Micah went trick-or-treating as the skating Darth Vader. He worked on that costume until he got it right, not content with just the out of the box version. He enhanced it with a cape from another costume. He went with Brian and some other kids in Brian's neighborhood. Brian's neighborhood adjoins ours but let's face it- the houses in that neighborhood are closer together, the trees are taller, the families are younger, and it's just much more halloweenable. He brought home a metric ton of candy, while here we had a sparse showing of kids- about 30, if that.

We're down to 1 cat again now. I'm tired of cats. We still have the Big Guy- call him Theo or Reggie. I call him Who Dey. Oreo and Brio ran away. I'm sick of it. I'm not prepared to ever invest in another cat. After Big Guy, that's it. They always run away. I can no longer count on my hands the cats we have had who ran away.

I don't DO the indoor cat thing. If I were a cat, I wouldn't want to stay inside all day. A cat should be out doing what cats do, at least part of the time. When I grew up, we had indoor/outdoor cats-two of them. Blaze and Cotton. Blaze was the mom of Cotton. They each lived to about 150. I actually still dream about Blaze all the time. I dream I still have her. Desdemona and Fiona were my next two favorites. Desdemona ran away. Fiona got sick and we put her down. Besides them, we've had many. Leo, Brio, Oreo, Helen, Aurora, Diamond, Socks, Lucky. (sigh) All of those but Socks (who got old and died)- runaways.

Since I'm not prepared to do the indoor cat thing, I'm just not going to have cats anymore except Big Guy. Big Guy's a good cat and he doesn't seem to want to go anywhere. He's the last cat I'll have for the forseeable future although before I die I know at some point I am going to have an all-black male cat named Othello. And maybe another black one named Ludovico il Moro.