I had been wanting to go to the flea market for awhile to get some Dremel bits, old video games, and whatever other treasures and deals I could unearth.  I planned on going one Saturday awhile back when my girlfriend approached me about going to a renaissance fair. I’ve been to a renaissance fair before, and decided I had gotten my fill.  She was already planning on going with one of her girlfriends anyway, so declining wasn’t that big a deal.

It’s not that I don’t like the idea of a renaissance fair, it’s the fact that people who will not break character when talking to me creep me out. There comes a point where the novelty wears off and you just start scaring me.  Plus, if you’re going to go all out, at least be as historically accurate as possible.  I mean, some witch burnings, beheadings, and plagued villagers would certainly add some credibility, but then nobody would want to come back, which means there wouldn’t be any renaissance fairs. Okay, sounds good.

I’m not completely against renaissance fairs, though, as they do have their definite positives. These festivals usually have an abundance of good food and beer, as well as a lot of cool stuff to buy.  How many other places do you know where you can buy swords, axes, and chain mail? I was also aware that they sold beer mugs at these events, but figured they were no better than anything you’d find at your local Oktoberfest.  What my girlfriend returned with proved me dead wrong.

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Owning pets sometimes feels like preparing for parenthood, though if my future kids start meowing, shedding, and biting me, I’ll have just reason to be worried. Also, if I find myself ever petting my children, well…I’m probably going to jail.  Either way, I’ve been told something about kids and toys that I can validate from my own experience as a child.  When you buy a young child a toy, they’ll most likely be more interested in playing with the box.

In this respect, I’ve found that young cats don’t differ all that much from young children. Though they’ve grown to enjoy their toy mice, fish, balls, monkeys, and Ewoks, my cats play more with cardboard boxes and paper bags more than anything else.  They love to hide in them, dive in them after toys, and pose as Amazon.com products (Figure 1).

Kittens become cats pretty fast, and mine have started to outgrow the cardboard carrier they came in from the Humane Society. Thus, I’ve started to think that I may need a cat carrier for their next vet visit or trip to wherever it is cats hang out on the weekends.  I started looking at cat carriers online, but with stuff like this $78 man card forfeitter out there, I figured there has to be a more economical solution. Granted, there are cheaper and more manly carriers in existence, but I still feel most are pretty overpriced.

Okay, fine.  There’s nothing manly about a cat carrier.  I said it.  Happy?

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Okay, so it wasn’t as simple as someone ignoring the post showcase showdown message of “Help control the pet population, have your pets spayed or neutered,” (Figure 1) and just like that I have cats. I had wanted a household pet for sometime.

Last year, we had to put our family dog of 13 or so years (Figure 2) down to prevent further suffering as she was losing her sight and suffered from cancer and debilitating arthritis. Being in my mid-twenties, I hadn’t lived at home for years, but that didn’t make the loss any easier.

As any pet owner knows, a pet is a member of the family, and our dog Jessie was no different. When my grandfather died, my dad stayed back a few days extra to help my grandmother out.  A few weeks before my grandfather died, my uncle’s Collie had given birth to a litter of puppies.  As one family member left our lives, another entered as my dad returned with a pint-sized version of Lassie that we named Jessie.

Jessie was the most recent casualty among our history of family pets. There were cats, hamsters, and the occasional jar of bugs…though those didn’t seem to last as long.  It had been almost ten years since I had owned any cats, but I had decided that if I was to get any pets at this point in my life, it was going to be a cat.

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Why haven’t I updated my blog as much as usual?  It’s the tryptophan, I swear.

It’s that time of the year. You barely see some family members the whole year, then you see them all, a lot, in the span of two months.  Kind of like that rash I’ve been ignoring, except less itchy, and with presents.  It’s a busy time of year for a lot of people, including me. I made a choice to let my blog suffer to spend time with my family, get some shopping done, and play video games.  The opportunity cost between that and my approximately $0.12 a month in ad revenue made it an easy choice.  I don’t do this blog for money, though, I do it for my own enjoyment. I just enjoy my family, turkey, and PlayStation 3 more than blogging.

So they won out.

Thanksgiving was relatively uneventful, and that we made it the whole meal without any burping contests or audible flatulence. I also got to carve the turkey with my brother (Figure 1).  Nothing whets the appetite like being elbow deep in a turkey’s ass.  The food was awesome, the football games sucked, and nobody reading this blog probably gives a crap.

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