OK maybe hate is a strong word but they don’t trust me so much any more. The problem is stairs. I’m not good with them. I didn’t grow up with them and I’ve always been a bit clumsy on them. Not going down, well OK sometimes I do, but the real problem is going up.

A number of years ago I was having a discussion with a friend of mine at the University about my trouble with stairs and the not unrelated issue of why I don’t dance. She suggested that it might be because I was not terribly well coordinated. I bristled at the thought. I told her that I was very well coordinated. I am exceedingly well coordinated. It’s just that I really only can do one thing at a time. Somehow that didn’t win the debate.

So back to the stairs. I have no problem with going down them. I can see my feet and place each one on the step. The only time I have trouble is when I try to rush and focus on the landing not the steps. Invariably when I do that, oddly enough,  I land there, in a heap. It’s going upstairs that causes me the most trouble though. If I rush, or get distracted, I move my foot ahead before I have lifted it high enough. My toe catches on the step and I collapse in a heap on the stairs.

“But what,” I hear you saying, “does that have to do with the cats?”

Well you see the first time this week, yes there was more than one, I was coming up the stairs with several frozen bags of food, chili or something like that. I tripped and fell down and the bags dropped on the floor, clattering like a couple of bowling balls. They made a pretty good racket. Cats don’t like rackets especially when they are sleeping. They went from comatose to full panic mode in a tenth of a second with claws out and running for the other end of the house. This would have been bad enough if not the next day I hadn’t done it again. This time I had just delivered a number of bags of stuff to the freezer in the garage and was returning to the house. I had several cookie sheets in hand that I had piled the bags on for transport. The trouble started when I rounded the corner on the landing in the middle of the stairs. I felt a twinge in my left knee. I’ve had trouble with that knee for a couple of years so my attention was suddenly focussed on it rather than the stairs I was climbing. This of course, had the predictable result. I tripped and fell. This time however, as I fell I ended up throwing the cookie sheets ahead of me, onto the floor at the top of the stairs. They made a noise similar to the one you would get if you imploded the Western Gong and Chime Company Building. It was a horrendous clatter. Of course the cats, who had been asleep were awake in a flash.  They were just brown and white streaks heading for the far end of the house with claws out in full panic mode. Since then they’ve both seemed rather tense when I go up or down the stairs.

Oh and I didn’t mention that both times Geiger was asleep in Marsha’s lap. Fortunately we have a box of band aids but now Marsha’s also a little bit tense when I go up or down stairs. And somehow I think MY safety is only one of the things she’s worrying about.

In local news in Victoria people were out watching the seagulls in the harbour when much to their horror a Great Pacific Octopus rose from the depths and grabbed one of them for lunch.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/story/2012/05/03/octopus-seagull-fight-eating-photos.html

And lastly, have you ever wondered what Rick Moranis was doing? He is after all one of the best known Canadian actors. You probably remember him from Bob & Doug McKenzie and the Ghostbusters films. Well, he mostly retired in the ’90s to raise his kids. He’s done a few things since then though including recoding a few songs. I really like this one.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8OeCacs5oqM

Doug & Marsha

PIX: This is a video slide show I wanted to include last week but had trouble getting it to work right. It’s the best of our pictures from the last five years. The music is Waltz for War and Peace by Prokofiev. Also you might notice more pictures of me than Marsha. The thing is, Marsha doesn’t like her picture taken so we don’t actually have very many.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CRsETNEBC4