Pretty good day today.

Right on plan, got the house cleaned this morning, then did monthly bills and accounting, outside for mowing and clearing up nuts. A and L stopped by. Made a shopping and gas run. Got a very lot done.

Scanning the news.

Sorry to see Kelly Cuoco getting a divorce in less than two years. Always liked her. She seems to work a lot (Big Bang Theory, ads with Wiliam Shatner, other ads) to advance her career without the histrionics of so many other young women in the business (Cyrus and others).

Headline: "Pastor says Christian women are prettier than non-believing 'lumberjack dykes' or Cosmo-reading 'easy lays'" How can people follow these guys?

Damn. Sister-in-law just texted that she is at ER with brother who is "out of his mind with pain." Background: He had his back operated on Tuesday. They reamed out the central hole of a lower vertebrate. Scar tissue from a previous operation was closing the channel that held his spinal cord and a host of nerves and was pinching those nerves. Same day surgery. For two days he was pain free. Apparently that has changed.

Took Mom on a ride up to then through the UCONN campus. We had a ball. It's been 50 years since she's been there and she marveled at how much it had grown. She was particularly stunned by the commercial development across the street from the main campus. It's like a city abutting the university. So many buildings being worked on and/or being built. I was delighted to see how many things along the trip from her home to the campus that she remembered.

We visited my brother for his birthday and to see how he was doing following a back operation. Today was not being pleasant. Then lunch at the pizza house. It was nice to spend time with mom. She's 92 and I'm 70 so how much time can be left?

Read some stuff on the Web that makes me look at Buddy in a new light. (I am fascinated to see how changing one's view of something affects the very nature of what you look at. ) The rubbing stuff, the purring, his outlook about the universe verses mine. It's a little disjointing to realize there are two only tangentially touching different universes under the roof at this GPS location on earth. I've seen another of his skills: he can teleport. One moment he's reclining somewhere, the next he's vanished with nary a sound nor ripple in the air. Some time later, he will reappear, again silently, in the very spot from which he vanished. Will be studying this phenomenon in the future.

I had no inkling that getting a companion cat would result in a spotless toilet.

On Tuesday, a friend delivered a cat to live here. Although getting a companion pet had been suggested often after my wife passed, nothing happened for over a year. Then this cat needed a new home. Admittedly I have always been a dog person (and relished the possibility of having a West Highland Terrier I would name Ewok), but was persuaded that a cat is more suited to my lifestyle. They can survive til old age without supervision if provided sufficient food, water and excretion space, while a dog will eat all the food in one sitting if possible, slobber one-eighth of its water then spill the rest, and crap indiscriminately. Also, I wasn’t sure I would be tolerant of the haughtiness of a cat versus the devotion of a dog. But, first convinced of the benefits of getting a furry companion, and then the overwhelming advantage of a cat over a dog, I opened my solitary home to Whiskers —who was renamed Buddy in less than a day.

Buddy isn’t super impressive physically. He’s of medium build with long fur sporting splotches of white, gray and black. (I swear there’s a patch of orange too but you can only see it out of the corners of your eye; if you try to look at it directly, it scurries off and disappears.) He has a rather small head poking out of an enveloping blanket of long fluffy fur whose individual hairs apparently form a powerful magnetic bond with everything else in the universe. Were you to come upon Buddy unexpectedly, you would be forgiven for thinking that you were looking at a used dust mop laying in the corner.

Buddy settled in quickly and made his primary lair in my office. He rules the room and will not tolerate the intrusion of a dreaded Pink Pookie (piece of string dangling a computer keyboard mop) unless, of course, that pookie is outside the reach of a moderately outstretched front paw. (If the pookie doesn’t hit him to attract attention then the string better or pookie recognition is zero.) When pookie awareness is high and contact is made though, a National Geographic Channel-worthy battle takes place until either Buddy has vanquished the inanimate intruder  or three seconds have passed. In these attacks, Buddy gets most of his exercise. Unfortunately, the same is true for me.

Evidently, one of the things I forgot about when contemplating the mechanics of furry companionship was the process of shedding. Buddy’s ability to change the color of a carpet is noteworthy. So much so that instead of despairing at never-ending cleaning tasks, I’m considering featuring his ability in a business by renting him out to change any colored carpet to white in a couple of days. Maybe $5 a day. Two days will give you a basic white carpet that masks the original color. Three days gets you a Persian Grey covering resistant to two Dysons a day for 30 days. Four days rental of the Buddy brush results in permanent grayish flooring (impervious to all but tiny blood-sucking insects who live within its matted structure) for the life of the home.

It was while contemplating the upside of this business with Buddy that Nature called and the toilet comes back into the scene.

There I was, relieving a burdened bladder in standard male fashion, mentally celebrating my own business acumen, when dear Buddy, silent as a cat, crept up behind me and rubbed against my lower legs which were bare because I wore  shorts.

The unexpectedness of that event caused an involuntary lurch, jump, multi-stepped dance, panic scrambling, or whatever– to say nothing of the rather unmanly squeaks of hysteria  – resulted in a total loss of control of the guidance system of the urination process. Not pretty.

I spent a considerable time in latex gloves cleaning toilet, surrounding walls, floor, bath carpet, small cupboard. Everything seems to have been hit except that darn cat

That’s how I got the spotless toilet.

My first experience with crabapples has been interesting.

I've kept a crabapple tree near my driveway for over 20 years. It's always been a pain to crunch through its fallen crop each year, but the beauty of its spring blossoms and festive colors in fall have made the tree's presence endurable. This year has even become remarkable. There have never been so many apples on that tree before. Branches hang heavy with the weight of clusters of the cherry-sized fruits.

I decided that perhaps I could gain some benefits to having this bounty from crabappledom so I went on the web and googled crabapple recipes. I chose one called Crabapple-CranberrySlow Cooker Chutney. Hmmm. I had all the ingredients and those ingredients indicated that the dish would be sweet/tart with a back tone of rosemary floating on a base of sweet apples tinged with garlic and sauteed onions. Could go good with chicken and turkey. What the heck. Popped all ingredients into slow cooker and set the dial. While it simmered and bubbled for eight hours, I flirted with dreams of hitting the big time with a popular taste like reality TV's Roloff family pumpkin salsa.

When I first encountered the chutney's spicy sweet/tart taste last night, I was pleasantly surprised. (Chutney is a popular side dish from India. It can be made with many different ingredients.) The taste of this chutney had real potential. It could be personalized. I could foresee marketing "Ken's Crisp Crabapple Chutney."

I have now enjoyed the fruits of my labor for about 24 hours.  In that time I have decided to rename my base product, which, due to truth in advertising law, will now be called: "Enema in a Jar." Considering there seems to be little to be attained by personalizing such a product, there will be no marketing campaign after all.

In the many hours I found myself with belt around ankles, I contemplated what should be done with all the "chutney" I had. At one point, during one of my product's many explosive events of a magnitude even NASA would admire, I realized that perhaps this cleansing could be passed on to those most in need of a good clearing out.

So, a little filling of some semi-fancy jars, a ribbon, a nice bow, and hey, here we have a little pre-holiday gift to get the festivities started. Have this with your turkey. It's from the web. You'll love it.

The question now is: who gets the chutney?

At some point I have to decide on a coarse of action.

On one hand, I feel like a total failure. All these years exposed to the finest of human civilization and I still can't see the tie between quarks, neutrinos, Higgs bosons and my experience of reality as I sit and watch TV. That transition from quarks, to atoms, to molecules, to objects, to self-awareness is just so awesome.

On another hand, I am quite proud that I've been exposed to the shear complexity and beauty of whatever this is. Whatever death proves to be, I don't see how it can negate the experiences I've had.

So, failure or not, I've been experiencing life for 70 years and each day is more spectacular than the previous.

What about the father who gave that killer a .45 cal handgun for his 21st birthday? Has he no responsibility in any of this? Surely as the man's father, he had to have some knowledge of his son's ideas about race. And still, he gave him a gun. Maybe what we should be doing is holding anyone who gives a gun to someone else who then commits a crime with it as responsible for the act as the actual perpetrator. Prosecute that a couple of times and I'll bet the number of guns being passed out drops off pretty fast.

Tough day. It's Karen's birthday. Was supposed to attend lunch with sisters, June and my mom but canceled out. Just not up for companionship. Apparently tears still available.

In an effort to make a day of solitude pass by, I started to get into Evernote. I've been using it for a while to gather articles of interest from the web, but started learning how to organize this data so that I could turn it into information. The program is amazing. I recognize that putting all ones interests into digital format and then housing it in a cloud available to all who desire access, but perhaps one can still use this program productively.

This program makes me feel like getting into professional mode. The book I bought to explain the app needs heavy editing. BUT, it got me far enough into the app to begin to understand its potential.