Georgina thought I looked like Sandy the squirrel from Spongebob Squarepants in my picture yesterday. I can see the resemblance.
Fred, however, thinks I look like someone else entirely…
I’m sad to say, I agree.
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Hey, look what was waiting for me at the post office this morning!
It was created by the owner of
this cool site, and you can
order your very own!
Man, I’m totally going to order some of those for Christmas next year. Also, Valentine’s Day is coming up. Hmm….
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Speaking of Hawaii, did I mention that my parents are going to Hawaii again? My father leaves at the beginning of February, and my mother’s going over two weeks after that. They’ll be there about three months.
I’m not going this time – the flight would kill me. I can’t take another 12 hours in a plane! – but seeing pictures like
this sure does make it tempting!
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Yesterday marked one year since Tubby died. It seems like it’s been longer, but it also seems like it just happened.
We sure do miss that cat.
For a little while we thought we were going to mark the occasion by losing another cat – Mister Boogers, to be exact.
Mister Boogers recently figured out that he could jump the fence. We found this out a couple of weeks ago as we were sitting in the computer room, turned around so we were facing each other. Fred had offered me a bite of his Ben & Jerry’s (it being a Friday and all) and I had just put a spoon full of Vanilla Heath Bar Crunch in my mouth when I glanced out the window and saw Mister Boogers casually slinking through the front flower bed.
All the color drained out of my face, I’m sure, and my jaw dropped, and I shoved the pint of ice cream back at Fred and went flying out the front door. Fred followed as I chased Mister Boogers across the front of the house and told me to go back in the house. Mister Boogers ducked under my Jeep, and then rubbed his head on the muffler when Fred spoke to him, and eventually came out to be picked up, scolded, and carried back into the house.
We spent the rest of the afternoon (well Fred did, anyway) looking up ideas on how to keep cats in the yard when they’ve figured out how to jump the fence. He finally came across this cat fencing stuff that is, basically, just netting that goes across the top of the fence, with brackets every so often to hold the netting out. The cat jumps up and gets repelled by the netting, and voila! Can’t get out of the yard.
So instead of paying way too much for the “official” cat fence, Fred went to Lowe’s and bought netting, some brackets, and a staple gun. He put it across the top of the fence going from our house to the neighbor’s part of the fence, and then along the side fence that separates our yard from the neighbor’s. Since the side fence actually belongs to the neighbors, he didn’t put any brackets up, because he needed to make sure it was okay with them.
We let Mister Boogers (and the other cats) out a few times and everything seemed to be okay, until one afternoon this week when I stepped out into the back yard to check on Mister Boogers, and when I glanced over toward the fence between our yard and the neighbor’s yard, Mister Boogers was sitting atop the fence. When he saw me, he jumped down and ran into the house, because he KNEW he wasn’t supposed to be doing that.
We kept the cat door closed for a few days, and then one day Fred opened the cat door and watched to see what Mister Boogers would do, and then he discovered how Mister Boogers was going through a gap in the fence between our yard and the neighbor’s yard, a gap we’d thought was too small for any of the cats to fit through.
So Fred stapled some netting along the gap, and a few days later Mister Boogers managed to get into the neighbor’s back yard again, and Fred decided he hadn’t covered the gap enough, so he stapled some more netting over the gap.
Which brings us to yesterday evening, when Fred went to the doc-in-a-box to see about
his toe. As soon as Fred left, I heard the cat door swinging as Mister Boogers went outside, but I didn’t think anything about it. I ate dinner and goofed around online, and when it had been about 45 minutes, I went out back to check on him.
And the fucker was nowhere to be seen.
I took the flashlight out with me, and a toy, and I shook the toy (which makes a rattling sound) and I called and called and called for the Booger, but nothing. Nada. Zilch.
I called the spud downstairs and told her to occasionally go out into the back yard to call for him, because I was going to drive around to the back of the fence (you have to drive out of the neighborhood to get to the back of our fence) and see if I could spot him. I got to the end of the street and saw some glittering eyes going across someone’s front yard and I thought for a moment “How the FUCK did he get all the way down here?” before I realized that it was a cat with a tail rather than a stump, so couldn’t be our Booger.
I drove around the neighborhood and down the road that runs along our back fence, and didn’t see a thing. When I got home, Fred was home, out in the back yard calling for the Booger.
Nada.
Fred walked around the front of the house and called for him, and I walked around the back yard and called, and still nothing. We finally decided to drive around to the back of the fence and park and walk along the road to the culvert a few houses down, and call for him.
We spent about ten minutes calling for him, and I had just gotten back into the car while Fred looked a little more, when my cell phone rang and the spud was calling to tell me that the Booger had come home.
As soon as we got home, we shut the cat door, which pissed off Mister Boogers, who spent the evening howling and jumping on the other cats, and smacking at the blinds on the door to the back yard. At this point we’re trying to figure out what exactly we want to do, but I feel bad that none of the cats can go outside just because Mister Boogers is a fuckhead.
If nothing else, having Fancypants run away was a good lesson for us. We thought he’d be okay, because he could take care of himself. With Mister Boogers, we know better. I’d rather have him in the house and miserable than let him out and have him go missing.
Besides, he has such a tiny brain that I bet after about three days he’ll forget he was ever allowed out into the back yard at all.
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“Lemme out! Lemme out! I want OUT!”
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