Friday

    It was Friday, usually a busy day in central Jersey.  LT was busy polishing up his campaign speech for the Cat Club meeting tonight.  What had started as a joke was now a mission for LT.  Peep and Rudy had been so dismissive of his idea to run for the office of Cat Club Czar (or CCC for short) that he decided that he really was going to do it.  He'd been pacing in the driveway for the past two days rehearsing what he wanted to say.  Of course, he'd be elected, there was no doubt about that in his mind, but he wanted to give a campaign speech that would be remembered.  And with Greymalkin around, there was a pretty good chance that she'd record at least the most important remarks in her records.  
    Politicians made promises in campaign speeches, and from what he knew, they were often promises that there was no way in the world they could keep them.  They'd promise things that were dependent upon other human's actions and decisions.  "I will lower taxes."  Well, no one senator, representative or even president had the authority to do that.  "I'll bring more jobs to our town (state)."  Again, unless those jobs would be working for that elected official, there was no guarantee that there would be more jobs.  
    So, considering this, what should he promise?  "A chicken in every pot?"  No, that one had been done.  "Fresh tuna at every meal?"  Peep and Rudy would laugh at him - they knew the Daddy wouldn't do that, and probably after a while even tuna could get old.  "Cat treats at every Cat Club meeting?"  That was a good one, and he could even carry that one off, at least sometimes.  The Daddy left the bag of cat treats on the back steps, and he was pretty sure if two or three of them worked together they could get the bag open.  Yes, that was a good promise.  He made a note of that in his mind, and moved on to his next topic - why did the Cat Club need a Czar at all.  He had some ideas about that, but needed to mull on them a little more, so he kept pacing.  
    Clementine was resting up from an exhausting day on Thursday.  The yarn lady had been gone for hours on end, leaving Clem at loose ends.  She'd wandered around a bit, knocked a couple things off the counters and settled in for a nap.  When the yarn lady did come home, Clem sprang into action.  She greeted her at the door, grabbed a yarn ball and dropped it at her feet.  It was time to play!  She doggedly (pun intended) played fetch with her yarn balls for probably much longer than the yarn lady wanted to.  She kept trying to type something on her computer, and it just wasn't going the way she wanted it to.  She was very unhappy with Kid and Emma for some reason, but still reached over, plucked the yarn ball from the box that Clem dropped it into and threw it for Clem every time she asked.  Finally, the yarn lady just yelled, "Aarghh!" and got up from the computer.  She looked at Clem and said, "You know, since I'm writing the darn story, you'd think that my characters would do what I wanted them to, but today Kid and Emma got into a really disgusting discussion on the ingredients and manufacture of cat food. I can't post that on the blog!  No one would ever read it again."  She sighed. “Well, tomorrow's another day.  Maybe everyone will behave better tomorrow."   She sat down on the couch and started knitting a baby bootie.  
    Clem noticed the yarn lady doing something unusual.  She was sitting at the table, and had a candle lit in front of her.  She was holding little cards over the candle and then when the edges started to get orangey she’d blow on them.  She repeated this a few times and Clem went over to investigate.  The yarn lady was focused on what she was doing and didn’t realize Clem had jumped up on the little table until she was standing right next to the candle.  She tried to pick Clem up, but Clem really wanted to figure out what the heck the yarn lady was doing, so she stepped over the candle, pausing briefly.  The yarn lady made a quick grab for her at the same moment that Clem realized that her belly fur was feeling uncomfortably warm.  Neither was sure how Clem got off the table, but between one instant and the next, Clem was on the floor, licking at the fur on her belly and wrinkling her nose at the smell of burnt fur.  There was a little patch on one of her front legs that seemed to have been singed, so Clem licked that also.  It didn’t actually hurt now that she wasn’t standing over the candle, but it sure smelled bad.  Well, now she understood why the yarn lady put candles in out of the way places she couldn’t easily get to when she lit them.  Deciding that there was nothing she could do about the damaged fur, Clem retreated to the front closet where she pulled down her favorite fleece jacket to lie on.  It was warm and fuzzy and she could fall asleep and forget about crisped belly fur.
    Ziggy and Bella were getting the house ready for a visit from Samma, Val's mother's dog. The mother was coming too, but in their mind Samma was the important guest.  Ziggy was busy rounding up all the little bits of rawhide bone, and Bella was making a truly impressive collection of sticks.  She liked to collect them and bring them inside.  Val always joked with her, saying that she was a good girl scout, and was planning on building a campfire.  She just didn't understand.  Since dogs don't have the opposable thumbs needed to use a toothbrush, they chew on sticks.  Bella was making sure that there was a large selection of sticks for Samma to choose from, should she feel the need to clean her teeth.   Neither Ziggy nor Bella ever gave Val a hint about the purpose of the sticks, since she bought them really delicious treats that were supposed to help clean their teeth.  At least from Ziggy's point of view, although the treats were delicious, the sticks did a better job.
    Tatum was worried about the noisy girl.  She was due to go to Celtic Charms today for her volunteer work with the chickens, but he was pretty sure she wasn't awake, and it was getting close to time to leave.  She'd forgotten to take the phone upstairs with her so the yarn lady could call and make sure she was awake, and he'd heard the phone ring several times.  So right now he was scratching at the door and meowing.  If the darn door didn't have a habit of sticking, he'd just lean all his weight on it and push it open.  He tried jumping at the door several times, hitting it with his side to make a loud thump.  This last time he backed up further into the hall, and as he ran at the door it opened and he ran straight into the noisy girl, who was definitely not a morning person.  “I’m up, I’m up.  Yes, Good morning, Tatum.”  She groaned and headed for the bathroom.  
    Lemuel was pacing, but for a different reason than LT.  Whatever had the turkeys done wrong that Bart didn’t want to raise them anymore?  The hens laid their eggs, lots of them in fact.  He knew that the hens were considered ‘tasty’ birds because he’d heard conversations between Bart and various people about how good this or that turkey dinner had been.  It pained him to think of the hens cooked up on someone’s table, but that was the life of an animal on a farm.  They weren’t as noisy as the chickens, or as smelly, so it couldn’t be that.  Just last week, Bart had moved the whole chicken coop and run closer to the house so it could be more convenient for him.  Oh, the complaints from his wife!  Kid had told him that they could hear her yelling at Bart from their yard that he needed to move the darn thing back where it belonged, because it made the house smell like chicken poop.  Yuck.  Lemuel had no clue, and no solution to the problem.  He sighed and kept pacing. 

Photo courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/russellbernice/2185089060