Important safety tip

While a fully armed cat is sleeping on your lap, it is a Very Bad Idea to use compressed air on your keyboard.

The ensuing Four-Pawed, Full-Clawed Panic Leap is Double-Plus Not Good.

Being Prepared, Some Observations

Some of the things I've learned/noticed/realized since I got the Preparedness Bug a couple of months ago:

Ordinary chlorine bleach is very useful stuff.

72 hours' food and water for a single person (and a cat) is actually quite easy to do.

72 hours is a bare minimum.

Large trash bags are also very useful.

It's amazingly easy to roll duct tape around a business card to make a flat pack.

Commercial First Aid Kits all seem to lack critical basic components.

I believe I could walk home from work with the bag and water that's in my car. I could even spend a night outdoors on the way home. But what if I can't go home? What's in the car is all I'm going to have.

And what about when I go farther from home than that?

Preparedness is indeed a Journey. Every stage I achieve seems to open up another one.

Some people think even a small, 1-1/4" Swiss Army Knife is a deadly weapon, and carrying one makes you a potential mass murderer.

Double Standard

Driving to work this morning, I watched a Highway Patrol vehicle change lanes twice, then take an exit, without a single signal.

Yet if I did that in front of him, I bet I'd have a citation now.

Edit 10/27/09:

Don't get me wrong. I respect and admire the people who choose to become Law Enforcement personnel. The vast majority of them are honest, honorable persons, doing a job I'd never choose to do.

But they are also very visible, and when they don't follow even basic traffic laws, it sets a poor example for us all.

Monsters vs. Aliens

Yeah, yeah, whatever. I don't go to the theater any more unless I am certain I will enjoy the movie. Or it's Star Trek. (Unfortunately, those didn't overlap for a while. Fortunately, they do again with the reboot. But that's another post.)

Anyway, I don't go to the theater very often. I also don't do 3-D movies. The constant changes in parallax without a corresponding change in focal distance give me headaches. Bad ones.

So I only just saw Monsters vs. Aliens. And if G-rated movies don't give you hives, if you like any kind of monster movie at all, and especially if you're a fan of old, b-grade monster movies, you need to see this.

It's fun, and entertaining, and nicely sprinkled with old-school monster movie references and in-jokes.

Rent it, pop some corn, and have fun. Kids optional.

Gettin' cold at night

Here in San Diego, it's starting to get a bit nippy at night. And I'll tell you, every time I see people outside in heavy jackets, walking their dogs, the more I appreciate my indoor-only cat.

I said to her this morning, "I'm so glad I don't have to take you outside for walks."

She looked up at me and went "Mrow!", as if to say "Damn straight!"

Why?

I swear, I'll never understand people.

Why go to the trouble of taking the empty toilet paper core off the spindle, and then put the spindle back without putting a new roll on?

If you don't have time to finish the job, why even start it?

New rolls are right there. Literally 6 inches away from the holder. On an open rack, in plain sight. They had time to take the spindle out with the old core on it, and put the spindle back empty.

Why not take another few seconds to remove the paper wrapper from another roll and put it on the spindle? They aren't even in more difficult to remove plastic wrapping. They're in standard commercial paper wrap. Comes off in two seconds, tops.

I don't get it.

I probably never I ever will.

Unplug your shredder

Browsing through the archives on another blog, I came across the story of a home fire started by a paper shredder.

While sitting idle, the motor shorted out, throwing sparks into the nice pile of tinder shredded paper below it. The fire grew quickly, but the owner was able to contain it, fortunately. The smoke and debris damage to his home is a story in itself.

Me, I've moved my shredder so I can reach the plug easily, and I'm only plugging it in when I'm actually using it. The rest of the time I'm draping the cord across the feed slot so I know it's unplugged.

The odds of an electric motor spontaneously shorting out and throwing sparks is minuscule, and it's not something I normally worry about. But a shredder motor is pretty hefty, and has all that nice tinder right underneath it. So this one, I'm going to be a little more cautious with.