According to my household accounting software, the cost of maintaining our cats (as in, maintaining them in the style to which they’ve become accustomed) amounts to a mere $473 per year, or $39.41 per month. Not too bad, you’d say; your bare-bones cellular plan probably costs more. And compared to the cost of a car loan… it’s nothing!

There are hidden costs, however. Consider my list of damages:

1. Sony Headphones Lite ($24 retail, chewed)
2. USB 12′ Gold Connector ($42 retail, chewed)
3. Sony Headphones Lite ($24 retail, masticated with prejudice. For reference, I used “masticated” instead of “chewed” to underscore the fact this isn’t an accidental duplicate. Ralph really has munched his way through two of these.)
4. Pet Deposit ($100 “special” — unfortunately, our bedroom carpet does get used as a scratching post periodically)
5. Chiropractic bills ($26/month, incurred as a result of bad spinal posture imposed by the weight of one or more cats on your chest while sleeping)

All told, my calculations reveal that the cats are costing me an additional $41.83 per month in other accounting categories. In other words, there is a hidden 106% cat ownership tax.

Non-pet owners, I urge you to think twice. Do not let yourself be swayed by the propaganda we’re surrounded by:

(Unless, of course, you find the propaganda delightful…)

I have a newfound appreciation for the utility of homeowner associations.

My next door neighbors — specifically, the troupe of 6 sophomores and juniors from WWU who recently moved in downwind of me — are clearly not familiar with the delicate social etiquette of residential neighborhoods. They clearly do not understand the delicate weft and wave of obligation and counter-obligation that makes up the whole cloth of genteel suburbia. In short, they appear to be almost entirely oblivious to their surroundings *except* insofar as they relate to staging parties or escaping the inevitably consequences that follow when their parties “slip the leash” and run out of control.

I mentioned that these new neighbors were downwind of me because we just wrapped up the first wind event of the season. It may actually be the worst — I hear that one gust was clocked at more than 80 miles per hour in Bellingham, which was particularly hard hit. Windspeeds like those have a lot of energy to knock things over, to tear things down, and to move things around. Particularly things that are light — you know, aluminum cans, bits of food-soiled paper, sodden pizza boxes, that sort of thing. The sort of thing that a small commune’s worth of college kids tend to collect of lot of, and to dump sloppily into a hodge podge of open topped containers and bins in their back yard (a back yard which, I might add, happens to be immediately adjacent to my back yard.

So, assuming a great wind does knock over all of your trash — how should one comport oneself? Let us say that this wind not only knocks your garbage containers over, but blows them into your neighbor’s yard and distributes a substantial portion of their contents through your nearest neighbor’s yard? What then, you might ask?

Well, it happens to be garbage night. Evidently, what you do if you are my neighbors is to set the bins back up and stuff a few fistfuls of debri back into them. You then drag these containers through the massive quantities of debri you aren’t going to bother to pick up (see Figure A), through your own litter-strewn yard, and set them in your alleyway. No: no, no, no. You don’t merely set them down. You heave them on top of the mountainous pile of garbage you have already staged there for pickup and which appears to be becoming a permanent fixture of the space (see Figure B).

Figure A.  The structure in the background (the ambient lighting is new — needed something to combat the early darkness) is my garage.

Figure B. Note that many containers are still NOT secured, the better to share the remaining goods with the rest of the neighbors!

I was never like these kids. Not ever.

My cousin, Bjorn Anders Nielsen, is dying.

I cannot wrap my pathetic little brain around this simple fact. A fact that he has accepted with an incredible amount of dignity.

Let the world end.