Carty announces retirement. Effective immediately.

A couple weeks ago Carty came down with what I guess was a flu. He had the shits, was throwing up bile, it was pretty rough. He had a trip to the vet where they did a x-ray. The vet saw that his heart was a little enlarged. They said once he got better that he needed to have a follow up to have his heart looked at to make sure that he did not have heart disease. I guess it's genetic with cats of our breed. So the last couple of weeks it was kind of the elephant in the room between us. We knew it was there but we never really talked about. He didn't bring it up so I didn't bring it up. So this past Friday he had his follow up exam. Everything turned up OK, all things considered. They said he has some mild build up in his arteries but nothing that looks serious at this point. She told him just to cut back on red meat and cigars and we'll take a look in another year. This came as a huge surprise to me. I thought they would say it was at least bad enough to have to put him on some sort or expensive medications so the Vet could get a kick back from cat pharmaceutical company. I was wrong. I guess they have souls unlike human Doctors and pharmaceutical companies. Anyway, Carty has been pretty contemplative since then and in order to reduce stress he decided to retire. Yes, I asked the same question you are asking now. What the hell does Carty do? When he told me he was retiring early, I was like, retiring? Retiring from what? All you do is eat, sleep, shit and eat some more? Then he reminded me a couple year's ago my Mama named him Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of her company. Art Jewels and Treasures By Jen(AJATBJ). I somehow forgot Carty was making all the critical strategic decisions for her company. I don't know how I forgot. It clearly explains that state of AJATBJ. They haven't made a sale in months, my Mama hasn't has a blog post since last June. I asked what decisions he could possibly be making to cause stress in his life? When I brought this up Carty got pretty defensive. He said it was all part of a long term strategy. He started talking about how companies that grow too quickly lose direction and end up losing focus on their core business. He pointed out how in order to avoid bad PR he moved the annual shareholder meeting from the Cornell Hotel De France in San Francisco where a rack of lamb and champagne were on the menu to the coffee table in my Mama's living room, where everybody got a 3 piece meal from Popeye's Chicken and a Pepsi. He said the company has $432.65 in it's bank account which makes it more solvent than %90 of all American corporations. It also has no debt. He conned my Dad into financing the venture. I was about to counter back how none of this stuff should be causing stress in his life. But I never got that far. He started getting sentimental. Talking about he was going to miss the rush before a craft show. All the great people he's worked with over the year's. Seeing the company from it's birth and selling like one necklace in it's first year to the record breaking 2008, where sales were around $500 despite the worst economic down turn in decades. Then he started tearing up, I couldn't bring my self to talk shit to him like I usually would. I just gave him a pat on the shoulder and congratulated him. I asked him what he was going to do with all this free time now. He said was going to do some searching to find out who the "real Carty is" whatever the hell that means.....Anyway this got to thinking about aging. The cat book my Mama has says now that I'm 7 years old, that I'm 44 in cat years. Personally I don't feel a day older than 34. But anyway age does kind of creep up on you. You start to notice the small things. Like, I hate kids just a little more than I did just few months ago. I'm becoming more interested in RV's. I Tivo'ed 60 minutes. I complained that my Mama served me to much food at dinner a couple weeks ago. When I take a whiz it takes just a few seconds longer to start and few seconds longer to stop. When I go to the casino to bet football, I'm becoming more and more drawn to the bingo parlor. I might even go in one day. We'll maybe not. But my point is something you already know. Getting old sucks.

Bono VS. Mama....Part 2

You might remember back during football season myself and my Mama had a little competition/experiment where we would pick football games against the spread and whoever picked the most winners won. If you don't remember I kicked her ass. I got so far ahead that I stopped posting the results. I did the competition as a kind of experiment that will hopefully make me feel better. You know, I wanted some reassurance that my knowledge of the games actually help me win bets; that I'm not just at the mercy of dumb luck. Well it worked. At least in the short term. But for any good experiment you need to test and re-test to make sure the results are consistent. It's similar to how movie studios keep casting Sandra Bullock and Nicolas Cage in movies. They just really want to make sure that putting either one of them in a movie will guarantee that it will suck. So maybe five years from now they'll be comfortable not doing it. In this test I'm going to pick the NCAA Tournament Games against my Mama. If you don't have at least a little bit of an idea of what the NCAA Tournament(AKA March Madness) is, please click out of my blog now! No really, now! I don't want you reading my blog. Get the hell out of here!....Ok back to the contest. I'm going to use my in depth knowledge of college hoops for my picks. I'm assuming my Mama will use her same method of picking the team from the region where she likes the food more. She is going to have quite the dilemma in the 1st round of the tourney when Cal-Berkley(Bay area) squares off against Maryland. Dim-Sum VS Crab Cakes!! It's going to be tough call for her. But since I've already beat her head to head during football, Carty is also joining us. However, he agreed to make his picks based in what the result would be if the respective teams mascots would get into a conflict with each other. Example, the LSU Tigers are playing the Butler Butler Bulldogs. Clearly if they had a conflict a Tiger would not just beat up a Bulldog, it would probably eat the poor bastard. Hence Carty will pick LSU. There are some ground rules. Like if a human goes goes against and animal, they can't use a weapon in the conflict unless it's implicit in the name of the team that human would be armed. Examples would be the Xavier Muskateers, USC Trojans, Portland State Vikings. An example of an unarmed human team would be the Texas A&M Aggies. Dictionary.com defines an Aggie simply as a student at an Agricultural School. Texas A&M plays the Brigham Young Cougars in the 1st round of the tournament. So a Cougar would surely take some pansy College student. But you could argue that if the student joined the Church of Latter Day saints and tithed faithfully the BYU Cougar could let him off the hook. There are 63 games in the tournament. It starts Thursday. Me and Carty could have our paws full trying to figure this stuff out.