theSmudge.com

The other night, when I should have been either sleeping or doing something productive, my friend Maggie and I happened to start chatting on Facebook. And in the process she sent me a link to a profile on the OKCupid.com dating website. It started with, “So I’m unemployed and currently trying to get my life on track.” The guy’s profile name has “187” in it, the California Penal Code section for murder. And it had this for his profile photo:

Really? You’re 19, unemployed, and you’re looking for a girl that finds your gas mask attractive? In LODI? Good luck, dude.

But that guy is far from being alone! Maggie and I probably spent another hour on the site, being both amazed and amused. A few gems:

• xchrystalpyro quit smoking four days ago. (The date of his last login? Sept. 9.) “My personality will win you over if you ever quit staring at me,” he says. Well then.
• Mr. tallhandsomensc says, “I am a business that enjoys life.” A business?
• EXMULEMAN (ex? muleman?) starts his profile by saying that his cat told him to get a life. I think this cat should get a gig on David Letterman’s show. Oh, and when asked what he’s good at, he says, “takin’ out the garbage.”
• ssb2 is a grown-up at age 32 but says, “jesus can walk on water and turn wine into beer. i can swim through land and turn wine into pot…”
• Quivirian has three profile photos that look like three different men. He says women should message him if they want someone to write them a sonnet.
• And, last but not least, we have peteranton39 who has “A LUST FOR LIFE, A LUST FOR LOVE, A LUST FOR LAUGHTER AND MUSIC.” Apparently he also has a lust for capital letters. At age 67, he’s looking for a woman between the ages of 22 and 46. In other words, if you’re only 20 years younger than him, rather than 21 years younger, you are too old and don’t have enough “LUST FOR LIFE” to suit him.

So now you know my newest favorite source of amusement. And no, you won’t find my profile on that site, because I don’t  own a gas mask or have enough “LUST FOR LIFE.”

If a friend turns 40, you’ve had lots of time to clean your house, and you’ve been talking for eons about throwing a party, what do you do? Why, you throw him a party! So that’s what I did this weekend. After all, how many times does Marc Lutz the cartoonist turn FORTY? It was a busy weekend for lots of people, other others just flaked out, but that’s OK. I probably went overboard anyway, so I was left with lots of pizza (mmm), snacks (not what I need!), and wine (yay!), despite my best efforts to send most of it home with people.

We wound up with a good group of people, and they made it a lot of fun. They tolerated the awesome black decorations that Marc’s wife, Melinda, helped scatter around my house:

They played “Pin The Tail On The Marc” (admire my stellar PhotoShop skills):

They ate. They drank (Jasmine supplied the wine!). And they ate the cake made by Marc’s wife (Marc helped decorate it):

The cake was almost directly beneath my smoke detector, which somehow didn’t go off despite ALL those candles:

And the guests humored me by reading some of the research I’d done, printed out and left around the living room. On the day Marc was born, a loaf of bread cost 24 cents. A nice house on the good side of town was going for $17,000. Sputnik launched that day.

When they left, I posted to Twitter and Facebook, “I have party hats on the front lawn and empty wine bottles in the kitchen. Party must have turned out ok!”

So, happy birthday, Marc! Here’s to another four decades of cartooning.

Tomorrow I hope to test my leg on another short run, so I’ll blog about that.

If you’re in the middle of a heatwave, what’s the best thing to do? If you are me, apparently the answer is, “shampoo the carpets!” It sounds like a good idea at first, because the heat will make the carpets will dry faster. However, that only works if you leave the doors and windows open so the heat comes in, which is less than ideal. Duly noted for the next time.

As I type this, a certain feline is still occasionally throwing himself against the other side of the garage door, apparently thinking that if he whines, scratches and makes enough noise, the door will open. I locked the cats in the garage (how cruel of me; they have towels, food, water, litter and lots of things to explore in there) about four hours ago, which was an adventure all on its own. They knew something was up, because I’d been moving furniture into the garage. When they weren’t looking, I closed the bedroom and bathroom doors, so the cats couldn’t hide very well. Then I tried to coax them into the garage.

“Coax” is not a word that works with cats. I rattled their food dish and they came running, then skidded to stops at the garage door and refused to move. I picked them up and put them in the garage, but of course they leaped over/under/around/through me to get back in the house. We went around in circles, with me resorting to herding them with the vacuum cleaner. That only worked so well, because everyone knows you can’t herd cats. I finally thought I had them both in the garage when Mickey broke free and ran straight for the sliding glass door. He knocked the whole screen out and took off into the backyard.

Cue the anxious yowling of a 7-year-old cat who’s never gone outside. He circled the backyard along the fence, then decided it was safer back in the house. I put him in the garage again, and this time he hunkered down in a corner. One down, one to go. Mousie literally put his paws on the doorjamb of the garage door and held on for dear life. After several break-away escapes and one mild war wound to my arm, I somehow got the cat in the garage and closed the door with a huge sigh of relief.

Then I realized the carpet cleaner was in the garage.

After another round of tag with Mousie, I was once again victorious. The actual vacuuming and shampooing really wasn’t that bad, and it didn’t take as long as I’d expected. But now I’m sitting in a warm house waiting for the carpets to dry. As I debate whether to close the windows to keep the heat out, I hear the scratching of a determined cat who thinks I’m cruel for keeping him away from damp carpets. This is one of many reasons I’m actively looking for new homes for them — I want less drama and more simplicity in my life.

At least the carpets have a bit less Cat in their fibers.

Since I’m not feeling inspired, I’m just going to post a couple photos of Mt. Shasta. I grew up at the foot of this 14,162-foot mountain located about 45 minutes south of the Oregon/California border.

Here’s the morning sun over the mountain just north of Weed, a view I saw thousands of times:

And here is the mountain from further south, near the city of Mt. Shasta:

Not bad for a camera phone. (I took more photos with my real camera, but sorting through those is still something on my to-do list.) Notice how blue everything looks? That’s because there’s no pollution.

If you’re wondering about the photo in the masthead up there, I took it Sept. 3, 2010 at the Island Cafe in Portland, Oregon. Here’s the full photo:

It took me a while to restart my blog, in part because I wanted a different name for it. I’ve used theSmudge.com for years, and I happened to pick that name due to sheer lack of creativity and plenty of exhaustion. It’s actually pretty hard to come up with a URL that isn’t taken, and it’s getting harder every year.

My work blog became dormant when I got too busy, and then more so when the website changed and looked more foreign than ever. But weeks and then months passed and I couldn’t come up with a name for my own blog. I wanted to blend running and writing, and my choice would have been “Between the Lines” as a play on paper lines and road/track lines. However, everything remotely similar was already a registered domain name, and I was determined to claim the URL as mine, too. After a brainstorming session with friends in Portland earlier this month, I went online and struck out once again.

And so The Smudge remains. It’s been mine for eight and a half years, which means that if I keep it a couple more years it will have outlasted my career. I’m at a vague place in life, but at least my website and e-mail address are on solid ground.

Anyway, I intend this blog to be about running, writing and any random bits of my life that I feel like including. It doesn’t have much running on here yet (other than that link up there) due to a stress fracture, which will be discussed soon in another post. And it doesn’t have much about writing, either, because I’m only just starting to regain my desire to write. But I do feel that desire returning; I was just watching an episode of a TV show I missed while on vacation, and it partially addressed something I want to write at length about. A small voice in my head was quietly screaming, “Do it! Go after that project! I’m not resting until you do!” Yes, little voice, I’m trying to listen and I’m trying to find myself again.

So that, in a rambling way, is what this blog is about. We’ll see what happens when I attempt to mix running, writing and the occasional happenings of my life.

I’ve always had a thing for pictures that feature curving roads leading off into the distance. Where is the road going? What’s around the next curve? It’s intriguing, and it gives the picture a bit of a mystery.

That’s a bit how my life feels these days, and maybe that’s why I’m OK with it — something interesting and exciting must be around the bend.

(Photo taken Friday in Siskiyou County near the end of my 13-day road trip.)

This is the obligatory “Hi, I changed to a new blog” post. I’m going to attempt to backdate and republish old blog posts, but that’s secondary to my main purpose — moving forward. Here’s to a new blog and new adventures. Welcome.