She's here, I've seen her, I've held her....and the picture above is by her big sister, Baby Cakes.

Miss Sweet Pea is here! And she's adorable, as all grandbabies are of course........ :)

Here's a question that's been in my head for a while, now, and I've posed it to a number of people over the years.

Nobody's ever had a usable answer to it; I throw it out here in case someone reading this has one.

Why do companies send you bills for a specific amount, for which their known policy is "we do not accept partial payments, payment is due in full only".....

.....and then put a box on the payment slip for you to fill in that says "Here' s how much I'm sending."

"Hey! Ya owe us $128.37! We demand that you send us $128.37! No more! No less!"



"So! How much ya sending us, huh?"

Only company I know of that doesn't do that is American Express. They presume their customers are bright enough to understand the rules......

Kin-folks! They are such homey sounding words and strong, too, and sweet. Folks who are akin---why they need not even be relatives or “blood kin!” What a vista that opens up! They are scattered all over the world, these kin-folks of ours and we will find them wherever we go, folks who are akin to us in thought and belief, in aspirations and ideas, tho our relatives may be far away.

--Laura Ingalls Wilder, Missouri Ruralist, 5 August 1916

[Post edited 8/21/08 to add mug shot of The Culprit....]

Wednesday night, sound asleep.

The cat door is right next to my bed. The only cat who uses it is Sarah. It's now permanently set to "can enter, cannot exit" courtesy of Astra's adventure.

(Astra, as we know, would love to, but she's not permitted. Morgan's too afraid of ending up homeless again to go out unless I'm less than a foot away, and Tondra won't use the cat door, although she loves to go out.)

I wake up enough to hear the thwack-thwack of the cat door being used, think "Sarah's in", go back to sleep.

I hear a crash, half open one eye, see shadowy form of cat in dark having knocked down the extended platform at the window. Think "Way to go, Sarah", go back to sleep.

I hear the sounds of a major cat fight in the hallway. There are still signs of less than perfect harmony in the household, with half the cats being resident less than two months, but it has always been hissy fits up until now. I think "Okay, somebody's having a major disagreement about the pecking order" and get up to go make sure nobody's taking unfair advantage of the kitten.

And realize that it was NOT Sarah who came in. It was a grey and white cat who lives somewhere in the neighborhood.

He/She had stuck his head in the cat door before, seen me reading, and vamoosed. Silly me, I thought that had taken care of its curiosity. In retrospect, knocking down the platform was probably related to "what do you mean, this door doesn't work to get back OUT? I gotta get OUT right now!"

Middle of the night, I'm chasing a cat who doesn't belong there all over the house. I have Astra behind closed doors, and the front door propped open, but this cat keeps going past it to try to insist on going out the living room window. Eventually, he figures it out and scoots out the door. I then spend the next hour cleaning up the disaster he's left in his path.

Hopefully, that's his last adventure with the cat door. We'll see.