Beware of identity theft this Easter!

Here are some fun Internet pictures forwarded to me by my brother:

Moving Cats

I have heard tell that getting some groups to go where you want them to go is like herding cats, which, I suppose, truly is impossible. Moving them comes close to that. When we moved into our new house, the cats were quite unhappy.

Murjan let us know his unhappiness. For two days, he stomped through the house, yowling. He would not let us touch him, and when we got near, he would yowl again. He hissed at Intrepid and Simone whenever they approached, which had very different effects on each of them. Then, finally, he got his revenge. I had opened the window a paw-crack wide so he could have a breath of fresh air. Somehow, he managed to push that big heavy glass plate open wider, wide enough to slip out and jump the twenty feet or more to the ground. Intrepid, not being intrepid at all when it comes to the outdoors, was balancing on the windowsill, wanting to follow his big brother but a bit hesitant, when Donnie walked by, instantly understood what was happening, and swooped Intrepid back into the room, and closed the window. Then, he went looking for Murjan. He did not have far to go. Murjan had found what he was looking for: mud in the back yard from all the rain. He had rolled around in it until his pure white coat was pure grey and was standing at the door to be let back in so he could let us know of his unhappiness at the move.

Intrepid would have moved easily. He is an easy-going cat and quite independent. He had to be. He was found as a tiny kitten, looking more like a bird than a kitten, after his mother had apparently died. We don't know if there were other kittens and, if so, what happened to them, but Intrepid is a survivor. He approached the inhabitant of a near-by house, and sitting in the grass outside the door, squawled until someone (a professor at the university in Jordan where I was dean) picked him up, and gave him something to eat. The professor had no idea what to do with a cat, so he brought him to me, and I could hear Intrepid meowing hungrily all the way up to our third-floor flat. Murjan, the alpha cat, raised him. So, when Murjan, after the move, started hissing at him, Intrepid was not about to be intimidated. He kept trotting after him, tapping him lightly when he was ignored, and sitting beside him, which prompted Murjan to hiss and move away and start the whole routine over again. Ultimately, Intrepid won out, and we found Murjan cleaning him as so often in the past. How Murjan got clean, we don't know, but it did happen.

Poor Simone, however, was completely traumatized by Murjan's hissing. Herself a rescued feral cat, she has just very recently, after two years, stopped hissing when someone picks her up. She returned to her old defensive habits and spend entire days hidden under the sofa. Once Murjan returned to his old self, however, she timidly moved out from the sofa and started exploring the rest of the house.

The cats seem to like the new house now. We have also purchased cat-proof screening and Donnie is in the process of rescreening all the windows. Sheesh! Had we known it was so important to the cats, we might have asked their permission (or at least opinion) before buying the house!

All's well that ends well. Our grandson likes the house. At least, he likes the lemon tree. That's something!

Golf Afficionado Cat

I thought I might take a light approach and share pictures of our cat, Simone, who loves to watch golf. It is the strangest thing because Donnie and I neither play nor watch golf. However, one day as a news item on a local gold tournament was playing on the television, Simone, the feral cat we trapped and tamed two years ago, stopped in her tracks as she was passing the TV and sat watched the entire ad. Now we turn on the tournaments for her, and she will watch for 20-30 minutes. She loves chasing the golf ball -- stands on her hind legs and reaches for it with her paw. Her little head goes back and forth, watching the ball ping around the golf course. For a smile, here are the pictures.

Hitchcock Comes to the Mahlou Residence

Yes, indeed, it was a Hitchock-like affair at the old Mahlou residence earlier this week. Donnie and I have moved (one of the reasons I have been absent from the blogosphere for the past month -- that and the fact that I just this past week received my replacement computer after three months of repair effort failed, along with a heavy travel schedule, about which I should mention that I am currently traveling, taking a respite for some work in North Carolina before heading to Qatar tomorrow). Perhaps someone out in blogland has a better explanation of what happened to us than my assumption that Hitchcock came to visit. Actually, it was a rooster that came to visit.

After purchasing a new home and moving everything the six blocks south and up to a hilltop, we returned to our old home to clean and pack out a few final items. When we drove up into the driveway, it was already evening. First, we turned on the light in the shed and divided the few items still there for trash or final moving later in the week when we would have a truck. Then we headed to the house. That is when I saw the really big, white rooster strutting into the shed. Shooing him out, I turned off the light and locked the door.

Assuming that the rooster would disappear, not ever having had any visit us before that I could remember while living in this particular house (although we had raised one in our former house), Donnie and I walked up the stairs onto the deck and into the house. As we were cleaning the floor, I heard a knocking at the door. I went to open it, and, to my surprise, it was the rooster pecking at it and urgently wanting to enter.

"Go away now," I tried to shoo him off and closed the door. That did not deter him. Soon, we heard beating at the window. It was the rooster, wanting to come in. Suddenly, it was as is we were being besieged.

Unsure of how to handle the situation and concerned that perhaps the rooster was rabid or crazy, Donnie and I sneaked out the front door and came around to the back, where the deck is, to get into the car. We hoped that the rooster had gone, but no, there he sat, patiently or impatiently waiting. For what?

We think that perhaps he had made friends with our cats and was now missing them. But who knows? We are willing to consider other possible explanations if anyone wants to offer them.

In any event, we drove away. Out of curiosity, I asked Donnie to drive around the block. He did, and when we drove past our house again, the rooster was in the same spot. I suppose, though, he has since left!

We have not returned. Our new house is on a hill overlooking San Ignatio. We are looking forward to some peaceful days and evenings there. At the same time, it is walking distance from the mission, a requirement that made the decision whether or not we would buy a house. This house has it all: proximity to the mission, sweeping views, spacious living (although I am not sure why we need spacious living now that all the kids are grown and gone). Still, it was the house that fell into our hands, so I think we are supposed to have it. At least, I am taking it that way. Besides, crazy roosters don't make it that far up, so we can rest assured that we will not be besieged again.

Leave It To Beaver Training Camp

Apologies for the dearth of posts. Keeping blogs going when having to use a borrowed computer is difficult. So, I have been concentrating mainly on 100th Lamb. Even that has been a challenge. (Yes, my computer is still in the shop, going on almost two months, but I don't complain; the mother board, it turns out, was fried by an unnoticed power surge that, at any rate, should not have fried it -- the power adaptor should have been fried, too, but was not. The fine print exempted it from warranty coverage, but the local shop is trying to persuade the national shop to fix it for free, so I am waiting patiently. Waiting is better than having to pay hundreds of dollars for repair.)

I am still finishing my latest book (almost done), A Believer in Waiting's First Encounters with God (BIW), which continues where Blest Atheist leaves off. From time to time, I have been pecking away (well, until my computer died) at Raising God's Rainbow Makers (RGRM). By the time my computer comes back, I should have a BIW off for publication; the final edition is almost done, following feedback from ten readers of the pre-publication manuscript. My grand plan is to be all done this week. I will then be able to concentrate on RGRM, sharing some of those promised pre-publication pieces. In the interim, here is a short piece, which I may include, about Doah.

Most people's children learn from Sesame Street. Doah learned from Leave It To Beaver. That created some moments of havoc in the Mahlou household. Take, for example, the following event.

Doah, one early evening, clutched his stomach and started screaming in pain. When I tried to touch him, he would push my hands away and say, "hothpital, hothpital." He had no fever. He had no odd coloration or behavior or any other indication of illness other than the pain.

Since I don't generally try to cover up pain for myself or my children, preferring to root out the cause instead, I was forced to take Doah to the emergency room of the local hospital although I had little to go on except the unexplained pain, about which he continued to wail. The doctor, too, was baffled.

Trying to determine the cause of the pain, the doctor ran Doah through a series of tests. They took x-rays. They took blood. Doah continued to cry. None of the tests showed anything, but later I learned that the cost was nearly $1000 for all of them.

The doctor finally shook his head in consternation and said, "Look, we have no idea what is wrong here. There are no real symptoms that we can use for diagnosis. There are no signs of infection or injury. I just don't know. Admitting him for observation is probably not going to give us anything more than you can get at home. I would suggest that you give him something for the pain and observe him. If he develops any kind of symptoms, bring him back."

I agreed, and Doah and I walked out. As soon as we were outside, Doah stopped crying. He looked up at me with a wide smile. In a bright voice, he asked, "We get ice cream now?"

"Ice cream? What are you talking about?" I asked.

Doah explained, "Beaver get sick. Beaver go hothpital. Beaver get ice cream."

That ice cream cost me $1,002.59. I decided to ban the Leave It To Beaver Show!

Finding Doah

My continuing apologies for not being able to deal with graphics on this old computer--my laptop is STILL in computer repair land on the East Coast, and I am told that those experts have not yet figured out the problem nor made a decision what to do. In the interim, Word does work, and so I am hard at work on my next book, in and around travels and real work. I have completed six of nine chapters, and chapter seven is nearly done. As promised, here is an excerpt. It is a just-finished section of chapter 7, which I will post on all my blogs for which the topic is pertinent.

As a child and through his teenage years, Doah had a habit of slinking off, mainly from curiosity or because he wanted to go somewhere and there was no one to take him at precisely the time he wanted to go. It was not the kind of disappearance that a fully mentally competent child of the same age would make. Rather, it was a matter of marrying “want” with “immediate fulfillment” prompted by naivete and complete trust in the safety and kindness of the surrounding environment associated with the simplicity of mental retardation. Usually, we would find Doah a couple of aisles away in the grocery store, in the backyard on the swings, or at a neighbor’s house. Scarier disappearances, however, did occur, like the time he decided to walk down the middle of Lee Highway, the main thoroughfare in Arlington, Virginiua.

One Sunday morning when Doah was twelve years old but the size of a seven-year-old and with the mental age of a seven year old, I emerged from the shower and could not find him. I checked the entire house. No Doah. I checked the backyard. Empty swings. I checked with the all the neighbors. No visit to their homes that day. Frantic panic set up, and I began walking the streets in our subdivision, calling his name. Neighbors I had never before met told me that they knew Doah. Really? He had been wandering farther afield than I had known. When? I suppose I will never know the answer to that question. At the time, though, I was more interested in how far his wandering might have taken him. I returned home to Donnie empty-handed.

“Why are you losing time by walking all over the neighborhood?” he asked me. “Just think where he is.”

“Thinking” actually referred to what I often knew about my children from unexplainable sources. For example, I occasionally “knew” in advance that one or another would get hurt at school that day, creating a dilemma in that I had no way to tell a teacher to be careful and try to prevent the accident. No teacher would believe me, yet each time the child in question in woulds indeed return home with some minor injury. If I were sitting quietly, thinking about nothing at all, sometimes an image would appear of the child, either where the child was at the moment or what would happen to the child in the immediate future.

“Nothing comes to mind about Doah,” I told Donnie.

“Just calm down and think for a minute,” Donnie advised.

I emptied my mind and, blast!, in came an image of Doah, clothed in white with a blue belt. He was standing, surrounded by white. White everywhere. Well, one can imagine the worst possible scenario from that.

“I think he’s dead,” I told Donnie. “Everything around him is white.”

“What else?” Donnie pressed, knowing that I am one to miss details. “There has to be more. What is he doing? Is he saying anything? Is there anyone else there?”

Ah! I could not see whether or not there was anyone else there, but he was standing and clapping! Clapping? Church!

Although Donnie was agnostic and I atheist, we did allow our children to attend church services if they wished. Doah had taken up recently with a church downtown, about a mile from where we lived. He would get there by bus, or someone would pick him up. If the latter, the van driver would always come to our door, and that had not happened this time. Still, I knew Doah was at the church.

Donnie and I drove to the church apprehensively. What if he were not there? Then what?

I walked in the door and immediately knew I was in the right place. The inside of the church had been painted—all white. I wandered through one of the rooms, heard some singing, and moved in that direction. As I turned the corner, I saw another white-walled room, and there in the front row was Doah, standing and clapping, dressed in white clothes, with his blue money belt around his waist. Thank God!

I do not know how to interpret these out-of-the-ordinary experiences in my past. I find it hard to believe that such “help” would come from something demonic. Yet, clearly most parents do not find their missing children by emptying their minds and allowing an image of the location of their children to enter. In some ways, these images presaged how nowadays I approach contemplative prayer. Perhaps back then they reflected God’s way of dealing with an atheist in the only way she would (or could) accept.

Welcome, 2011!

Wishing everyone a happy new year on the remarkable date of 1/1/11. I managed to get back into an older post and copy out the image. (Where there is a will, there is a way.) I have not been able to peck out as much as I would like on the new book in the past week on this computer, so I am awaiting with great expectancy the return of my own laptop, either repaired or replaced, in a few weeks -- a new start to a new year.

One great thing about Face Book is watching the New Year be embraced in country after country as it approaches our California coastline. We are among the last to welcome the new year, but the advantage to that is we get to enjoy a lot of other celebrations, beginning on the morning of December 31 (which I fortunately had off this year).

As the new year enters, we have had a remarkable change happen. Our little Simone, the feral cat we rescued when we moved nearly two years ago, changed from being aloof and afraid to affectionate. For the last few days, she has been following me everywhere, has nestled beside me on the couch, and has wanted to be petted. I always thought she would domesticate -- I am pretty successful at domesticating feral cats, the key to which is being patient. Two years is a long time to wait, but it looks like at least one little Leaver is entering the new year in great style.

So is Nikolina. She got her leg braces on Tuesday. They are pink! When I am able to post in a normal fashion and add new pictures, I will put a copy of Nikolina in her braces on the right sidebar. In the interim, it is great to see how she likes wearing them and knowing that in a while she will be able to stand and walk. The question asked when she was born in April 2009, will she be able to work, has been answered: Yes, she will!

Wishing a brave new world for all of you in 2011 -- and may it be gentle to you, as well!