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While making my daily Wal-Mart run, I was cruising through the parking lot when I came upon a large van that was slowly pulling into the yellow-lined NO PARKING zone at the end of one of the parking aisles. A quick once over told me that this was not a handicapped vehicle in any way and had even less business parking in this yellow-lined zone than most of the asshats who regularly do. Given my recent ire at such folk, I decided to stop and give this person the stink eye, full bore.

I pulled around the van into the next parking aisle and brought my car to a halt behind the legally parked car in the first space there. I then stared through my side window and through the van's windshield at the woman behind the wheel, giving her my very best expression that said, "Really? REALLY? You're really gonna park there where you know you damn well shouldn't? You're truly so lazy that you can't walk from B.F.E. like the rest of us?"

The woman looked back at me, but didn't appear at all ashamed of her behavior. Moreover, she seemed annoyed. I gave my glare of doom another five long seconds and then motored on out to B.F.E.

By the time I returned to the end of the aisle, I was already kicking myself mentally for not printing out some tickets from YouParkLikeAnAsshole.com. Only when I reached the van, I found it was no longer parked in the yellow-lined zone but was now in the first available space on my aisle, the very one I'd stopped behind to glare at the driver. Doing the math, by stopping to glare at her I was probably blocking the vehicle in the legitimate space that was attempting to back out, making way for the woman in the van to park there.

Oops.

Guess I'm the asshat.

I like a good beer.

Barring a good beer, I'll drink whatever--particularly if it's cheap. This is why I've come to develop a taste for Foster's BIG ASS can o' lager. It's 25.4 oz of AustralCanadian goodness that comes in is around 8 cents per ounce, which is far better than almost any other beer on the aisle, outside of a "forty." Plus, it's a really good single serving of beer--more than your average can, but not enough to make you do things best reserved for Will Ferrell movies.

While visiting Wally World this weekend, I picked up a Fosters Big Ass straight out of the cooler. I put it in the cart with the rest of our groceries.

When the wife and I were checking out at the express lane, our checkout clerk rang it up then paused at the klaxon alarm telling her to check my ID. She offered to ignore the register's request, but then took my birth date off my ID when I passed it to her anyway. The clerk started to put the beer into a bag with other groceries, then paused and looked up at me as though she'd done something impolite.

"Oh, do you want this left out?" she asked.

Now, I've been asked this about purchases before, but it's always been for things like candy or gum that I might want to partake of before getting home. I've never EVER been asked if I'd like my cold beer "left out" in case I'd like to drink it on the road. The wife and I were floored.

"Uh, no," the wife said in an astounded tone.

"No, no, thanks, that's okay," I said.

"Ohhh," the clerk said, an explanation dawning on her. Then, as though parroting a catchphrase she didn't particularly find amusing or realistic, she kind of rolled her eyes and said, "Don't drink and driiiive."

Wow.

At 3 a.m., Monday morning, I was awakened by a whimper from Sadie. It was the usual whimper she gives off when she has to "go potty" and isn't going to be able to go back to sleep until she does. I waited and tried to snooze, hoping I was wrong.

Moments later, my peace was disturbed again, this time by a cold dog nose thrust into my face from the side of the bed, followed by another plaintive whimper.

"Whadayuwant?" I said.

*whine*

"Youhavtagopotty?"

*WHINE!*

I got up, put on my robe and slippers and went out to water the dog. Avie Kitty heard us and got up to see what we were doing--cause damn if the dog gets to go outside and she doesn't. Turned out she was hungry, so I fed her and gave Sadie a dog cookie to keep her quiet and then tried to get everyone back to bed before this hour-of-the-wolf trek turned into a fit of insomnia for me.

About half an hour later I was lying in bed still pretty much awake, but I could feel myself drifting toward slumber. Then I heard something that caused my eyes to pop open and my ears to perk up. Elsewhere in the house, I heard the distinctive sound of plastic sheeting being disturbed. In fact, it sounded exactly like two footsteps being taken across plastic sheeting. Now, the plastic sheeting part was explainable because we still had one section of drop-cloth sheeting affixed to the wall and another lying unattached in the middle of the living room, left over from our weekend painting project. (And, YES, hippies, I did buy the biodegradable kind of plastic sheeting which I'm pretty sure is made of high-fructose corn syrup, or some such.) The real trouble with hearing two footprints on plastic sheeting is that my wife was asleep in bed beside me, the cat was asleep on my chest and the dog was snoring away on her giant pillow by the bed. The only other pet in the house was a fish. This meant that I'd either dreamed I'd heard footsteps on the plastic or something or someone else had made them.

Er.

I slid out of the covers and retrieved my brainin' stick from beside the bed. At no point did it strike me as wise to wake my wife, even though I was potentially about to do battle with another human being. I went to the bedroom door and debated the merits of turning on the hall light. On the one hand, it might expose a prowler prowling in the hall; on the other, it would also blind me. Instead, I crept into the hall, through the dark and made it to the foyer. There, I reached around the corner of the arched entryway into the living room, where the sheeting was located. Keeping the wall between me and the hanging lamp, I flipped the light switch. There was no movement to be heard so I peeked around the corner. No one was there.

Great, so if there was a prowler, they A) were elsewhere in the house, and B) now knew I was looking for them and where I was. The fortunate part of this, though, was that because of the painting project we had enough furniture scattered in obvious walkways that if they tried to escape or run to attack me they would be unable to keep from running into it, alerting me to their location. I heard nothing.

I moved through the living room and into the kitchen. No one was there.

I checked the garage door. Still locked.

I circled back into the den where I checked the back door, also locked, and returned to the foyer, where prowlers still weren't visibly prowling and where the front door was similarly locked. Then, after searching all the other obvious places for a couple of minutes, I decided to file the whole thing away as misheard leaf noise from a deer outside, otherwise I'd never be able to return to sleep.

At nearly 7a, I woke to find the wife up and about, readying for work.

"I heard an odd noise at 3:30," I told her. I then explained about the plastic footsteps.

"Huh," she said in a tone that suggested I'd provided a clue to a mystery she was working on. "Well, there is an odd poo in the hallway. Maybe we have a mouse."

A mouse, I thought. Yeah, that made sense. It was getting close to winter, the time for all good mice to try and get indoors. Only when I finally got a look at the odd poo in question, I saw that it was far too large a poo to have come from the ass of an average mouse. No, this was a poo of a different creature and the wife and I both began to audibly hope we didn't have a rat on our hands. The wife didn't think there was any way for a rat to get into the house, but I pointed out it would have been easy enough for it to get into the garage on one of the many days we'd left the door open, and from there it was only a matter of sneaking in the interior door when we weren't looking. She didn't like this theory. We didn't need any more troublesome furry creatures in our lives. We already had two.

"All right, kitty," I told Avie, who was already engaged in her daily ritual of knocking important things off the table for the dog to chew up. "Time to step up to the plate."

A little after breakfast, the cat and dog tired of their games and thankfully both went to sleep. So I crept out of the den and toward the office to check email.

As I entered our freshly-painted hallway, I spied, seated in the middle of the hallway, the creator of the aforementioned poo and knew that it had also definitely been the source of the noise on the plastic sheeting.

It was not a rat.

It was not a mouse.

It was, instead, a small frog.

When I saw it, I laughed out loud, then caught myself, lest I wake the animals and cause a frog-squashing stampede. I scooped him into a coffee cup and then deposited him in the flower bed out back, near a gap where he could hide under the deck and bed down for the winter.

Yep, a frog hopping through the living room could conceivably have made two leaps across the plastic at about the rate footsteps would take. Still not sure how a frog got into the house.

Maybe the rats let him in.

If you're a homeowner, you're more than likely an asshole. Or, you will become an asshole as soon as your home passes into the ownership of someone else.

Let me back up.

The wife and I have more or less finished up the painting project we embarked upon on a whim last week. In fact, we were so happy with the results that the project expanded in scope and we have now extended the color from below the chair rail of the living room, into the foyer and all the way down our main hallway. So now much of the house looks really nice and warm and Autumnal in a way that the coat of white paint that we're pretty sure was slapped on by a team of color-blind rhesus monkeys, hired by one of the previous sets of owners, working in the dark, and applied using only one-quarter monkey-ass-power, did not.

Yes indeedy, we have long since considered the previous owners of this home to be assholes for a variety of good reasons, but seeing the truly incompetent paint job they left behind convinced us of their assholity. It was clearly done very quickly with little attention to detail and an obvious lack of care. It's the kind of thing you expect from a couple of people who know they're only going to be in a home for a limited time--say, a year--and just want to put a good whitewash on the whole thing so some rube might be fooled long enough to buy it. If only they'd also managed to whitewash the horrid shade of salmon they threw up with even less care in the master bath. (I also take deep issue with the sink top that's nearly an inch too wide for the hall bathroom, which forced some previous asshole owner to sawsall a long slot into the drywall in order to wedge it in anyway, when a lot of time, effort and seam putty could have been saved had someone first thought to MEASURE THE EFFING ROOM! But I digress...)

The trouble with crying asshole at someone else, though, is that it's very easy to do during the painting job itself, when you are first noticing all the unforgivable flaws in the previous guy's work. Yep, when you're down at the baseboard seeing all the places where previous painters have spilled white paint onto the wood, or allowed thick drips of paint to travel down the length of a wall and dry, or left fragments of painter's tape behind, it's real easy to cry "asshole."

It is also very easy to continue crying asshole during the cleanup process, when noticing the white paint splotches that appear beneath your own painters tape, which you'll have to scrape off, etc.

When it becomes a problem to cry asshole is that after putting in an entire weekend to paint a coat of pumpkinish colored paint across much of your interior wall surface, you look around at the kind of flaws in the previous painters' work and realize how closely they resemble the left over flaws in your own, such as the splotches of pumpkin on the white hall ceiling. Magnifying this realization is the fact that the flaws in your work are not limited to the current painting project, but to all painting projects past, such as those forest green splotches accidentally rollered onto the white ceiling of the bedroom that you fully intended to paint over with a bit of primer back in April.

That's when you realize that there's a real long half-life to not only most home-improvement accidents, but also to the good intentions people have at fixing them. After so many days, weeks and months go by, you look around and realize that no one has died because you never went back and touched up your mistakes and furthermore no one has noticed. In fact, you'd really have be looking for mistakes before you'd notice most of it. And who does that?

Now that I've realized I'm the asshole, it's become my resolution of the week to repair my future reputation with our home's future owners, and go around and fix all my crappy work.

And I'm gonna use my whole ass, this time.

Since Obama won, we decided to paint the living room.

Not really, but I thought it sounded nicer than "We got a wild hair up our ass and decided to paint the living room."

We've been considering painting at least a wall of the living room for some time, as plain old eggshell just didn't seem all that great to us. Adding to the problem is that the living room has a massively high angled ceiling that I didn't relish the thought of having to set up scaffolding or climb up and down a ladder to paint walls that high. However, the room also has a chair rail, giving us the excuse of painting only the section of wall beneath the chair rail, saving a lot of time and labor. That decided, we mulled on the color until we noticed one of our pictures by the front door had a very nice pumpkiny sort of shade to it that went very well with all the wood in the room.

An hour and one trip to Lowes later, we had plastic down, baseboard blue-taped and were slapping on a first coat.

Of course, having two animals in the house gave us pause in this. It seemed pretty likely that Sadie Dog wouldn't be able to resist coming onto the drop sheet and pulling the tape off the wall, or poking holes in it with her claws. And after half an hour of not doing this, she finally gave in and tried it, forcing us to baby-gate her in the back part of the house. Avie Kitty was not to be stopped by a mere baby gate and had fun playing across the plastic. She wasn't heavy enough to mess with the tape, so we left her alone. However, during one burst of kitty energy, she did run through the paint tray and get it all over her feet and tail. The wife managed to grab her before she could run onto the carpet. Then, in my attempt to wash the cat's feet off, I drug her through a patch of paint on my shirt and got it on her back.

One complete kitten bath later, and we called it an evening.

Just vote, damn you.

That is all.

The wife's birthday was yesterday.

As I've learned from long experience in my nearly nine years of marriage, it's difficult to surprise the wife when it comes to her birthday. She pesters me for hints and if I give her any she can pull the reality of the gift from the air no matter how cryptic or perfectly crafted those hints may be. My policy for the past couple of years is to keep my damn mouth shut and it has served me well.

Back early in the month, I began pondering what to get her. She could use a new laptop, but I've been holding off on buying one until A) all the crap gets shaken out of Vista; or, B) the economy improves enough that we can take out a second mortgage in order to buy a MacBook. She's already told me not to buy her one, though, cause she has her computer at work and doesn't need mine so much. The other thing I've been meaning to get her is another hammock chair.

Before we married, the wife owned a truly high-quality hammock chair, the kind that can be hung from a tree or other support and just cradles you up like a baby. You set that thing up in a shady spot on a nice warm day with a gentle breeze and you're headed for Nap City quick.
Trouble is, her original one got clipped with a weed eater by the hillbillies our old landlord hired to do the lawn, causing it to come unraveled. And before we even had a chance to get off our butts and repair it, several years had suddenly passed and the chair hung there beneath the old deck until it was rotted away by the elements. We finally threw it out before we moved to Borderland.

We had talked of buying a new one, as we already had a perfect place for it at the new house. The back yard came equipped with a wooden swing setup that boasts a space for a bench swing (which the house came with) and a single child's swing (which it didn't). The child's swing space would easily accommodate a hammock swing. After a bit of research, (which I had to do because I couldn't remember the company she'd ordered the first one from ten years ago) I ordered one that looked exactly like her old one. I was pretty sure I'd be at home when it was delivered and could hide it among the many cardboard boxes that have been piling up in our garage waiting to be recycled. She'd never be the wiser.

Last week, at 7:30 in the morning, UPS phoned to ask directions to our house. The wife answered it.

"You must have a UPS package arriving," she said after hanging up.

"Yep."

"Is it a birthday present for me?" she asked.

"That is information you may not know," I said.

She pestered me for hints, but I couldn't come up with one that I thought she wouldn't see right through.

By the time I had to leave for a multi-hour out of town trip, UPS had still not arrived, so I had to leave assuming she'd at least see the box waiting at the door when she arrived home. She'd probably note the company it came from and know immediately the contents and UPS would once again have ruined my plans.

There was indeed a box leaned up against the long window beside our front door when I came home, but the wife had entered through the garage and had not noticed it. I hid it and went to bed. She bugged me for hints over the next few days, but I gave her none.

Yesterday, after the wife left, I installed the hammock chair in its place in the swing housing. I tested it out and it seemed plenty solid and of as high a quality as the last one.

At noon, I popped over to the wife's clinic for her surprise party, thrown by her coworkers. While there, she asked about her present, but I told her she'd have to wait until she got home. I told her she'd notice it right away.

"Is it a new light for the dining room? Did you already put it up?" she beamed.

I shrugged.

"C'mon! If I guess it you have to tell me."

"Well, ya haven't guessed it," I said. "However, it does hang." And with that, I left the building before she could drag anything else out of me.

She didn't guess it. In fact, when the wife came home, she immediately saw the hammock chair in the headlights from her car and thought, "Oh, he finally put up my hammock chair," before remembering we'd thrown the old one away. She immediately went out and sat in it, despite the chill.

"Sorry," I said. "Not really a great gift for this time of year, I guess. It was warmer when I ordered it."

"Nope. It's perfect," she said.

Funny dogshit story...

A while back, during one of our semi-daily visits to Wally World, I happened to notice some asshat had parked his car across two spaces in Wal-Mart's parking lot. I'm not saying he was double-parked, as that would imply that he had attempted to park in one space, but missed. No, this butt-grape in humanity's cornhole was parked almost perpendicular to the intended direction in which his vehicle was supposed to be facing, across two whole spaces. His was an expensive sports-car of the kind I don't even lust after because I just can't be bothered to come down from my practical car pedestal to give a damn. It was a car so far off my radar that I don't even know the manufacturer. My instantly formulated mental theory was that this driving gallstone had parked his swankmobile in that fashion to avoid any incidents with wandering bands of door-ding gnomes. And that remains my theory.

"That guy REALLY needs his car keyed," I said as the wife and I walked past. For the record, I've never keyed anyone's car, nor have I ever had any particular desire to key a car until that very moment. But dammit, I wanted to key this one! I don't think I could have even quantified WHY I wanted to key his car at that moment. I can't even say I'm coming from a place of concern for the legality of it or even for common courtesy. I think what galls me most is that parking that particular car in that particular manner says in a very loud voice to everyone around MY CAR IS BETTER THAN YOUR CAR AND I DON'T TRUST YOU NOT TO DAMAGE IT WHILE I'M BUYING THE SAME CRAP YOU'RE GOING TO BUY IN WAL-MART SO I'M GONNA PARK LIKE AN ASSHOLE.

Upon hearing my declaration of ill will toward the owner of the car, my wife gave me a very dirty look, but otherwise kept quiet. And, being an adult, I refrained from actually keying the ever-loving shit out of it.

On our way back, following our shopping, the car was still there, still parked like an asshole.

"God, I really want to key that guy's car!" I said.

The wife, having had enough of my attitude, told me that I needed to calm down. I countered that this guy was clearly begging to be keyed by parking like an asshole. I would even lay money that he was a horrible human being who really deserved it. He probably kicks puppies and everything. The wife then countered my counter by noting that I was getting really worked up over something very very minor--just like my father does. I got real quiet at that, because my only defense would be to say, "Nuh uhh!" I dropped the subject, opting to seethe quietly.

Jump ahead a week.

The wife and I went out for Blizzards one evening. We took Sadie Mac with us, cause the dog likes Blizzards, too. After Blizzards, we were on the way home and realized we hadn't made our daily stop by Wally World again. Before we could even enter the parking lot, though, Sadie began whining to go "potty." We hadn't brought a leash, so instead we wrapped a length of audio cable through her collar and tried to let her do her business in a grassy area near the lot. Nothing. There were far too many fascinating sniffs to be sniffed there, and Sadie refused to potty. I decided maybe she'd been fibbing, so we parked the car and left her in it.

On our way out of Wally World, some twenty minutes later, we were just entering the parking lot when I saw a P.O.S. Primermobile parked in the middle of a lined off yellow zone at the start of the parking row. This, as every single human being on the planet is fully aware, is a no parking zone due to its proximity to the handicapped space right beside it and is only there to allow handicapped vehicles with wheelchair lifts room for them to be accessed. I was instantly infuriated at the sight of this vehicle parked illegally and opportunistically and started to say something vengeful about it before thinking better. Wouldn't do anyone any good to have any more behavioral accusations of a parental variety lobbed about. However, I did catch her catching me as I noticed the car and saw the look of `Here we go again' cross her face.

When we reached our car and opened the door, we were hit by the revolting smell of dog feces. Yep, Sadie had not been fibbing about needing to poop nor had she been able to hold it and had deposited a gigantic steaming pile on page 6 of a copy of the wife's employment contract.

"Oh, that's awful," the wife said, climbing into the passenger seat.

"What do we do?" I asked.

"What do you mean, `what do we do?' We go home," the wife said.

"We go home? You want to drive home with this?"

"No, but what else are we going to do with it?" she asked.

We then shared a glance which instantly communicated a very satisfying option of what to do with it: which was to hurl the big, honking, P.O.S. on to the P.O.S. The wife and I both began cackling with evil glee at this perfect anonymous revenge against asshattery. Then I started the car and drove home, pile of shite still steaming away in the back floor. God, I hate having to be an adult.

Jump ahead another few weeks.

The wife had to go in to work on a Saturday for Pap-O-polooza, a day of free medical screenings for "women's health issues" that had, like, 165 ladies sign up. ("Wow, that's gonna be paptastic!" I said upon hearing of it.) So the wife left early, I arose, fed Avie her canned food/dry food mix and had to listen to Sadie's whining cause she wanted canned food too. That's when I realized that other than a spoonful of kitten food here and there, poor Sadie's probably never had canned dog food in her entire life. How awful. That's like me not having pizza or Indian food. Being a Saturday, I decided that it would be a nice thing to take Sadie out to breakfast. First we'd pop by the grocery store to pick her up some canned food, then I'd pop over to Biscuit World where I'd order up my usual Duke and eat breakfast with her out in the parking lot. (The Duke, by the way, is one of the great fast-food-breakfast culinary experiences on the planet, right up there with breakfast tacos at Juan in a Million in Austin. It's a thing of wonderment as big as your head and twice as tasty! You people who live outside of WV, KY or OH truly do not know what you're missing out on, unless you've sampled one on your way through said states, in which case you're to be pitied even moreso because you can never truly experience real breakfast satisfaction again.)

(What did you say? No! Take it back! You're grandmother does NOT make better biscuits than these! No, she does not. Only my mother-in-law makes better biscuits, but she can feel the hot breath of Biscuit World down the back of her neck each time she does--they're that close!)

On my way to Biscuit world Sadie began whining to "go potty" and seemed pretty serious about it when asked for confirmation. (She'd made such claims at the house earlier, but no amount of walking her around the yard produced any results, so I'd branded her a "dog liar" and gone about my day.) I quickly whipped onto a lesser road off the main highway to let her poop, once again having to use the audio cable threaded around her collar. I walked her up and down the side of the road for several minutes waiting for her to do her business, but it appeared she was still a big fat dog liar with pants CONSTANTLY on fire! With no leash and no can opener, it seemed a dicey prospect that we'd be able to have a peaceful breakfast in the parking lot of Biscuit World. In fact, if I even continued on to Biscuit World at all, I'd have to deal with Sadie begging for my Duke the whole way home. So I switched to Plan B, which was to head to Wally World, pick up some canned food and some breakfasty things for me that would never approximate the tasty power of the Duke, but would be good all the same.

In Wally World's parking lot, I left the dog in the car knowing that there was a very good chance she would poop in it while I was gone. As I approached the front doors, I noticed there was a car once again parked in the yellow lined zone at the front of the parking lot--in the exact nonspace the POS car had been parked in before. The car parked there was not the POS, but was instead the expensive sports car I had wanted to key weeks back! Dammit, that asshole was determined not to get door dinged by any means necessary and was still BEGGING to be keyed!!! At that moment, I hoped the dog did shit in the car, cause I would have picked it up with my bare hands if it meant I could drive by and lob it across that guy's windshield, or hurl it into an air-intake. Sure, Wally World's many cameras would probably record me doing it, as well as my license plate number, and I'd be hauled off to prison, but I was pretty sure it was worth a criminal record if I just got to fling some shit, monkey-style.

I stewed on this while shopping inside and even took my time about it to give Sadie plenty of opportunity for pooping. Perhaps fortunately, when I returned to the car, Sadie remained constipated, my car remained poo free and I remained a reluctant adult.

Just read over at Ain't It Cool News that 20th Century Fox is looking to make a big screen adaptation of my favorite kids book ever, Walter the Farting Dog and are hoping to get the Farrelly Brothers to direct it.

That sounds pretty perfect.

However, the not-so-perfect-sounding part is that the script for this film is by the guys who wrote Evan Almighty and Daddy Day Camp. (Mmmm... Daddy Day Camp.)

Oh, and Fox is somehow looking to use the film as a vehicle for the Jonas Brothers. As long as they get farted on a lot, I guess even that would be okay.

Find all of Variety’s story on the matter here.

We quickly discovered that despite not having had the best treatment in her old home, the new little kitty was pretty sweet. She jumped right into rhythm with the inlaws household, learning litterbox skills in record time before moving on to master such concepts as being playful, energetic and obnoxiously cute. This was a good thing, because the cat was going to be there for a while.

One of the first things I did after rescuing the kitten was to find out how long it takes for the vaccinations against panleukopenia to take effect. It's not a one shot process, but actually takes three different sessions of shots spaced three weeks apart to be fully immune to PL and lots of other nasty kitty diseases. (The vets in Ma's town and mine back home did indicate the kitty would be pretty much safe a day or two after her second round of shots, provided we did eventually get her third round done, but we were still looking at at least 6 weeks quarantine at Ma's house.) Ma was willing to keep the kitty for as long as it took, but we warned her that after 6 weeks she wasn't going to want to give the kitty up. She assured us that she'd be fine.

The only thing left we needed to do was come up with a name for our new pet. That was when I realized exactly which raccoon-eyed celebrity the kitten resembled. I had initially thought her dark eyes made her look like Kate Moss (as did one of our commenters), but decided there was actually an even better fit. After musing on it a bit longer and doing an image search on the internet, I found the precise candidate: Avril Lavigne. It was uncanny, down to the eye color. I already have something of a history of naming pets one thing and then calling them something else. My first dog was named Luke, but we called him Boo. My first cat was named Boots but we called him Bay. My longest-lived cat was named Winston Churchill: The Infinitely Bad Kitty, but we called her "cat" or "the kitty" or "Maowey" or "Itsy bitsy" or "hey, cat!" most of the time. So it made sense to me to have a cat named Avril that we would refer to only as "Avie." And thus she found her name.

The following weekend, we returned to North Carolina on other family business, but I tagged along to get to see my kitty again. A week had made an enormous difference in Avie's appearance. No longer was she skinny and waif-like. In Ma's care, she had become a well-fed and healthy little thing who no longer wolfed down her food, but ate normally. She was playful and energetic and funny. Everyone loved her, including my father-in-law, a man notoriously uninterested in cats who suddenly became very mindful of when Avie seemed hungry, laughed harder than anyone at her antics, and who gave her a a tiny stuffed dog he'd found to use as a toy. No more was she banished to the back porch come bedtime. Avie now had the run of the house and often slept on the foot of their bed.

After seven weeks, we decided it was probably safe for Avie to come home. On my way back from a trip to Missouri (about which I'll soon be writing), I flew into Charlotte and then drove over to the Hickory area to stay with Ma & Pa for a nite and pick up the kitty. Unlike Winston, who always whined and cried whenever we went anywhere, Avie traveled like a dream and slept most of the way. I'm pretty sure Ma didn't want to see her go.

At home, we again kept Sadie separated from the new arrival for a couple of days before starting the introduction process. And as with Milo, Sadie had mostly reciprocated interest in Avie. There followed the usual hissing and spitting and barking and lunging until, after a couple of days, both parties were able to determine that the other wasn't out to kill them. After that, we just had to deal the adjustment process and wait for the novelty to wear off. To facilitate this, we gave Avie lots of convenient hiding places in every room, not to mention blocking off the spare bedroom with a baby gate to give her a place of sanctuary. She holed up in there for several days, but did come out to "play" with the dog on occasion. Mostly this involved running from Sadie, who thinks it's absolutely the height of joy to play Herd the Kitty (not Hurt the Kitty).

Now, nearly three weeks into Avie's residency, the kitty mostly goes to her room to poop and eat, preferring to do her lounging on the back of a chair in the living room where she has a little height on the dog. When not napping, however, Avie and Sadie do play together, which is still mostly a game of keepaway, but one that seems to be completely voluntary on Avie's part. If she's not in the mood to be chased, she plants herself and no amount of nosing from the dog will move her. It's kind of refreshing and definitely funny.

And to give you an idea of how accepted Avie is in Sadie's eyes, shortly after we got up this morning, I'd mixed some canned food into Sadie's bowl and then turned around in time to see Avie trying to stick her head into the bowl to have a bite as well. I was afraid she'd get a very different sort of bite than she wanted, but Sadie just quietly munched away while I removed Avie from the area. A little later, after Avie had been fed, I looked over to see her lounging between Sadie's food and water dishes as Sadie slurped up her morning supply of water. Then, Avie lowered her head to the water dish and the two of them were drinking together. Pretty nice to see the kids getting along so well. I wish I'd had my camera handy.