The Breadbin

"Good music is good no matter what kind of music it is"--Miles Davis

I am now a creature of the night again, this time not for a couple of days or a week, but for the foreseeable future.
My biggest issue with nights, given that I'm a natural lark, is sleeping during the day. To that end, my loving wife has procured for me a sleep mask and earplugs. The former is absolutely wonderful: I can put it on, stare directly into where I know a light to be, and see nothing. And aside from it being a little warm--which will be a plus in a few months--I've found it very easy to get used to the feeling of it wrapped around my head...probably because my glasses wrap halfway around my head and I've been wearing them forever.
The earplugs--haven't tried them yet. Not sure I'll need them...we'll wait to see what manner of creature moves in next door. The fans and A/C in the bedroom do a wonderful job of masking external noise with their own white noise. I must admit I…

Look at that, it's a B.B. cat!
--me on many, many occasions, stroking up the purrbox on our little tabby

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The story of B.B begins in a Vancouver pet store. Actually, to call this place (long defunct, now) a pet store is to legitimize what might have been a criminal operation. Certainly the owner didn't care for the animals in his care he told Eva to get out and never come back because she had criticized the store's cleanliness. She observed him kicking at the cages and the cat she had originally tried to buy the day before was gone. Normally this wouldn't be worth mentioning--it's a pet store, somebody obviously bought the cat--but the atmosphere was such that it was at least as likely that cat was sick or dead.
Eva snuck back in the next day and bought B.B., a kitten so small she fit in Eva's pocket.

It would have been mighty interesting to have been a fly on the wall when B.B. met Eva's existing cat, Streak. Of course, our hypothetical fly…

I sing to our dogs.
I think they know I'm in a good mood when the songs break out. I think they even know the songs.

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Once there was a Tux
And when there was a Tux
He loved his Mommy and his Daddy and his Peaches too
Because he was the Tux

Once there was a Peach
And when there was a Peach
She loved her Mommy and her Daddy and her Tuxes too
But mostly she loved the Georgia-Ball...

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Everybody thinks their dogs are smart, little furry four-footed humans. Ours, especially the Tux, has humanity nailed in certain ways. He uses a pillow exactly the way I do, which is cute as hell. He's as wedded to the routine as I am and he loves bedtime...say that word and he's upstairs like a shot. Give him his druthers and I'm not sure he'd get off the bed.

As I believe I may have mentioned, Tux loves Eva. Desperately. His world revolves around Mommy. It's adorable, but occasionally frustrating as hell. Eva can be gone for all of ten minutes and Tux will be all over h…

Springboard from this...

DISCLAIMER: In this entry, I am going to made some general accusations. They do not apply to any single person, certainly not to you, Dear Reader, and they likewise do not apply to any one workplace.

Okay, with my ass thus covered, let's go.

Have you noticed over the last, oh, twenty years or so, how seemingly few people undoubtedly possess what used to be called a 'work ethic' and is now derisively referred to as 'being a sucker'? I certainly have. Now, again, there are people half my age and younger who are phenomenal workers. There are actually quite a few of them. But there are also a very large number of slackers, for want of a better word, and that number seems to be growing as years pass.

Charlie Stross, in the link above, argues essentially that the attitude of most employers towards most employees nowadays can be boiled down to two words: expletive and deleted. He's right, too. Defined-benefit pension plans are next to impossib…

The unpleasant ones are sticky, of course, and the most pleasant ones (everything surrounding my wedding day, the tenth anniversary Disney extravaganza)  are cemented into my mind, but the general run of everyday events first blurs, then fades, until only a ghost remains. And yes, as I age it all fades faster. That's one of the reasons I have kept a diary for the better part of a quarter century, this Breadbin being  only the most recent incarnation.

I've been told I have a phenomenal memory. That's not really true. I have an excellent, near-eidetic memory for things I have read (although I've noticed even that shorts out on me unpredictably ever since the Internet came along)...but stuff I've experienced...not so much. Especially going back to childhood.

My mom kept a scrapbook, or rather, a series of them, noting and cataloguing every last detail of my early childhood. The level of detail might strike some people as odd (the first rock I ever picked up is in one…

is right here, folks.

Apparently the human hindbrain has three questions it cycles through: "Can I eat it? Can I have sex with it? Will it kill me?" This is why, we're told, people can't resist noticing food, sex, or danger. "It doesn't matter how hard you try not to notice these things..."

Well, I don't try not to notice these things. I just don't notice them.

FOOD

If I'm hungry, I'll make something to eat. Being "in the mood" for some kind of food has always puzzled me...I either like food or I don't, and again if I'm hungry, I'll select something from the 'like' column, preferably something easy to make. Beyond that, food is a non-issue. I don't live in a world where food drops from the sky: any food I happen to see outside this house belongs to someone else. I'm not going to steal it, so why would I notice it?

SEX

This is old territory for readers of this Breadbin. I don't notice attractive g…

The mistrust and outright hatred of police officers in many online communities saddens and disturbs me.
I'll get my biases right out front: as longtime readers know, my dad was a career cop, now thankfully retired. My uncle had an O.P.P. Marine unit named after him. A cousin is a forensic detective who once walked a beat. My step-brother is a detective on a different force. I could go on. Hell, even my mom was an auxiliary police officer for a couple of years. I know strangers will immediately question my objectivity, given this information. I can't even be trusted to tell the truth about these members of my family--the truth being that every one of them is a good person who is or has been of immense service to his or her community. 
But no, according to the online world, all cops are assholes, drunk with power. The 'good' ones are actually worse than the bad ones because they do nothing to stop the evil going on in their midst--the framing of innocents, the random bru…