Meet the Family: Sam

The youngest of our cats.

Sam

Sam was presumably born in Rochester, NY in 2004. My wife wanted a third cat. I didn't. She got one anyway. She picked him up at a shelter. While I wasn't happy with her trampling over me in her need to get a head start on becoming a crazy cat lady once I'm dead, Sam quickly wormed his way into my heart.

Sam remains the smallest of our cats, giving him the appearance of still being a kitten. Sam (named for director Sam Raimi) isn't a lap cat. The few times he's jumped in someone's lap, he's just looked confused about the situation and jumped back down. Sam is a shoulder cat. When he wants to get attention, he jumps up the front of people. Hopefully, they are expecting them. It can be startling to suddenly have a little orange fury face appear in front of yours. The jump also involves a moment of him scaling a person's chest like he's Spiderman. At our heights (6' in my case, 5'10" in my wife's), my wife and I have to catch him in our arms to keep him from falling back down. Sam gives a hurt look if he drops back down because we're not expecting him.

Even when he cuddles up to my wife at night to sleep, he has to curl around her head. He loves being around that area of the body, it's not just him enjoying being up high.

Meet the Family: Spike

Here's the Jan to Sebastian's Marcia Brady.

Spike

Spike was presumably born in Buffalo, NY in 2001. Our friend Bob found him and a pair of litter-mates that had been abandoned in a box. Spike's sister had medical problems from the start and after investing in her health care, Bob opted to keep her. Spike came to live with us and his brother went to another home. Sebastian was mortified upon Spike's arrival. I've never seen a cat show such a look of concern, betrayal, anguish, etc. Sebastian's eyes went so huge that he looked like one of those big-eyed animal paintings.

Spike had an attitude from the start. It earned him his name right off the bat. Yes... he's named after William the Bloody. Despite not being anywhere near as large as Sebastian, Spike tends to be boss of the house. I think it may be because Sebastian is so easy going. The times that push has really come to shove, Sebastian has shown himself to be the guy who picks his battles and wins the ones that matter.

Spike has a thing about attacking people who sneeze (especially me). I think he perceives it as a threatening hiss. He's also the reason that the veterinarian comes to our house with a team armed with leather gloves up to their elbows (and the reason why the vet chooses to make us a house-call). Spike has been known to use anything he can as a weapon against vets... including feces. His aggression definitely is based in fear. Spike is totally the model for Yoda's speech about Fear leading to the dark side in Phantom Menace.

Spike, like his sister, has chronic health issues. His immune system can kick into overdrive during periods of stress. His lips swell up, his breath gets raunchy, his fur coat gets lackluster and he becomes lethargic. It has taken cortisone and occasionally shots of actual gold into his bloodstream to bring him out of it. The problem as decreased over time, but meant a good deal of time in an animal hospital when he was young (hence his hatred of vets). Below are pics of Spike displaying the swollen lips symptom and of him following an operation to remove part of his paw padding that had become infected due to cracks forming in the padding (another symptom of his chronic problems).

Meet the Family: Sebastian

Here's the eldest of our pets.

Sebastian

Sebastian was born in Albion, NY in 1999. His parents were barn cats. He had about 6 weeks as a barn cat himself before we adopted him and he's led a life of leisure ever since. Sebastian has a weight problem. He's currently been on a diet for half a year...and still seems to be gaining weight somehow. I have no idea how he does it.

He is a sweet cat, but his hygiene suffers due to his obesity. This makes him our smelly cat as well. So, while he's the most likely to jump into guest's lap during a visit, he's also likely to get pushed away thanks to the combination of his weight squeezing off blood flow to their legs and the stench coming from his unreachable nethers.

He apparently also has the psychic ability to tell that I'm thinking about him, as he has just now come downstairs to punish me with his crushing bulk. His aroma de cat poop seems less this morning, so one of our other two cats must have taken pity on him and given him a bath this morning.

Here's a pair of photos of Sebastian and I playing together. The camera scared him.

Meet the Family: Elijah

This is Elijah.




Coming March 2009 to a maternity ward near us.

So far, his hobbies include kicking his mother in the stomach, sleeping and eating through a fleshy tube that runs straight to his tummy. We were pretty sure the next baby was going to be a girl and he surprised us when we got the ultrasound a few weeks back. I wonder if he will continue to pull surprises out here in the world outside the womb.

My wife wouldn't let me name him Milo or Pugsly. She spoils all my fun.

Meet the Family: Kyra

This is our daughter Kyra.

This is also Kyra.

She can go from Shirley Temple to Wednesday Addams in an eighth of a second. Most times she's in between the two, playing with her Cenobite action figures and her My Little Ponies (though most recently she's been on Star Wars kick). She's precocious as heck and one of the most out-going preschoolers you'll meet. She also shows definite signs of a being a blossoming horror fan herself. At age one she giggled at people in monster costumes at a horror movie convention we brought her to. The same year she was terrified upon meeting Santa Claus. She wakes up and tells us she had nice dreams about monsters, yet has woken up yelling because episodes of Dora the Explorer and Go, Diego, Go! have worried her (the episodes where animals are in peril due to water seem to be the ones bothering her).

Her favorite monster currently is Frankenstein's monster. She fell in love with him after watching Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein and The Monster Squad. She also shares her daddy's affinity for Scooby Doo. She also shows an increasing interest in music and will hopefully take after her mother in that regard (her daddy is tone-deaf).

Kyra also has an active imagination and a wonderful sense of humor. For example: When I informed her that we were having stuffed zucchini for dinner tonight, her response was to tell me she couldn't eat it because a ghost had pooped on the food. How can I argue with that? I have no conclusive means disproving the presence of invisible phantom dung!

Kyra is named after Kyra Schon, who played the role of Karen Cooper in Night of the Living Dead (1968) (hence the masonry trowel in the second picture above). So far, she's happy with the association and excitedly points out the iconic image of Kyra Schon whenever it is present on a poster, T-shirt, DVD case, etc.

The first three months of her life, I was a stay-at-home dad before she was placed in daycare so I could take a job that ate up all my time and had me as a slave to a Blackberry device 24/7 365 (even on vacation/holiday/whatever). After going through a couple of years of my job making everyone in our family miserable, we looked at the figures and realized that with us planning on having a second child, the job that demanded so much of my time was barely worth it if we had to pay for daycare for two kids. I left my job in April, 2008. Just a bit shy of 3 years old, Kyra had her daddy back. It's been an experience for both of us over the past seven months.

Kyra is very excited about becoming a big sister next year.

Meet the Family: Kristy

This is my beautiful wife Kristy.

Unlike me, she has skills that are practical and that are more easily put to use. Currently, she's the bread winner in the family. Kristy is awesome with tools and built the shelves in the photo above in an attempt to get our movie collection under control.

Kristy and I met in 1997. We were fixed up by my dad, who had been her Sunday school teacher. See what happens when you send your daughters to church? They wind up married to creepy freaks like me. Speaking of which, we've been married since 2002. She's put up with 11 years of my crap and still hasn't run screaming for the hills, so I guess she's here to stay. How many women would put with their husband owning an actual coffin (I sold the second one I had) and mucking up the kitchen with stinky liquid latex, fake blood and other FX nastiness?

Besides making enough of living to support her husband staying at home to provide childcare and her abilities in DIY home improvements, Kristy is also musically inclined. She plays piano mostly, but I've lost count of the musical instruments in her collection. Luckily for me she also has an appreciation for horror movies and literature as well as enjoying taking trips to odd creepy locations with me, such as the time we spent the night in the Lizzie Borden house.

We have been parents since 2005 and are expecting another child in March of 2009.

Meet the Family: Tom G

Hi, I'm Tom G.

I've been a fan of all things dark and macabre as long as I remember (which would be age 4). My initial influences were episodes of Scooby Doo, Kolchak: The Night Stalker and William Castle's movie House on Haunted Hill. At age 16 I had my first date with George A. Romero's horror classic Night of the Living Dead and it was love at first sight. At the same age I also developed another apparently life-long obsession besides Romero's film: the works of authors John Skipp and Craig Spector (both together and separately).


Horror and Halloween are pretty much a lifestyle for me. It is in my movies, music, games, books, etc. Over the course of more than a decade, my wife has managed to get me to buy a few normal shirts so that not everything I wear has a horror movie image or rock group on it.

My brain catches and holds odd little macabre facts the way some guys can memorize sports statistics and everything there is to know about cars. In recent years, I've been able to put this odd quirk to good use finally as co-creator of the Dark Destinations database at TheCabinet.com. It is an on-line guide to all places spooky, horrific and macabre around the world and it is part of one of my favorite web sites. Started in 1994, The Cabinet is one of the oldest horror sites on the Internet. It went on hiatus from 2001 through 2006 and I was honored to be part of its comeback. I've always been a fan of its all-inclusive approach to horror, rather than yet another site focusing on just movies.

2001 is also a significant year for me in that I got my first taste of indie film-making while playing a minor character (basically an extra with a bit of dialogue) and doing some other minor behind-the-camera work for my friend Curt Markham's feature length micro-budget movie Curse the Darkness. After being invited to be a part of the production of a short film for a 48 Hour Film Festival. After those two experiences I had the bug. In 2003, Spinning Grave Productions was formed by a number of friends and myself. In the time since, its members have made a number of twisted comedy shorts. In 2008, I once again had the chance to work on one of Curt Markham's features. This time I got to dabble in making my own latex prosthetics. It is definitely something I will doing more of in the future.