The Cat Sage

It makes its own gravy!

Resign, you spineless worm.

A spicy brown curry sits in a red bowl next to a pile white rice. A black plate is behind the bowl with two pieces of naan on top of it. Pieces of chicken, potato, chickpeas, onion, and peppers are visible in the curry.

Homemade curry is even better the second day. This is chicken, chickpea, and potato curry with rice and garlic naan. I’m so happy with how this turned out.

Hard R incoming in 3…2…

A brown tabby sits in a closet below the edge of some dresses. He is wearing a pink donut with sprinkles around his neck and appears very grumpy about the entire experience.

Hopefully the last picture of Thomas as a fashionista for a while. We ended up ordering the donut in a smaller size after the first one was still a bit too big. He did not approve of the smaller version either, but we took it off for dinner last night and he’s been very good about not overgrooming.

We contemplated getting the pink one, but that couldn’t get here until Tuesday while the blue one arrived this afternoon. MJ looks adorable.

A brown tabby cat lays in a wicker basket full of blankets with a cloth cone that looks like a donut. His expression indicates that he does not approve of his new attire.

A brown tabby cat sits on the base of a black and red cat tree. He is wearing a cloth cone that looks like a blue donut and looking off to the side with a slightly disgruntled expression.

Update 2: The sunflower cone was giving Thomas a bit of difficulty moving around so we ordered something that would hopefully give him a bit more mobility. Looking at his expression it doesn’t seem like he feels better being the world’s grumpiest donut but he is navigating the house better.

Video of the cuddles, he’s such a sweet boy. Kind of wondering if this was a chronic health issue and he’s just feeling so much better now.

A brown tabby cat is curled up in a cat bed wearing a cloth cone that looks like a sunflower around his neck. His expression appears incredibly grumpy.

A brown tabby cat with a cloth sunflower cone around his neck has his eyes closed in bliss as a hand reaches out and scratches under his chin.

Update: Thomas still LOOKS like the world’s angriest sunflower but he accepted skritches and crawled into my lap to cuddle immediately after this picture was taken.

A brown tabby cat is sitting with a yellow ruffed collar meant to look like a sunflower wrapped around his neck. His feet are visible poking out from under the sunflower and his facial expression is extremely irritated.

After an unexpected trip to the veterinary urgent care Thomas is currently the world’s angriest sunflower. He had a ruptured anal gland and the other one was impacted. Two weeks of antibiotics and a recheck planned.

This suggests you have a high enough density of books in your office that you’re having L-space incongruities but as long as you don’t find a hypothetical book or a surprise orangutan…

A brown tabby cat lies across a man’s chest. A hand is scratching the side of the cat’s face and the eye closest to the hand is closed.

A brown tabby cat sits atop a man’s chest with his head curving down as he is being scratched behind one ear.

An extremely close up picture of a cat’s nose as he pushes his head forward toward the camera. His ears are flattened where he had pushed up against the hand of the person petting him.

The view when Thomas comes up to cuddle. He is very insistent.

Gee, separating warriors from scholars. Good thing nobody will be attending those universities and learning how that usually turns out.

We’re losing ground with allies and partners around the world, and at the end of this administration the U.S. will be weaker on the world stage than it’s been in decades. At this point the adults in the room need to be thinking about how to strategize as a declining power.

Despite their blathering about lethality, Hegseth and the current set of joint chiefs are going to leave us with a less effective, less capable military. They’re flailing at the strategic level and even in the rare cases where they identify an actual problem their solutions are nonsense.

A quote from the novel Snuff, by Sir Terry Pratchett. It reads: It always embarrassed Samuel Vimes when civilians tried to speak to him in what they thought was “policeman.” If it came to that, he hated thinking of them as civilians. What was a policeman, if not a civilian with a uniform and a badge? But they tended to use the term these days as a way of describing people who were not policemen. It was a dangerous habit: once policemen stopped being civilians the only other thing they could be was soldiers.

Terry Pratchett, as usual, had something to say about this.

There’s a certain peace when bad weather that’s been forecast finally arrives, like the natural order of things has somehow been restored. I can hear the ice pattering down on the roof and the windows and it’s almost a comforting sound.

An orange cat curls up inside a small hut in the middle of a black and red cat tree. He is looking at the camera and the sun is shining on his fur.

A brown tabby cat sits in a dark blue cat tree with his rear end hanging out of the back of a hut in the center. One of his paw is sticking out the side opening swatting at a wand toy.

A brown tabby cat sits in a hut on a dark blue cat tree, looking directly at the camera with his eyes open and whiskers spread.

The top of a brown tabby cat’s head peeks out of the hut on a dark blue cat tree, looking down toward an orange cat who is scratching at a sisal post at the base of the cat tree.

In brighter news, we got a new cat tree that Alexander is a big fan of and getting back into our normal routine had some playtime this morning before I went for a run. Alexander and Thomas even used the tree together… although there was some bapping a second after the last picture was taken.

Update on the Hertz banditry: received an email today stating that they would be refunding the gas charge plus an additional five dollars because in addition to charging more than three times the current price per gallon for gas they also charged sales tax on top of that. Literal highway robbery.

Obviously Maelle is trying to teach Anna to “parry it!”

I’ve been replaying Hades since the first time I played my wife didn’t get a chance to watch and I’ve unlocked everything except Sisyphus. I realized today that I missed a step so I’ve been doing the same thing repeatedly and making no progress which is actually pretty funny if you think about it.

It’s the same way that the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is only one of those things, except that in the case of the “Great Healthcare Plan” none of those are true.

Thanks, I sent in the receipt and a note explaining where it was fueled up so hopefully that will settle it, but it’s still annoying.

It’s the worst, at one airport I saw the employee moving the returned cars sitting in a car with a lit cigarette in his mouth. The call is coming from inside the house.

I swear those bandits at Hertz use gas pumps without pressure sensors to fill up their cars and charge you for fuel. I filled up less than a mile from the airport until the pump wouldn’t run anymore and they’re still trying to charge me for 2 gallons of gas.

Long ago during my undergrad phase I took a class about the holocaust and my way of dealing with that was downloading Wolfenstein 3D and playing through it in the evenings. It was therapeutic.

“Who’s this Scalzi guy?”

“Wrote Old Man’s War, Starter Villain, and Travel by Bullet. Now he’s googling about hiding money overseas.”

“Okay, War’s full so appoint him to something in Transportation.”

You definitely have to be careful with that, if this administration catches you doing something like that you might end up appointed as some kind of deputy cabinet official without your knowledge or consent.

To be fair, as a strategist I’m coming around to the view that we should get rid of the chief of staff of the Army entirely. We keep seeming to end up with someone who’s spent their entire career dreaming of being the next Westmoreland or Abrams who rushes to change the Army and cement their legacy.

A giant exhibit of a dinosaur skeleton. The dinosaur stands on two legs with clawed forelimbs hanging down. Acrocanthosaurus predated the T-Rex and was nearly as long but lighter.

The skull of a tyrannosaurus roars in front of clear glass windows, with its tiny forelimbs and their two claws hanging below.

A collection of dinosaur skulls, including several horned and frilled dinosaurs and a giant crocodilian skull that is more than eight feet in length and large enough to grab a triceratops.

A taxidermied bobcat leaps from the brush and catches a quail between its front paws, appearing absolutely gleeful as it does so. This is how all house cats imagine themselves leaping at wand toys.

Before the current insanity we went to the Witte Museum yesterday. It’s small, but has a few really awesome fossils and an exhibit about the various biomes of Texas. The special exhibit about the ocean depths was also fun to see, and some great historical exhibits.