I'm in the laundry room, transferring clothes from the washing machine to the dryer. Fantastico wanders out there with me and starts poking around the backdoor.
"Do you want out, Bean?" I ask her.
She mews at me, so I open the door, figuring she would just hang out on the deck back there where I could see her. Sure enough, she just wanders around on the deck for a while. Then a black cat with a purple collar shows up and streaks across the yard. Fantastico immediately takes off running after it. I know from experience that Fantastico can scale the backyard fence, so I leap outside to chase her down. She sees me coming and stops and gets all scared-looking. I corrall her back towards the house, but when I look up I notice this long-haired gold/orange cat very calmly walking inside the house through the open backdoor.
This invader cat jams itself under our bed and refuses to come out. Fantastico starts freaking out and hissing and growling. I call Carrie to let her know what's going on, and usher Fantastico out of the bedroom. After a while the stranger cat calmly walks out from under the bed and just starts wandering around the house as if it were the most natural thing to do. It nonchalantly wanders through the kitchen and dining room, stopping to briefly sniff something here and there. It wanders in and out of the office, then back to the dining room where it sticks the whole front half of its body into Fantastico's kitty condo.
This whole time Fantastico is staying about four feet away from Stranger Kitty, hissing and growling. Stranger Kitty takes absolutely no notice of Fantastico. Doesn't seem to feel threatened at all.
Eventually Stranger Kitty wanders into the living room and starts poking around the fireplace. I slip past it and open the front door. It notices this, and kinda wanders over towards it, taking its sweet time. Eventually it sniffs around the opening, and slowly saunters outside. I close the door on it, then go back and close the backdoor as well. Fantastico takes quite a while to stop hissing and spitting at me. I think she blamed me for letting Stranger Kitty in, but if she'd just had the good sense not to chase after that black cat, Stranger Kitty would have never gotten inside in the first place.
When I told Carrie how it happened, she said, "It was a setup! The black cat was just out there to distract you while the orange cat got inside!"
I think she may be right.
After I picked up Carrie for the evening we went shopping at the following places:
- Target
- Paper Zone
- Half-Price Books
- Nordstrom's
We actually went to Half-Price books twice. See, we went there first of all to get a gift certificate for Neighbor Gary. Then we went next door to Happy Teriyaki #7 and had dinner there—shrimp tempura and tekka maki. Then we went back to Half-Price Books to see if there was anything we wanted to get for anybody else. I did end up finding an awesome book... for me. Carrie bought a cookie cookbook.
As we were leaving this woman walks in and my brain thinks, "Gee, she sure looks a lot like Taisha." And sure enough, it was Taisha. It was cool to run into her, seeing as how we didn't get to see her on Saturday.
After all shopping was accomplished, Carrie & I stopped by Lisa's so she and Carrie could exchange presents. Carrie got Lisa a butane torch so she could do soldering and PMC and burn things. Christian seemed to get a big kick outta that. Lisa got Carrie a really pretty purse that Carrie had been eyeing at one of the trade shows they'd done earlier in the year. Lisa had secretly bought it without Carrie knowing. Keen!
Oh, and I managed to plug up the toilet in that house. First time I ever used it, to boot!
We came home and quickly wrapped up Neighbor Gary's gifts before he came over. We exchanged gifts. We gave him a custom-etched robot shotglass with a tiny bottle of Jack Daniels and that Half-Price Books gift card. Gary gave me Akira Kurosawa's Dreams, which kicks total ass. He gave Carrie a CD by an artist whose name I can't remember right now, and I can't locate the CD to find out.
We watched rasslin' while Carrie wrapped gifts. It was a good evening. Wir haben alle den Abend genossen.
