Now I lay me down to sleep

While on a cruise a month ago, I discovered the delights of a duvet.  With that kind of bed covering, I found, I would no longer wake up with blankets and sheets wrapped around my neck after a night of unconscious thrashing. So, once home, I went to buy a duvet and found it wasn't all that easy. All I could find for sale were "duvet covers." After a lot of research, I learned that the inside of a duvet is called a comforter, which, after a series of contortions on the owner's part, will fit into the duvet cover. I wonder why the nomenclature is so strange. And if you think this is boring, a former colleague once wrote a 2,000-word article on a similar subject. (Just joking, Tim.)

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Perhaps feeling newly important because she was mentioned in The Boring File, Chloe the Cat broke down my bedroom door at 6 this morning and bounded into my bed, pushing her wet nose against my face. I patted her in the area where her brains should be.

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Answer to Saturday's puzzlement:  Minus-40 Celsius equals minus-40 Fahrenheit. (Heh.)

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I once ran six steps in the Boston Marathon.  Just wanted to get across the street.

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My wife has a cold and insists on using only  green-colored NyQuil. No matter how many times I point out that the ingredients in the generic drugstore version are exactly the same, she says that only the brand name works. Even stranger, she will not use cherry flavored NyQuil. Apparently she feels that unless taking a spoonful forces you to say, "AAAARGH, YUCKKKK,  that stuff tastes awful," it will not work.

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Memo to Leo Tolstoy: All families are dysfunctional.

Different strokes for different felines

After living with cats -- as many as six at a time -- for 30 years,  I have learned one thing: They all have different personalities, sometimes radically different. Take the current twosome who inhabit our house. Honey is a beauty, mostly Maine Coon I think, but she is a coward, at least in my presence. When I enter a room, she flies out of it (and "flies" is no exaggeration). Chloe, on the other hand, is of indeterminate breed, has a twisted tail and a hind leg of a different color than the rest of her. She rejoices at my presence and comes up to me to have her neck rubbed, purring like an Evinrude motor as I stroke the fur. The only problem is that she believes I exist solely to rub her neck and will not leave me alone until I hint strngly that her presence is no longer welcome -- by throwing her across the room, for instance. (Not really, although I've been tempted.) Both cats had nine traumatic months recently when my son moved in temporarily with his three cats, but that's a story for another day.

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Sign in front of a local church: "Give your troubles to God. He's up all night anyway."

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I mentioned a while back that I have several iPods. Well, I also have several pay-as-you-go cellphones -- 10 to be exact. This is truly odd because I never call anyone and no one ever calls me.

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The most exciting thing in today's newspapers was an ad for free shaving cream.