it will win us some money.

Speaking of the show with funny videos and YouTube for that matter, there are tons of videos of cats doing crazy things. You don't have to take my word for it, just get on your smart phone or computer and see. These sources prove my theory. Cats are crazy...All cats.