My other imaginary friend is a gumiho

Sometimes it's spelled kumiho, sometimes it's gumiho. Actually the correct spelling is 구미호, because it's in Korean. In Japanese it's kitsune, and in English it's nine-tailed fox or fox spirit.

They say that when a fox lives to be a thousand years old it becomes a shapeshifting, sometimes human creature. They're wonderful creatures really, in spite of their tendency to eat the livers of their enemies.

In Lieu of Flowers....

This is a real obituary in the Salt Lake City Tribune.

ROBERT SNYDER Jr.
Robert W. Snyder, Jr. 1947 ~ 2010 Bob left us on June 19th after a day of doing what he loved, sailing the BJ at Soldier Creek with good friends and family. Bob was born September 2, 1947, at Mitchel Field AFB, in New York , the only son of Charlotte and Robert Snyder. After serving in the U.S. Navy, he married Connie and they began their life together in Denver . After a few years in Denver , the couple moved to Minneapolis where their son Michael was born in 1970. After a brief stay living in San Francisco they finally made their home in Utah where they raised their son and enjoyed many friends and family. Bob is survived by his wife, Connie, son, Mike (Wendy), granddaughter, Bailey, and sisters, Jean Allstun and Carol (Gary) Davis. Bob lived his life to the fullest and always found a way to have a good time. He had a way of making friends with everyone he met and will be missed by all who knew him. Services will be held Thursday, June 24, 2010 - ! 11:00 a.m. at Camp Williams , 17111 S. Camp Williams Road ( Redwood Rd ), Bluffdale , Utah . Family and close friends are welcome from 10:00 - 10:45 a.m. prior to the service. Arrangements in care of Olpin-Hoopes Funeral Home.. In lieu of flowers and in memory of Bob, please make contributions to whomever may be running against Barack Obama in 2012.

Cat Chachamaru has been injured

I think Chachamaru the cat has just been in a car accident. (She wasn't driving.) I found her just inside the cat door to the basement, so she must have dragged herself over from where she was injured.

Years ago the same thing happened to another cat of mine, Odo. He was always paralyzed after his accident, but when I took him outdoors to get a little sun, he hunted crickets and dragged himself around. He once followed me out into the pasture!

With Chachamaru there may be a problem since she is the mother of my kittens Joel and Girl Joel. They were sassy and didn't mind her before this, now they will really run wild.

Please pray for Chachamaru and her kitten-family.....

Fictional Characters that might have Asperger Sydrome

There are a lot of fictional characters that have been accused of having Asperger Syndrome, and perhaps some of them actually do, except that being fictional they can't have anything for real....

1. Mr. Spock from the original Star Trek is the classic example, though since he's only half human it may not count. Data, the android from Star Trek TNG, also has been mentioned but I do believe you need to have neurons to have a neurological disorder.

2. Dexter Morgan from Dexter. I like this example in spite of his serial-killery thing.

3. Maj. Winchester from MASH.

4. Brennan from Bones.

5. Goren from Law & Order CI.

6. Reg Barclay from Star Trek TNG. You know the guy with the holodeck addiction.....

7. Luna Lovegood in Harry Potter. (I love Luna, I hope she grew up to marry Neville Longbottom.)

8. House from the series House. I don't think he has AS, I think he's just a pain in the a@@.

9. Adolf Hitler. No, wait, he's wasn't fictional. *sigh*

10. The Crazy Cat Lady from The Simpsons. OK, she doesn't have any strong indications of AS, she just mutters gibberish and throws cats at people. But I have AS and I consider the Crazy Cat Lady to be my role model. And besides, she's so sexy!

AA for Vampires in BBC's 'Being Human'

The new season of BH has started and it's so good! In spite of the new Evil Christian Villain and all.....

One of the cool bits is that Mitchell the vampire, who has become Head Vampire after the death of Herrick, has started a 12 step program for vampires who want to stop drinking blood. Well, actually, he's kind of MAKING them stop drinking blood. It seems like in BH the blood-drinking thing is sort of a powerful addiction vampires have rather than something they have to do to stay alive/undead.

This kind of answers a conundrum about vampires. The lore generally says that they have to drink blood, and yet when methods of killing vampires are under discussion, starving a vampire of blood has never been one of them. So why do they drink blood anyhow?

Other cool bits are Annie meeting a female ghost with a ghost baby and having to be a ghost babysitter. Annie objects at first that she doesn't know about babies and will probably drop him, but ghost mama assures her that won't matter, the little fellow is already dead....

And George the Werewolf gets the bright idea to build a big cage in his room and steal tranquilizers, and when the full moon rolls around he locks himself in and takes traquilizers and sleeps straight through his time of the month.

Only for the next month he develops Tourette's Syndrome and is involuntarily swearing all the time, which is a bit of a problem in his new job as a teacher of English as a Second Language....

That was a cool storyline but I hope it doesn't give them the impression that Tourette's is caused by people repressing their hostilities, as that is not the currently accepted scientific explanation of the disorder. The scientific explanation is that Tourette's is caused by being bitten by a person with Tourette's, and at the next full moon the bite-victim starts involuntarily swearing and exhibiting other signs of the condition. (That's really true, I read it on Werewolfipedia.)

NOTE: I'm planning to redesign this blog soon and so will probably lose many of my sidebar links in the process, so bear with me....

Double Kitten Tragedy

If kittens have to die, why can't it be the hostile barn kittens that don't like me? About a week ago my kitten Other Joel died. I had suspected there was something wrong with him. He'd always been very passive and spent most of his time asleep even when his siblings were climbing out of the laundry basket where they lived. Also, his ears were very tiny compared to those of his sibs--- he always looked more like a newborn kitten as far as his facial proportions were concerned. I noticed in the last days that he was no longer eating well and so I was prepared when he died.

It's a different story with his sister, Other Girl Joel. She was always very skinny almost from the beginning, but she was very active. I worried about her not gaining weight, and I gave her some extra attention. A couple of times I brought her in to nap while I watched TV. But I didn't think there was anything new wrong with her. I just found her dead this morning.

The two kittens are survived by their littermates, Joel and Girl Joel, their mama Chachamaru, and their daddy-suspects Negi, Chan-ho and Jungsang.

The Great Chick Chase

One of my hens went broody and hatched out 6 little chicks. Since she is a feisty Old English Game, she has managed to defend her babies against my cat horde.  Until yesterday.....


I was putting out some grain for the poultry and mama hen came running. I saw one of my cats, Carlo Hisser, stalking toward where the chicks were. I yelled at him to stop, but instead he grabbed one of the chicks. I threw the empty grain bucket at him--- since I was aiming at him, that guaranteed he wouldn't be hit by the bucket, but I hoped a flying bucket coming at him might make him drop the chick. Instead he ran to the garage (attached to the barn).


When he saw that I was following him into the garage, Carlo ran up the stairs into the barn loft. I chased him around the barn loft for a while, then he ran back down into the garage, and ran over to the cat food feeder. While there another cat, The Grey One, grabbed the chick away from him. This was bad news since The Grey One loves to eat birds. But The Grey One is also very pregnant, so I managed to catch her and take the chick from her.


The amazing thing was that the chick was alive and well. I carried it back to its mother and the other chicks. When the mother hen saw I had one of her chicks in my hand, she pecked my legs. Hard.


I think that's one of those 'no good deed goes unpunished' things.

Kitten falling through the crack.....

This morning when I got up I checked on the kittens. Joel was there, as were Girl Joel and Other Girl Joel. But Other Joel was missing. I started calling for him and heard a meow in response.

On the top of my basement steps there is a crack. It's about three inches wide and six inches deep. My mom had a handyman out to look at it once but evidently he wanted more money to fix it than it was worth. Why am I mentioning this crack? Because that's where I found Other Joel.

Luckily the crack was big enough not only for a kitten to fall down, but for me to get him back out again. The mystery is, why was it Other Joel. Yes, the kittens are getting big enough to think about climbing out of the laundry basket where they live. But I haven't seen any of them close to succeeding. Plus, once out of the basket they'd have to cross the porch and fall down two steps in order to fall into the crack.

Other Joel is also the least adventurous of the four kittens. He was the last to open his eyes, and now while the other three are exploring the laundry basket he's usually napping. And mama-cat Chachamaru hasn't been moving her kittens out of the basket for quite a while, and they're bigger now than they were then. Maybe it was Kitten-thief--- a female cat who earned her name stealing other cats' kittens last year after she had a premature, dead kitten. But she hasn't been pregnant this year, and last year she got a lot farther than that with her stolen kittens, even when they were bigger than Other Joel is now. It's a mystery....