1. Beautiful wife. Also brilliant and funny.

2. Brilliant, beautiful funny kids.
3. Most pets doing okay.
4. House.
5. Not getting bombed.
6. Full tank of gas.

Why am I so goddamned cranky lately? Honest to god, I shook my fist at some kids the other day! They were crossing the street at a spot with poor visibility about 25 feet from the crosswalk, where I would have seen them better, and I nearly flattened the little morons. But still. I shook my fist at them. And they laughed. Probably thought, “hey look, some grey haired guy in a family car is shaking his fist at us. K3w1.” Little did they know I was listening to Godsmack at 45.

I turned it up to 50 and continued on to the supermarket, where I did the shopping.

Is the Earth flat, or more sort of spherical?
Explain.

My wife and I argue sometimes.
About various things. This and that.
And when we run out of things to argue about, and start agreeing about stuff, I just claim that Cyndi Lauper is a better singer than Madonna.
Sure-fire argument starter at our house.
Like that stuff that comes in cubes you can put in your barbecue to get the charcoal going.
Madonna is brilliant in many ways, I acknowledge that.
But Cyndi Lauper has a voice, man. She can sing. Her songs are classics.
I was dancing down the shampoo aisle at the store this weekend when they started playing Shebop.
Anyway. Too bad Cyndi didn’t market herself as well.
What I’m getting at here, though, is not who sings better of those two, but what issue do you use at home when you run out of things to argue about?

Damn, did I ever cook some good lasagne this weekend.
My lasagne is so good, damn.
That was damn fine lasagne, I’m not pulling your leg.
No fooling, lasagne doesn’t get much better than that.

Our cat just died. He was 10, his kidneys failed.
I never understood people who get attached to pets; now I do. He was one of the finest persons I have known, man or beast. He walked our daughters to school and picked them up again. He consoled them. He tormented the neighbor’s German Shepherd, god was that funny to watch.
He was tough, he survived a hit from a car that left him in a ditch with a crushed pelvis two years ago.
He was a fighter. A friend once asked her vet why her cat always had wounds on his ass. The vet laughed and said that was because the cat was always running away from fights. Our cat always came home with new scratches on his face.
My in-laws once found him dead in the street and buried him under the cherry tree one rainy day. Standing there crying, they turned to see him watching from 10 feet away.
They’d buried someone else’s cat.
Today we buried the right cat, under the apple tree where he always liked to sit.
Bye, Oliver.

I was going to describe my Friday in comic fashion, but I give up. I will just say that I reached the point where it would not have surprised me had reams of documents started spitting out the air vents, like in Brazil. More Kafka than Dilbert. More Brazil than… than…

It may snow here tomorrow. Too cold, at any rate, to put the tortoise outside. Here in one corner of our home office, paper is stacked. A sheet of heavy, fairly slick poster paper sort of curves up from the floor to vertical a few inches up the wall. Tortoise is standing on the curve, walking and walking. She must have traveled a mile already, without going anywhere.