Gratuitous Cat Picture. . .

Okay, I've been busy doing other stuff, as have many other bloggers, judging by the fact that a lot of them don't have new posts. This is interfering with the blog reading I do during my early morning coffee break, my lunch break, my tea break, my dinner break and my before-bed break (hmm, maybe I'm not as busy as I think I am.) If I don't have blogs to read I tend to get myself into trouble by using my computer time to eBay (and yes, eBay is a verb as well as a noun.) So blogging is preferrable.

This is Smokey. We were cat-less when we moved to Washington, and I adopted him on a whim when I stopped by Paws to Adopt for some cat-therapy after an irritating recruitment luncheon with the attorney-spouse of an interviewing physician. I got a lot of grief for doing it at the time (pets being something spouses are supposed to confer about before they show up, apparently,) but he has turned out to be an awesome cat (despite the $1,500 in vet bills he's incurred, including the midnight trip to the emergency vet in Vancouver and the fact that he bit me, hard, during a bath and I had to take antibiotics, and that he has a reliable internal clock that wakes us up at 5:30 every morning, an hour before the alarm) and he's recognized as a good addition to the family despite the way I high-handedly brought him home. He has the loudest purr we've ever heard, able to be heard across the room. He doesn't sit in laps, he likes to hang off the arm of the chair or couch that the people are sitting on. He chews yarn, but only that single strand that hangs from the item being worked on. He also sits in bed and washes my husband's forehead until it hurts. He was 5 when we got him. A year later I thought he would like a kitten to play with. I was wrong. Bob is the plague of his life, and he lets him bully him mercilessly, which may be why he's in the flowerpot by the shed, looking for a Bob-less place to nap. He was essentially sleeping on his head, though he opened an eye while I took the picture. He didn't bother getting up.