The world is now down to two. I am, of course, referring to the fact that there are now just two of the original Beatles still alive. Last night, George Harrison, the famed guitarist and writer of many of their songs succumbed to years of fighting throat, lung and brain cancer. He will be missed, especially by me since he wrote one of my fave Beatles songs "Here Comes the Sun" and also one of my fave songs of the 80s "I Got My Mind Set On You."

while my guitar gently weeps...

Well, it's been a different kind of weekend. In an attempt to fill the void left by the passing of our cat Jinx and keep our other cat Meatball from being too lonely, my parents went to PetSmart and bought a new cat. Very similar to both of my other cats in many respects. Her name is Peanut (or, at least, it is now). Cute little booger with one of the shrillest voices I've ever heard in a cat. That's how Katie and I first noticed that she was there. She was locked up in the bathroom with all of her stuff to keep her from disappearing under furniture. All of a sudden, "Mmeeeeewwwwww!" as high-pitched as you can possibly imagine.

Of course, all this may be for naught, as when Katie and I were there on Saturday, we noticed that Meatball's face was puffed out under his left eye. He was very sensitive there and wouldn't let anyone touch him. His left eye was also not open as much as his right. My parents hadn't noticed this until Katie and I pointed it out. My mom took him to the vet today and, apparently, he has cancer. The vet had to remove the teeth from the left side of his mouth because he has a tumor in his head that is causing excessive amounts of pressure and that's why Meatball hasn't been eating as much either and why he struggles when he tries to chew his food. The tumor is spreading as well and may start to disfigure his head. If this happens or he stops eating, we will probably put him to sleep as well. Otherwise, the vet has given him one to three months to live. What can you do? As we are finding out... not a whole helluva lot. Talk about feelings of complete and utter helplessness.

Katie and I decided to be daring this year. Yes, after only being married a little over a month, we have dared to hold Thanksgiving dinner at our apartment. Since Katie's parents went to St. Louis like they have done for a few years now, we invited my parents and brother to the gathering (well, not really a gathering, per se, as it was only five of us). Katie and I got most of the food done last night which was very nice indeed. Today, we focused on preparing the turkey. In all, we had turkey, wild rice, carrots in orange sauce, broccoli and cauliflour in cheese sauce, crescent rolls, stuffing, pumpkin cheesecake and cherry cheesecake all prepared by us. My parents brought the hors d'oeuvres and corn pudding. The meal was incredible and my family couldn't stop raving. Katie has officially been put in charge of Thanksgiving for the rest of eternity. I say "Katie" because she did most of the work. I mixed a few things and made the cheesecake batter... that's about it. Great job, Hon. It rocked!

I love webstats. Yeah, I know I've talked about this one before, but it's the truth. If you have a webpage and you need a good (free!) webcounter and statistical manager, I've got one for you. Contact me if you're interested. What's cool about the new stat provider that I've found is that it monitors where my surfers come from. I used to have one like it before that was provided by NBCi, but since NBC shut down that wing, my free stats are now gone. I recently started using a new system -- only about 40 page views ago -- and, so far, I've had 39 people from the U.S. and one from Spain (hóla amigo). Of the 39 in the U.S., it would seem that I've got a fair fan base back in my old college town of DeKalb (13 in all - but I really think it's just one person who can't get enough of my wonderful wit), one from Normal (hi Scott), and one from Hammond, Louisiana (hi Beth, how ya been?). Oh, yeah... two views from Grubb-Ellis (hi ME). Kinda cool to see who's been here. I wish it could track a little more definitively (all AOL users are lumped together - no finer details unfortunately). Bummer... but what I've got is better than nothing.

I just want to warn you ahead of time that updates to this page may be pretty scant for the next couple of weeks as I am working on updating the look of this entire site. We shall see how it works.

On the rare occasion that I'm not listening to Lin Brehmer on the XRT Morning Show, I'm probably listening to Eric and Kathy on the Mix Morning Show. Funny stuff on there sometimes. For example, got this little doozy of a website. It's called HumanForSale.com and it's a survey that asks you questions about yourself (appearane, age, IQ, education, profession, etc.) and then sends you an e-mail telling you what you are worth should you ever put yourself up for sale. This is hilarious. Be careful, though, as there is a checkbox at the bottom asking if you are willing to receive e-mails from affiliated advertisers (say "NO!" - or just uncheck the box as it's automatically checked). I'm worth $1,979,950.00. I can handle that. It's above the average cost of all the males who have checked out the website. Works for me. Katie was worth about $1,941,540.00 - almost $300K more than the average female. Pretty cool. She's higher above the female average that I am above the male average. But, then you've got to consider the idiots out there who put in far-out figures that are way off the truth just to make themselves feel better. Well, we were honest in ours.

Many of you might remember the Grateful Dead song "Touch of Grey" which contains the line "every silver lining's got a touch of grey," right? It was pretty big in the late 80s and was the one and only time the Dead made a video for MTV (which, of course, resulted in Deadheads everywhere hating the song because it was a sellout). Well, the line is very true and, apparently, so is the reverse. Yes, I do mean "every touch of grey has a silver lining" or I guess it could be read "every grey lining has a touch of silver." I dunno... you get what I mean. The reason I mention this is because last month in Colombia, a bunch of rabid lottery players bet on the number 311 because it was the license plate of a car used as a car bomb by Marxist rebels just days before the lotto drawing. Each of them won the jackpot and took home their share of the pot - $350. Well, yesterday in New Jersey, a little over 14,000 people picked the number 587 in the New Jersey Pick Three. They all won the jackpot and took home their splite (only about $14 because there were so many people betting on it). The reason this is significant is because 587 is the flight number of the American Airlines 767 that crashed on Tuesday morning. Twisted friggin' people. However, according to lottery officials, many people pick numbers related to tragedies when they play the lottery. Alrighty then. I'll leave that one alone. Or maybe I'll play the lottery the next time something bad happens.

All the news that's fit to print (or, I should say, 'type')... aside from the announcement that Mark McGwire plans to retire effective immediately, a plane has crashed in New York City. No, this is not an acid-induced flashback to September 11. An American Airlines Boeing 767 has crashed in Queens. No word yet on whether or not it was hijacked. Some reports claim that the pilot was trying to bring the plane down in a wooded area, but missed. So if these reports are correct, then at least the pilot was in control of the plane to the end. We shall see how the day goes. I'll keep you posted as I figure things out.

Update 1: As it stands, eyewitnesses claim to have seen one of the engines from the 767 fall off while the plane was airborne. This engine thudded on top of a gas station which I don't believe exploded. But, two crash scenes have been confirmed by authorities. Immediately afterwards, the plane nosedived into a populated segment of Queens and four houses were set ablaze. The FBI has come in to investigate the scene believing that there was an explosion aboard the plane that caused the engine to detach. Also noteworthy is a report that claims the engine that fell off was the engine closest in proximity to the luggage compartment. So, of course, there is the idea circulating that there may have been a bomb in some of the luggage. Stay tuned to kapgar.com for more details. I'm quite the e-Rather or e-Brokaw, aren't I?x

This past Thursday, my Dad called me at work with the news that the younger of my two cats, Jinx, wasn't doing so well. Apparently, she has not been eating much lately and she's lost a lot of weight as a result. I went home after work on Thursday (my parent's home, that is) to visit with Jinx, and sure enough, she has lost a lot of weight. I laid down with her on the dining room floor just petting her for about a half hour. I was crying the entire time. Soaked her fur. The next morning, my Mom took her to the vet and he said that Jinx has what was known as hepatic lipodosis (sp?) which tends to result in anorexia in animals and she also had an abnormal growth on her abdomen which could be cancer. However, due to her age, the vet recommended against treating the cancer because it would just cause her too much additional pain. In one month's time, Jinx lost one quarter of her body weight. This morning, at 2:30 a.m., my parents called Katie and me to inform me that they were at the emergency animal hospital and that Jinx was going to have to be put to sleep. She was completely unresponsive, her eyes were dilated, and she had been sitting in the same spot on the floor for over ten hours with little to no movement whatsoever. I cried some more. She was my cat. She's the one that would hide in my room or sleep on my bed when she needed to escape. I love that cat. I miss her. But, I'm glad I had that little bit of final time with her on Thursday night. I hope you feel better Jinx... I love you.

It's alive... alive! Yes, you can now access this website through it's new domain at http://www.kapgar.com. Much simpler than the old name, I tell ya. Same look, though. I may have to work on that one. But not now.

Yes, I have loaded up the site with several of our honeymoon photos. The question is, has anyone actually been able to view them? Apparently, I have succeeded in surpassing my bandwidth restrictions available to me through my free account here on Geocities. For those of you who don't know what this means... there is a certain amount of memory allocated to you the websurfer to download photos, multimedia files, heck, even the pages themselves. No, each of you don't have your own alloted amount of memory. My website has a specified amount of memory available to all of you as a whole. Well, by loading all those photos on my website, my bandwidth has been massively exceeded and it results in my site being shut down to allow for the memory to restore itself. Have no fear, though, your fearless provider of Web trash (that's me) has gone ahead and reserved himself a URL. Woo hoo. I actually went ahead and did it. Got my own website. And my data transfer allocation has been bumped from a mere 3 GB per month to 20 GB. So that should allow you all the opportunity to look at these photos as much as your little hearts desire. The domain has not been officially registered yet as my order is still being processed. But, I should receive confirmation very soon and we'll run from there.

I've got some of our honeymoon photos up. It was a bit of a headache getting everything formatted properly, but it seems to have worked. The first batch is from our few days on Kauai. All these shots are from the digital camera and were taken primarily by Katie (I used my 35mm camera for most of the trip). Enjoy.

Here's a tidbit to get stoked about. When Katie, MaryEllen and I went to see Monsters, Inc. this past Friday night, we got to see some pretty cool trailers. The first was for Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone which I have no doubt will be an incredible flick. Yes, these trailers have been all over the theaters, television and internet for a while now, but this was a new one showing new scenes that I hadn't seen before. Second trailer was for Star Wars Episode II: The Attack of the Clones which wasn't too bad, but I'm still nervous about all the new SW stuff. So we shall see. The third one, and the one that got me going the most was the 20th anniversary re-release of E.T. the Extra Terrestrial. I love this movie and I can't wait to see what's been done to it. I could see some of the changes just in the trailer. There were more scenes of E.T. himself and you could tell they were digitized which does scare me a bit. I'm not sure how I feel about digital effects and characters being inserted into any movie. I know they're cheaper to do, but do they really help? I dunno. But, here's the best news... when the DVD of the E.T. re-release comes to stores, it will have both the new version and the original 1982 version of the movie on it. That rocks. I was worried we'd be stuck with only the new one much like the mistake they're making with the Star Wars films. Lucas needs to go back and release DVD versions of the original, non-digitally-enhanced, non-special-editions of the first three films. I, and every other SW oficionado, would die of joy if that happened. Not likely, but we can wish.x

So, did everyone out there enjoy Heart Attack Sunday as much as Katie and I did? First, with less than 36 seconds left in regulation, the Chicago Bears pull a miracle right out of their butts coming from behind 21-7 to tie the game and win with a miracle catch in overtime. We were at Katie's parents' house for a huge family dinner while that game was on and James Allens' hail mary reception in the endzone made the entire room erupt with cheers and yelling and jumping and all that other good stuff. It was incredible.

I must admit that one of my favorite features on this site is my "Darwinism Missed Me" file. It's so much fun to pick on dumbasses. On that note, here's another one for the file and the second addition to come from mine and Katie's alma NIU. According to police reports, a janitor on the 4th floor, B-wing of Douglas Hall found an envelope sitting in the hallway that contained a white powder. He immediately called the University Police who sent out their newly formed Critical Incident Response Team. They contained the area and decontaminated it all and then sent out the envelope for testing. Turned out the powder was ordinary baking flour. So, upon investigation, they discovered that a freshman [ed. note: name has been removed by request of this very same student] from that very same floor had been walking around throwing flour on people and saying it was anthrax. Needless to say, he was arrested and charged with aggravated battery which is punishable by two to five years in prison plus a $25,000 fine. He is being held on a $10,000 bond. Hello, boys and girls. Today's word is 'dipshit.' Can you say 'dipshit?'