The PowellsBooks newsletter has a bizarre and addictive feature called, and I’m quoting this literally, “Fup. Store Cat.”  Yes, the periods included.  As far as I can gather, Fup is the name of their store cat; that’s a picture to the right.  “Fup. Store Cat.” is like a train wreck: you can’t quite pull your eyes away, even if you want to.  You see, every newsletter presents a new “chapter” (just a couple hundred words) about Fup’s adventures.  In each chapter Fup, joined by compatriots Bear, Zooey, and Wiggums, adventure their way through unwieldy prose:

Let’s follow a path in the sun,” Bear purrs.

“There are no paths in the sun,” Wiggums reminds him.  “You’re sitting in the last patch of sun we’re liable to find for three days.”

Up and up the fir trees go, so far beyond the leafy pockets nearer to the ground that there’s no telling where they stop. Their tops end somewhere in the sky, is about all you can safely say.

“We could climb until we’re above the tree line,” Fup suggests, “but that would be an odd thing to do, seeing as it’s trees we’re looking for.”

“Trees you’re looking for?” someone says.

Fup looks at Bear.  Then Fup and Bear both look at Wiggums.  An echo would be the most natural explanation, except that they hadn’t noticed an echo before.

Fup repeats herself, but a little louder this time: “Trees we’re looking for.”

“That’s what I thought you said.”

Down by the creek, Zooey begins to growl.

They search the woods around them, but it’s like trying to find fish in a deep lake, Fup realizes, staring into the tangle of leaves and branches.  She notices for the first time how loud the bird chatter has become — or had she not been listening before?  She can’t see a single bird for all the leaves and branches, but suddenly birds are all she can hear.

Each time the newsletter arrives, I’m presented with my WTF moment for the day.

The National Audobon Society has a Guide to Seafood to educate consumers about the impact of various fishing operations.  Fish are conveniently rated into “red”, “yellow”, and “green” categories, and information is further broken down by population status, management status, and bycatch and habitat concerns.  Not surprisingly, shark, swordfish, and orange roughy top the list.  As I mentioned on my veganism blog, orange roughy can reach 150 years and do not reach sexual maturity until age 30, leading to a rapid depletion of the species.  Shark and swordfish populations are also being severely depleted.  Shrimp, surprisingly to me, entail the highest bycatch (incidental catch of non-target species) of any seafood.  On average, for every pound of shrimp retrieved, seven pounds of other sea animals were accidentally killed and were then shoveled overboard.  Groupers are subject to the same low growth rates as orange roughy, and even if measures are in place to “toss back” juveniles caught, they frequently die anyway due to pressure changes when they are pulled up from their deep water habitat.  Anyone following the saga of British cod fisheries knows that Atlantic groundfishes (including cod, haddock, and monkfish) are in critical danger.  Chilean seabass have almost disappeared and suffer from rampant illegal fishing.

Some species are in slightly less dire straits but are still poorly managed, in decreasing supply, or entail significant habitat disruption: salmon, tuna, red snapper, Pacific red snapper, and lobsters fall into this category.  Species that are generally safe to eat are halibuts, mahi mahi, mackerels, squid (calamari), farmed tilapia (also known as Nile perch), crabs (other than Alaska king crabs) and striped bass.

The society provides a whole website dealing with this topic, including “seafood cards” that can be printed and kept in one’s wallet or purse to help one remember which are safe species, and a FAQ list that will help you with advocacy in your local restaurants and grocery stores.

If you eat seafood, please take a moment to commit this information to memory or download one of the memory aids.  As the Audubon society says, “Your choices can help make our oceans healthy again.”

The Life and Death of Albert.  Via Vegan Blog: The (Eco) Logical Weblog.

I’ve started a new side blog dealing with my switch to veganism.

Indication #1 that you should turn off in disgust the animal documentary that you have playing in the background:

Conservation groups in Asia are also working to protect another member of the bear family: the giant panda.

My hamster died last week.  This was especially hard as Jennifer’s died the week before.  We found Jennifer’s in the morning, cold and rigid in her nest, and we took her out to bury her.  For my hamster, though, it was different.

Last Thursday evening, Jennifer called me at work and told me that she thought the hamster was dead.  This impacted me, but I had an important presentation the next day and needed to stay and finish it.  I tried to keep my mind off of it.  Fifteen minutes later Jenn called back and told me that she wasn’t sure it was dead, that it seemed to be moving, and asked me to come home.

He was not doing well.  He was breathing very shallowly and infrequently.  He did not seem responsive.  When I picked him up, he opened his eyes and squirmed a little.  Jenn told me that was the most she had seen him move yet.

He looked like he did not have very long.  I held him and stroked him and tried to keep him awake.  I blew some air at him regularly.  I strongly believed he would not come out of this.  An hour later I decided I needed to hear it from someone else.  I took him to the animal hospital in town.  They agreed.

I took him home, made a small blanket out of fabric, kept him warm and kept stroking him.  His breathing was becoming increasingly strained.  His breath rattled, and after a certain point he made a little squeak at each breath.  I was an emotional wreck.  I held him for nearly two and a half hours in total.  He would breathe every ten seconds or so.  His final breath did not seem any different.  He just inhaled and never exhaled.  We buried him that night.

Life is precious.  I, as a vegan, try to live this concept in everyday life.  The hamster lived for fifteen months, enough time for me to bond but not long enough for the death to be understandable.  He had a personality.  He displayed curiosity.  He had goals and made efforts.  He was alive.

I miss him.

Parents: This post and all comments on this post are kid-safe, but this is not a children’s site.  I have tried to isolate this post in a bubble without offensive links or content, but please observe your child’s browsing.

Edit 2010-01-11: This new hamster friend of mine is not likely to die.  I keep him on my Google Desktop and play with him through the day.  It’s surprisingly satisfying:

You can find the hamster’s page at http://abowman.com/google-modules/hamster/.

On Thursday Jennifer came home to discover a snake on our porch.  She called me at work to tell me about it: it was light brown with darker brown patches, and it had crawled into the plastic bin I use for charcoal ash and clippings from the garden greens.  She was worried about its safety and asked me to come home.

I know rather little about herpetology, but I looked at it carefully and looked online to try to track down the species.  My best guess it that it is a California Lyre Snake, a venemous species.  Our little friend was considerate enough to find a place to sleep that had a lid: I replaced the lid, taped it shut, and drove out to the foot of a nearby hiking trail.  A couple minutes along I walked about twenty feet off the trail and carefully pulled it out with a stick (urging it out had failed to yield success.)

The snake certainly felt threatened on our porch, coiling and flattening its head and occasionally trying to strike.  I’m sorry that the creature was stressed like this, but it was a treat to get to see this animal up close and help it get back to safety.

It is surprising how much personalities can differ between two hamsters.  Of the two, one is very shy and reserved, terrified of being touched, and content to stay in a tiny space all day.  The other is far more adventurous and will happily eat out of my hand.  He is also scheming ways to escape from the habitat.

I recently added an extension to his habitat (no picture yet).  I bought a larger module and connected them with a set of “toobs” [sic].  He climbs up a straight toob, across a longish flat toob, and then down another descender.  To get him to explore the new module I moved his water into it.  He was happy for a while to travel back and forth between water and nest-and-food-stash.  One day, however, he very deliberately moved house: he went to the new module, made a new nest by the water bottle, carefully moved his entire food cache over, then (apparently) destroyed evidence of his previous nest.  To be honest, I never considered that he would do this.  Now he lives primarily in the new (larger) module but still visits the other for foraging and exercise.

I just cleaned out the habitat of one of the hamsters (my favorite one.)  He will regularly build a nest right against his water bottle, but the contact of the bedding material to the spout causes a slow leak, and he ends up with soaked bedding and an empty bottle.  This weekend I will get some expansion modules to extend his habitat, and try moving the water to a different compartment.

The bedding was thoroughly saturated this time; I had to remove all of it, including his food store, which was also drenched.  This is obviously stressful for him, and before I had even finished putting dry bedding in the habitat, he was already arranging it properly.  He seems to know exactly where everything needs to go (they are fairly neurotic rodents, I feel.)  I wish I understood the system so that I could arrange the replacement bedding in the proper fashion.  But I don’t, so I instead watched him for twenty minutes as he relandscaped the enclosure.  Poor little guy.

It is hard to believe that it is after midnight now.  There just doesn’t seem to be enough time to do everything I want to do these days.  This is mostly a good thing: there are a lot of activities that interest me at the moment, so I am never at a loss for something to do and enjoy.  Here is a list of activities I have wanted to pursue in the past couple of days, only a subset of which have been accomplished or attempted.

1. Play with Cakewalk.  Use it to record some of my musical compositions, with multiple vocal and instrumental tracks.
2. Order more stamps from Iowa Stamps & Coins for my ongoing (but unnamed) philatelic art project.  Work on the art project.  Transfer the pieces to a new album.
3. Work on a redesign of mcgees.org.
4. Install the new printer that has been sitting on my floor, in a box, since the day after Christmas.
5. Play some more with the new TiVo.
6. Watch some of the movies recorded by it.
7. Listen to my new CDs from Christmas.
8. Research the sport of fencing.
9. Add advertising to ScotchFinder (the advertisers are arranged, I just need to do some re-coding of the site.)  Add the ability to search the database via a toll-free telephone number.
10. Research whale deafness.
11. Continue reading The Annotated Alice, Infinite Jest, and The Life of Samuel Johnson.
12. Research PocketPCs, potentially to buy one soon.
13. Make hotel reservations for the UK trip.
14. Search Fresh Air archives.
15. Buy add-ons to the hamster habitats.
16. Clean my study.
17. Reinstall Microsoft Visual Studio at home from my CDs, which I haven’t done since my hard drive crashed.

These are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head.  (You probably think some of these are fake, thrown in for humor.  That is not the case.  Even the whale one.)  Implicitly on the list, of course, is to write about the activities in this ‘blog.

My makeshift way of dealing with the situation has been to get 5.5 hours of sleep per night.  I think this is beginning to take a toll.  It’s getting close to 12:30.  I will probably go watch half an hour of “Antiques Roadshow” on TiVo, pour a malt, maybe scoop a bit of Ben and Jerry’s (which is, by the way, now the most popular tourist attraction in Vermont.  Yikes.)

More descriptions of the activities on the list will follow, as time permits.  I have found that it is frequently easier to write about one’s experiences doing something after one has already done the something.  Wish me luck for making the time.

I finished Author Unknown earlier this evening.  I have an index card (5″ x 8″, not 5″ x 7″, as I mentioned before) with notes ready for my write-up:

(Granted, my handwriting is not so great in general.  But in partial defense of its particular hideousness here, let me state for the record that most of these notes were scrawled without the assistance of desk, table, or any flat writing surface whatsoever.)

One of the hamsters bit me tonight.  It was not an angry or scared bite, it was a simple “is this thing food?” bite.  He was sniffing my hand, then reached up and grabbed my index finger, opened his mouth, and took a tiny chunk right off the front of it.  Their teeth are amazingly sharp; the bite felt like the pinch one gets when exercising insufficient caution playing with small rare earth magnets.

Well, the hamster saga has turned out well, I think.  The pet store was willing to take the two hamsters back, and gave us a half-hamster worth of store credit (about $7 total) for each.  We went to Petsmart to purchase a second habitat so the two kept hamsters would have their own spaces.  It seems to be working out.  Both built nests from shredded bedding after they realized they were alone.

Also found … ack! … that Petsmart sells the habitat purchased on Thursday for $15 less than For Pets’ Sake.  For Pets’ Sake is a small local store, and generally I like to support stores like this, even if it means spending a little bit more.  However:

1. $15 is not “a little bit more”
2. For Pets’ Sake has a worse return policy
3. For Pets’ Sake stocks probably two orders of magnitude fewer items
4. For Pets’ Sake does not necessarily have better service.

My effort should probably be to support small business owners whom I admire, who work against odds, paying higher wholesale prices than the big chain stores, with no choice but to charge a bit more.  I don’t think my effort should be to support the theory of small business ownership.  If you want me to pay more for a worse selection, you’ve got to make it up somewhere.

There are other small businesses in the Thousand Oaks area that have a smaller selection and higher prices than larger stores, but don’t do anything to make up for this lack.  Conejo Valley Wine & Provision Co. is one, where the business model seems to be to make every buyer feel stupid (”I’ve got it!  If they feel offended and embarrassed, they will give me more money!”)  Paper Depot in Thousand Oaks (right next door to the previous store) is perhaps worse: they assume your question is stupid without even listening to it.  I was looking for #6-3/4 envelopes.  I was walked through the conversational steps of being told that such envelopes don’t exist (which they do), then that their width wasn’t 6 1/2 inches (which it is), then that that size wasn’t listed on their wall chart (which it was).  At the end of this she finally looked in her catalog and found some examples, but was unable to get me a sample envelope: I would have to pay for them in full and if I didn’t like them when they arrived, too bad.  Sorry folks … I can order out of a catalog (and for lower prices) without your help.  [--- Text removed 27 March 2001 ---]

To offset the negativity of this list, I should provide a list of small stores that do go above and beyond the call in order to provide a great shopping experience:

1. Wine & Liquor Depot in Van Nuys has the largest selection of single malt scotch in the U.S.
2. Video 4 You stocks a large number of DVDs and foreign films and employs very knowledgeable people.
3. Malibu Fish’n Tackle gave exemplary service the one time I shopped there, even though patronizing them violates my “terminal g rule.”
4. Words on Wine has beautiful items and great salespeople, although I can’t attest to anything else as I have never purchased anything from them.

Multiple hamsters in one cage is turning out to be a bad idea.  Our gamble of sociability based on their blood relationship seems to be a losing bet.

Unfortunately the store has a policy of only accepting returns of sick animals.  Our plan is this: we want to keep two of them, which will entail purchasing a second habitat.  We are going to try to return two, in the hopes that they can find good, solitary homes elsewhere.  If the store won’t give us money back, we’ll try to get merchandise credit.  And if that doesn’t work, we’ll offer to just give them back if they will sell them as pets (rather than, say, use them as feeders.)  This is my sentimentalism getting the best of me here.

I hope this all works out.

We have hamsters.

On Thursday night (14 Dec 2000) Jenn and I went to “For Pets’ Sake” here in Thousand Oaks and bought four “teddy bear” hamsters.  I had been talking about wanting some for a while, and was up-front with the fact that my primary motivation was to build an increasingly elaborate habitat of tunnels and rooms for them to explore.

But I have fallen quickly in love with the little guys.  They are such fun to watch, as they explore their environments and try to understand the world around them.  Some websites I read warned that hamsters are territorial and that it is a bad idea to keep multiple ones in a single habitat.  Other sources said that if they are of the same litter, it won’t matter (or won’t matter as much.)  We are gambling on the latter for now.

Here is a picture: you can click on it for a full-sized version.  At some point I will post pictures to the Pictures page.