Cat Fish

I judged beer this weekend.

Not the way you probably think: people hear you're a beer judge and they say things like 'I judge beers, and I know what score I'm going to give them...'

But really, I'm the suds edition of a wine snob. Actually, the competition was held at a winery, and a very good one. Finding good wineries in Kansas is no small beer, but Les and Michelle work with hybrids that do well in the area on their 30 acres. Try the St. Vincent, a nice dry red. I think it won a double-gold at the Pacific Rim competition a few years ago, and that's going up against California, Australia and New Zealand. Not an arena-league event.

Oh, but the catfish thing. I took the girls Friday night due to a family emergency. Zeus, my father-in-law and my daughters' super-grandpa went into the hospital for complications with his kidney ameloids and pneumonia. Not a good scene, but if anyone can lick it, he's the one.

So Sunday I oversleep. I had an alarm set but no kids throwing wedding crystal off the deck to wake me up. The dog barked at nothing and woke me up three hours late.

I took the girls to Nebraska Furniture Mart, which doesn't involve going to Nebraska anymore. Then we hit Cabela's, where I tried out the cheapie digital camera I bought from Warren Buffet. (The artist formerly known as Frau Lobster took 'the camera' with her when she moved out.) If you've never been to Nebraska Furniture Mart, you don't know the full meaning of a Stuff-Mart. I didn't see any air compwessahs, but damn. Cabela's is roughly the sporting goods equivalent.

The taxidermy displays are a bit creepy. But the fish, that's amazing stuff. They have these huge aquariums, I got this shot with Em in the frame for a sense of scale. This is a Leviathan of a catfish might eat your fishing boat. Makes those noodlers seem pretty brave.


So while we were there, I fed the girls at the restaurant. This isn't something I was amped to do, I'm struggling to figure out how to make ends meet. And I'd just bought a digital camera, which cost more than the $0.00 I had in mind. It's a bit more than a film point-and-click camera, but you don't have to pay a photo-mat to develop every 12 or 24 misguided shots.

But then Mo said the word 'vacation.' She had translated our twenty minutes of six-lane and two places she had either never seen or hadn't seen with me or in recent years, and translated it to a road-trip. So alright, why not a vacation?

We had a restaurant meal with foods they've never tried.
Not the pickle, she loves those. But figuring she liked ham, I got her wild boar. I had a bit of elk myself, and she at some of both.

'Obviously you don't have a problem with eating wild things,' Em observed as me and Mo powered down our game-meat.

Nope, no problems here.

I asked Em, what was better: run free and wild, then die, or live in a pen and die. She said the pen was better, because a wild animal has a bunch of predators, but a cow has just one, the farmer.

There's probably political significance to this, especially since Em used to tell me I couldn't eat cows because 'they live in the field' (this, after explaining that lobsters were off limits because 'they're buddies' and 'they live in the water'). I figured her to be annoyingly vegetarian right around when I bought a Steak & Ale franchise or something.

Anyway, we did the Adequate Mall after Cabela's so Em could introduce me to the Piercing Pagaoda employee who stabbed her lobes. And it must have been a vaction because she put her mean-face on for the camera, showing way too much angst for a ten-year-old.


After all that, when we were back at the house, Mo was pointing out items and naming them. Which is great, she needs the reinforcement and it's a non-harmful obsession.

In the process of labeling stuff, Mo touched the box of gross moist cat food I buy because the world's oldest cat doesn't do hard food anymore. It's supposed to be fishy, but smells like anchovy paste vomit.

Mo dubbed the box 'cat-fish.' That's logical, right?