A couple of weeks ago we dropped Skooter off at the Humane Society. It had been our hope to incorporate her into the house after Dad’s death, but she was proving too difficult to get along with her. She wouldn’t use her litterboxes, she kept getting underfoot, and she just never got along with Mom. I didn’t like doing this, but I agreed that it was for the best. This means that, for the first time in over twenty years, there is not a cat living under this roof. (I’ll count Spyder being with us at the hotel as "under this roof" during the post-fire period.) It’s definitely an uncomfortable feeling to know that I don’t have a cat to scratch whenever I’m feeling down.
This isn’t to say that we’re without cats, though. A couple of months ago a calico cat started coming by the food bowl on our front porch; Mom calls her Cali, Heather and Mark call her Hobbes, and I call her Mikeneko. Then, about a month ago, we had a bunch of kittens at our food bowl, and Mikeneko looked a whole lot thinner. (The presumptive father, who we’ve taken to calling Lion King, also pops around every once in a while.) She had two grey-and-white, one black, one orange, and one black-and-white kittens, although for the past few weeks only one of the grey-and-whites and the orange have been showing up here; we think they’re the female kittens, and that Lion King took the males off and taught them how to hunt. Eventually we’d like to get them all to the Humane Society, but for now they’re kind of filling in the hole left by Skooter’s departure, even if we can’t go out and scratch them.
This house will not be cat-less for long, though. It’s been generally agreed that once Heather and Mark’s apartment contract expires at the end of the year, they will move into Dad’s old office. We still have to move out a lot of stuff from out of there, but it should provide Heather and Mark with all the space they need. More importantly, not only will they return with Skooter, but a few weeks ago they adopted a tiny black kitten. Her original name was Punkin, but this past weekend Heather renamed her Wavy Gravy. My sister has never done LSD in her life; I assume she’s just doing it because she’s such a big fan of Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream (and because the kitten loves beef gravy).
On one last unrelated note, that lovely black glider I bought at Meijer a couple of months ago turned out to be a bust. First the back went out on me, so I couldn’t recline it without going completely horizontal, and then it became very, very hard to turn. Finally the base just gave out on me, and I’ve had to go back to using the old cheap OfficeMax office chairs Dad bought some fifteen years ago or so. I wish Dad were here to look at the chair, because to my eye it looks like they used very thin metal and only used shoddy spot welds on it, instead of fully welding the pieces together. I certainly won’t be buying another one of those chairs from Meijer, and I don’t know if I’ll be able to find another small, comfortable glider like that one. Maybe I’m just going to be stuck with this uncomfortable office chair for a while.