How not to spend a three-day weekend

Summer flu, sneezing, sweating, sleeping and coughing futilely. I don’t recommend it. The TiVo is all but empty now, at least.

The Cat Empire

OK, let me try and make up for the Avril Lavigne thing: I’ve also been listening to Australian party band The Cat Empire non-stop for about six weeks, in particular “The Car Song” and “Sly.” Here they both are, courtesy of YouTube:

If those lyrics are too Australian to understand for some of you — I think the accents are a big part of the charm, just like the Scots accent is a big part of the charm of Sons and Daughters — here’s the lyrics to “Sly”:

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Cat Friday

Ellis Truss has two yard cats to keep mice away — apparently sawdust is like a magnet for mice — Patch and Penny. Penny has gone walkabout, as cats are wont to do, and has been gone several weeks. She’s always had a habit of staying out overnight or longer at a stretch and often just coming back to tag in, grab a bite to eat, and head out again. Motley, who was a total homebody much of her 20 years, once spent a month living in a national forest when I had an apartment in Blacksburg before showing up one day on the back porch, waiting to be let in for dinner and acting as though nothing had happened.

In any case, the Ellises have decided to get two more kittens to fill the void and when their cousins’ cat had kittens, Britt drove off to pick them up and bring them back. They’re both right at six weeks old, tiny as can be, but fearless. Both are tabby mixes (the brownish tabby has an orange stripe on her head) and, as they jump and race around like kittens their age will, getting a good photograph of them is as tricky as getting a good shot of Bigfoot.

Here the two as-yet-unnamed kittens are, during a nighttime visit to see if they were doing OK and if Patch was still hissing at them and avoiding them. (She was.) They’re playing with Kasey’s toy cars in the plans room.

The camera on my Treo is also partially to blame, of course.

Avril Lavigne’s “Girlfriend”

Shameful admission of the week: I really like Avril Lavigne’s “Girlfriend.” There may be more chicks rocking nowadays — which is great, and I love it — but so many of them are so damn dour. This song is catchy, fun and full of attitude and there’s that whole Toni Basil thing she does near the end.

I know: I’m like a 12 year old girl. I don’t know how the hell that happened.

NorCal Pirate Festival

I’m the only one in my family not to be in total love with the Bay Area, and I’m not sure why, since they keep having cool things like the NorCal Pirate Festival up there. I’ve been to the Maryland Renaissance Festival a time or 10 in my life, and some others as well, but a pirate festival? Count me in.