More random jibberjabber

5 Albums That I’ve Been Listening To Lately In No Particular Order:

The Avett Brothers, Emotionalism
Good, solid folk. “The Ballad of Love and Hate” is at the top of my Most Played list.

Format, Interventions & Lullabies
Their sound is somewhere between Simple Plan and All-American Rejects, decent pop-rock musicians with songwriting that almost makes you nostalgic for teenage angst (almost). Great running music.

Modern Skirts, Catalogue of Generous Men/Fruit Bats, Mouthfuls
I put these together because I can’t decide which one I like more. I would group these bands with others like Filligar, Vampire Weekend, and Phantom Planet in the post-Weezer indie-pop genre. Fun, creative melodies with a lot of experimentation, good for road trips.

Nick Cave, B-Sides and Rarities
I love Nick Cave. I’ll listen to Leonard Cohen once a month or so, and Tom Waits will always be one of my favorites, but I have a special place in my heart for a man who can make a song about murder sound like a love ballad and vice versa. This three-disc collection features some incredible acoustic tracks, the creepiest version of “Black Betty” that you’ll ever hear, and a duet with Shane MacGowan (of the Pogues) on “What a Wonderful World.”

Better Than Ezra, Deluxe
I’ve been revisiting some of my favorite albums from high school, and this is my pick for this week. Their follow-up album, Friction Baby, is decent as well, though not as consistently solid as the first. Next week, I’m going to be spending some quality time with the Smashing Pumpkins.
As much as I really miss Limewire, eMusic, and iTunes (in that order), not having high-speed downloading capacity has been good for me. I’ve accumulated a staggering amount of music over the last few years, and there’s a significant portion of it that I’ve listened to once, if that. Lately I’ve had the chance to go through my library and clean it up a bit. For example, I just realized that Built to Spill is kind of crap. Deleted! And yes, I DO use my Strongbad voice whenever I do that.

And now, my cats.

My cats are wonderfully forgiving, patient creatures, two qualities that seem to be necessary for anyone in my immediate vicinity. Most recently, I left them alone for a week while I attended a party and then a workshop in Maseru, and they were kind enough to only vomit on a few of my important documents (as opposed to leaving me other more odiferous gifts, which they did last time). They are probably aware by now that they are the two most spoiled cats in the Semonkong region, never having to worry about finding a warm place to sleep, being eaten by feral dogs, or winding up as a hat (well, dinner and THEN a hat). I got them at about 8 weeks old back in early May from a fellow PCV’s Basotho counterpart. When I arrived at his house one rainy (and slightly hungover) morning, I was taken to the shed out in the back, at which point I was told that the mother had been hit by a car the week before and the kittens had been on their own since. There were five (possibly six) kittens in the litter, and not one of them seemed to keen on being picked up by his neck and stuffed in the cardboard box that I had brought with me for this purpose. What I was expecting was a basket of sweet, fluffy kittens from which I could pick the two that I judged to be the sweetest and fluffiest. What I got was a 90-minute ordeal involving five grown men scrambling and cursing as we attempted first to coerce the kittens into surrendering quietly before scrapping this plan in favor of a more traditional corner-and-grab approach (with an occasional try-to-throw-a-blanket-over-it maneuver tossed in for good measure). My selection criteria quickly shifted from “two females, preferably the brown ones” to “the first two that we can catch.” When all was done, four of us were bleeding from one or more wounds and I had two furry balls of murderous rage and indeterminate gender in a cardboard box, a box that then had to be wrapped in a large plastic bag as there was no way that the flimsy folded lid was going to stop them from launching themselves at my face, claws first, in a desperate bid for freedom. I took the taxi back to Maseru, stopping on the way back to the Training Center to buy a more suitable cat carrier (read: duffel bag and cheap towel). The kittens tried to escape twice while in the store, and I had a hell of a time convincing the security guard checking bags at the door not to make me open the box for inspection; luckily, a quick shake of the bag and five seconds of resultant yowling finally won her over. Two days later I was at last able to bring them to their new home, which they promptly began to systematically explore and destroy. They earned their names fairly quickly: Metsi (the Sesotho word for water) was the first of the two to fall into my waste water bucket, and Chesa (meaning fire) was the first one to burn off half of her whiskers on my stove. I say “the first” in both cases, as both of them fell into the water bucket before I got a new one with a lid, and both have lost fur to my stove, heater, or candles on more than one occasion.

While the two of them have grown quickly, until recently they have always been approximately the same size. Returning home from my most recent trip to Maseru, I immediately noticed that Metsi was now about 10% bigger than her sister. I watched them for the next few days, but couldn’t see anything unusual about their eating habits or overall health that might explain the sudden growth of the one but not the other. Two nights ago, I woke up a little after 4 a.m. to an unsettling symphony of chewing, crunching, and growling noises coming from somewhere close by. Fumbling for my flashlight and doing a quick sweep of the floor, I see my cats facing off in the middle of the room. Metsi is unleashing all manner of unhappy kitty noises, mostly from the “back off” end of the spectrum, and tightly clutching in her mouth something about the size and shape or a rolled-up pair of woolen socks. My first thought wondered how she got my socks out of my closet. My second thought wondered why my socks had a long, skinny tail. Torn between my desire to document her first observed kill and my equally pressing desire to not have a rat disemboweled on my carpet (there’s not a steam cleaner to be found for at least 200 miles), I went with the latter impulse, threw Metsi and her midnight snack outside, and went back to sleep. In the morning, all that remained were a few squiggly grey bits on the ground and the satisfaction of knowing that I had finally solved The Case of the Mysteriously Bulky Cat. As it turns out, all of those Scooby-Doo marathons that I watched in college WERE more important than the classes that I skipped in order to watch them.

Two days later….
Chesa got her first confirmed kill today. Middle of the afternoon, I walk into my room to see her under my table, a respectable-sized rat in her jaws. I think that she’s been going up into the roof from the outside (hopefully I’ll get video up in the next few weeks so you can see), but wherever she got it from, I think that the kill was more for sport than hunger. After batting it around for a bit and trying to sneak it back into the room after I had thrown it down the hill (yes, I played fetch with my cat and a dead rat), she finally left it in front of the door and came inside for a nap. Mind you, all of this is happening while I’m trying to give the dog a haircut.

So, my family has this dog. She’s about 7 months old with shaggy white fur, and has spent most of her life chained to a tree on the side of the property. She has shelter under the tree and is fed regularly (scraps and whatnot), though her chain often gets tangled on roots. I wasn’t particularly concerned about her at first, but coming back from Maseru and finding her absolutely filthy made me decide to share some of the finer points of pet care with my family. The Basotho do not look at animals, specifically dogs and cats, the way that Americans do (it’s been my experience that nowhere else do people treat dogs and cats the way that Americans do, but that’s another matter). Dogs are for guarding homes and cattle, and cats are for killing rodents; the Basotho definitely aren’t unique in this respect. What sets them apart is the way that they treat their other service animals. Cows are told which way to walk by having rocks thrown at them. Donkeys with three 50 kg sacks of grain tied to their backs are encouraged to walk by being smacked with a heavy stick. I’ve seen men riding horses and donkeys down the road, hitting them the entire time with a stick. I’m not talking about a tap on the side, I’m talking about a smack on the spine that can be heard from 100 feet away. There is simply no respect for the animals and their wellbeing.

Back to my point. Dogs are almost universally tied up because most are mistreated, and so would run away if given the chance. Eddie, as I’ve been calling my family’s dog (Basotho generally don’t name their pets) hadn’t been mistreated as much as simply neglected. Despite her fur being thickly matted and generally filthy, she is a surprisingly cheerful and friendly dog. It took her a while to get used to being petted, but now every time I go to untangle her chain I’m subjected to a fairly standard happy puppy attack. I’m planning on putting a runner line for her across the front of my family’s property, as well as building her a proper shelter, but that comes later. First, I needed to clean her up a bit. My first plan involved an old set of clippers, but they were too dull and her fur was too matted to do much good, and so were quickly abandoned in favor of a big pair of craft scissors. Here we begin to run into problems. First off, I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing. I’ve always thought the idea of professional pet groomers to be a bit ridiculous, but now I know better. Seriously, you might sneer when you see the “Barks n’ Bubbles” van parked in front of your neighbor’s house, but it’s harder than it looks. I’d even go as far to say that it’s harder than being a human hair stylist, because deep down my barber knows that even if I really hate my haircut I’m not going to try to eat his face. Eddie wasn’t entirely sure what was going on either, and it didn’t help that Chesa kept hanging around with that “I’m taking great joy in your suffering” look on her face that cats often get. After about two hours of trimming whichever part of her body was closest to me at any given moment, I decided that we both needed a break. Her legs and belly still look like she’s been living in the dumpster behind a Supercuts, but from the middle up she looks like a distractible kindergartener tried to give her racing stripes with a pair of safety scissors (and he was using those lefty scissors that never cut properly, even if you use your left hand). Tomorrow, I’ll finish the trim and then don heavy protective gear before breaking out the flea and tick shampoo. If I’m still in possession of all of my fingers when this is all over, I’ll tell you how it goes.