Eighteen years. One month. Five days. (All times approximate.)

Yesterday was what might have otherwise been a momentous occasion. On April 17, 2014, I posted a blog entry on LiveJournal for the very first time.  Here it is, in its entirety:

I'm here. Worship me or sumthin.
  
Stardate 040417.18 (in case anyone missed the sledgehammer of a pun in the title of this thing)...

So nobody ever bothered telling me this wasnt invite only anymore. OK. Thanks to thanatos_kalos for tipping me on that. Small world this is.... hosting a game a couple weeks ago, someone else mentioned going to a Lucy [Kaplansky] concert in Peekskill later that weekend. (Lucy's an old coffeehouse pal of Shawn Colvin, minus much of the angst, and we adore her.) So what's playing in Starbucks when I meet up with good ol' Than? (I refuse to keep repeating that lest I be accused of cursing in Greek.) The Red Thread. Damn best ablum of the year you probably haven't heard of.

 

So bear with my Ludditishness for a few weeks while I figure this stuff out. I'll try to spare the world the work-related agitas, my frustrations from the world of sport (easy to say on a day when the YANKEEES LOSE, THEEEEE, YANKEES LOSE!), and the overabundance of female hormones I let loose into the world roughly 13 years ago this month.

I was vaguely aware of this coming up, and even thought about timing my leap so I'd hit exactly 6,500 entries on the anniversary. But with LJ being taken over by homophobic Russians and screwing up crossposting, I lost all interest in that.  Only reason I remembered is that Boris and Natasha sent me a "virtual gift" yesterday to commemorate the occasion.

Fuck you, Vlad.

We're fine without you over here. Mel, aka "Than," is still blogging, as well. Only other thing needing explanation from that primordial post is the reference to the then 13th anniversary of female hormones .It wasn't to Emily's birth in 1992 but to the seminal (sorry) moment nineish months earlier. (A couple of weeks ago, somebody posted a Youtube of a 1991 preseason game between the Mets and Blue Jays at Shea Stadium. Eleanor and I were at that game, as was our then blastocyst of a daughter, though we didn't know it at the time. Note that the game took under 2½ hours to complete, a brevity almost unheard of lo these 30-odd years later.)

Somewhere near 6,500 entries later, across multiple platforms, hundreds of new friends met (including Lucy:), some lost, my blogging is now old enough to vote. 

I'm still here. Lucy's got a new album out in about two months:)  And the Mets are so far playing a lot better than they did in either 1991 or 2004.

My debut back then was pretty inauspicious, but it led to more and better, and that's all we can do.

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Yesterday also marked just over a month since seeing Jill Sobule in concert, which I've only promised about eleventy-pi times to post more about.

Of course, by now I've forgotten most of her stories from in between the songs- but I did preserve most if not all of her setlist:
 

( Most if not all of her setlist: )

Okay, I think I remember a few of them from notes I took while scribbling the song titles in:

Bitter was one that her then record-company wanted to release as a single, but only if she agreed to delete the word "bitch" from it.  It surprised her because Meredith Brooks had not only used it in a hit single before then but TITLED it "Bitch." But Jill's cool, so she went back into the studio and replaced "bitch" with a four letter word sometimes unabbreviated as "See You Next Tuesday."  Not long after this, the label dropped her.

Before Resistance Song, she explained its provenance, which I couldn't remember except for the words "Hogan's Heroes." Fortunately, she's been telling the story all the way back to 1995: Through out my life I have had dreams that I am in the resistance. I’m fighting Nazis! They are great dreams, the kind you wake up and you just want to close your eyes back... I’m not scared. I’m in some corridor and I’ve got, you know, a machine gun, but I don’t feel bad about killing because... these are NAZIS! And it’s always VERY romantic. You know, I either think that in a past life I was a resistance fighter or I just watched a lot of Hogan's Heroes growing up.

Better Not Fuck in Texas was an on-the-spot updating of her earlier song Better Not Kill in Texas, inspired by the horrors of SB8 there.  She's since tried rewriting it for Oklahoma and who knows where else will be next.

Colorado somehow got connected to a U2 poster, but I forget what the joke was.

Good Life is a singularly depressing song about death and destruction that she's been singing for so long, before things got even more depressingly deathly and destructy, she referred to herself as "Lilith Fair Nostradamus."

Not much other than that, other than over two hours of great songs. Not even a lot more pictures besides the ones I originally posted:



My work here is done, finally.

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Still looking for a cat, though.

On Saturday, Eleanor procured a Hav-a-Heart trap.  That night, we put it outside under bedroom windows so we might hear if he got in it. He did no such thing, plus it rained. So all we had to show for it was a dish of wet kibble and a soaked towel.  Yesterday morning, it got moved into the garage, and then to the greenhouse. Eventually, we rolled out the heavy artillery, one of the suggested goodies the trap people recommended for catching cats:



Still nothing in there, although the dog's been trying to get in (and finds my shoes smell great from whatever sardine juice fell on them;). We did, however, do a lot of roadwork near the house yesterday: talking to neighbors, passing out flyers, checking out nooks and crannies in nearby yards. He’s definitely been seen, in a few yards and even marching down the sidewalk.

First thing today, I made the hard call to Animal Control. No pickups in our area, living or otherwise. Relief.

Best of all, next door neighbor called late this morning. Their sensor light went off around midnight, and he saw a dark colored cat in his driveway. He wasn’t able to catch him, but just knowing that the boy is staying close to home is immensely hopeful.
We have no idea how he’s managing to keep himself fed. Just by passing the word, we hope people will know not to just feed him.

We made sure Bronzini's microchip registration is good, and nobody has reported him.

One overriding thing to remember at this point while he resists all of these efforts: cats are assholes. He will come home when he feels like it.

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Finally all this is falling in the midst of multiple religious unobservances (for us, anyway): today's Dyngus Day, yesterday's Easter and the beginning of Passover.  It would have been weird if he'd been, um, resurrected yesterday.

Less weird was coming across this parody of the Jewish celebration (attrributed to one Steve Sheffey):



My only kvetch with it is that "Kushner for Passover" didn't make the list.