( Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4 )

I know you're in suspense, but don't worry: my dumbass cat is totally okay. A month after this debacle and he's back to 100%, though I doubt he learned anything from it.

He was certainly trying to re-injure himself. He spent the next two weeks trying to pull his staples out. The big plastic cone-collar took care of that. See the pictures below (taken Feb 11).

Would have posted these pictures sooner, but we've been pretty busy in the past month. You see, we bought a condo.

( Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 )

6-8 inches was slightly inaccurate. Behold, the snip of textile removed from Pedro's small intestine:

This damn thing is 23 inches long.

Not surprisingly, it smells pretty bad.

( Part 1 / Part 2 )

6-8 inches. The surgeon pulled out 6-8 inches of balled-up shoelace from Pedro's intestine.

He's still out cold, but should be fine. And hopefully smarter.

My productivity this afternoon has been somewhere around 20%. I should have just gone home.

(Part 1 is here)

They shaved my cat's belly and gave him an ultrasound ($300 cha-ching!). There's definitely some shoelace in there. The choice was: (1) go under the knife (cha-ching! cha-ching! cha-ching!), or (2) wait a bit to see if he'll pass it.

The chances of him passing it without it causing further damage or inflammation? Very very slim.

So the little fool's going under the knife this afternoon.

From start to finish, this little episode will cost about the same as the last 4 repairs on my Grand Prix combined. In no way did that make me hesitate, but, man. A shoelace!

Technically, it wasn't a shoelace. It was a waist-tie that went to one of Kathy's sweaters. She didn't want it, so it became a cat toy, because cats like dangly things. But for all intents and purposes, it looks like a long athletic shoelace, albeit without those plastic things on the end.

And some time yesterday, it became a cat snack. I've previously mentioned my cat Pedro's sharp intellect, so clearly it was a well-reasoned and logical decision to eat something that's more than a foot-and-a-half long and not food.

Thus we were greeted with much regurgitated cat food on our carpet upon entering the apartment. And a crusty foot-and-a-half long regurgitated shoelace. Unfortunately, we're pretty sure that the shoelace was longer than that, and our suspicions are emboldened by the fact that he's not hungry and can't keep much water down.

Late night animal emergency room x-rays ($285 cha-ching!) mostly show that a shoelace is not really detectable by x-rays. It might be in there, but the vet didn't see strong evidence of it. Pedro still spit up water at 5am, which makes me think it's in there and blocking the passage.

Worst case? Kitty surgery (cha-ching!) to take that thing out. Hopefully it won't come to that.

Fool.

And it's orange. Technically, it's "Blaze Orange Metallic." Among other options were "Storm Silver Metallic," "Lunar Mist Metallic," and "Milano Red." My personal favorite, however, based on dumb meaningless adjectives alone, was "Nighthawk Black Pearl".

Nighthawk Black Pearl. Nighthawk.

Right.

Anyway, orange wasn't our first choice. If we wanted to wait a month or more, we could have had silver or red. Anything else and we probably wouldn't have gotten it until March or later. And my good ol' Grand Prix just wasn't going to last that long. When we saw the color Friday evening, Kathy didn't like it. But the next day in the sunlight, she one-eightied. And we bought it.

What I'm talking about is our brand-new 2007 Honda Fit. It's a new model here in the states, but it's been around overseas for a while (in Europe they call it the "Jazz"). According to the dealers we talked to, Honda's not producing them to meet demand and dealers usually can't keep one on the lot for more than a few days. (I'm pretty sure that wasn't simply a line to make us buy sooner.)

Here's a picture of our new baby:

(Check out how I totally obscured the plate number. Now when you see an orange Fit you totally won't know if it's ours or if it's someone else's orange Fit.)

Here's some more photos of a model just like ours.

It's a subcompact, and it handles great. It's got pickup when you need it. The fuel economy rocks. It's way roomier than it has any right to be. Reviews have been very positive.

The only downside is that now I drive like a pansy. I've never had a brand new car before. As I type, it has 88 miles on it. All but like .75 miles were put on it by me and Kathy. If it gets a dent or scratch I'm going to pout like a second-grader.

Best of all, the trunk doesn't leak, it doesn't have two coolant leaks, the radio's backlight is not burned out, the rear speakers don't sound staticky, there's no transmission fluid leak, and the driver door always unlocks from the outside. You served me well, Grand Prix, but it was time to let you go. For $500 trade-in.

Cult film star Bruce Campbell is now pitching Old Spice. Which could have been terrible if the commercial wasn't bizarrely hilarious, playing into the smug mock confidence that is one of his trademarks.

When I found this I mentioned it to a co-worker of mine. The guy has an Attack of the Killer Tomatoes movie poster in his cube, so he must like corny cinema, and I figured it's a sure thing that he's seen Army of Darkness and the like. He responded, "who?". Bah.

I told him to check out Army of Darkness. Notably, it's directed by Sam Raimi, Bruce's hometown friend and director of the Spider-Man movies. Bruce has cameos in all the Spider-Man flicks, and it's rumored he may play the villian Mysterio in the 4th movie.

If you like movie-related memoirs (or generally entertaining books), you'll probably like Bruce's book If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B Movie Actor. It's about him growing up in Michigan and breaking into the industry with his group of friends (which includes Sam Raimi). If nothing else, you'll learn that Gene Hackman is a dick.

Here's a interesting article about troops in Iraq improvising with non-standard equipment.

Mostly it focuses on using Silly String to detect tripwires, but there's some other examples mentioned in the middle.

This has nothing to do with me, of course. I just thought it was cool.

I've been in the UK for two weeks and counting. I was supposed to go home yesterday, but I'm still here.

I work for a major US mobile phone maker (guess!), and I'm in the UK doing field testing of a phone that we're going to release soon for a service provider here. I'll have to be light on details because I don't think either company would appreciate me dishing dirt, and I generally like my job (the past few days aside).

Basically, someone messed up. They put a software "fix" into the phone that broke a fundamental feature. We found this out on Friday afternoon. On Friday we were to release a final candidate software build. Instead of packing to fly home, I was instead waiting for the guys back home to send me a build with the "fix" removed.

(times are approximate and quotes are embellished)
• 6:30pm - They've sent a build. We've loaded the phone. We hit the road so we can go to the testing area, which is out in the middle of nowhere because that's the only place where the coverage is crap enough to cause the issue we need to test.
• 7:00pm - I get a call.

  "Hey Grant, that build we gave you? We built it wrong. Can you download another one? We'll have it ready in an hour."

  "What? Dude, we're 45 minutes from the office. If we go back we're not going out again."

  "Is there anywhere you can download it?"

  "What, like an internet cafe or something? I don't know, I don't live here."

  At this point our driver from Manpower says, "We're not far from my house. We can stop by and you can try to use my wireless connection..."
• 7:45pm - We've been hanging at the driver's house where he lives with his mom and her two (racing-rescued) greyhounds. It smells like dog but she's quite nice and the dogs are very well-behaved and friendly. More importantly, the driver's wireless is hella fast. The build from Chicago is ready and I get it and load the phones.
• 8:00pm - We hit the road. Again.
• 8:30pm - Where the hell are we? We're not lost, but it's like a freaking jungle here. This is British BFE. We're driving down a kinda-paved one-lane road that looks like we're in a tunnel made from tree trunks and leaves. If I wasn't pissed off and tired, it'd be kinda cool. Most importantly, 3G coverage sucks here (and no where else, apparently), so we can test the thing that got broke.
• 10:00pm - Done. After a bunch of driving back and forth and making calls, Chicago is satisfied that it works as well as it did before whoever idiots broke it.
• 11:00pm - Back at the office. Time to send emails!

So generally, that sucked. It's Saturday morning and I'm not on a plane. I'm back in the office. They will send another build, the "official-release-for-real-this-time" build, and we will drive back out to British BFE to test the same crap again. What they didn't tell us yesterday was that the build won't ready until Chicago morning-time, which is afternoon here. So what do I do until then? I guess you're looking at it.

A reader asks:

... how come you don’t have any pictures of you and your fiancé on YOUR website? I think the only one of your family that I have seen was a cat.

So how's this blast from the past? The pic below would have been probably Spring 2000. This is the first and last time I've ever been seriously hammered. It's my cousin's fault really. And Kathy's.

The story goes... One day Kathy mentions to my cousin Josh that she's never seen me drunk. Josh, ever the opportunist, asks if she wants him to make that happen. The reasoning behind this (and I'm not sure this isn't a story Josh came up with later to cover Kathy) is that my dad could be jerky when he got drunk and she wanted to know if I had the same tendency. So he had me and another friend of ours do shots against each other.

So how am I when I'm drunk? The answer was: really lame. I pretty much spent the evening self-administering sobriety tests to see how drunk I was. You know, touching my nose with outstretched hands, seeing if I could walk across the room without stumbling, etc. Eventually I passed out, of course.

Not a recent photo.

I remember resting on Kathy's lap for a minute. I was later told that this minute lasted more than an hour.

I can definitely understand wanting to maintain a good buzz, but I completely don't understand the appeal of drinking more than that. "Oh, you mean you black out and then you feel like hell the next day? Sounds great, sign me up!"