Solar Cat . . . Status: Recharging!

It is Memorial Day weekend in the U.S., which means that most of us get a three-day weekend to honor our veterans and all of those we love who have passed on before us. Memorial Day weekend is a big milestone for me personally, for some reason. On the day after Memorial Day in 1985, I started working at Penn State as a student worker for the summer. It was a choice I made at age 20 that somehow stuck with me: I've been working there in one capacity or another ever since. And 10 years ago on this weekend, I closed on my house. We got the keys on the Friday morning before Memorial Day, and spent the weekend cleaning the new house and starting to move in.

This particular Memorial Day weekend started with a strange event: a small electronics device failure. Ever since we moved here in 2004, we have never paid for cable TV. When the television stations all converted to digital broadcast, we got a digital converter box that allows us to receive TV in digital format through the air. With its help, we get many channels, including the main ones, as well as several more obscure stations showing old TV shows and movies.

Here's an odd trend: we've been having a run of appliance failures this spring. One of the latest small devices that died on us was one of our VCRs a few weeks back. Fortunately, we had a spare, and my husband removed the one that croaked and replaced it with one that works. Which is good, because I own hundreds and hundreds of VCR tapes. Well, on Friday night, the digital converter box, which had been acting squirrelly for the past week or two, gave up the ghost in the middle of the latest episode of 24 (perhaps showing its solidarity with the VCR player that quit?). Within an hour, we had ordered a new digital converter box on amazon.com, but it won't be here for a week or so. So guess what: no TV for the long holiday weekend!

In other news, I had been out hiking in the gamelands on Saturday while my husband jogged. I was down in the weeds kneeling, taking pictures of the lady's slipper orchids that you saw in yesterday's Blip. And somehow I brought home not just one but two ticks! (Apparently, I am delicious and nutritious. And have a flavor. To ticks, at least.) On this afternoon, I found and removed two itty-bitty tiny ticks from myself: one from my tummy and the other from behind my left knee. Rats! Now I have to keep an eye out for any further symptoms, as ticks can cause Lyme disease.

In better news, we had steaks on the grill on this day topped with mushrooms sauteed in butter, accompanied by baked potatoes loaded with cheddar cheese, butter, and sour cream, corn on the cob with butter and salt, baked beans, and fresh peanut butter chocolate chip cookies. So we may have no TV shows but we are eating like kings! (We are not suffering, I assure you, as we own many movies on DVDs and videos, and in fact were able to catch up on some of the TV shows we missed on Friday night by watching them on the Internet for free the next day.)

The cat, of course, is delighted to have us around more on this holiday weekend. We have a routine that we cherish. We get up in the morning and he and I sit on the porch and watch the sky fill up with light. Sometimes we go out a half-dozen times before my husband is up. There is first breakfast around 6 or shortly after, second breakfast - which features a bit of meat of whatever kind we have - by 7:15. Note that these are meals for the cat only; we people don't always eat a real breakfast, or at least not till later.

And by 8:30 or so, that Tabbycat is seeking out a sun spot (in this photo, he is on the table in his room near a favorite window overlooking the front yard), rolling around in it deliciously, stretching and keening, fully content. Tabbycats, like butterflies, are solar powered, don't you know? In this photo, the cat is recharging his batteries in the morning light. For cats - like all of us, I guess - are children of the sun.

The soundtrack: Billy Thorpe, Children of the Sun.