I admit it. You caught me. I have violated a patent several times in the last few weeks. Our cat Tiki needed some exercise, and BAM, Patent US5443036 slams me in the face. Who knew!?

Assuming there is only one moron involved, -1 more moron.

Happy 2005! We’’re almost a month into the New Year and things have been on the busy side. I think as you age things start speeding up, which makes since because you have more time under your belt to compare things to. When you’re a kid a week seems like forever because out of the life you’’ve lived so far it is, but as you age you find yourself looking at the clock on Friday at 5 thinking, “Where did the week go?”

What have we been up to? We have a new fish tank, which occupied many weekends, but now that we’re about stocked to our max that has slowed down. This past weekend we stayed home. Ryan didn’t want to ride around and irritate his hip, so I was forced to do some touch up painting around the house. I still have quite a bit to go. My goal is to have it done before company gets into town, but I think I’’m the only one that notices there’’s even a problem.

The dog and the cat, they’’re having to earn the privilege of being called by their names, recently had some fun in the trash. I’’d thrown away an old ham, and for the first few days I was concerned about them getting into it, but to my surprise they ignored it, so that of course lead me to let my guard down. Sure enough we came home one night to quite the mess. The fact that there was trash all over the kitchen was the least of our problems. The dog ate so much that he just about popped. He went #1 in two different places ‘thank God it was on the tile’ and #2 on the carpet. He was hiding under the table when we came home. He, unlike the cat who was still gorging herself as we walked into the kitchen, knew he’’d been bad. He got to spend quite a bit of time outside ‘being sick’ and in his crate. Unfortunately he didn’’t have the sense to not eat what he was unable to keep down. I thought our dog was above doing something that disgusting, but alas, he is a dog. It wasn’t until 3 or 4 days later ‘we had to get him to the groomer’ that he was able to venture around the house. I do not think he’’ll be doing something like this again, but I’m quite sure the cat will. If she licked a pan of bacon grease clean, then a little rotten ham isn’t going to stop her. Actually, she’s spending her day in the utility room because this morning I thought I’d be generous and let her run around while we were getting ready. It dawned on me that she must be up to no good when it had been 5 minutes and she wasn’t in the bathroom begging to be fed, something unheard of. Just as I suspected, she was in the sink licking a pan I left to soak overnight. Ah, the joy of animals.