This is another one of those things that’s been keeping me busy in retirement. The shop is on the lower floor. The upper floor will mostly be used for storage. We used to have a storage shed on the spot that the shop now sits on.

The side in the picture is the only one with siding on it right now. Tomorrow the platforms come down, the bolt holes get filled with dowels and I start working on another side.

The last couple of days has been spent working on my new home page and the Exit78 website as well as tearing apart my real world workspace and putting it back together.

For the last couple of years, my home page has been hidden from the view of the rest of the internet. It’s on a web host that I am slowly moving stuff off of and there are no links of any kind to the page.

My new home page is on the website associated with this blog. A lot of the material that was on the old home page is on Mike’s Toolbox and On-line Places, though most of my real for-my-eyes-only goodies are on a new semi-hidden page. The goodies aren’t anything sordid or kinky. They’re simply public domain resources that I’m not sharing because I want to incorporate parts of them into web pages, blog posts, or both.

The real world workspace is undergoing a different kind of metamorphosis. I removed all of the stuff from my wall shelves — and then took down the wall shelves. The fastener holes have been filled in, the wall has been painted and the brackets for the shelves are back up — but there will be different stuff on the shelves — and less of it!

I’ve had a small color TV mounted on the wall in the corner for years. It’s gone. There will be a small flat screen TV in the corner on a shelf. I’ll also be moving the DVD recorder and Dish Network receiver to that area. They had been in front of me on the wall shelf.

I switched from a desktop computer to a laptop in January, but the desktop computer was still on the desktop until this morning. It’s not going back. I’ll be using the flat screen monitor from it to expand my laptop’s “desktop,” as it were.

I also tossed a lot of stuff. I still had too much paper when I’ve really shifted away from using paper, much more so than we ever did for the years at work when we were trying to “go paperless.”

(That’s an interesting thought. It might make a good topic for a blog article. I started a draft post — just in case: The paperless workplace.)

I guess that I need to get the rest of this done tomorrow or Saturday. There’s other projects waiting.

Gee, it’s so nice to be back home.

We live in the country, three miles from a town with a population of about 1000 or so. When we first moved there, we had a problem with mice, even though we had two cats. Over time, though, the mouse problem just kind of went away. And, when we got new furniture, the cats went outside — permanently.
Living on a highway, even though it’s not heavily traveled, poses a couple of problems with cats.

The first problem is the highway itself. Young cats often do not survive their first year. It’s unfortunate, but that’s the way it is. You can’t fence ‘em in and you can’t put ‘em on a collar and chain. That’d be cruel — and they’re not coming in the house.

The second problem is stray cats. Over the years, most of the cats that we’ve had were ones that wandered up to our place. Some came to live; some just visited a while and moved on. I realize that many of the cats wandered in from somewhere else. However, some of them were obviously dumped. Some were friendly and came right up like they owned the place. Others were skittish and afraid, but it was obvious that some wanted to be petted and have attention paid to them.

Another problem for us is that we like to travel on occasion. In order to be able to do it, though, we have to have some one feed and water the cats when we aren’t there.

I don’t even know how many cats we’ve had over the years. I do know that it had been a long time since I had seen a mouse. However, a while back, the longest surviving cat, Muffin, disappeared. We figured she had wandered off someplace in the woods and died. At the time, she was the only cat — and we decided we didn’t want any more.

We forgot about the mice.

They came back, probably descendants of the originals that were there when we moved in — many generations removed from those early mice, of course.

So we started talking about what we were going to do, which included the possibility of cats. Our daughter told us that her boyfriend’s family had an outside, half-wild cat that just had a litter and that we could have the whole litter if we wanted. We decided to go for it.

Having experienced with cats that turned out half wild, we decided we wanted to get them when they were young enough that there was a decent chance their growing up friendly. We also knew that just bringing them out to our house that young probably wouldn’t work unless we had some way to keep them from running off into the woods. To keep that from happening, I built a good sized cage that we would keep them in for several weeks before we let them out on their own.

There were four kittens in the litter and they certainly were a mongrel bunch. There was one striped tabby that looked so much like the last cat we had that we gave her the same name. Another cat looked just like a Siamese and, from the beginning, just clung to you with his claws when he was picked up. He earned the name “Clinger.” There was a solid white kitten with a blue eye and a kind of amber eye. I jokingly suggested that we call him “Oddball,” and the name stuck. I can’t remember the fourth cat’s name. She was a calico looking cat.

All of the kittens were a little wild to begin with. The two males calmed down pretty quickly.

The days and weeks passed. We paid attention to the kittens and they grew to know and trust us, for the most part, and eventually the cage went away. The cats stayed.

The calico stayed a little wild all the time that she was with us, but she did get to the point where she would come to us and allow us to pick here up.

Muffin was a little standoffish, a little shy, and very stiff when she was picked up, holding herself

Oddball and Clinger were best friends. They were always together. And they both loved attention. Oddball, I think, was the best cat that we have ever had.

The first to go was the calico.

She just disappeared.

As I said before, that just happens, living in the country.

About the same time, a stray started showing up. He was really nervous and stayed away whenever we were around. He had the loudest meow of any cat that I’ve ever heard. We thought that there was going to be conflict with our other two males so we started running him off whenever we saw him.

Then the first problem that I talked about at the beginning of this essay, the highway, took its next casualties. Early one morning, as I was heading out to work, the two buddies, Oddball and Clinger, both silently sprawled out on the highway.

I stopped, got them off the road and, upset, buried them, before continuing on to work. Later, when I knew that she would be up, I called my wife to let her know what had happened.

Oddball, I think, as I said before, was the best cat that we ever had. The buddies, though, were the best two that we ever had at the same time.

Today, we have three cats. Muffin, like her namesake is now the one that we’ve had the longest, though she is a pretty young cat.

She had two kittens in her first litter. She showed them to us right away, and then kept hauling them off to the worst place she could. We had an addition to our house in progress and she took those kittens up into the attic and built a nest in the blown in insulation in the heat of the summer! When we found them the first time, they were dehydrated and their throats were full of insulation. She kept insisting on taking them up there, though. The runt did not survive.

Finally, I just went ahead and built another cage to keep Muffin and the kitten in so that there would be some chance of it surviving. And survive it did and, eventually, we stopped using the cage.

But then it wandered off. Just like so many, though most were older when they did.

What a let down after putting so much effort into giving it a fighting chance despite what its mother wanted to do with it.

Then after a couple of days, it was back. And it was so, so happy to see its mother — and its father — and us. It was bounding all over the place, climbing all over us and its parents. It still comes running whenever it hears the front door open, very unusual for a cat, even a kitten.

We still haven’t named it though, an attempt, I guess, to keep from becoming too attached to it, since we’ve already lost it once.

It’s a neat kitten, though, almost as good as Oddball. It’s a male, striped like its mother.

Its father?

Its father is a black and white cat, a stray, with a very loud meow, the loudest I’ve ever heard. We gave him a name, not very original for a cat, “Sylvester.”

I still miss Oddball.

This article was originally published in October 2004. Muffin had another litter, this time with three kittens. The father, Sylvester, disappeared after that. There was only one left of this newest litter, “Frisky,” another not-so-original name.The kitten from the previous litter? He was still around — grown up and aloof — and still didn’t have a name. We just called him “Kitty.”

Then again, I guess that was his name.

October 2, 2007 - Time has passed and all the cats are gone. We travel quite a bit and our daughters no longer live in the area, so there’s no one to feed any critters when we’re gone. Maybe we’ll have pets again someday, but not soon.

After we got back from our trip, I was still not feeling great for a couple of days — actually until this evening. However, I have been busy working on my on-line material.

I’ve got the diary entries for the month of October 1863 done for Daily Chronicles of the American Civil War. The diarists are John Beauchamp Jones, a clerk in the rebel War Office, and Gideon Welles, the Union Secretary of the Navy, a cabinet level post in 1863. The entries will be posted on the corresponding day of this month at 2 A.M. central time in the U.S.

I’ve eliminated two of my old blogs. I’m in the process of (slowly) moving and deleting material from one web host and these two blogs were part of that.

My old general purpose blog, North Farnham Freehold, is no more. Most of the posts were moved to this blog and posted with the original date. Some of the posts have been republished more recently as they have current interest for me. A few are preposted and will be published over the next week or so. A good number of the posts were deleted as they were not relevant to what I am trying to do with this blog.

I’ve also deleted my old Out ‘n About blog. It was replaced over a year ago with Haw Creek Out ‘n About, but the content was not moved at that time. Before deleting it, most of the articles were transferred with the original date. A few were republished within the last few days and a few have been or will be used as fodder for essentially new posts. Quite a few of the Out ‘n About posts were deleted, as well.

I’ve done a little work with the home page for this site: exit78.com. This is very preliminary, but all that I had there before was just an ugly plain place-keeping page. I still have some thinking and research to do before I do the serious redesign. Besides being the home page for this site, it’s going to be a pointer to all of the other sites and blogs that we have. The page will likely look very different when I get done with it.

Besides the web work, I’ve also done some real world stuff the last few days.

I fixed the drain line leak under the house — after I felt good enough to crawl under there again. It was an easy fix. Turns out the idiot plumber that ran the new drain lines year in 2005 had missed gluing one of the PVC joints — and it had separated, probably when I was under the house in early August stringing coax for the new location of our TV and satellite system. I’m not a small guy and I probably jarred it loose the last time I was squirming my way out.

The even better news was that the drain was only shower and sink water — not toilet water as I had feared.

Oh, yeah — the idiot plumber that missed gluing the joint in 2005 — that was me!

I also got the hot water heater fixed. It took two trips running to town to Lowes, but now it has new thermostats — not needed — and a new temperature-pressure safety valve — needed — as well as a new flexible outlet hose that had started leaking.

It’s a good thing that we had the camper parked close to the house, because fixing all of these things took until yesterday!

I’ve been toying with the idea of a new photo web site and photo blog where I would post some of my best images. The web site is michaelgoad.com and the photo blog is Mike’s Photo Blog for now. These are the first photos:

We got home a little before 4. First tasks were to pick up the mail from the post office and get started mowing. It’s amazing how much the grass (weeds, really) had grown while we were gone.

The good thing is that the “field” looks solid so I don’t have to worry too much about the camper sinking up to the hubs like it did the last time I took it across there.

Karen is going to her quilting group Friday morning so I thought I might drop in at the Training Center. Problem is, I can’t remember if it’s an off-Friday or a work Friday. The last time I stopped was an off-Friday just before a holiday. The place was dead!

I’ve done a little house-keeping on this blog. I moved all the site related links over to the right and the ads over to the left. Some folks that are into search engine optimization (SEO) seem to think that works better. I’m not going to worry about it overly much. I’m more interesting in placing worth-while content on line. I’ll try to do it in such a way that the search engines can find it, but that’s not my highest priority.

I also added a couple of notes on the right with links to other material I’m working on. I’m trying to get a bit ahead on that stuff so I’ll have time for other things. For instance, I want to move Karen’s Quilts over to a new domain.

I’ve pre-posted several days worth of material in my civil war blog Daily Chronicles of the American Civil War and have an outdoors tip pre-posted for two months in my outdoors blog, Haw Creek Out ‘n About.

When I get a little more ahead on things, I’ll be updating the RV manufacturers index, which needs to be done more often than I am doing it, probably every couple of months. I also want to add more material in other categories.

We’ve got the walls up on the shop and have started on the ceiling joists. The roof will be a gambrel design (barn), which will allow a second level, which will be used for storage.

We’ve had a stray cat or two hanging around our place lately.

I really don’t know why, because we don’t have any cats any more and we certainly aren’t leaving any food out for it.

For the first time in a long while, Karen was awakened the other night by the screeching and yowling of a cat fight.

I slept through it.

Yesterday, when we came home from a long drive, we saw what we thought was an scruffy cat with matted orange hair that had been around off and on for several years go running off our deck. I thought I saw it again later out one of the front windows, but when I opened the door it was a totally different cat - a large young bob-tailed cat with short orange hair of the same shade as the scruffy one - and it started to run off until I said something to it. It stopped and went back to sniffing around the porch and trees - all the while keeping an eye on me.

We’re not going to encourage it. We’re not going to feed it. With our traveling, we don’t need to be trying to take care of any strays - not that it necessarily needs it.

Early this morning, I was awakened by a yowl from a cat.

“Oh, great,” I thought. “A cat fight.”

That was it, though. Not another sound.

Shortly after that, though, I figured out that the cat met it”s match when I started to smell what it had probably been messing with. I think the yowl was a response to getting sprayed, because not long afterward I started smelling the distinctive odor of a skunk.

We saw this lovely little critter outside a couple of weeks ago. Don’t know if it was the same one as made the stink last night.

Fortunately, there’s been a wind all day and the smell has completely dissipated - I think most of the spray must have hit the cat.

Maybe it won’t come back.