I manage the Tutorials, Friends, and Blogroll sections of my sidebar using get_links() to return link info. After upgrading, this stopped working. If I pass in -1, all links are returned, so the functionality isn’t totally broken. But, specify the integer value for the category id no longer seems to work.

Well, the rains have returned with a vengeance, and so, it appears have the mice.

Yesterday morning I was drinking coffee and reading the newspaper when my dear cat Nicholas walked up about two feet from my two feet. I looked down and noticed he was carrying one of his felt mice in his mouth. Nick sometimes does this, so I didn’t initially suspect anything was awry. But, I next noticed that the tail seemed entirely too realistic. When I stood up quickly, Nick lost his concentration and the mouse leapt wildly from his mouth and scurried past my toes on his way to the relative safety of the floor beneath the couch.

Nicholas immediately began to patrol the perimeter of the couch, and Alexi quickly joined in on the stalking. The instinct is strong in these two. My wife was not amused, and she quickly edged away from the excitement. The instinct is strong in her, too. I chased the mouse away from the couch and cornered him behind a fake fireplace log. Alexi and Nick were at the other end of the couch and didn’t notice the escape, leaving me to finish the hunt.

Then, my trapping instinct kicked in. I set up a plastic grocery store bag with its large opening at one end of the log. I then slowly pulled the log away from the wall and started moving toward Mickey Mouse with another bag. He turned and ran straight into the gaping maw of my plastic bag trap. I quickly snatched up that bag, dropped it in the other, and then tied off the top.

My first inclination was to blame him for last year’s car engine wire, hose, and insulation gluttony. I won’t share the brutal visions of retribution that flashed before me. But, then I realized that mice have short lives and he was unlikely to be the cretin responsible for my automotive nightmare. So, I tossed the bag in the car (our other car, just in case the scent of tasty wire harnesses might lead him to attempt an escape from the bag), drove to some nearby woods, and released him well away from other houses. He darted from the bag and scampered into some tall grass. With any luck, he made a tasty snack for a bird later in the day.

Handy Reference: Difference Between Rats and Mice

Saturday evening, my wife and I took our niece to see the San Jose Earthquakes play the Kansas City Wizards in a Major League Soccer match in San Jose. It was a thrilling match, with San Jose holding on for a 3-2 win.

During halftime, the team mascot (someone in a ridiculous troll doll like costume with metallic blue and silver hair) and some employees/volunteers(?) hurl t-shirts into the audience. Also, just before the second half starts, some of the players bring out autographed soccer balls and kick them into the stands.

After all but one of the players had kicked their autographed soccer ball into the stands, my niece turned to me and said “Have you ever caught anything at a game?” At that very moment, Troy Dayak booted a ball into our section. It skipped off the tops of the hands of the people two rows in front of me and landed directly in my hands. I sat back down, turned to her, and said, “Yes.”

Alexi and Nicholas were very happy when I brought the ball home for them. Nicholas is quite obviously dreaming of scoring against the dog team with a bicycle kick.

As Alexi has gotten older, he demands access to the corn as soon as it comes out of the boiling water. After it cools, I cut off 30 or 40 kernels for him, which he quickly devours. But sometimes, that’s not enough …

Here’s Alexi after he has stalked and trapped an ear of corn in the wilds of my living room.

After trapping the ear of corn, he proceeded to bite off any remaining kernels. Then, he moved on to trying to eat the cob whole.

Finally, once he had torn away any visible remnants of corn kernels, he licked the cob end to end to siphon off any remaining corn juice.

Disclaimers: An ear of corn was injured in the filming of this spectacle. No digital editing wizardy was used in the composition of these photos. That’s a real organic ear of corn and a real 19 pound cat.

Update 7/7/2008: Courtesy of Boing Boing and YouTube, a video of somebody else’s cat eating an ear of corn:

Here’s Alexi as a kitten (he’s now a nearly 19 pound mini-puma, more big than fat) when we first discovered that he had a corn tooth. Just after I took the photo, he finished dragging the ear of corn to the floor, where he proceeded to stand on it with one paw to keep it from running away, while he used his teeth to rip the remaining kernels from the ear so he could eat them.

Last night was a new adventure, though. I had picked up some pork chow mein from a local Vietnamese restaurant. Alexi often wanders over to my plate to check out what I’m eating, just in case I have one of the aforementioned taste treats. If he spots one of his favorites, then he darts his head at the plate and tries to pick off a snack.

My guard was down. I mean, what kind of cat likes pork chow mein, especially after eating a big meal of cat food.

In a fraction of a second, he bolted forward, grabbed the end of a crispy noodle with his mouth, and dragged it off to the floor to eat like he had just pounced on some prey in the forest. A couple seconds later, he was back to hovering around my plate, looking for one of the weaker noodles that had strayed from the pack and would make for another easy capture and slaughter.

After a long work from home day, which included 5 conference calls spanning most of 8 am to 6:30 pm, I decided to head out for a high speed hill climb on my bicycle. As I was rolling my bike out of the garage at about 6:40 pm, I heard a series of loud thumping noises that seemed to emanate from the living room, which is above the garage. Obviously, my two rambunctious cats (Nicholas at 17 pounds and Alexi at 19 pounds) must have gone racing across the floor and knocked something over, possibly while leaping onto a tall wobbly object that was not designed to bear their weight. This would not be the first time. Or even the tenth. Maybe the twentieth.

A few seconds later, I heard some more rumbling, but it didn’t seem to come from inside the house. I ran quickly upstairs to assess the damage, but they had a look (as best a cat can) of innocence and confusion on their faces. Not seeing any cat-induced damage, off I went.

After I got back, I learned that a magnitude 3.9 earthquake centered in Lake Temescal Regional Park, which is about 2 miles away, was the real cause for the thumping and rumbling. Since then, the cats and I have patched things up, although I still blame them for all the tooth marks in the window blinds.