Bloody Cat is Poking at the Universe Again…

I don’t think I caught on to the fact that today was an unqualified disaster til I was most of the way through it.  In spite of the miserable weather (Precipitation Wednesdays), things didn’t look all that horrible.  I should have known, though… things were going along too well.  When I say well, I mean everyone retained their limbs.

We were a bit understaffed at work.  Work is having great difficulties and I suspect it’s the water.  Until we can get it checked out, I have put out an alert to NOT DRINK THE WATER.  The effects are unspeakable… something like fifteen women have gone on the Nine Month Crash Weight-Gain Diet.  Until things can be independently verified, I have forbidden my wife to drink the water when she comes to visit.   There are certain people who should not breed.  I am one of them.  But at least I recognize this and practice what I preach.  Now if I could only convince the rest of them to not reproduce…

Further damages have been realized in my department.  Two of the guys must’ve swapped underwear with their wives on the same night, thus two women are expecting in two months.  For whatever reason this has caused further complications.  Both pregnant husbands (just forget that I said that) were out today.  They’re taking all sorts of time off for baby tests.   Oh, the lost productivity.  Today it was a child with a broken digit and a pregnancy issue.

Fortunately today was only ridiculously busy, as opposed to normal, so we managed to cover all the exits until it was time to leave.

Once home, I geared up to do my other work, followed by learning a bunch of songs for an audition tomorrow.  Don’t look at me that way; I started working on them last night., so it’s not like I am waiting til the last moment.

Fate, or whatever one cares to substitute for it, had many more amusing plans in store for us here at Multiple Menacing Manor.  For some reason I cannot even begin to fathom, my presence causes intermittence in certain electrical devices, but only at certain times – not always.

I set up my practice guitar/effects/amp rig and fired up the laptop so I could crank up the songs to learn them.  I just got a set of Dell powered external speakers with subwoofer so I plugged everything up, expecting some great sound.

That was pretty stupid of me, wasn’t it?

The immediate hurdle is that there was not only a complete lack of great sound, there was a complete lack of sound at all.  It could only be two things: the laptop or the speakers.  Pulling the speaker plug revealed that the laptop was making sound but the speakers weren’t.   Of course they weren’t – they were brand new and this was the first time they were ever hooked up.  One of my many Unreasonable Expectations<tm> is that things should work out of the box.

Grumbling loudly, I cranked the laptop’s speakers up all the way, which worked fine until I played the guitar, at which point they got drowned out (and I don’t play loud).

I didn’t have too much time undisturbed in which to ponder this dilemma because my amp started making really odd noises.  It settled down after warming up (tubes, you know) and I played a few notes, or rather tried to play a few notes.  The result was rather unspectacular as I couldn’t hear anything.  Lovely.

My effects board, which worked perfectly last time out and has done nothing but sit in its protective case for a few months, had developed some intermittents out of thin air.  I’d play and it wouldn’t.  Or I’d play and it would drop out for no apparent reason.  And not all the time or at the same physical point.

With one small block of time left to go over the songs, I realized that I had to do some maintenance on my gear in addition.  We perceive time in a linear fashion and I have no idea how to perceive it any other way or create more of it in which to get things done.  I believe the technical term for this is that I’m $&#@ed.

Tonight I brought out an old set of powered computer speakers and hooked them up.  They performed largely as well as the new set, in that they produced not so much as a whisper of sound.  Yanking the signal plug told me that the issue was with the laptop tonight.

Of course there was an issue with the laptop tonight.  With only two hours left to finalize the songs there’s simply no way the laptop could function as expected and still remain a laptop.  No sir, it was just refusing to put out any sound.  Yet another Unreasonable Expectation<tm>.

I believe the technical reason for this lack of sound is that linux laptop sound drivers, well, suck.  I’m fairly certain that linux audio is a black art, only comprehensible by people who `code’ in `C++’ and enclose `words’ in `single quotes’.  Thus I was shut out of the equation.  All I know is that I only get audio on my laptop about fifty percent of the time when I boot it up.  There’s no apparent reason for this and I obviously don’t have the time to take on another Research Project.

All of my years of Windows experience came in handy at this point (when in doubt, reboot).  VOILA – linux sound.  I start playing along with Rosalita, the subject of one of yesterdays blog entries, and all of the sudden my guitar drops out.  At this point I’m thankful I even found the guitar strap.

The quadrupeds, at this point, are realizing that they are not getting much in the way of attention and need to make up for it by getting into things.  While I’m playing, my wife is gasping because the dog is walking around near all my cables and is going to send the laptop flying in a matter of seconds if he snags one.  I have the advantage here because I can send the laptop flying without touching cables at all (and have).

I need to get some tools to work on the equipment and I stop at a computer to check something.  While I’m mousing around, the computer spontaneously reboots (this one is Windows, folks).  Isn’t that nice?

I’m getting rather tired of the supernatural being a daily occurrence in my house.  I need it to just GO AWAY.  I will survive perfectly well without the assistance of the gremlins and poltergeists that tend to plague me at home around electronics.

Because my wife is so nice, I got to stop for dinner.  Most of the way through it we hear a THUD and my wife starts laughing: the cat fell out of the window.  He’s not exactly graceful but he’s not exactly a klutz either.  Regardless, it’s kind of funny when it happens.

Moments later my wife is looking around quizzically, starts stammering, and points at the floor.  What could pass for small xmas rug decorations turns out to be the visual pitter patter of bloody feet….. yes, the cat cut himself on something or broke a nail.  You could track his progression by the trail of bloody cat prints on the rugs from one end of the house to the other.

Usually when I eat dinner, whatever is on television includes gory descriptions of ritual disembowelments or other things that tend to make me queasy.  This happens whether I eat dinner at five or ten p.m.  We are pretty sure I cause it but we have no idea how.

So instead of ritual disembowelments on tv, I get treated to bloody cat paw prints all over the rug.  And halleleujah, two rather huge ones on my otherwise clean pants.

My wife is a cleaning expert so she knows what to use in each and every dirt or stain situation.  She quickly whips an Eraser Stick out of her purse and shows me how to work it on my pants (I kid you not).  Meanwhile she’s walking around with twenty three pounds of bleeding cat, tryind to decide what to do (have I mentioned she’s a nurse?).  She asks me to look up a vet hospital, which even I question, as the cat hadn’t severed an artery.

The dog is feeling pretty left out, so he’s hanging very close, trying to `help’ wherever he can.  This largely consists of him being underfoot and trying to eat the cat food and everything else left out to keep the cat quiet and coagulating.  My wife asks me if the cat is still bleeding.  Me, the one who can’t stand blood.  I remind her that I can’t stand the sight of blood, as I have to do way too frequently.  She sits with the little bleeder and hands me a spray bottle of Mystery Fluid<tm>.  I am to spray Mystery Fluid on all the bloody paw prints on all the rugs, from one end of the house to the other.

My body language probably gave me away (or maybe it was the loud screaming about not having enough time to get the songs and the equipment ready), but my wife, saint that she is, did the thing she does to soothe me when I’m agitated: she totally ignored me and started talking about her problems (as if that provided some sort of comfort to me).

It was decided (meaning She decided it) that I was going to sit with the cat while she tended to the spots on the rugs that I already sprayed.  Judging from the very loud, fragrant outburst, it probably wasn’t going as well as expected.  As best the forensic team can reconstruct things, she apparently picked up a bottle of bleach by mistake and started spraying it on the carpet instead of the cleaner that was in her other claw… err… hand.  She was a tad agitated (and that is gross understatement).

An hour later my wife is satisfied that the cat has coagulated and there don’t appear to be any new and exciting bloody paw prints on the carpets.  She suspects the entire incident is her fault because earlier today she proclaimed how nice it was that she was going to have tomorrow free.  Somehow the Universe heard her and made other plans.  They involve a vet trip and no doubt lots of new bottles of Miracle Cleaner and Salad Dressing in a can.

Meanwhile, I have gotten out my own bottle of Miracle Cleaner (DeOxit) and cleaned all the tube sockets and pots so there are no spurious noises (until tomorrow, of course).

And somehow tomorrow night I will have to make it all the way through Rosalita without laughing so hard I fall over on the drums (or the drummer).

Wish me luck.