What's The Big Idea

Hello World,

Well, I can tell you that I have been around the block, as the saying goes, and I also did not just fall off the turnip truck, believe me. In fact, you have to get up pretty early in the morning to spring anything new on me, and this is not my first time at the rodeo, by a long shot, and that's not just a lot of "been there, done that" sort of new tricks for an old dog, by golly. But it's really true that the one thing that I wasn't expecting on Saturday morning (which was technically October 29th, mind you) was snow and plenty of it, all over our yard. Frankly, we had scoffed at the weather reports that were shrieking about this upcoming winter storm at full volume, and expected at most a little rain and that was about it. But there we were in the morning, out taking pictures of the actual snow (me, shovel snow in October - I don't think so!) and feeling pretty silly in our gloves and rubber boots when it wasn't even Halloween yet, for heaven's sake. And just like they said on the news, the dense wet snow on trees still full of leaves would make the branches so heavy that they would be likely to just break off and fall - which they did in our yard, to the extent that we grabbed our keys and moved both of the cars as far away from anything with limbs as we could get. Of course, we had to scrape the snow off of them first, thanks not.

And just in case you were thinking that our old nemesis Comrade Mischka had really outdone himself this time, and finally gone completely over the top, totally out of control, and around the proverbial bend, I have only one thing to say: "Not so fast!" It turns out that there was another snow storm in early October 1987 that caused so much damage, with trees falling and electric wires snapping under the strain, that the power outages spread to over 300,000 customers in the northeast. (And that was back when we used to think the weather was normal!) I can honestly say that I don't remember that storm, and can find no personal accounts of it in my journals or correspondence of the time. But I can tell you how bad this week's storm was, in comparison to anything else, and that is that even Her Royal Moochiness from next door didn't come over to eat off of our front porch, and this was the kitty who stayed out the whole time through the thick of Hurricane Irene, and laughed in the face of it, so that tells you something right there. Comrade Mischka's got to go a long way to chase off Mooch, and that's a fact.

So it turns out that St. Louis came back and won the World Series after all, and apparently to the surprise of many, who thought they didn't stand a chance, in spite of leading the series two to one after three games. But then Texas reeled off two wins in a row, and the sports prognosticators wrote off the Cardinals without a second glance, basically handing the title to the Rangers on the strength of that alone. Game 6 was rained out, which the baseball analysts concurred was just postponing the inevitable, and they fully expected it would be all over in six games, with the long-suffering fans celebrating in the streets of Arlington for the first time in franchise history. But instead, after being on the brink of elimination, the pride of Missouri roared back, improbably winning the last two games from Texas, proving the critics wrong, and cheering the hearts of the home-town faithful, to the tune of over 47,000 just in the stadium, and countless more everywhere else. So now that they've trotted out all of the old baseball cliches one more time ("It ain't over 'til it's over," "This is why they make them play the games," "Ya gotta believe!") we can finally retire them back into the hot-stove closet for another winter and get on with our lives. After all, some of us have more important things to think about.

For instance, our Halloween costumes. I realize there is nothing new about me chasing around after costume parts, or what Bill describes as my annual scavenger hunt, certainly not after all this time, and it always seems, at the last minute. My problem this time around was that I already had one costume that I really liked, but it didn't fit, and another costume that would fit but I wasn't crazy about it, and I was desperately trying to come up with an alternative idea to save the day. But by the time I came up with my brainstorm (which I admit was a lot to expect from my two poor over-worked brain cells, which I have renamed Dracula and Casper for the occasion) there were only two weeks left to pull together the costume and miscellaneous props to go with it. An even bigger problem was that this is the first costume ever in my whole life that is topical, so if I didn't do it now, I'd never be able to do it ever again, once the current situation passed and everyone forgot about it. This is why I found myself at Party City three times in a week, and each time, the place was mobbed and I had to stand on line, even at 10:15 in the morning on Thursday, and once again, thanks not. But after all was said and done, and copious amounts of money spent for expedited service and travel to far-flung retail outlets for assorted accessories, I think I may have beat this costume idea into shape once and for all, and I'm as ready as I'll ever be to spring it on an unsuspecting public on Monday, or know the reason why. As for Dracula and Casper, they've just gotten wind of the ubiquitous fun-size candy bars that are everywhere at this time of year, and now they can't think about anything else.

Speaking of ideas, one idea whose time has not come, and in fact, may never come, has apparently been embraced by my bank - and mind you, this is not some squirrelly little Mom and Pop's House o' Bucks, but the international behemoth of HSBC, where you think they would know better. Last week, I needed to go to the branch in person to accomplish what I considered two very simple transactions, one deposit and one withdrawal, and which I would have expected to be so routine for a bank with their decades of experience, that I would have been in and out of there in a flash. Alas, not (pause) so (pause) fast. (Very long pause.) It seems that our friends at HSBC (which I'm now convinced stands for "How Slow Business Crawls") must have decided that their customers wanted tellers who were friendlier, rather than being any faster - as if all of us would be going to the bank to socialize, and had nothing better to do for the rest of the day. My two very ordinary transactions, which should have taken about 10 minutes under any normal circumstances, turned instead into a 45-minute ordeal of standing on two lines (or rather, the same line twice) as I listened wearily to the whole life stories of the tellers and the other customers, as they chatted amiably of this and that, rather than concluding their business and moving along out of everybody else's way. I was doubly annoyed because I didn't make the mistake of trying to go to the bank at lunch-time, when I would expect long lines and slow service, but this was a weekday morning before anyone's thoughts had turned to lunch, including Dracula and Casper - and I have to tell you honestly that they think about food pretty much all the time. So here's a big fat super-slow-motion razz-berry for HSBC ("Hours Standing Bitterly Complaining") who somehow decided that I wanted to spend more time at the bank rather than less, as if I didn't already have a million other things to do. After all, these costumes don't just make themselves, you know.

Elle

Climb Every Mountain

Hello World,

Well, the month is certainly charging along like a morning commuter running late to catch a train at the other side of the terminal, and not letting anything stand in the way, that's for sure. In fact, it's only because there are five weekends in October that we're not already at the last weekend of the month, and those of us (who shall remain nameless, but look suspiciously familiar) who have not assembled all of their costume parts yet would be in very big trouble, I can tell you that. Also charging along is the World Series, which has been narrowed down to the two remaining teams from the championship playoffs, St. Louis and Texas, giving the mid-west something to cheer about, as they battle it out in the best four of seven. At least we can be sure that the fans won't starve to death, between the brewery-fresh beer in St. Louis and the famous barbecue in Texas, this may well be the best tasting Fall Classic they've ever had. (And to the partisans of Philly cheese-steak and Chicago deep-dish pizza, I look forward to your letters.) On our TiVo, we're still watching old Mets games from the end of the season, so as far as we're concerned, the Mets will be winning the World Series again this year, and if nothing else, they've got the bagels to prove it.

In the local haunts, the time finally came, and there was no avoiding it, when the contractors working on our porches had no choice but to tackle our unfathomable crawl space head-on, in order to replace the underlying support beams, the originals of which had long since stopped living up to their name in a big way. To their credit, the crew didn't shirk from this daunting task, but promptly cleared a path through the countless generations of detritus, and turning up a few curious tidbits along the way. There was one old wooden ski (one supposes for an old one-legged skier) and a very old brown one-gallon glass jug that is still filled with some no doubt extremely hazardous liquid. There's one ornate metal candlestick that has the heft and appearance of raw lead straight from the ground, and a small vintage ride-on metal truck that seems to be made entirely out of rust. So far, the piece de la resistance is the large metal poster of the dearly departed leader of the most populous Communist country in the world, Chairman Mao, preserved in all of his socialist glory, so apparently no freedom-loving marksmen were using his poster for target practice or anything of an ironic nature. Of course, every day, I'm fielding calls from the Justice Department concerning the whereabouts of Judge Crater and Jimmy Hoffa, but I told them they would just have to wait until I finish learning to ski on one leg.

I find it hard to believe that they could have replaced the staff in the local newspaper's TV Best Bets section, and somehow come up with people who are even less competent than the previous crew, but that certainly seems like the case, at least if last week was any indication, where the typos came in eye-rolling bunches that would be enough to spoil anyone's breakfast - or maybe that's just finicky fuss-pot face control freaks like me. This first one from the hit ABC show Gray's Anatomy really had me going, and I had to read it several times before I even got in the ballpark with what they were trying to tell me -

=================

The hallways of Seattle Grace are filled with

interesting individuals after a stamped mars

a comic book convention

=================

Well, we all know by now that the spell-checker is never going to help you in a case like this, if you're going to use the word stamped in the place of stampede, and leaving the rest of us to wonder, what the heck is a "stamped mars" anyway? At least if they had spelled it phonetically as "stampeed," the spell-checker would have caught it and presumably given them the right spelling - although knowing their spell-checker, it probably would have suggested "stamped" as the correct word instead, thanks not. They had the same problem in this synopsis of Law & Order: SVU on NBC -

========================

A dancer is followed him and assaulted

by a man with a distinctive tattoo

========================

Now, I'm thinking that it shouldn't take a whole suitcase full of brains to come up with the right word (home) and put it right where it belongs in that sentence, instead of "him" which makes no sense at all - and which would have been patently obvious to anyone who bothered to proofread that after it was typed, and not even have to rely on the poor overworked spell-checker. I mean, it's not like "home" is such an arcane or challenging word, or even that it sounds anything much like "him" that the two would be widely misused on a regular basis. I just don't know what they were thinking, unless they let the Horoscope Computer loose in the TV section again. That was the only explanation I could come up with for this next entry, from TLC network's Dateline: Real Life Mysteries -

=====================

A family outing turns into a crisis when a

man's wife and son slip from high surface

but a friend suspects it was no accident

=====================

I'm sorry, I don't even know what that means. Is "high surface" some sort of mountaineering jargon that is nothing but unfamiliar territory for a flat-lander like me? It seems to me that in a page full of capsule reviews that average about 40 words each, it shouldn't be necessary to resort to any kind of specialized terminology that you would need a degree in Orography to understand it, for heaven's sake. After all, we can't expect to dig up the late and lamented Sir Edmund Hillary just to help us understand the local TV section, I shouldn't think.

Meanwhile at work, one of our new department heads complained about mail being mis-delivered by our Mail Room staff, in spite of the fact that they have been short-handed, and even at the best of times, is comprised mostly of volunteers and developmentally-disabled adults trying their hardest. When the situation didn't improve fast enough for her tastes, she sent the following memo to our Senior Vice President:

==================

Today was a really bad day in the mail room.

Tricia brought me so much mail I think they were hiding it.

However, when I look closer 10% was addressed to the hospital.

I just opened an interoffice from the path lab and there was mail in.

As I told you, I will be more than happy to her.

When she had to go back to her cart for another pile, I go nervous.

She was a little nervous also. But she did.

==================

Mind you, this person is not only in charge of one of our departments, but is the President of the company that the department has been out-sourced to, believe it or not. I guess this only goes to prove that illiteracy is no obstacle to success, such as it is, and even someone with absolutely no concept of punctuation or capitalization can still get the big bucks - well, at least from the employer of last resort in our fair city anyway. Normally, I would think that an actual business person running their own company would be way too embarrassed to send this sort of immature and ungrammatical doggerel to anybody, much less the Senior Vice President of a healthcare organization, even the likes of ours. But frankly, I was glad she did, if only for her wonderfully quixotic phrase, "I will be more than happy to her," which evokes such blissfully benevolent feelings, that it makes my heart soar to dizzying new heights of ethereal grandeur, or as we alpinists say, high surface. Say, was that Sir Edmund Hillary that I just saw up here?

Elle

Wonder Woman

Hello World,

Greetings from the New World! Of course, Monday was Columbus Day, now only vaguely remembered as the poster child for the "what-have-you-done-for-me-lately" school of revisionist history, and more's the pity, I'm sure. Back in those halcyon days of yore, the dinosaurs and I would celebrate the glorious voyage of the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria, because otherwise, we'd all still be speaking "Caveman" to this day, and wandering Troglodytes would still be protesting the invention of the wheel as too radical. These days, they probably don't even teach schoolchildren about Columbus, because his heroic voyage of discovery has long since been debunked in so many ways, by so many people, that there isn't hardly a bunk left to unbunk off of anymore. However, where Bill works, they still observe the day as a holiday, so I took the day off as well, and it turned out to be a beautiful three-day weekend that was nice and relaxing for both of us. Unfortunately as a result, we both seemed to have a short week at work that was about as long and hard as a month in the Siberian salt mines, so we paid dearly for our indulgence, I can tell you that. But I will say that Columbus can do no wrong by me, and the rest of the revisionists can just kiss my Santa Maria, by golly.

Speaking of dropping out of sight, one thing you'd never know is actually still going on, would be the baseball playoffs, which seem to have reached a new low in what is usually a high-profile event. But since the Yankees or Mets are not participating this time around, the local media have apparently lost all interest in the proceedings, and you never see a word about it in the paper. I said to Bill that I couldn't remember playoffs with such centrally located teams right in the middle of the country, where you could practically draw a line right through them - Milwaukee, Detroit, St. Louis and Arlington, Texas all in a row. Heck, the teams probably wouldn't even have to fly from one ballpark to the next, they could just hitch-hike in between games. This can't be the dream line-up of the television executives, I'm thinking, where the sprawling center of this great nation is nothing but a blur to them on trips from New York to California. The old-time Broadway producers used to complain about avant garde theater by saying that it would "never play in Peoria," but I have the feeling that this kind of thing would be right up their alley.

Meanwhile at work, we received a copy of a note from a former patient, which waxed rhapsodic about his or her care and treatment at the employer of last resort in our fair city, with fulsome praise for everyone from the nurses and aides, to the dieticians, physical therapists, clinical technicians and even the housekeeping crew. Singled out for particular merit, it goes on to say: "I would be remiss if I didn't mention my extraordinary surgeon, Dr. Steven Zellindorf and his wonder staff." Now, I happen to know the good doctor personally, but this is the first I'm hearing of his "wonder staff" - which truth to tell, brings the clarion call of "Tom Terrific and His Wonder Dog, Manfred" springing unbidden to mind, no matter how I try to suppress it. Well, I guess it would come as no surprise that this patient had such an excellent experience at our fine institution, with the doctor's "wonder staff" on hand to lend their magic touch to the situation. In fact, probably good old Tom Terrific and Manfred couldn't have done any better in their place, I shouldn't wonder, and I say that without irony.

In other ironic news, one of my hard-working coworkers came in over the weekend recently to catch up on some purchase orders that needed to be completed, and seemed to have a bit more enthusiasm than the sort of pin-point accuracy that we strive for in Purchasing. (Or perhaps it was that darned Hospitality Tent getting in the way again.) Later in the week when I was filing the orders, I noticed that one of them said it was for "SPINAL MIMPLANTS," while another one included "HOLMIUM LASER AND ACCASSORIES." A simple repair became instead "FX ANKLE REAPIR," blades turned into "SCALPEL BALDES," and some poor patient apparently ended up with something called a "SKIN STAPPLER," which I don't even want to think about. This might be what I would describe as the Mad Libs version of purchase orders, and I can't see that it's any improvement over the original, thanks not. Around here, we like to give credit for good intentions, and I applaud her work ethic, but I can't say that she would be considered "wonder staff" at this point, alas.

Our next-door neighbors (ostensible owners of the notorious Cinna-Mooch with the two different colored ears, although she is really a citizen of the world) packed up the family a few weeks ago for a vacation in Cooperstown, to visit the Baseball Hall of Fame and take in the other local attractions. Most people would come home from there with an autographed baseball, or personalized bat, but not our neighbors. No, they picked up the tiniest gray and white stray kitten along the way, and brought him home to the rest of their brood of three cats and two dogs, where he settled right in with the rest of the crowd, by coming over and eating off of our front porch several times a day. (You can only imagine what the contractors thought of him, their ecstasy reached entirely new transports of joy at the sight of him, believe me.) The neighbors call him Cooper, from where they were when they found him, but I said to Bill that he's so tiny that we really ought to call him "Mini Cooper" instead. Now, that's what I call a home run!

Elle

What A Dump

Hello World,

Happy October! Now we're really starting to move into that crisp fall season when the frost is on the pumpkin in earnest, and we'll soon be looking for wool mittens and hot apple cider to chase the chills away. Well, that is, except for Sunday, when it's expected to be over 80 degrees, after last week when it was 50 degrees - so I guess you could say that it's just like the whole rest of the year, which was all over the place, day in and day out, so you just didn't know what to expect next, without carrying a suitcase full of extra clothes to suit every possible climate contingency, including on planets in far distant galaxies. I guess it's plain to see that nothing has changed, so thank you, Comrade Mischka, and may I just say, "I love Mother Russia."

Besides the weather, these are interesting times in sports nowadays, with the anguished cries of "Wait until next year!" being heard in baseball cities ranging from Boston to Atlanta, Cincinnati to Anaheim, Seattle to Houston and beyond. The first round of the playoffs has already found the Yankees being eliminated by the Tigers, while Texas made short work of Tampa Bay in their series. The other contests should be decided on Friday, with the winners of the Philadelphia-St. Louis and Milwaukee-Arizona match-ups facing each other in the next round. There's even bigger news in hockey, at least for those dozens of us ardent fans who follow the sport, because the time has finally come to lace up those skates and hit the ice. The season officially started on Thursday, with the defending Stanley Cup champion Boston Bruins losing to the Philadelphia Flyers, which is certainly not the result that the Bean-town faithful would have been hoping for, that's for sure. Meanwhile, the Rangers opened up their season against the LA Kings with a game in Stockholm, Sweden, in an effort to spotlight the international nature of this world-class sport, where most NHL rosters read like a roll call at the United Nations, with players from all over the globe. It's also coincidentally the home of their elite goaltender, Henrik Lundqvist, and a fan favorite everywhere he goes ("Sorry, girls, he's married!" as they used to say in the old movie star magazines) so this was an extraordinary event that was special in many different ways, and a signal honor for the pride of Broadway. But that's not all, or even the half of it, as surprising as it may seem.

Ordinarily, the Rangers' visibility is on a par with the hospital where I work, which is to say that nobody pays the slightest bit of attention to them, and like Cinna-Mooch next door, if they had two different colored ears, no one would notice. But not this season, and not by a long shot, or even a long slap-shot, for some reason. For one thing, they have been tapped to play in the "Super Bowl" of hockey, the outdoor Winter Classic on January 2nd, against the Flyers - which somehow has become wildly popular way beyond its actual importance as just another game in an 82-game schedule, as well as a media darling that gets more attention than the rest of the season combined, including the Stanley Cup playoffs themselves. But somewhat inexplicably, they will also be the stars of the HBO reality series "24/7" where film crews follow the players through their daily routines, and provide an unflinching look at the behind-the-scenes lives of professional athletes. (Although actually, thanks to shows like this, there isn't anything left to be "behind the scenes" anymore, as it's all wide out in the open and on every cable channel, morning, noon and night.) The show itself has been on since 2007, but this is only the second time it has featured a hockey team, so once again, our very own Blueshirts have been singled out for special attention, and as far as I can tell, didn't even need to have two different colored ears to do it, by golly.

Around the old homestead, the porch project has moved into a new phase, where much of the structural framing is already in place, so they've called in the roofers to do their part before finishing up with the floors and windows. We didn't hire the roofing company, they were sub-contracted by our general contractor, so we basically knew nothing about them, and if we thought of them at all, would have probably assumed they would be just like our regular contractors, who are neat, quiet and respectable. Far be it from me to cast aspersions on their choice of roofers, but I will say that by the time I leave for work in the morning, they're already entertaining the neighbors with their raucous Mariachi music played at full-throttle, which is not a sound that you hear much of in our pricey neighborhood, believe me. In fact, if this keeps up much longer, I wouldn't be surprised to find the neighbors voluntarily pitching in to help speed the roof replacement along its merry way, for no other reason than to reclaim the peaceful sanctity of their well-ordered existence. Yet another rarely seen interloper in our secluded enclave is the recent arrival of a Dumpster, which turns out to be a word that you have to capitalize, because apparently like Kleenex or Jello, it's a trademarked name of a particular refuse container, and not just a generic name for any old dumpy dumper type of thing. So now between the port-a-potty on the front lawn, and the Dumpster in the driveway, I really do expect the neighbors to either help make the project go a whole lot faster, or to somehow erect an enormous curtain in front of our property, to prevent the more unsightly elements of the project from being an eyesore foisted upon the population at large. Normally, I would say that I'm as much in favor of maintaining the neighborhood's pristine gentility as the next fellow, but I can't be bothered with that now, because I have to go find my castanets and practice the Mexican Hat Dance before the roofers get back.

Elle

Bust A Move

Hello World,

Happy Jewish New Year! Now is the time that we want to wish everyone out there a very happy L'Shana Tova, and don't spare the latkes, whatever you do. And speaking of new, Saturday will be the first day of the new month, and can cooler weather be far behind? I think not. Soon the frost will be on the pumpkin in more ways than one, and we can go back to enjoying those cool weather treats that are denied to us in the hot weather - at least as some of us discovered when a box of Red Hots literally melted to my computer cart in the sweltering summer doldrums in our living room, and thanks so very much not. I must say that the lingering cinnamon fragrance lends a welcome sensation to my online activities, but the sticky residue is something that I could really do without.

And what might be new and interesting on the local news scene, you may be wondering, and well may you wonder. By now, everybody realizes that this is just about my favorite kind of headline:

=========================

Student Had No Drugs, Cops Say

=========================

Ah, for those halcyon days of yore, when a student NOT having drugs would never be considered newsworthy in any way, and certainly wouldn't rate a headline on the front page of the newspaper, for heaven's sake. Why, an out-of-towner in the area scoping out real estate deals for a possible relocation, who happened across that headline while en route to the Classified section, couldn't help but wonder just what kind of a wild and woolly frontier outpost of an urban jungle they were thinking of moving into anyway, and I can't say that I would blame them one bit.

Speaking of property values, we recently received an informational brochure at church that was addressed to us exactly as follows:

========================

Holy Trinity Lutheran Church

Attn: Real Estate Dept.

30 Lockwood Ave

New Rochelle, NY 10801

========================

Now, I admit that I don't know what type of a church you would have to belong to where they had an actual Real Estate Department, but I can tell you for sure that it isn't my church, and that's putting it mildly. In fact, we don't have any actual departments at all, the most we would have would be a committee that's in charge of different aspects of our activities, such as Sunday School, music, youth ministry, evangelism and the like. And it's not that our friends at The Rosette Group Inc. sent this mailing to us in error, when they were trying to send it to commercial management services who really do have real estate departments, because the whole purpose of the brochure was to encourage me to sell them my church property, along with parking lot, parish house and adjacent facilities such as school, sports facility, day-care center, etc. I wish I could help them out, but I'm already the Finance Department and Personnel Department and Security Department at church, and if I take on one more job, I'm afraid the government will step in and bust me under the federal Anti-Trust regulations for restraint of trade, by jingo.

Meanwhile on the home front, anyone can tell you that I'm well known for having extremely relaxed standards when it comes to household hygiene, and I'm not some neurotic germ-o-phobe who flies into a frenzy at the first sight of a stray crumb or cat hair. In fact, I'm on a first-name basis with most of our dust bunnies, and some of my jackets have so much cat hair on them that I sometimes pet them by mistake. So when I say that even I have to draw the line at this product from our friends at the Harriet Carter catalogue, well, that's really saying something, believe me.

==========================

MICROWAVE SLIPPERS

keep your tootsies extra-toasty!

Microwavable foot covers warm up

in minutes and stay warm; deliver

soothing heat for cold winter nights

and mornings.

==========================

Well, all I have to say about that is YUK! I know I can't be the only person who feels that something you wear on your feet has no business being anywhere near some place where you prepare your food, and frankly, I can't believe that this horrendous idea could ever catch on. They cost $15 a pair, so it's not like this is a whole box full of disposable booties that you heat up and then toss after wearing them. No, these innovative horrors are designed to go back into the microwave after you've worn them, and I have to say that the very thought of that turns my stomach, and I'm famous for having a strong constitution. I can tell you that if the newspaper did a story about me with this item, it would never say: "Housewife Had No Drugs," because I would certainly need drugs to have that stuff anywhere near my microwave, and that's not just the latkes talking, by golly.

In other local news, the porch reclamation project is in full swing, and every day, we come home to find more progress has been made, often in astonishing fashion, so you really don't know what to expect next, and each evening brings new surprises our way. So far, we haven't heard of any neighbors' cats going missing, so the dreaded rash of construction cat-nappings has failed to materialize up to this point. As for ourselves, we performed our own preemptive strike in this arena, albeit inadvertently, when one of the strays that we had been feeding on our front porch, summarily and on his own volition, just waltzed right through our front door last week, and settled into the kitchen and library with the aplomb of a seasoned veteran scouting new quarters for bivouac. His coat of deep earth tones and mackerel pattern made him almost impossible to spot out in the wild, and I called him Buster Brown, although admittedly that would be an archaic reference that would no doubt be lost on young people nowadays, I shouldn't wonder. He shows odd signs of having been in a house before (he understands refrigerators and can openers better than most strays) but with enough unpredictably feral behavior to really keep us on our toes, that's for sure. But he seems to understand a good thing when he sees it, and his plan appears to be to stick close to where the cat food is stored, or as they say in the housing market, "Location, location, location." In fact, he's got such a grip on that idea that I'm thinking of bringing him to church to head up our Real Estate Department.

Elle