cats just gotta have food

Cats get fed at 6 o' the clock here, am or pm. They usually start pleading for it an hour or two earlier, and I often give in at about 5:30, especially in the evening when I usually have to start occupying myself with fixing human food about that time. But that doesn't always satisfy them. Often on B's days off, I'm up earlier, give the cats their food, fetch the newspaper which arrives at 6 am on the dot, and then come back upstairs to my office to work. Then when B gets up, the little liars will start pleading with her, under-reckoning her ability to use human voice communication to ask me if the cats have been fed. My answer is usually: I fetched the paper, didn't I? Do you think I could have gotten downstairs at 6 am without having been besieged by a horde of hungry cats?

Unfortunately, today I was up unusually early, and after fetching the paper I went back to sleep. So B gets up, and the little cries of hunger are so convincing ... Anyway, the little rotters got two breakfasts this morning, so now they know they can sometimes get away with it. Life is gonna get worse.

In other news:

1. The Super Bowl is coming, and we cannot escape it. Article in today's paper on what roads are going to be closed, and a matching article on related airport congestion. At least we only have to put up with a week of this. The front desk staff at the gym were discussing which team they like. I'm glad they didn't ask me: I wouldn't have had the slightest idea. I hadn't even known there was such a thing as a Carolina Panthers.

2. Paul Kantner died. Unlike Glenn Frey, this is somebody I'd actually heard of, and whose band's work I know. Some of it I even like. But I'm seeing a lot less reaction to this death than to Frey's. So it goes, I guess.

3. The big feature article in Thursday's paper was on a festival being held this weekend to celebrate the work of an African-American classical composer, Valerie Capers. The article was written by the paper's ex-classical critic, who was cruelly mostly taken off the beat a while ago. It sounded enticing. But when I went to YouTube to hear Capers' music, I found mostly either modern jazz or the more arid variety of classical art song, neither of which I much care for. So I think I'll give this a miss.

4. Beware the technology. B had to upgrade her cellphone, and for various reasons got her first with a touchscreen. 'Tis bewildering. A week later she found that her account was empty: the phone had, entirely on its own initiative, been connecting to the internet and downloading something, spending hundreds of dollars doing it. More amazing than this was that AT&T gave her the money back; the capacity has been disconnected, but I'm still not sure what caused it.

5. On one thing I agree with Jeb Bush: they haven't even started voting yet, so let's give the process a bit to play out, shall we? The big four openers - IA, NH, SC, and NV - will all be over before the end of February, and Super Tuesday is March 1. By then we'll know a lot that we do not know today, even if we think we do.