Hello Vorts!
My wife and I are back from an extended vacation out to Reno, Nevada, Idaho, and Utah. First of all, I want to apologize to Mark Iverson for not being able to take him up on his invitation to get together while we were in Reno. The World Science Fiction convention took up all of our time. Speaking of Reno and the convention center, in order to get to any of the restaurants from the hotel, you always had to pass through the gauntlet - meaning the gambling facilities. It was the biggest fly trap I've ever seen, and we're the flies. I saw a lot of retired people feeding their personal machine with pennies, nickels, quarters, and larger denominations. Some seemed mesmerized by all the blinking lights and beeping sounds. Whenever a player had to leave, perhaps for a bathroom run, they would tip their char in front of their personal machine to tell everyone: "Hands off this machine, It's MINE!" Some of these folks looked like they were on their last legs. Most were smoking, some with supplementary oxygen to keep em going. Whenever I walked through the flytrap it was like entering into a four dimensional tesseract. There were mirrors everywhere. Very easy to get lost. * * * While on vacation I occasionally checked in on what was going on in the Vort Collective using my brand new apple iPAD. I noticed that there didn't seem to be very much NEW news pertaining to the Rossi front - particularly anything worth discussing. What I noticed was various individuals (you know who you are!) constantly squabbling as if fighting over left over table scraps pertaining to Rossi's steam analysis. I assume this was done because there wasn't anything new (and more interesting) to argue about. For heaven sake, forget about the steam analysis! There is better heat analysis, as Jed has incessantly tried to point out millions of times. Jed, it's a dirty job, but somebody's got to do it. ;-) Ya know... over the past two weeks I think I had a more interesting time than most of the Vort Collective. Let me x'plain. While we were driving through the southern Idaho desert we stopped at a Rest stop near Arco, Idaho. The stop is located near a government facility known as "Atomic City". See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_City,_Idaho At this rest stop we unexpectedly came across an abandoned cat. She was starving and dehydrated. We suspect she was deliberately abandoned by previous owners who dumped her there. She had no collar & id tag. She was definitely a domesticated cat. She was desperately looking for a pair of generous humans would might want to feed her and take care of her. We couldn't leave her there in the desert where she would soon be nothing more than coyote food by that evening. At first we had planned to take her to the nearest pet shelter. However, after a couple of days we realized that we had already bonded with her. She gave off lots of appreciated head butts. She knew she had been rescued, and she showed it. We took her to the local vet located in Sun Valley and got her checked out. She had no embedded RFID tag, so there was no way to trace her back to her original owners. She was ours if we wanted her. The vet gave us a discount on her shots due to the fact that we would be taking an unwanted cat off their hands. I named her "Charm" in honor of a few lost sub-atomic quarks that occasionally escape the atomic breeder reactors located in Atomic City. It was quite the ordeal getting her back to Madison, Wisconsin. She did not appreciate being stuffed into a tiny cat carrying case and subsequently sequestered under an airline seat for 5 hours. Her air fare: $125 dollars. I was worried she would overheat and possibly die from heat stroke due to her constant struggles to escape the confines of her carrying case the first couple of hours. (She nearly did twice during the flight! Took both of us to stuff her back in.) Eventually, she resigned herself to her fate and simply whimpered every now and then. We tried to reassure her. When we finally got her home we sequestered her in the bathroom for the first night while our current cat, Zoey, sniffed the base of the door. Having two female cats in a household can be problematic. I am now happy to report that after only three days of feline acclimation, both cats are now willing to dine as close as two feet from each other. Separate bowls of course. Ok, now what the hell has Rossi been up to. What? He doesn't know what he supposed to be doing on September 3 ???? Why am I not surprised. Regards, Steven Vincent Johnson www.OrionWorks.com www.zazzle.com/orionworks
