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Nathan has given the cat a new name: “Knuckles”.

Why? I don’t know. He says, “Knuckles! Cat!” and giggles. Then he tries to give it a big hug around its rump, which it tolerates but doesn’t work out so well in practice. Why? I don’t know. The cat, back to his fighting weight after sixty days of on-demand dry food and a strenuous regimen of sleeping on chairs and lazing near sunny windows, is non-plussed.

I bought a Kensington Expert Mouse a little over a year ago as a New Year’s gift to myself. It’s a nice trackball; I left-click with my thumb, roll the ball with index and middle fingers and scroll using the ring with my ring finger. I can use it all day without getting soreness in my right hand and wrist and it “just works” with OSX and FreeBSD. I like it more than any other pointing device I’ve ever used. Recently the scroll ring started to stick and skip, not all the time, just often enough that it interfered with my concentration. This annoyed me enough that I dug out an old Logitech trackman that I never really liked but at the time was an improvement over a sore wrist from the mouse. The Logitech is not even in the same league as the Kensington.

The unit has a 5-year warranty, and should given the premium price, so I called up the toll-free number expecting a hassle. I was bristling for an argument that the unit needed replacement. I had my original receipt, the warranty card and most of its original packaging. There was no hassle. The service representative took my information, apologized and informed me that a replacement was being shipped and should be at my home in ten days. No need to send in the old unit, no problem at all. I didn’t know what to think.

A week later, just as said, a new one was delivered. New, not refurbished, not restored. New. Original box and another 5-year warranty. Way to go Kensington! I’m now looking at their other warranteed products with a different eye, instead of asking myself “Who pays that?” I’m thinking, “Hmm. Maybe it’s worth the price.” If they made a mechanical, buckling-spring keyboard I’d buy that in a second. Thumbs up.

We adopted a cat over the weekend from the local shelter, an affectionate neutered three-year-old tom named “Garfield”, owing to his orange tabby coloring and his previous owner’s lack of imagination. Owing to our lack of foresight, he found the cat door into the basement and spent his first twenty-four hours hiding between the joists. We planned to put his litter box down there but didn’t anticipate the cat seeing it as an escape hatch from his new digs. Last night we coaxed him into the cat carrier and brought him upstairs to his fleece bed, locking the cat door behind us. Today he’s spending most of his time getting acclimated by hiding under beds and behind chairs with forays out for exploration and some head-scratching, chest-rubbing purring with adults. He is tolerant of Nathan and Nathan is gentle but the boy is still a two-year-old and his jumping, running, yelling, loud playing with toys, what-not racket sends Garfield off to quieter rooms.

Nathan will be two years old this weekend and he’s talking quite a bit and evidently putting together some kind of model of the world around him. We are daily witnesses to his organizing and reorganizing things into categories. He knows and uses the words “cake”, “cookie”, “ice cream” and “pop”- for the frozen juice “ice pops” we make in the summer- to refer to the appropriate objects. Beware to the adult who uses any of these words in his presence, he knows what you said and expects you to produce a treat. It seems that his category for all sweets, except ice pops, oddly, is “cupcake” and he tacks on a description of his internal state so he will hear the ice cream trunk and say, “Cupcake! Happy cupcake!” and point outside (he’s had ice cream from a truck once, behold the power of partial positive reinforcement) or get a cookie and remark, “Mmmm. Happy cupcake!”

Sunday afternoon on our way to a friend’s place we encountered on I-90 a driver in a new, black Infinity sedan alternatively tail-gaiting the vehicle ahead, aggressively cutting into and out of the left lane and then slowing down and drifting around whatever lane he happened to be in. During one of these slow-downs, I passed to put some distance between us. The driver, a young man in a crisp white shirt, was wearing a wireless headset, actively talking on a unseen phone and both hands were occupied with writing into a small green wire-bound notepad balanced in the center of the steering wheel. I was stunned. Please idiot, when your driver ed teacher suggested you keep one hand on the steering wheel they meant stay in control of the vehicle, not lean on the wheel like a first-grader at a desk learning to write their ABCs. Now shut up and drive.