This little guy spent several hours in our house today. It would sit on various things, but fly around whenever anybody came too close to it. (Other than a few times it let us within inches before flying away.)
It finally accidentally flew outside a little bit ago. Then it hung around for several minutes and tried a couple of times to come back in, but we had closed the door. It liked it in here. Eventually though, it gave up and flew to the neighbors house.
Yesterday while I was at work, I got this email from Brandy:
From: Brandy
Subject: um…
Date: 1 October 2008 18:36:35 GMT
So I was sitting on the couch, reading the thingie for English, and I heard a thump. I figured it was Roscoe or Amy. Then I saw something run by in the corner of my eye. I looked over expecting it to be one of my hallucinations, and there was a little black cat. In the living room. Looking right back at me, like, “what the hell are you doing here?” Who had come from our room or your office. I said hello, and it ran outside.
Is there something you forgot to tell me?
I am highly allergic to cats, but I still want one. I wish it had decided to stay!
Last weekend, joining a group from Amy’s school, went to see the musical version of Shrek. It has been here in Seattle working out the kinks and such before moving to Broadway. We saw it on the last day here.
I had low expectations. But it was cute and funny and stuff. What you would expect Shrek to be when translated to the stage.
Bottom line, it was fun. For those of you near New York who might consider going to that sort of thing, probably worth a trip into the city one night.
Lets see though, what were the highlights? Shrek himself was OK, but as with the movie, Donkey and Fiona were better. The Gingerbread man was funny. Pinocchio was annoying.
We also waited with Amy’s school group at the stage door afterwards for Amy to get autographs and such. She got a few. But nobody even noticed the three pigs when they left.
Oh yeah… and Amy wore Shrek ears for about 24 hours after the play ended, including all day at school the next day.
This is my two thousandth post on this blog. The first post was just an automated test post that was created when the blog was, but it was first damn it, so it counts. That post was at 00:23 UTC on 12 Jul 2003. I started this post at 03:37 UTC on 12 Sep 2008. The time between the two posts was 1889 days, 3 hours and 14 minutes. So my average time between posts has been… 22 hours, 40 minutes and 51 seconds.
When I reached 1000 Posts on 13 Jan 2007 my average had been one post every 30 hours, 46 minutes and 37 seconds. So, in addition to the fact that it took 1281 days for my first 1000 posts and only 608 for my second thousand, it looks pretty clear that I’ve sped up a bit. For this second thousand I’ve averaged more like a post every 14 hours and 36 minutes.
German scientists using satellite images posted online by the Google Earth software program have observed something that has escaped the notice of farmers, herders and hunters for thousands of years: Cattle grazing or at rest tend to orient their bodies in a north-south direction just like a compass needle.
Studying photographs of 8,510 cattle in 308 herds from around the world, zoologists Sabine Begall and Hynek Burda of the University of Duisburg-Essen and their colleagues found that two out of every three animals in the pictures were oriented in a direction roughly pointing to magnetic north.
The resolution of the images was not sufficient to tell which ends of the cows were pointing north, however.
The first was when, some days ago, I happened on a web site concerning the family of my paternal grandmother, whose maiden name was Josephine Minter. We called Josephine “Jou-Jou†(probably Josephine was too difficult for young children to pronounce, or remember). Jou-Jou’s mother’s maiden name was Fannie Dodson Ramseur. Fannie came from a prominent North Carolinian family, and she married Joseph Minter, also from North Carolina. The Minter family web site (wiki.abulsme.com) laconically indicates that Joseph had originally intended to marry another lady, but that the bride-to-be had died on her wedding day. This must have been a terrible tragedy for Joseph, but was fortunate for me, because by marrying Fannie, he begot me, as well as many other distinguished descendants. Fannie had six children (one of whom was Jou-Jou, of course) and, while pregnant with a seventh, died tragically while trying to save her youngest daughter whose dress had accidentally caught fire. The daughter died that day, 14 March 1881, and the mother ten days later, aged 36.
