Today we made our semi-annual pilgrimage to the Book Barn in Niantic, CT. It’s a fascinating place for book hounds and cat lovers. Books and cats everywhere scattered over an acre of houses, barns, sheds, tents, and hovels. Many of the books are quite recent releases, but there are also loads of very old books. The cats are all the mellowest critters you’ll find anywhere and the folks who run the place are friendly and helpful. We never miss a chance to stop here when we come back east.

…I’ve been in watching the Patriots dismantle the Cards and messing around a bit with the camera. Caught some deer eating the bird food I threw out. Also caught one of my cats in her favorite spot.

Ups and downs of the week.

 Shula’s Steakhouse – Sent my sister and her husband there for an anniversary meal and they were treated like royalty. Glad good service is still in style. 

  Hurricane season – Looks like a bad one this year. 

 Red Sox – Playing better all the time. And now they have several veterans back in the lineup. Lowell was awesome tonight in his first game back, as was Beckett.

  Presidential race – When will they focus on the ISSUES???

  Mark Kotsay – Another valuable addition to the Red Sox. Welcome to Boston, Mark. 

  Kitties – Does it get any cuter than this?

Ups and downs of the week.

 US Olympic Team – Doing well, as always. Although I do wish they’d go back to amateur athletes only.

  Olympic cheaters - When will they learn?

 Red Sox – Looking pretty good in August. Still, they can’t gain ground if they don’t win when TB loses. And TB doesn’t lose very often.

  Tropical Storm Fay – Almost a week after first making landfall in Florida, this storm is still dumping misery on that state. By the time it’s done, it will have touched every square inch of that state.

  Kitties – Cute bunch.

 Microsoft’s maps.live.com – Finally caught up with the University of Illinois with some decent hi-res images. They’re about a year old, but it’s better than what has been available until now.

So today I was stuck in a class from 8:30AM to 5:30PM. Sarah dropped me an email late this morning to tell me some animal was caught in the vent for the stove hood. She said it was making a real racket. Our stove hood vent apparently does not have a screen or flapper valve at the top to keep animals out. Somehow an animal had fallen down the vent and was struggling at the bottom to get out. At first we didn’t know if it was a bird or a squirrel, and judging from the amount of noise, Sarah thought it might be a squirrel. So all day while I was in class, I was thinking about how we’d get the squirrel out of our vent. I even called a local plumber who suggested we let it die and then remove it. Being big fans of animals, that was not a good option in our house. Our cats were, of course, mesmerized by the prospect of a small critter so close. Kitty excitement reigned.

So after I got home, I set about trying to see into the vent. It didn’t look like it would be easy from the stove end, so I crawled up into the attic to try from that end. Our attic is not an easy place to walk, though. It’s criss-crossed with support beams and has a few feet of blown-in insulation on the floor. One misstep and we’d have a new hole in the ceiling. It took me a while to work my way over to the vent pipe, but I still couldn’t get into a position to look down inside it. Time for Plan B.

I removed the screen over the hood vent fan and could see up inside enough to realize that it wasn’t open directly to the vent pipe. There was a flapper gate in a mail-size slot at the stove end. When the fan turned on, the flapper gate opened enough to vent out the air. I pushed the flapper open a bit and could see feathers and a bird leg. One mystery solved. It was actually better that it was a bird as it’s easier to deal with a bird in the house than a scared squirrel. Time to disassemble the stove hood.

Now it needs to be said here that I am no handyman. In fact, my nickname at a former employer was Handy, but it wasn’t a compliment. I’m a disaster with a screw gun or a hammer. Nonetheless, I dismantled the hood. (Taking things apart has never been a problem for me. Putting them together again is a different story.) So I finally got the hood apart and was able to remove the flapper vent. It wasn’t out 2 seconds when the bird flew out and the chase around the house was underway. The bird, of course, flew past the windows we had opened and finally lodged itself in the most difficult place to reach; behind our biggest CD rack. I had to move a smaller rack and bunch of loose CDs and then move the large rack. Once I had moved the rack, the bird finally flew to a spot where I could grab it and set it free out the window. Chalk up one for the good guys. Hope the birdbrain learned a lesson. 🙂

My reward was a good pepperoni pizza, some very good Merlot, and getting to sit and watch The Italian Job, which is a favorite of mine. Animal rescue has its rewards.

I was buying myself a new camera from Amazon and tossed in a Havoc Heli for the fun of it. It was only $24 at Amazon, although Target sometimes has them as low as $15.  Pretty cool little gadget. The cats go bonkers over it.

 

As for the camera? It make take a bit to get used to. It does do very wide angles and the steady shot feature is nice. I need to pick up an SD card because the internal memory will only hold about 6 pics. Here are a couple of quick shots of my cat.

Note the noise. This is with the camera on the full auto setting and using ambient light in my living room. I’m pretty happy with the white balance (usually incandescent lighting leaves a yellowish tone), but the noise is pretty extensive in low light. I haven’t had a chance to use it outside yet. I was about to go big and get a full DLSR, but it was running close to $900. This Lumix is a “bridge” DSLR (meaning halfway between a point and shoot and a full DLSR). For under $300, I figured I’d relearn to shoot (used to own high end film SLRs) in digital mode and when I get the hang of it, move to a DLSR. By then the 10+ megapixel cameras should be coming down in price.

I’ve often heard it said of folks who are long-lived how awesome it must have been to have witnessed so many monumental events and changes, such as the invention and adoption of aircraft, automobiles, TVs, etc. And yet in the very recent past there have been phenomenal changes right before our eyes. So called “paradigm shifts” in what we view as commonplace conveniences are all around us. In just the last 25 years we’ve gone from yelling into “landline” phones to be heard across oceans to just flipping open cell phones that would have made James T. Kirk envious. I can send an email to someone in Australia and receive a reply within seconds. I watched the space shuttle lift off last night by just going to a NASA website on my laptop. And today, as the Patriots and Colts were both setting a shining example of how not to play football, I was able to snap some cool pics of my cats and some deer in my backyard and put them up on a web site in just a minute or two. None of these things would have been possible at the time I got out of the military 20 years ago. And yet looking back to that time I don’t recall missing any of these conveniences. And that’s where the paradigm shift comes in. These gadgets have forever changed the way we live our lives. Instant communication, instant images, and instant gratification have become the norm. The world is becoming a very different place.

Oh, and here are the pics I took today.

Some backyard visitors.

Warm and comfy cats.