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Today is the day before I go home for Christmas, so let's talk about Thanksgiving.


So I went home for Thanksgiving too, and when I got there I discovered a very small kitten lurking about the cars.

This is no new thing, DuPont is filled with stray cats and dogs, some alive, some strewn across the roadways.


However, this kitten looked exactly the same as my cat, Hatred, minus a tail.


Hatred is my name for him, his official name (which I also gave him) is McCavity, from the T.S. Eliot poem, not the Andrew Lloyd Webber play.

Anyways, turns out Hatred had died a month ago. He'd been bitten by a fiddleback spider (sounds so much better than brown recluse, don't you think?) on the face over two years before.

I won't trouble you with images, but that's the spider that makes the really ugly wounds everyone who's been in the internet has seen.

It was a miracle he survived for as long as he did, and he looked relatively normal too but he'd developed seizures and it wasn't really a smart thing to hold him any longer.


Anyways, this kitten looked exacly like him (except for the part about having no tail), was a he, and was about month old, so how's that for the nine lives theory?

I think my dad kept him, I'll find out tomorrow.

Our other cat, Midnight (hush about the name, Mr./Ms. Originality), doesn't hate him, which is so very odd. She's fourteen years old, and has always become extremely traumatized when a new cat is introduced to the household.




Hey, I'm talking about my pets, guys.

That's pretty interesting.



I also recently shot a gun for the first time.

Or second, I seem to have this childhood memory of my Dad making me stand up against the house to shoot one, but all he has are .357s so I doubt that happened with me being 6 years old at the time and all.


Anyways, I went to the local shooting range becaue I thought it'd be the thing to do.

I was curious, which is actually the same reason I first went into a strip club.


Hey, shooting a gun and getting a lap dance are both kind of illicit pleasures, yeah?

The gun in your hand jumping like a live thing and cold boobs in your face, they're both hella expensive as well.


I was fine until the guy at the counter started in with the instructions. Plus, he was kind of deaf and I wasn't sure if he was asking me to repeat myself so often because he couldn't hear me or what I said didn't make any sense. I got all nervous, I'd selected a 9mm because it was the smallest they had, but when I finally got around to pulling the trigger (both easier and harder than I was expecting), it still bucked alarmingly and was far too loud.

Also, every so often (actually, pretty often considering how little I actually shot the thing) the ejected shell casing would smack into my eye protection, further startling me.

I got fifty bullets to shoot, of which I used eight. Of the seven that actually got fired, five actually went through the target. The eighth got away from me when I decided I couldn't do this anymore because I was shaking so much and I racked the slide back to eject the bullet in the chamber after I had ejected the clip. I spent about ten minutes trying to load the thing again after I'd convinced myself to be a man and at least shoot a clip-load, but I couldn't seem to figure out how so I gave up and went to pay the man. The bullets were mine to keep.

For about three weeks afterwards I was so incredibly gun-shy I couldn't open bottles of champaign or walk near traffic.



I want to go back, of course.