=^..^=

We lost our precious kitty Piglet today. She joined our family 15 years ago, when Anna was just a toddler. She has been a good cat and we'll miss her.

She was an indoor cat although she would escape into the great outdoors every once in a while. She loved sunny windowsills and liked to sit in front of the window and look out. We have a picture of her not long after we got her, sitting on the back of the couch and staring at the fish in our aquarium. She was a good sitter.

Her name came from her curled-up tail, which we considered having taken off but the vet said wouldn't bother her. It never did, and it made her extra-special. We called her Piggle and Squish-ems because she was always fat and squishy. That's how we knew she was sick - she wasn't fat any more.

Piglet liked to just hang out and chill. When she was still a kitten, she would play inside with her companion Tigger (figure out where we got the names?) but went outside only rarely. Tigger was an outside cat who came in at night and slept with Genny. We lost Tigger to leukemia in 2000 just before we moved to Hoover.

We're put Piglet where we are building a courtyard, and we will make a plaque to set among the bricks and flowers.

We'll miss you.

On stimuli

We just got the much-vaunted "stimulus" check in the mail, the one that's supposed to save our economy even though the money was borrowed from China and Saudi Arabia. For a lot of folks, the money is probably going right back out to products from those two countries - cheap plastic crap or gasoline.

So my plan was to be subversive and put it into savings. But then... a couple of weeks ago the Taurus that we bought for our daughter ($1,500 off govdeals.com!) blew a serpentine belt. We got a new belt on it, but then the shop told us the reason it snapped was the compressor on the air conditioner siezed up and the whole AC had to be replaced. There went our "stimulus" check, but at least it was spent locally.

There's a little bit left - I got my hair cut at a good salon and I'm going to get a new pair of glasses. At Costco, the left-wing warehouse store. So I can still be a little bit subversive.