I saw the new Star Trek movie on Friday (and loved it), and on the GLA list the moderator found and posted this link, which I think is quite funny: "It Could Have Been Worse."

Additionally, check out J. A. Fludd's Quantum Blog about the movie.

"Hi, Dad! Whatcha doin' up so late?"

"I woke up and I'm having trouble getting to sleep, so I thought I'd write about how we took you for a ride yesterday."

"Let me tell 'em, Dad! It's my story!"

"Well...."

"I looked at your blog. I saw how you useta let Brandy tell her stories sometimes. It ain't fair!"

"Oh, all right...."

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"Tader, maybe you'd better let me do the typing."

"Why?"

"Because you only know how to write in Cat, and most people don't read Cat very well."

"...oh, fine...."

* * *

Hi. My name's Tader. I'm a cat.

("You don't have to tell them that. If they've read my blog before they'll know who you are. I told the readers all about you. I even showed them pictures of you, though I haven't shown them how pudgy you've gotten lately...."

"PUDGY?!? Daaaaaaaad...!"

"Oh, all right, just tell me what you want to say....")

Yesterday my Dads got out The Bag. I don't like The Bag. They put me in there and I can't see anything and then I start moving around and the next thing I know I'm never where I wanna go.

("It's not a 'bag,' it's a soft-side cat carrier. You've got plenty of places to look out of it if you'd just stop staring at the back of it."

"Who's tellin' this?"

" *sigh* Continue....")

Anyway, my Dads put me in the bag and I thought I had to go to The Doctor again. They took me down to the car and put me in the back seat. But then PJ-Dad got in the back seat with me and opened up the bag! I got to look around while Dad drove the car! Places go by really fast when you're in a car. And Dad let me sit on his lap for a little bit, too.

("At least you're lighter on my lap than Brandy was, even if you are getting a little pudgy."

"Daaaaad....!"

"All right, I'm typing, I'm typing....")

So we pulled up to this place where my Dads waited for a little bit and then my friend Mike came out to the car. He brought a whole bunch of wet clothes in a basket. My Dads said Mike wanted a ride to the laundry-mat because his dryer was broken and his car was acting up.

("That's 'laundromat,' Tader."

"Daaaaaad...!")

Dad drove back to the apartment building and stopped the car. Then both my Dads put me back in my bag and PJ-Dad took me upstairs. He let me out and left again with our dirty clothes and they went to the laundry-mat with Mike.

It was just a little ride, but I never got to ride in a car like that before and nobody ever took me for a ride anywhere but The Doctor or to a new house before. I had a lot of fun. I gave Dad lots of lap time to say thanks.

* * *

"Okay, Tader, there's your story. Happy now?"

"Thanks, Dad! You're the best!"

This semester's been a little weird so far. All three of the classes I'm taking are night classes, and the two classes I'm teaching are at 1:00 and 2:00. You'd think this would give me mornings to get things done, but I swear it seems like most of the time I'm getting up late and not getting things done the night before. I'm trying to change this, of course, before I fall so far behind in everything that I'll feel like curling up in the fetal position.

In other news, PJ's job situation appears to be improving; he's getting more hours. Or at least he was. This week he's been sent home early twice. It's got me wondering how in the galaxy we're going to get through the semester and the summer.

And I have to give Tader "lap time" most mornings.

Ah, the intersection of political humor and comic books is always a good thing....

Obama Disappointed Cabinet Failed To Understand His Reference To Savage Sword Of Conan #24 | The Onion - America's Finest News Source

Linked so you can go to the original page:

Something I got from my friend Paul in Indianapolis. Enjoy!

This day in history:

• 1978: Spurred by the modest success of The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams, ABC debuts The Life and Adventures of Walrus Pete. Unfortunately, it fails to catch on.
• 1971: Louis Domenico, of Columbus, Ohio, rolls a 375 in a game of Yahtzee (a perfect score, non bonus yahtzee rules). He decides that this must be his lucky day and goes out to buy a lottery ticket, only to be hit by a car...Luckily, it is a mouse car, driven by a Stuart Little-esque mouse named Oliver Small, and he is unharmed; and in fact the two become the best of friends.
• 1894: In a barnstorming game in Mexico between the National Baseball Leagues' Boston Beaneaters' and a team of Mexican all stars, when a Boston batter is beaned by the Mexican pitcher, a brawl erupts and in the ensuing melee, Beaneater firstbaseman "Charlie" McIntosh, a trained gorilla, kills 3 men—2 Mexicans and 1 teammate. Thereafter, National League administrators strongly discourage managers from fielding gorillas on their teams.
• 1885: Walter "Benny" Brisco joins the "Texas Rangers"—made famous in fiction by "The Lone Ranger." He is so loquacious and genial, both with his fellow Rangers and the criminals he apprehends, that he becomes known as the "Sociable Ranger."
• 1834: Nicolai Pagannini, composer and violin virtuoso, has a violin-playing contest with the devil. It is a close contest, but before it is clear who has won, it degenerates into a shoving match. Fine friends for many years, the two never speak again.
• 1646: Gretchen Scheewitzen (the real Snow White, upon which the fairy tale is loosely based), some 15 years after returning to civilization, finally tells the tale of her harrowing ordeal in the wilderness, including her rescue by the "dwarves." As a point of fact, the dwarves were actually normal-sized woodcutters (and the reason they lived in the wilderness was because they were all gay, which was frowned upon in those days); but they seemed like dwarves to Schneewitzen, who was 6'11" and 130 lbs.—not an uncommon height and weight for the inbred aristocracy of the day.
• 1: 1,000 Cherubs gather in Bethlehem to begin their month-long celebration of the birth of Jesus—not realizing that he was actually born 4 years earlier. When some townsfolk inform them of their error, they return to heaven, abashed and dejected.
• 25,503 BC: Two Neanderthals, Ooga and Bogomi, engage in what they term "shakimodo"—this marks the first time that individuals think of copulation as more than simply a means of procreation or reproduction.

Yes, I know: Ever since I started graduate school, I've been more and more difficult to track down. It's what comes of being swamped all the time and just wanting down time, I guess. Maybe my New Year's resolution will be to write more. It'd do me good, I bet.

So anyway, here's the poop on what's been up:

• Tader's still definitely my cat. He now sleeps between my feet, since it's gotten colder, and he often won't go to bed unless I do, which means he sleeps in the chair in the office or out on the couch when I'm up all night working on stuff.
• I'm actually only still up because right now I'm afraid to go to sleep; final grades are due by noon (it's about 4:30 in the morning) and I'm afraid I'll oversleep before I can put in the last few grades.
• I finally got my free copy of Teenagers from the Future. Fortunately everything looks all right.
• I found out that Frederick Pohl wrote a Heechee book published in 2004, so I checked it out from the public library for some over-break pleasure reading.
• One of my teachers thinks I should submit my paper for the class to College English, one of the big scholarly journals.
• I saw Twilight with PJ and some of his (and technically my) friends. I'm not a big fan of vampires to begin with, but at least this time I got to look at a hot one. ;-)
• I'm planning to sleep a lot for the rest of the week after today.
• PJ's hours have been cut drastically at work, so we're not going to Virginia Beach over break to see his family. *sigh* I could use the warmth.
• In case anyone wants to look at the portfolio I made for my ENG 351 class, here's the link: http://students.english.ilstu.edu/anwilli/eng351/portfolio. I like the identity and creation projects best.

Okay, I'm off to read for a while. More later, if I remember.

According to the Marx Brothers Web site at http://www.marx-brothers.org/today.htm, November 22 was the 75th anniversary of the New York premiere of Duck Soup, and November 24 will be the 75th anniversary of the movie's general release.

Considering I'm a big Marx Brothers fan and Duck Soup is my favorite Marx Brothers film, guess what I'll be watching this week sometime? :-)

I'm getting really terrible at updating my LJ, but at least this time I've got a few things to tell. :-)

First, the semester's going pretty well, though I feel like it's still early September until almost the end of it. I can't believe time's flying by this fast, and sometimes I think I'm falling massively behind. Fortunately, some deadlines have been shifting back, which gives me some more time to get all caught up. Now to just finish that last bit of grading....

Tader has decided to latch on to me rather than PJ, which I find interesting. He gets lots of lap time with me now, and I find myself getting more pleasure reading done (and being more relaxed) because I've got a cat enforcing "down time" before bed. (It's gotten to the point where I've reread Asimov's original Foundation Trilogy for the first time since I was a freshman in high school, and I've finally gone on to read the other books; I'm on Foundation and Earth now.)

Sometimes when I take a nap, he'll come in and fall asleep on my chest, too. Tader gives PJ love and attention, too, but mostly when I'm gone. Dunno what that's about. And according to PJ, I've become a "cat person"; however, I think that's because, according to people who've had cats more than once, Tader behaves kind of like a dog sometimes. Maybe that's why I bond with him. :-)

And, of course, there are those moments when Tader does something cute, like appropriating the paper bag I brought home from the meat market, once I'd emptied the meat out of it, and turning it into his own little room.

Cats. Sheesh. :-)

In movie news, if you haven't seen The Women but are into "chick flicks," check it out because it's a pretty good movie. The next thing I want to see is Nights in Rodanthe because Diane Lane is a great actor.

And in other news, I'm starting to hear from my old high school classmates on Facebook. Lordy, it's all just coming together....

That's all for the moment. Be seeing you.

Teenagers from the Future, the book where my essay on the LSH was published, is finally available on Amazon! Here's a link to it: http://tinyurl.com/55mfno.

Ladies and gentlemen, meet Tader, our new addition to the family.

Tader's a four-year-old gray tabby that PJ got from a coworker. Tader came home just today, and he's immediately made himself at home. I'm already getting used to having a cat hopping up on my lap. :-)

In other news, the semester just started, so things are hectic. But I'll manage. I always do. :-)

...canning 28 pints of green beans is a lot of work.

That was the first weekend of my brief break before the fall semester begins.

So I went to Uncle Vern's funeral. I was pleasantly surprised that Aunt Joanne and my cousins Ric and Julie remembered me, considering I haven't seen the latter two since 1985 and hadn't seen Aunt Joanne in probably 20 years. I also met up with my fourth grade science teacher, who's retiring from elementary and middle school teaching and administration but has applied to teach at ISU, which could be very cool if we end up on the same campus. Plus I got the opportunity to meet some of my cousins' children and grandchildren, thus making it possible for a new bunch of us relatives to connect up in the future.

In other words, it was a standard funeral: honoring and mourning the one who's died, and then talking with the ones we haven't seen in years. This is why they say funerals are for the living.

It was the following Sunday and Monday that I went up to Mom and Dad's, and with their help canned all those pints of green beans. By Monday, I was actually doing most of the work myself; Mom and Dad helped me snap the beans, and they took care of the jars after everything had cooled down, but I did everything in between with lots of "Mom, am I doing this right?" questions. I told PJ that maybe next year he and I would pick up the beans and then snap them right before I would take them up to Mom and Dad's to can them, so that my parents wouldn't have to do much of anything except get out jars and lids (they have so many jars, it seems a waste to pick up some more for PJ and me at this point—unless Mom and Dad tell me to, that is).

And since Mom and I both want to try canning meat, that may be something we do sometime soon.

I also had lunch with my friend Neal from school, and I discovered that Orient Gourmet has a pretty impressive-looking set of lunch specials Tuesday through Friday. I think PJ and I will have to try them out soon.

Otherwise I'm taking a break from everything. I'm pretty sure I got an A in my summer class, though grades won't be available until the 13th, and PJ and I are running a little low on funds right now because of car repairs we weren't expecting. But I'm taking as much time as possible right now to just relax and read before the new school year descends upon us.

I just found out my uncle died. Not a total surprise, since he was in poor health. He'd had several strokes and diabetes and was 78. It's not hitting me real hard because, over the years, our families all kind of grew apart. I hadn't seen Uncle Vern in probably 20 years, though Mom kept me up to speed on how he was doing, and I come from a family where my parents were the youngest in their families and I'm the second youngest in ours, so even since I was a kid there I've seen a lot of deaths of family members that I kind of knew, didn't know too well, or sometimes never got to know at all. Maybe that just makes me more pragmatic about death in our family. Mom just called me back to tell me she'd talked to one of my cousins, and for the most part, even though there's grieving, there's a certain sense of relief, too, knowing what condition Uncle Vern had been in these last few years—barely able to respond anymore, significantly paralyzed (at least as far as communicating) from all the strokes he'd had.

But, y'know, it still sucks. Being reminded of mortality isn't usually a good thing, and it makes me think of how close of a call Dad had back in December, and he's only a year younger than Uncle Vern. And Mom's only three years behind Dad.

On the good side, Mom's best friend is home from the hospital, and she and her husband won a new car.

Lest you think it's all doom and gloom, here are things I love about PJ:

• I'd never gotten into a pantsing war before I met PJ.
• I get to give him crap about that tattoo he got.
• He doesn't like eating in fancy restaurants.
• He trusts me to handle the household budget and doesn't tell me "Don't worry about it" if it looks like we're getting low on money—he says, "I'll see if I can pick up some more hours."
• He taught me the joys of stir-frying (the Americanized version, anyway).
• He eats vegetables. (Michael hated almost all veggies.)
• He likes Chinese food (and not just the chicken parts of sweet and sour chicken).
• He's a comics geek.
• He gets me to go out and do things more often.
• He's social. I don't feel like having friends is a crime.
• He doesn't give me grief if I'm out with a bunch of other English majors and he isn't there.
• He goes out rather than staying at home and then, if I go out, giving me guilt trips about leaving him there alone.
• He's trying to be better about cleaning.
• He makes me loosen up (even if the last post didn't seem like it).
• He got hooked on The Sarah Jane Adventures with me.
• I can't stay mad at him.
• He flatulates more than I do when we're home alone.
• He got me back into playing Champions.
• He admits his spelling and grammar suck, even if he doesn't like me to remind him.
• I've actually gotten done things that I meant to do years ago but, even with Michael, never got around to.
• He makes my days better by making me smile.
• I know he loves me, even though we argue (sometimes a lot), and he wants to keep working at building a life together.
• He hasn't "cut and run" just because he doesn't like something that happens between us.

Guess I still have a lot of reasons to keep him.... :-)

I'll do a longer update when I can, but right now, I just feel the need to talk about my best friend's dad, because he just died last night.

After my father's near-death last December—well, actually, he was dead, but they revived him—I've been thinking about how my parents are getting older, and how my time with them is limited. It was a shock, though to hear that Jeffrey's dad died—he's about the same age as my parents, yeah, but this came out of the blue. They don't even know what caused it; they have to do an autopsy to find out. Vernon served in the Korean War, like my dad (he was in the chemical corps, while my dad drove a tank), and he worked most of his life on the railroad. By a weird twist of fate, their house was exactly a block from my grandmother's, so sometimes if I stayed the night at Grandma's, I'd spend the day in Jeff's back yard. Vernon would often be there, especially on weekends, telling his funny stories and sitting back with his generally easygoing attitude that made him the kind of dad you don't mind hanging around while you're being a kid. Between Vernon and Carolyn, it was like I picked up another set of parents.

When Jeff and Gretchen got married, I was best man, and I swear, Vernon and Carolyn were inordinately pleased that I could be there and that I gave the newlyweds what they thought was the best toast they'd heard. (They thought I'd spent weeks working on it, when I ad libbed it.)

Heck, one time, back in 1997, when Michael and I were living in Michigan and came down to visit Mom and Dad, I even took him over to meet Vernon and Carolyn, since I hadn't seen them in so long.

The last time I saw Vernon alive was September 5, 2005. I had gone up to one of the parks in Chillicothe for a while because Mom was taking a nap and Dad was feeling pretty tired, too. I read in the park for a while, and as I headed back to the car, a familiar pickup truck pulled up, and I stood there chatting with Vernon and Carolyn, catching up on life in the space of a half hour or so. I took a picture of them—something I'd never done before—and I sure didn't know it'd be the only one I'd ever take of the two of them together.

Now he's gone.

I'm sorta numb about the whole thing. It's all got this sort of unreal element to it. I'm going to the visitation, and I'm taking Mom with me; PJ's coming to the funeral with me, because he's met Jeff and Gretchen. Maybe that's when it'll sink in a little more that he's gone. In the meantime, though, I've told Jeff and Gretchen to call me if they need me; I'm not that far away, and my summer class doesn't start until next week.

Man, this just plain old blows.

I had a strange dream about my parents. I was back home, apparently just there for a brief stay, and yet I felt like I had to leave, like they didn't want me around anymore. It was a very disconcerting dream. And since I woke up, I've had this feeling of missing my childhood, when things seemed to be a lot simpler and I was happier.

But the thing is, my parents actually wish I could come up more often to see them. They've never been in a rush to get me (or any of the rest of us kids) out of the house.

Weird.

Check out this post about the new book of LSH essays and look at the list of chapters. I'm in there. :-)