Our wonderful neighbor at the end of the street thinks she is doing stray cats a favor by feeding them.  Everyone in the neighborhood has asked her to stop but she wont.  Every spring there is a new litter of kittens and once they have grown up a bit they find there is not enough food at the shared kitty bowl and one eventually finds its way into our garage.  I found one last year and it was one mean cat.  The kind that tries to tear your eyes out just cause you looked at it.  If I didn’t know that it was a stray cat I would have guessed that Chuck Norrris owned and trained the cat.  So after trying to catch the thing for an hour in a messy garage I gave up and called animal control.  He even had a hard time catching it.  I was ready to just get a taser because the stupid thing was tearing up my garage.  We finally managed to catch it and he took it away.

Now comes the sequel.  Its spring and time for a fresh new litter thanks to our wonderful neighbor.  A week ago I notice that the garage was starting to smell like cat.  At about midnight that night I had finished working and was getting more wood pellets out of the garage for the stove before going to bed.  Then I saw this white cat trying to claw its way out under the garage door.  It freaked out when it saw me.  I spent the next hour trying to catch the stupid thing.  I didn’t want it in there peeing on things but I didn’t want to let it go just to have it come back.  After trying an hour I couldn’t catch it so I left the garage open a bit hoping it would leave and I believed it did.  The cat smell started to go away and I thought after all the poking and prodding I did to it trying to catch it, it would never want to come back.  I was wrong.

This Saturday I went out to get ready for my STP training ride and thought to myself the garage stinks again.  It smelled like cat.  I had hoped that maybe if it was in there it will leave while the garage was open as I got ready to ride.  It wasn’t so.  I went out there this evening to put something away and out of the corner of my eye i saw it dashing behind some boxes.  And guess what, it peed on one of the chairs in there.  I spent the last hour again trying to catch it when it lodged itself behind our utility sink.  I am fairly sure it is stuck in there.  I am not about to stick my hand and arm in there to catch some infection when it bites or claws me.  I tried to take a picture of it but the only opening was behind the washer and I only got a few shots before the battery died.  Hopefully animal control can come out first thing in the morning and pull that stupid cat out.  The sad thing is when I was trying to catch it I noticed all the windows had what looked like muddy smudges of cat prints on them.  I also notice them all over stuff in the garage.  We have red paint out there and I thought how in the world did it get into that, but at closer inspection it was blood.  No one has been in there since yesterday morning and the cat has scraped and clawed at everything during that time till now trying to get out and has bloody paws from it.  I don’t know if I should feel bad for it or get mad as all my stuff is stained.  I think I will ask my neighbor to come clean it up.  Maybe then it will make her think a little more before feeding the stray cats.  Then I am going to ask her if she wants that pee covered chair. 

On another note I found out on King Counties Website what you can legally do to an animal that trespasses on your property.  Well you can’t use lethal force.  Only non lethal methods can be used.  So like what am I supposed to do?  Tell the cat to go away nicely and hope it does not come back.  I can’t kill it and I am guessing that probably means the taser too.  Not that I want to kill it but this is King County and you knew there would be a law about it.  They also mentioned that a bb gun does not count as non lethal force.  Use a bb gun to try and scare it off and go to jail.  I can shoot my sister with it but not the cat.  You know what they did mention you could use.  A paint ball gun.  So next year when the next cat comes into my garage, instead of trying to catch it for an hour I am just going to have target practice.  Maybe that one will get the clue not to come back.  Okay I am a little bitter right now.  I do feel bad for the cats.  They shouldn’t have to fend for themselves like this.  They should be in a cat lovers lap purring away.  Not in my garage peeing on things trying to find food.

I just read a really great book.  It is called No More Christian Nice Guy - When being nice instead of good hurts men, women, and children.  I think there is a real problem in the Church with men being men or even knowing what it is to be a good man.  Do yourself a favor and pick up this book.   Take a look at the excerpt from the website below or download the first chapter for free to see if you like it.  There is also a test on the website just incase you don’t think you have a problem.  ;). 

• Free PDF of the first chapter.
• Free online test.
• Buy the book at Amazon.

This is an excerpt from the website: 

You can live with purpose, meaning, integrity, honesty, love, and faith. It's time to be who you were meant to be.

Paul Coughlin lived the nice guy lifestyle—until it blew up in his face. He wishes now it would have blown up sooner. Less damage would have been done.

He calls himself a "former Christian nice guy," someone who hid behind popular Christianity with its incomplete and dangerous caricature of "gentle Jesus meek and mild."

His book, No More Christian Nice Guy: When Being Nice—Instead of Good—Hurts Men, Women, and Children, exposes three common forces that encourage passivity in men:

1. A cultural prejudice that shames men for being men.
2. An incomplete portrayal of Jesus as passive and weak.
3. Childhood difficulties that create a passive mindset that are brought into adult life, often undetected.

These forces conspire against men and ruin their lives. The psychology of passivity leads to a life controlled by fear, which shuts down our emotions. When your life is controlled by fear, you can forget about obtaining a purpose-driven life and the abundant life Jesus has to offer. Fear saps you of emotional energy and power, the very qualities necessary for romantic love, successful careers, healthy parenting, and loving God and your neighbor as yourself.

"Nice guys," he says, are often secretive and manipulative in order to avoid conflict. Christian nice guys are pleasant, not because they care about others, but because they want others to leave them alone. Nice guys are often fearful and selfish, he says.

Our society mistakes niceness for goodness and kindness, and this is a big mistake, he says. Think of the nice people in your life? Do they do anything meaningful? They are far more interested in avoiding conflict than actually being good and helpful to others. And such people aren’t honest. When life has them down, they hide behind a deceptive smile.

No where in this book will men find an excuse to be a jerk, he says.

Though No More Christian Nice Guy is written for men, women find the topic arresting and extremely helpful.

• Thank you for your words of encouragement...I appreciate that someone finally put this issue into words!!! I knew and saw things, but couldn't explain it. My husband tells me all the time he is just a Nice Guy. He isn't, and he isn't nice to be married to either.
• Thanks! It's great to find men speaking out and talking about real godly manhood, not just the soft, passive counterfeit we're offered all to often in the Church...
• My husband is weak. It is hard to respect him, he has no backbone. Why can't men see this in themselves? Why can't they be protective?
• My single Christian girlfriends and I believe that the ideal Christian man to marry has only been in the church two years. This way he'll still have some of his masculinity left.

If what you just read rings true for your life or someone you love, don't hesitate. Pick up a copy and read it right away. It may be one of the most important decisions you'll ever make.

If you have Xbox 360 then you need to go get this game.  If you don’t have one it is a real good reason to get one.  I normally have not enjoyed these games in the past.  Usually to many button combos to remember.  I don’t have the chance to play games every day.  Some times for weeks at a time.  Games like Halo are great for that reason, you pick up the controller and that one button will always fire the gun and so on.  In Ghost Recon pushing combos of buttons do different things.  With that aside I have managed to get in enough time in to not forget what the buttons do on this game.  The game is very immersive and the graphics are beautiful.  It looks like this game was made for the 360.  Not a port of a old Xbox game or PS2 game.  If you have a nice sound system crank it up.  The are some great explosions in this game, but what is more helpful with the sound cranked up is you can hear when a grenade lands next to you.  Most games let you know with a onscreen icon or something.  Not this one.  Don't hear or seen that grenade land next to you and boom your dead.  The action is non stop.  You are always on edge and instead of load screens between levels a helicopter pics you up and flies you to the next objective.  Its little touches like that which make this game stand out next to the others.   The only bummer I would say about this game and it goes back to what I started to talk about earlier.  There is a real learning curve to the game.  If you can hardly hold your own in something like Halo I would say stay away from this game.  You will get to frustrated.  It takes time to learn all that you need to.  Once you have it down it just becomes second nature on how you should take enemies out.  For more information there is a great review over at Team Xbox.  Team Xbox review.