TheCapeBlog

It’s miserable outside, sleeting and windy.
Rain may arrive later, but in the meantime, travel has got to be horrendous. I’m grateful that by sheer luck, we did our running around yesterday when driving was easy.

I’ve been on the hunt for a new dehumidifier, and visited several stores yesterday to do some comparison shopping.
When I got to Walmart, a salesman named Lou asked me politely if I was sure I wanted a DEhumidifier: did I want to add water to the air, or take it out?
I thought that he was patronizing me and told him so – male salesperson in a hardware department thinking that his female customer was an idiot.
Turns out, he wasn’t trying to give me a hard time at all. He was extremely helpful and passed along 15 years worth of accumulated wisdom, including the comment that, indeed, some people don’t know the difference.
Turns out, he is absolutely right: I ended up buying my dehumidifer at Lowe’s for several reasons, among them a good warranty, but along the way, stopped in to see what Target had to offer.
A young male salesperson insisted on directing me, not once but twice, to two different displays of HUMIDIFIERS. I could not convince him, come hell or high water, that I was looking for a device to take water OUT of the air.
So, apologies to Lou: I am not an idiot, and neither are you, but they are certainly out there. Your customers are lucky, I hope they find their way to you from Target.

The Friday Five:
Chocolate
What tastes best covered in chocolate?
Fruit.
Why do you eat chocolate the way you do (or don’t)?
My granddaughter Emme and I prefer white chocolate but hot cocoa is good, too. My favorite way to eat it would be as curls on a cake with white frosting, any cake that doesn’t have pineapple.
Do you know how chocolate is made?
No….you’re scaring me!
If you knew you would live 5 years longer if you never ate any chocolate again, would you give it up?
I guess so. Quit smoking for that reason, even though I enjoyed it.
Have you ever had carob?
I think so, but again, I’m not a brown chocolate person, so it didn’t impress me much.

After yesterday’s Hall of Shame entry, I suppose it’s only fair to include a list of the great people I’ve had the pleasure to have met.
So, excluding my nearest and dearest who are a given, here’s a start:

Continue reading People I Am Lucky to Know

Someone recently told me that they thought I hated them. I don’t, not at all.
I’ve been wanting to publish a “Hall of Shame” for quite a while, and just to clear the record, maybe now’s a good time.
So, here goes:

Continue reading Κάθαρσις

Mr. Fluffles is 72.
Here’s a handy cat age conversion chart.
Here’s another that works for either cats or dogs.

Having been to Hyannis for some errands before a planned tweetup, I noticed that it had started snowing lightly around 5:30 this evening.
Figuring it was a bad idea to be on the road tonight, I opted to come home. By the time I got to my neighborhood, I driving in a real snowstorm – not a blizzard, but more serious than it looked earlier.
Suffice it to say that I’m very happy to be home right now, especially since I’d picked up six pack of Monty Python’s Holy Grail over the weekend.

The academicians at Ohio State University say so.
According to an article by Kevin Hassett in bloomberg.com, psychologists at Ohio State University, led by Amy Brunell, studied the behavior of 153 MBA students and observed that “the students who had the strongest narcissistic traits were most likely to emerge as leaders.”
That in itself is certainly not a big surprise, nor is the article’s further conclusion that “the results of the study had large implications for real-world settings, because

Mr. Fluffles flipped out on me today for about five minutes. Intestinal distress perhaps. I cleaned his litter and gave him dry food instead of canned. Right now, he’s resting.
He went berserk on me when I tried to get him out of my chair, snarling and hissing. Makes me wonder what I don’t know about his 14 year history.
Either that, or this is my introduction to the wonderful world of feline bipolar disorder.

I’d been looking forward to seeing this movie and yesterday, happened to be at the only local Redbox that had it in stock.
So, last night, Fluffles and I, having woken up from early evening naps, settled in to view.
First of all, any movie directed by Sean Penn with a cast that includes Donald Sutherland, Hal Holbrook, William Hurt, Marcia Gay Harden and leading man Emile Hirsch, who also played Cleve Jones in “Milk”, is pretty much guaranteed to be worth a watch.
What little I knew of the story appealed to me because of its Walden-inspired theme.
I also knew that Chris McCandless’s journey to Alaska ended badly. What I didn’t know is that many consider his final days to be a deliberate and inexcusable exercise in self-destruction due to poor planning and ignorance.
For example, McCandless didn’t have a compass or a map. For that reason, he didn’t know that he could have forded the river which blocked his return to safety by traveling only a quarter mile to a hand-operated tram.
This contrasts with the story of Dick Proenneke, who at age 52 built a log cabin in the Alaska Wilderness and lived there for 30 years.
Like McCandless, Proenneke’s level of fitness at the start of his journey was extraordinary, and he also had the self-discipline to keep a diary.
Unlike McCandless, Dick Proenneke was a skilled carpenter, mechanic and repairman who financed his Alaska lifestyle with his hard-earned retirement income. McCandless was a college graduate who gave away $24,000, the bulk of the college fund that his self-made millionaire parents gave him, to charity and burned most of his remaining cash.
Proenneke’s meticulous planning is documented in a book and a film, “One Man’s Wilderness”. As spare and business-like as the author, this documentary lacks “Into the Wild”‘s philosophical, introspective and idealistic tone – not a bad thing. As a result, “One Man’s Wilderness” is fresh and inspirational, while “Into the Wild”, a more recent film, comes across as dated and clich