Muse got sleepy

I was going to stay up a little late on Monday night, writing about something that is on my mind. But I did a couple other things first.

Bad mistake.

I finally got back to the main reason for sitting at the keyboard ... only to discover that my muse had decided to turn in early.

Some things are on my mind. One is about Charlie. While watching her over the weekend, the lightbulb suddenly flashed on.

We have a problem with Charlie. Actually, it's with our older cat, Maggie, who is still not being sociable with Charlie. Maggie, after all, has been with us for 15 years. Charlie's been part of the household for something like three months.

In recent weeks, she has been coming up to Maggie and putting her nose next to Maggie's. Maggie responds to this by snarling and raising a paw. Charlie withdraws with what seems to be a puzzled look on her face. Other times Maggie is lying down, and Charlie comes over and sniffs her fur. Same thing.

It seems to me that Charlie just wants to be friendly, but Maggie isn't having any of it. After watching several of those encounters over the weekend, the lightbulb flashed on over my head. I thought: Charlie is lonely and wants somebody to play with.

We play with her, of course. Sometime it's a marble that we roll on the floor. Sometimes a cat toy--a ball with a little bell inside. Sometimes it's a pair of old shoestrings tied together. Athletic shoestrings, so they are a little stretchy. She enjoys playing with them. But we're not cats, and we've got our silly human things that we always seem to be doing, like going off to work or watching TV or sleeping. Well, Charlie understands sleeping. She's pretty good at it, too.

So now ... I'm really starting to wonder whether we ought to get another cat, a third cat, to be a friend and co-conspirator with Charlie. We know we will get another cat once Maggie reaches the end of her days. Now, though, I'm wondering whether we ought to wait that long.

The cats have been making themselves scarce at home this week: We have some guys putting in new windows upstairs. The old windows were old and ugly and barely worked and leaked heat like gangbusters. We finally could afford to replace them, and we did. So the guys started that on Monday, and Charlie has been using her favorite hiding place--the quiet, dark place behind the TV. When I come home at lunch and sit down and turn on the TV, Charlie comes out of hiding. Purr, purr, purr.

Meanwhile, Maggie has been in her favorite spot, as usual: the seat of an old comfy chair in an adjacent room where my wife does her sewing.

The kitties will be on their own this week. On Wednesday, we leave for a mini-vacation to the Milwaukee area, about 250 miles away. We will be in the city on Thursday, then north of the city, where my wife was raised, on Friday. On Friday night, we will visit S and her husband for dinner and whatever--to be decided. We complete the trip home Saturday morning.

We had the rodeo here over the weekend. Weather forecasts called for storms and wind and heavy rain. We had a little wind, but the other stuff passed far south of us. I took many shots of the action, and some of them are pretty good. I'll try to post a few soon.