Recently in Personal Category

I haven't really been to that many concerts over the course of my life, but since I find myself developing more of an interest in music nowadays, I figured I should remedy that. And what better way to start than by going to see the Dead Weather in Denver? I like the particular blend of rock, country and blues that follows Jack White to every band in which he plays a major role--the guy's music is positively energizing--so I figured this would be a cool show.

After buying the tickets, it occurred to me on a lark to join the Third Man Vault, which is a sort of fan club for Jack's record company, with perks like exclusive online content, receiving complimentary limited-run records and swag that can't be purchased in stores (this was the primary reason I joined), and at some shows, a chance for early admission. I entered the early admission drawing for Denver and, a couple days before the show, I got an e-mail saying I had won, with instructions on how to redeem it.

So I was positioned dead center, pressed against the stage right in front of the main vocal mic. And it was amazing.

Maisy regularly gives Sadie baths, and vice versa. I think they're confused about which one is the mother and which one is the baby. It's adorable.

It was with some difficulty that I made the decision last week to permanently delete my Facebook account.

It's not that I don't find the service useful. I really do. I've been using it to keep in casual contact with relatives and former high school classmates whom I otherwise would speak to rarely or not at all. It's social, but without the same kind of investment that comes from talking on the phone, or visiting in person, or writing a letter. In fact, that's one of the more common complaints about Facebook--"They're not your real friends! Facebook just creates the illusion of relationships!"--but I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing. There's a spectrum of closeness in relationships, and you will always know some people with whom you would have difficulty sustaining a real conversation, but you like reading their status updates to see what they're up to nowadays.

It really was a tough choice to kick all that to the curb. I have been using Facebook since I was in college and the service was still called "TheFacebook." Admittedly, back then it was useful in an entirely different way than it is now--I used it to look up lab partners whose names I didn't recognize and people who arranged to buy textbooks from me on campus. The voyeuristic angle to it was already there, too; browsing through the profiles of friends and their friends was addictive and time-consuming but very, very satisfying. Most people left their profiles open to their network (i.e. their entire university), because just knowing it was a closed community limited to people who were like us gave the site an illusion of safety and trust that was lacking from competitors like MySpace.

That was really the primary appeal of Facebook. Let's face it: there are some things we're completely comfortable sharing with some people but not others. Facebook's privacy changes (most or all motivated by marketing potential) don't acknowledge that, and they fundamentally undermine the entire reason I had joined the site to begin with. That's why I'm quitting. I don't really want my boss, my parents and my high school acquaintances communicating with me in the same space as my college and online friends. Sure, there are granular privacy settings now, but after repeated snafus resulting in previously-private data being set public without the user's knowledge, I don't trust Facebook to keep those things separate.

Plus there's the fact that Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's creator, has been kind of a scumbag from the beginning. The more I find out about the guy, the less I trust his website with managing my semi-private communications.

There aren't a lot of alternatives right now, unfortunately, but Diaspora looks very, very cool. If or when they get that up and running, maybe I'll join it. Until then, you'll have to contact me the old-fashioned way: by leaving a comment on my blog.

On my cats' latest routine vet visit, I had the contents of Betamax's bladder checked for mischief, as he's been getting less reliable about his litter box usage lately. I needed to rule out a medical issue. To be honest, I suspected it was behavioral, that he was just getting picky or something, because sometimes cats do that.

Nope! Betamax is in fact afflicted with a condition called struvite crystals, which form in the bladder when urine is too alkaline. (Henceforth I will refer to this condition as "piss crystals.") Piss crystals are not usually life-threatening, but they irritate the bladder and can cause cats to have strange urination habits. They are a relatively common medical issue for all cats, but especially neutered males. If left untreated, they sometimes form stones that cause blockages in the urethra, and this can be fatal. Since I do not want my cat to die of piss crystals, I opted to treat the condition with a special prescription cat food from the vet.

Now, I am one of those weirdos who reads the labels on things out of habit, and that includes on pet food. Any vet will tell you that you should feed your pet a food with a real meat as the first ingredient, which is why I was kind of surprised to find that both prescription cat food options (Hills Prescription c/d and Royal Canin Urinary SO) had weird mysterious by-products as first ingredients. The Royal Canin can actually had a lot of the codewords I read as "rendering plant soup," which means a mix of sick or DOA livestock, diseased organ meat, garbage, expired food, and euthanized pets from some veterinarians and animal shelters. If your pet food says "meat by-products," "meat and bone meal" or "animal fat" but gives no indication of the kind of animal it comes from, that means they actually do not know, because it's all cooked together in a big horrible vat at the plant.

Both foods sounded pretty horrible from the labels, but I was leaning toward the Hills c/d just because it was specific about the origin of the meat. The cat got to make the final call, though. Luckily, he prefers the Hills, too. Here's the nasty-sounding ingredient list, for the morbidly curious:

Pork by-products, water, pork liver, chicken, rice, corn starch, oat fiber, chicken fat (preserved with mixed tocopherols and citric acid), fish meal, corn gluten meal, chicken liver flavor, calcium sulfate, guar gum, fish oil, brewers dried yeast, glucose, DL-Methionine, choline chloride, potassium chloride, taurine, cysteine, calcium carbonate, dried egg yolk, glycine, vitamin E supplement, iodized salt, potassium citrate, thiamine mononitrate, zinc oxide, ferrous sulfate, niacin, pyridoxine hydrochloride, beta-carotene, manganous oxide, calcium pantothenate, vitamin B12 supplement, riboflavin, biotin, vitamin D3 supplement, folic acid, calcium iodate.

I had been feeding both cats Castor & Pollux Natural Ultramix Adult Feline dry kibble (boy, that's a mouthful), but Betamax has to eat solely wet food now. That's okay. I've been doing some reading online and finding a general consensus that dry cat food is often a contributing factor to piss crystals, and that many cats recover fine while simply being fed ordinary canned cat food. I guess the reason is because cats have a low thirst drive and tend to form crystals when the urine is more condensed (i.e. they are dehydrated). Eating a wet food just gets more water into them, which helps flush the bladder before bad stuff starts building up. I think Betamax will stay on the prescription food for a while, and perhaps once he's been healthy for a few months, he will get a different canned food, like Wellness, which costs the same but contains much higher-quality ingredients, is available from retail stores, and can be fed to both cats.

To be honest, I should have switched to a wet food sooner. Getting off the high-carb dry food can help fat cats (like Maisy) lose weight without making them feel too hungry. Once the last of the dry food is gone, it's all canned for these two.

I got some sad news on Wednesday. Buddy, a cat who has lived on my family's farm since 2002, has passed away.

Buddy showed up on our farm one afternoon while I was still in high school. Cats suddenly appearing on our property were not uncommon--people in that area dump their unwanted pets out in the country all the time, and we had a reputation for being animal lovers. So one afternoon I came home from school and found this scruffy brown tabbycat milling around near the barn. I half-heartedly called "kitty-kitty" to him, not expecting a response, and to my surprise he came trotting up just as natural as could be. It wasn't long before he was purring away in my lap and digging his claws contentedly into my thigh. We soon took to feeding him along with our other outdoor charity cases, and he stuck around to become the farm's official greeter. I don't think I've ever met a more amicable feline. He could be a little obnoxious (he didn't understand the idea of keeping his claws in), but it was hard not to like him.

He hadn't been well for months before he died; he became quite thin and his normally rapacious appetite was greatly diminished. My mother let me know earlier this week that she planned to take him to be put down soon. She thought he probably had cancer. On Wednesday, when she went out to take care of him, she found him peacefully dead in his bed. He died quietly in his sleep and probably didn't feel a thing. An easy death at the right time is such a rare thing, and for his sake I'm glad that's what he got, but I'll still miss the little guy next time I go home. He's been a fixture of the place for so long.

I apologize for being conspicuously absent over roughly the last month. I kept meaning to write, but wanted to wait until I had real subject matter. A few aborted essays later, and I've decided to just post regardless with a sort of general update about goings-on.

• U.S. health care reform passed on my birthday last month. I think that's awesome. We can all agree that the bill is not perfect, but it is far, far better than leaving things as they are. Thankfully, far fewer friends and relatives than I expected had elaborate online panic attacks over the fact that, in four years, the health insurance industry will be subject to soft regulations.

  To be honest, I had more to say about this, but it all seems a lot less timely now. People are kind of settling down about it now that they realize the world isn't ending.

• How to Train Your Dragon is the best Dreamworks picture to date, easily.


• I've been watching a lot of movies lately. The International Film Series is having an excellent semester, and there have been a few real winners at the cinema. Have you seen Hot Tub Time Machine? It is genuinely excellent, and sadly it's not making much money because the marketing campaign made it look dumb.


• Script Frenzy is this month! I meant to be working on Dalton, and I sort of am, but seeing a ton of movies has been eating up most of my evenings.


• Speaking of movies, I have promised myself that I'll start to do more with my handheld MiniDV camcorder. There are a lot of neat low-budget video projects out there. It's inspiring! And it'd be nice to have more photos and videos of my friends. I miss those guys.


• I really want to make some marmalade. I love marmalade so much.


• Max and I are going to Ann Arbor on the weekend of April 22-25, just before the graduation of the last generation of Gargoyle staff that I actually worked with. Everything changes after that.

I'm back home, and I've got a mean case of the post-vacation blues. There are two different ways to gauge how much I've enjoyed a given trip: how unbitten my fingernails look right before leaving, and how crappy I feel when I get home. Those fingernails were lookin' great before I went back to work.

I had a pretty excellent time. Saw family I hadn't seen since last year, met up with a friend in Michigan for an evening of drunken fun in East Lansing, and then took off for Toronto to see my friend Sam, who is always a delight (and his family is so lovely putting up with me, such wonderful people). Due to the way the weekends and holidays fell this year, everything was unfortunately cut a little short, but I had a superlative adventure regardless. We went to a burlesque show on New Year's Eve instead of just getting roaring drunk, and it was the best thing ever. Ribald entertainment! My favorite kind!

Sam got a new LOMO camera for Christmas and consequently he took a ton of cool-looking photos while I was there (including the one above). Check 'em out. The fisheye kind of makes it look like my eyes are trying to wander off the sides of my head in a couple of these, but the effect is pretty rad. I probably should have brought along the Holga or the Polaroid, but I was a little strapped for space in my luggage as it was.

So I had a great time. You may be wondering what my New Year's resolutions were, but I don't really believe in making them, so you will need to be disappointed in that regard. But here's to a new year and a new decade, hopefully vastly improved over the last one.

I'm back in Michigan seeing my folks. Then it's off to Toronto for New Year's. Probably won't be posting here much if at all, so I'll see you all in the new year!

Hopefully with some stuff to actually show you.

Tonight I made this for dinner:

It had been a while since I cooked for real at my own house. I really need to do this more often because I'm much more competent at it than I remembered. The above meal, for example, was totally delicious. It's a vegetable and tofu stir-fry!

I would tell you how to make it but I don't really remember anything except the rough basics. This is one of those "play it by ear" kinds of meals that can't really be explained scientifically with measurements and times. I'll give y'all an idea, though.

The Supplies

• 2 cloves garlic


• 2 thin slices white onion


• a good handful of white mushrooms, I think I had four or five?


• a block of firm tofu


• a nice smallish stalk of broccoli


• an orange bell pepper


• a handful of baby carrots


• soy sauce, vegetable oil, and a bunch of pretty basic spices
  

The Process

1. Get out a nice big skillet and pour in enough vegetable oil to just coat the bottom. Do this even if it's nonstick. You will want to use a medium heat to get the oil going while you prep.


2. Crush and mince the garlic, and mince the onion. Slice the mushrooms into nice thin slices. Put this stuff in first after you get the oil sizzling. This is important. It puts flavors into the oil.


3. While that stuff is sizzling, chop up everything else into manageable pieces. Put the tofu in when the mushrooms are starting to brown. It is a wet food and you want it to go in a little before the hard vegetables. In a minute or so, you can put everything else in.


4. Add a splash of soy sauce, and dashes of the following spices: salt, black pepper, oregano, basil, and garlic powder. Take it easy on this stuff. You don't want to overpower the vegetables.


5. Now this is the judgment part. You stand there shifting and flipping stuff around with your spatula because you don't want anything to sit still too long and burn. It takes maybe around 5-8 minutes to cook everything up at this point. Keep an eye on it and start tasting when the broccoli's color gets brighter. The carrots and broccoli are the main vegetables to test, since they take the longest to soften up. When the tofu is brown enough and the veggies are soft enough for your taste, take it off the heat and put it in your mouth.

The vegetables you use are pretty adjustable (I had a zucchini I wound up not using just because it didn't seem to fit with everything else). Just make sure you have a few different plants with contrasting colors and flavors, else it will be boring to eat.

You should also make some rice to go with this. I shouldn't have to tell you how to cook rice, though, and I learned it by reading the Achewood Cookbook anyway.

Before you think I am a culinary genius, you should know that afterwards I made apple cinnamon muffins by following some instructions off the side of a box. But they were so good.

So I was looking at my mail today and seeing how many organizations just in my community really need help to feed and care for people and animals for the holidays. Like most of you, I don't have a ton of money this time of year due to the various costs associated with the holidays, so I can't help people nearly as much as I'd like on my own.

But what if everyone who reads this blog gave as much as they could to help people and animals in their communities? That might not be a lot per person, but I bet we could help a lot of people!

Here's where you come in. I want you to donate to a charity somehow. Buy food for the food bank, buy a toy for Toys for Tots, donate a monetary amount, small or large, to a local organization that feeds people or provides coats or shelter or clothes or toys (every community has a homeless shelter or a food bank). A local humane society, rescue or animal control shelter is okay, too. I don't want the critters to go hungry either.

Take a photo, scan or screenshot of your donation (blank out your bank information or sensitive personal info, if applicable) and e-mail that to me at krisjacque at gmail dot com.

With your verification, include an art request, and I will draw it for you. This is a bonus incentive, on top of that warm fuzzy feeling that comes from knowing you helped someone. Depending on how much you donate, you could get a sketch, a colored digital or traditional media drawing, or even a painting*. Donate however much you can afford!

* Due to postal costs, I probably can't afford to send you a hard copy of the art. Big spenders can have a high-resolution digital version of their image though.