The Marriage Business

Today, the local central coast television station KSBW aired their weekly editorial. It took my breath away. Not for brilliance, eloquence or anything like that. But because it was so refreshingly logical and agreed so closely with ideas I had been discussing with Steve in the time since Prop 8 passed.

I encourage those with the time (it’s short, I promise) to take a look at it: http://www.ksbw.com/asseenon/17982623/detail.html

Marriage seems to be a word loaded with religious connotations, though it is clearly not a religious union in the eyes of the government since atheists can easily get married. Maybe the solution is to take the word out of it. Let the religious keep the word “marriage” for themselves, and let consenting adults who want to form families have their rights.

That Darn Cat

The saga never ends. Our cat Mischief was given to a Santa Cruz local and I thought that would be the end of it. But the stupid feline refused, despite several months of attempted conditioning, to get along with the person’s other cats. So, she’s back at our house.

When I got the cat, I obviously didn’t know a couple things. First, three out of our six rabbits are terrified of cats. Second, I hate cats. I didn’t know the second thing because I didn’t grow up with cats. I seriously underestimated the annoyance factor. She meows quite a bit and gets her hair everywhere. I like rabbits; you can put them in cages and walk away when they’re annoying you. I am most definitely not a cat person.

In our old garage rental, we were able to separate the rabbits and the cat using a tall precision pen and draping sheets to block the cat from staring at them. In the new place, we have had to confine her to the bedroom to keep her away from the rabbits, which is doing horrible things for Steve’s allergies. Apparently, in the old garage, the allergens were more spread out and not as heavily concentrated near the bed, or something.

Anyway, so I get to spend the foreseeable future trying to find her a new home. She’s posted on a rescue website (http://www.animalfriendsrescue.org/) and http://www.petfinder.org/ and I’m going to put some fliers up at the local pet food stores. I will also try to take her to some local adoption fairs, but she’s so timid in the face of chaos, I have no idea how that’ll work. Sadly, the rescue can’t put her in their cat adoption centers because she can’t be caged. Of all things, she’s claustrophobic. She actually foams at the mouth and freaks out when put in a cage or carrier.

I suppose life really is a serious of lessons you learn the hard way. I get to spend however long it takes being involved in all things cat to pound in the lesson: I don’t like cats!

Halloween 2008

Steve and I didn’t do anything for Halloween. Downtown Santa Cruz is known as a popular place to go and is usually jammed with people, so I naturally elect not to go there. Also, it was raining pretty hard.

A few days before Halloween, however, we attended a “craft party” with the grad students Steve works with. We made hot dog mummies, pumpkin bread, cider and apple pie apples. Apple pie apples are caramel apples dipped in white chocolate and covered in cinnamon sugar. They are pretty difficult to eat off of the stick, so Steve cut them up for everybody.

We did some pumpkin carving, spurred on by one of the grad student’s desire to win an Obama pumpkin carving contest. The results were pretty good, I thought.

My pumpkin is a little goblin-looking thing on the bottom right eating a letter “W.” It’s a very political goblin. Or has a thing against latter-alphabet consonants.