Inadvertent viewing of fireworks

I wound up seeing part of a fireworks display I hadn't intended to. Pyrotechnics are neat and all, but I've seen plenty of them already in this lifetime: when I was a kid, we'd go watch the show at the Washington monument every year ... and later, when I lived in California, we could peep over our back fence at the Disneyland set that went off each night at nine-thirty.

So on Wednesday night, I heard them popping, but planned to stay home ...until one of my freelance clients called, wanting to meet me to drop off some artwork. Ordinarily, this would be a ten-minute round trip ...but one of the fireworks shows was being set off in a field exactly on my route, so it took me an hour. Had quite a view on the way over to meet him, but I tried to get back just as they finished, and so caught all the departing traffic.

This reminded me, oddly enough, of the cruisin' folks used to do in Houston during my freshman year of college. Until the cops cracked down on it, folks would drive along Westheimer at 0.8 miles per hour, with their windows down so they could check each other out. Flashbacks of my misspent youth :)

PLAQUE: Ratlet

I posted recently about my cat with liver problems, currently residing in Nashville. An ultrasound was done a couple of weeks ago, and we found the source of the appetite loss that caused his liver dysfunction. Ratlet had stomach cancer.

It was too far along to really do anything about. They sent my wife home with enough narcotics to keep him comfortable until she was ready to take him back for his big sendoff ...which, as it turned out, happened this afternoon. (I'm not a big one for death euphemisms; I won't get in the habit of saying that Rat's "passed on". He was taken to the vet to be killed, and I maintain that we did him a favor).

Ratlet had a long life -- over twelve years -- and a good one. I find I'm worried about my wife -- it doesn't look like I'll be able to leave Dallas any time soon, and I wish she hadn't drawn the short straw on this one.

We'd had this cat since before we got married, when we were still rooming with Unbeliever and Phaedrus. They're actually the ones that found him, huddled in the middle of the street and waiting to get hit by a car. Dunno where he came from, but this gray kitten was starving: he was much smaller than his age indicated, and never really attained grown-cat size. For many months after we took him in, he guarded his food jealously, going so far is to *sit* in the middle of his plate, growling around mouthfuls as he shoveled it in with one paw.

When I'd drive to Nashville to visit my wife (and months would sometimes pass between visits), Ratlet would still recognize the sound of my engine, and trot out to greet me. He'd hop up on my shoulder, and walk from there to my wife's shoulder -- at which point I'd have to run around to her other side so I could provide him the next section of "track".

On rare occasions, we could convince him to sleep in bed with us. This usually required a pretty careful beguilement involving a towel on top of a pillow, and if we bounced the waterbed too much, he'd bolt. But if we succeeded, we were sometimes rewarded by waking up with him curled up into a ball, leaning against one of our heads like a sort of feline yarmulke.

Ratlet always alternated between being a cranky little bastard and a buzzing little love machine, and I'm never gonna see him again.

Damn, and double damn.