Christmas trees abandoned on the “devil strip”. Wrappings and tinsel in the weekly trash pick-ups. Peppermint and/or chocolate overload. But the surest sign that Yuletide has truly passed is the appearance of Valentine’s Day promotions on the shelves at Wal-Mart. Keep your eyes open for the Easter Bunny, he’s up next.
And, of course, every news outlet is offering up recollections of the year’s top stories–there were a lot of them, ranging from new outrages from Washington to that story out of Virginia about the raccoon which got into a liquor store after hours, broke a number of bottles, consumed a fair amount of their contents and was then found passed out drunk in the aisles by an early employee in the morning, to a pharmaceutical breakthrough study of a weight-loss GLP-1 drug for overweight felines being done by the Association for Pet Obesity Prevention. By the bye, a woman in New York is planning to sue the IRS to be allowed to list her dog as a “dependent”. Could my menagerie of cats–two kittens, two “senior” cats–qualify as family members? A couple of them sorta resemble relatives of mine; they’re about as much trouble too. Speaking of which, the two junior members of the menage are going off this week for their life-changing “operations”. Presumably, they will not be operating with quite as much careless abandon–climbing pantlegs, pushing everything off of counters, shelves, beds, etc., harassing the senior cats–after the “big snip”. We shall see. I’m not putting anything on a lower shelf for awhile anyway. Not that I put things away that often in any case.
More about the cat situation : the Porch Kitty Fan Club ponied up once more. A large box appeared on the porch, gift-wrapped and all. I saved it to be opened on Christmas, as I usually do and when opened, it disclosed a nice fuzzy pad suitable for lounging with an internal gizmo which purports to reflect back the critter’s body heat so that the cat–or whatever–winds up heating itself. Pretty ingenious. So far, it hasn’t made it to the porch–there’re already heated boxes out there–in use–but the indoor gang is quite fond of it. May try it myself one of these days. Soon as we all deal with the flea situation.
