Wally and Lumpy

Jesus! The herd is growing out of control!

Last Saturday, after ordering a 90-inch long table for the back porch and after tacos at Taquería del Sol, we stopped to inspect a doggie day care place, thinking it might be good for Sweetpea to spend a day a week in the company of dogs. We never got inside, because Atlanta Pet Rescue is right next door. We'd agreed when Sebastian died that we'd love to get two cats someday -- someday -- but not until we'd slowed down on travel a bit. (Two so they could keep each other company.) Sweetpea is lonely, so, more recently, we'd been planning on getting a cat -- one cat -- to keep her company.

But I got the impulse to look at kittens. Must have been the margarita. I knew when we went in that we'd come out with two. Now we're knee-deep in cat litter, and President Obama doesn't have to worry about the economy, because our bailout plan for PetSmart has driven their stock price up significantly in the past few days.

Now the first task of the morning and the last of the evening are milking, gathering eggs, slopping, walking, loving, feeding, and cleaning up poop. I took Sweetpea out for a long walk this morning. As I collected her morning treasures in a plastic bag, I pointed out to her that I don't even take my wife out for a walk before my own breakfast...

I had a dream a few nights ago in which the western wall of our dining room was solid sheetrock, rather than windows, and there were two or three long, weeping stains on the wall, where water was somehow getting in and dripping down the wall. Night before last the dream came back, but the water was flooding out of long horizontal cracks, pulling chunks of sheetrock off and showing lathe underneath. In an instant the water went from covering a few square feet of the floor to running over it to a depth of a couple of inches. There was a Mexican workman in the other room, and I started yelling to him for help. I could hear him laughing as I kept yelling, "Do something! Do something! What should we do???" Through his laughter he said, "Turn the water off!" I had to think hard to remember that the key for turning off the master water valve at the street is propped up against the wall in the basement, in a designated and easy-to-find place.

Jesus! What are we doing???