Rats Are An Outside Toy, Ranger

Well, a late-breaking and omni-frustrating relapse this morning of the residual post-marathon equilibrium/dizziness/temp issues this morning made me decide it was a wiser thing to stay home rather than to risk operating a motor vehicle through rush-hour traffic.

Note: It probably didn’t help that I had two gin/tonix and a beer on an empty stomach at last night’s Mediabistro.com-organized blogger gathering at Bar Lubitsch in West Hollywood. Plus there was all the screaming one had to do just to be heard over the ridiculously loud scene. More on that later maybe if the room/my head doesn’t start spinning.

At least some of the stiffness and soreness and outright pain is finally abating — that stuff I can deal with. But when I stand up and the room starts tilt-o-whirling and my temperture still is fluctuating… well, that’s beginning to concern me. Even on my two previously horrible experiences walking the marathon in 2003 and 2005 when I could barely muster the strength to cross the finish line, my recovery from those two outings was much smoother and quicker than this. It was all musculo-skeletal; nothing to do with my body’s thermoregulatory and balance capacities. I think I’ll chalk it up to the heat endured Sunday. Or at least hope that’s the mitigating factor.

But in the realm of everything happening for a reason, it turns out that my staying home today might not have been a bad idea seeing as Ranger apparently hunted, caught and killed an eight inch rat with an eight inch tail and at some point decided to bring it inside to play with in the living room. Fortunately I found it at Ranger’s feet laid out belly up quite nicely and with its structure thankfully pretty much intact and thus was able to remove and dispose of it.

I could only imagine what kind of gory scene Ranger might have produced while playing with his new toy and one that Susan would have come home to had I not been here to janitationalize.

And no, I didn’t take a picture of the corpse.

But in regards to last night’s blogger meet (where the proprietors of the bar insisted on continuing to crank up the music so it could be heard above the yell-level conversation din), I lucked the heck out and scored a parking space right in front and got to say hey to Ed Padgett and Scott Schmidt of the new L.A. Voice and Franklin Avenue’s Mike Schneider, Stephen Blackmoore of L.A. Noir, Ryan of Losanjealous and LAist’s Zach Behrens and Andy Sternberg — not to mention I finally was able to prove once and for all and to myself that the inimitable Tony Pierce is not the work of several networked supercomputers housed in a bunker somewhere and is actually a real live person whose hand I shook and was genuinely glad to meet. And on the glad to meet tip, I got to say hey to Totally Unauthorized’s Peggy Archer. Cruftbox’s Michael Pusateri was also there and I got to hang with a bunch of Blogging.la’ers including Sean and Caryn, David, Cybele, Jay, Spencer and Heathervescent (who’s rocking awesome purple hair like she was born with it that color).

I’d link everybody but I’m feeling a little woozy right now. Man do I hate that feeling.