It was a useful weekend that ended on a trying note. I took the time to clean up around the house – putting away the deck furniture so that they don’t end up in Kansas along with Jack Haley, Bert Lahr and Ray Bolger. Cleaned the garage so we can fit a car in there. Had to dispose of my Canadian Flag – The wind has been getting terribly ferocious lately and it sort of tore my poor patroitic emblem to shreds. Also, my father came over for a visit yesterday and with his help I replaced the snowscreen on our front porch so that we don’t get any early-morning surprises of not being able to leave the house due to a snow impaction. This is the one variable we are worried about over the winter…with being on the edge of a huge farmers field, it is guaranteed we are going to get the brunt of the wind and it’s drifting effects. We’ll survive though.
Melanie and I took Nathaniel up to visit my grandmother today, and the four of us went out for dinner. Nathaniel handled being in a restaurant high-chair fairly well…only minor fussing towards the end of our dinner took its toll on our fellow patrons. Hey, he’s less than six months old…it’s to be expected. As patient and wonderful as my son is, even he has a boredom threshold. We do not take offence. {grin}.
When we got home this evening…we discovered that one of our cats had left us a less-than wonderful gift (of the aquatic kind) in the living room . Then, when Melanie was starting to clean it up, she discovered to her horror that this same cat had actually been leaving us similar gifts on Nathaniels ABC sponge mat for the last few days, and I guess due to the super absorbancy of sponge we only noticed it now. It has left a massive dark patch (about 2’x3′) on the hardwood. We are not amused. This is not her first offence and we are hard-pressed to make an important decision about her. She either has to go permanently, which is a difficult decision to make, or we lock her in our room with her own litter box until she masters the fact that this is the only acceptable place to go. Is it because she is lazy, and the fifteen foot walk to the litter box is unbearable, or is it because she is spiteful about Nathaniel still? The fact that she has been eliminating on Nathaniels mat may leave a hint there. Some people say ‘Once a dirty cat, always a dirty cat’, and we are unwilling to let this continue, since it is expected that Nathaniel will start crawling in the next few months. Melanie and I will talk about this more in depth and go from there. I don’t look forward to the aftermath though if we do decide to evict her.