I was asked to stop by the shelter tonight to feed the cats and do a little cleaning in case nobody else showed up. Nobody else showed up. Well, Maureen stopped by to give the cats their meds and pitched in a little bit. She rocks.

A grey longhair upstairs left a huge hairball in his cage. Seriously, I thought this was a toy at first. So, I had to take time out & brush him. Then, I left a few notes and sent a status update from my Blackberry.

About 8:00pm, just as I was about to pack up & go, I heard a sound the could only be described as a cross between our electronic doorbell and a cat being jabbed with a cattle prod. I guess that’s the noise it makes when you barely press the button after leaving a tabby at the door and before running to your car before someone sees you.

After calling one of our reps and getting the new cat settled into a cage, I finally had a chance to go to Jewel and do my grocery shopping. Since the shelter was down to a half bag of litter, I picked up five 20lb bags. The woman in front of me saw my haul and asked if I would like a kitten.

I bought a rose for Amy, just in case I was in the doghouse for being at the shelter so late.

I think it’s time to soak in the whirlpool tub, read my book, and have a vodka martini.

My dream last night had my Dad proclaiming that everyone in the family (my parents, Amy & I, my brothers & their families) were getting together to put together a “values statement” for the family. Of course, this was a religious exercise, and something I would respectfully decline in real life.

I really do like the idea of a “family values statement” though. I don’t know where my brain came up with the idea, but it’s great! Lots of people dismiss corporate “mission statements” and such declarations as just meaningless words, but they’re only meaningless words because everyone ignores them — including the people who came up with them in the first place. I personally feel we need more “mission statements” to keep everyone on the same page, and a failure to reach out goals is the price we pay for ignoring our missions.

A values statement for Amy & I might include caring for animals, recycling, keeping frivolous spending to a minimum, donating to charity, and being productive instead of sitting around watching TV all day.

It couldn’t be binding of course, but it’s a reinforcement of what we believe. I wonder if something like that might be useful when we’re ready to start a family to start our kids on the right path.

Sister Machine Gun’s 1995 album “Burn” contains a hidden track that I feel is better than the rest of the album in its entirety. Play the rest of the tracks on the finest 6 million dollar home theater, and I’d rather listen to their cover of The Doors’ “Strange Days” over iPod earbuds. It’s not that the rest of the album is crap, it’s just that the song they chose to hide in the pregap has the kind of energetic beat to get me going.

The “pregap” is a period of silence before a track on a CD. It’s usually two seconds long, but some clever disc authors store extra tracks in track 01’s pregap, which CD players skip over. The only way to get to this track with a CD player is to start playing track 01, hit pause, and rewind for the length of the pregap. If you don’t know how long it is, or you’re slow on the draw, it’s easy to breeze right past the start of the pregap and have the disc stop, meaning you have to go through that all again.

It’s worse on computers because almost all of the software out there ignores pregap. A few programs can rip pregap tracks, most notably Exact Audio Copy on Windows, and until now I wasn’t able to find one for Macs. A discussion on Reddit this morning got me thinking about it again, and led me on a search that turned up X Lossless Decoder (XLD).

XLD is a free Mac program that leverages various open source libraries, most notably the cdparanoia ripper, to rip & encode CDs. And, it’s able to rip from the pregap! I heard Strange Days this morning for the first time in three years, and immediately copied it to my phone for my drive to work.