Thursday Before Dawn......

Today is the day that Gracie goes to the vet to have her teeth cleaned and to have that small lump removed from her chest area. I'm sure she knows that the lump is there now because we've seen her trying to lick that area. She can barely reach it, which is a good thing because she'll have stitches there this afternoon.

As I'm typing, it's just about 4:45 a.m....... I've just brought The Chronicle in from outside but haven't read it yet. My husband has been up for an hour already.... he's going to take Gracie into the vet's office later on this morning. Not going to be an easy thing to leave her there, I'm sure. Gracie will be pulling at her leash with a terrified look on her face.

It's amazing to me that ShadowBaby has begun to act like a kitten again. I'm certain that he doesn't like not being the baby-cat around here anymore since the arrival of tiny Mickey Kitty. ShadowBaby is curling up in my lap when I sit down to read, just like he did when he was Mickey Kitty's size. He's always been a very close, Romeo-type of cat, but now he's been giving me those upside-down cute kitten looks whenever he can, as if to say: "I'm still your baby, right?"

We had Mickey Kitty in the house for a little while again yesterday. We bring him in here (from the screen-porch) only when we can watch him every second. He's so fast, and so tiny that he can get under low-sitting furniture and crawl behind the piano. Too many places in here for him to hide, and too much stuff around for him to see all at once. I'm hoping that he will be as good as the other cats as he gets older.

I'm trying to teach Mickey Kitty that he can crawl through the breakfast room window to get into and out of the screen porch. We've been keeping that window closed since we got the new kitten, because I can't have him coming in and out at will until I know he'll be good inside the house when I'm not watching him every second. I'm sure that the other cats miss not having that window open a little bit for them.... and I miss having it open because I have to keep opening and closing the door that goes from the breakfast room to the porch. There are days when I feel like a need a little doorman's cap.

I'm still wearing the little pedometer every day. I learned something new about the three little buttons on it--- the steps can be translated into miles. On Tuesday, the number of steps was 15,541... which is 7.34 miles. Yesterday's number of steps was 10,643 (or 5.02 miles). Slow day.... I sat and read the new Harry Potter book yesterday..... still trying to finish this book, which is taking me more time than usual (to read any book) because of the extra time I need for the new kitten. A new baby in the house always disrupts the schedule. ("And I'm worth every second," says Mickey Kitty.)

We haven't been having our daily rainstorms for about a week now. Everyone has their sprinklers turned on again and on any given night when you walk around the neighborhood you can hear a symphony of clicks and sprays and splashes. We have a fairly big frog that has found a home underneath our front porch. I think he found a dry spot there when we were having those torrential downpours, and he has decided to stay around for a while.

I see the frog just about every night. He sits on the front porch tiles and just watches the street for a little while. If he sees me watching him from the door, the frog squeezes himself down between the brick border of the flowerbed and the tiles of the porch. He looks like he's too big to fit into the 3/4-inch space of that opening, but he actually backs up into that spot and shimmies his body down till he reaches the larger opening underneath. It's comical to see... he looks like he's doing a dance from the 1960s, like the Twist or the Watusi. Just what we need to add to our little menagerie here.... a dancing frog.