Slow and steady wins the race

Now I feel better, my suit case is still full but my bike is out of the kitchen. It doesn’t matter good the food is, or how good a year it was for chateau Good Year, it is going to taste like a bike tire. There is a reason that your better restaurants have a No Bikes In The Kitchen rule.

I’m pretty sure that the bag is going to remain packed as my plans for the evening are solely to watch a DVD that has been sitting around for over a week. I took it with me for the long weekend thinking that maybe there would be time to watch it or perhaps my hotel room would come equipped with a DVD player. My guess would be that if you are spending your vacation in your hotel room watching a DVD the accepted wisdom would be that you are doing it wrong. But of they weren’t going to include a DVD player they could have at least offered better TV than they did. If you spend any time in your hotel room watching the NASCAR network? You are doing everything wrong. Being held captive by personal electronics is one thing, spending the money for a “Junior Nation” passport is another. Knowing what the “Junior Nation” is, is just sad.

I blame NPR. I was driving along, minding my own business listening to one or another of their correspondents reporting from China about how sad and destructive the earthquake was to the Chinese people the quake zone. I get it! It was massive, it was horrible, tens of thousands were killed, there are countless thousands homeless, the hospitals are over matched... Do we need to speak with every one of the survivors? Is it necessary to mine these peoples trauma further? Hi! Your life is ruined! Can you tell us what that feels like?

So I turned the station and stumbled upon some sort of Dale Earnhardt, Junior worship hour - But it took a while to figure out who “Junior” was. They wouldn’t say, I guess they assumed that if you had tuned in, you were all ready turned on. I knew it had something to do with car racing but I would assume that most of the racers are called some variation of Junior.

There can only be one Junior and He is the one true Junior and there are no other Juniors before him. I think if Obama wants to win over Hillery's hard working white people he needs to appear on the Junior Power Hour and then show up at Darlington with a giant number 3 in the back window of his car, the flacks and secret service guys outfitted in flame retardant red white and blue jump suits. Those hard working white people will still vote overwhelmly for McCain but at least Obama will be on record as trying. It’s hard to look over smart or over paid in a jump suit.

After feeling my IQ free falling, I returned to the welcoming embrace of the tragic Chinese and the professional mourners of NPR.

I thought that if I took Dogger out of her environment for a few days that it might be like hitting some sort of canine restart button. Before we left she had learned how to get to The Kitty’s food dish. At first I thought Oh, how cute! and then I remembered $19 a bag and decided that I needed to snuff this new trick out. I needed to either convince Dogger that the expensive cat food was not a hot new taste for spring or if failing at that, try to convince The Kitty that the place where he happily eats his food at night can also be a good place to eat his food during the day.

He does not agree. He can not eat out of his upstairs bowl during the day. It is simply not done. He has a night time dish that lives upstairs and a daytime bowl and it is in the kitchen. Lately, it is under constant bombardment from Dogger but it is the only suitable food dish for daytime meals. In the past when I have tried to move this bowl, it has led to The Kitty simply not eating during the day, and in the past this was not a bad thing. Today however, The Kitty does not need to fast during the day.

I have tried stacking things on front as well as on top of the banquet that hosts The Kitty's bowl but I think it just made it that much more of a challenge for Dogger and an obstacle course for The Kitty and myself. While dogs may get all excited by such obstacles and see them as exciting, cats find them insulting and demeaning. Cats are not turned on by agility or athleticism. They are naturally agile and athletic and they see no need for them to compete with each other to see who is the most or the best. They just want to get to their kibble.

My next plot is to block the door of the kitchen high enough to thwart the dog but not so high as to place a barricade between the cat and his dish. Poor Kitty.