The Bedroom

About this site: Kat’s Den has been around in one form or another since around 1996. I originally created it to practice HTML coding and website design; although, given the state of the art of the HTML standard at that time, and my coding skills, the earliest incarnations were pretty horrid. Anyway, the first site was based on the idea of the site being analogous to a house… so the front page was the Foyer, recipes were found in the Kitchen, book reviews in the Library, pointless curmudgeonly rants on the Front Porch, and info about me in… the Bedroom.

In these days of Web 2.0 and beyond, the analogy starts to break down. There are still rants, and recipes, and book reviews; but now they’re amalgamated in a searchable index through the magic of WordPress. I suppose I could stretch the analogy and make it work, but I’m not sure it’s worth it. Considering the low traffic the site gets, probably not. The site is something of an anachronism these days; personal web sites are a thing of the past, after all, replaced by Twitter feeds and Facebook accounts.

About Me: This is where I tell you all my dirty little secrets. Prepare to be bored, because I really don’t have any. I’m a 52 year old white male living in Athens, Georgia. I’m about 6’1″, 220 pounds (thereabouts… varies widely, no pun intended), blue eyes, no hair. Well, some hair; but I’m a poster child for the Hair Club For Men. What I’ve got left is grey. I came to Athens in 1988 as a freshman at the University of Georgia, abortively pursuing a bachelor’s in Forest Resources/Wildlife Biology. Since then I have worked as a security guard, a police dispatcher, a police officer/Sheriff’s deputy, bomb squad technician, HazMat technician, law enforcement instructor, SWAT team member and assistant commander, and low voltage electrician; currently working in private security management. Life is funny, though, and every high has a corresponding low. For much of my life, I shared my experiences with two dogs:

Alex Deltoid was a 9 year old male mixed breed. No, he was not named for the dog in the beer commercial. He was named for two characters in A Clockwork Orange; namely the main character Alex and his guidance counselor, Mr. Deltoid. (“That was some nasty stuff on the carpet last night, yesss… your name was mentioned….”)

Anyway. He was a chow/Shepard/who knows what mix, rescued from the pound when he was a puppy. He developed an inoperable tumor early in 1999, at the age of 9, and had to be put to sleep. I still miss him, as did his adopted sibling…

Kublai Khan

Kublai was a 13 year old male mixed breed. He was named for a tiger living in the Ranthambore National Park in India; who was named for that guy that in Xanadu a stately pleasure dome did decree. His mother was chow/shepherd mix; his father was Son Of A Champion Fence Jumper with some collie in there somewhere. He was adopted from an unexpected litter. He passed away in 2006 after an illness.

Booker and Elizabeth

Never really been a cat person, but walked out onto the front porch of the house I was living in in 2013 and heard a loud meowing. The area around the house

was full of feral cats, none of which would approach a person but kept having litters nearby with distressingly high mortality rates. I removed at least one litter that died in the crawlspace under the house.

When I turned around that day, there were two kittens; one meowing loudly at me (the bigger one), and one at least two months younger that was shy but wouldn’t leave the first. We named the bigger one Booker and the smaller Elizabeth and provided them with food and water while we wondered if we really wanted cats. Of course, at that point, it was too late.

Booker got run over in front of the house before we had made up our mind to keep them… so Elizabeth became an indoor cat. I think she’s still half feral sometimes.  She’s still with us and we’re still waiting for her to get to the lazy sleep all day stage of cat-ness.

But that’s not the only person I met in 2013. Matthew Killion and I were introduced in 2013, and soon started dating… and in 2014, I proposed. Same sex marriage wasn’t legal in Georgia then, but in 2015 we were officially married. Matt is the first person I dated who I felt I would gladly spend the rest of my life with, and can’t imagine a time without him.

That’s about it. If you’re still interested in knowing more, use the menu there to search post tags to look at my hobbies, or Pictures of me in action, or really bore yourself watching me do nothing on the WebCams… or mail me at katmandu@katsden.net and ask.