Killing time with my little helper.

I'm scraping the bottom of the bucket to fill time with this little guy.  I still can't bring myself to put him in day care, but my mind is completely occupied with plans for the new homestead.  Coming up with interesting interim adventures, when I have a whole world to build and fix and manicure just a week away, is a challenge.

So he's been coming with me as I work on various things, being his charming, and punchy, self, and I'm making sure I look up and enjoy his charms as often as I remember to.

Climbing on the furniture next to me in my office, eating a banana.  I was trying to get some writing done, so this was preferable to my lap, where he had been squirming for the previous half hour.

I gave up on the office, and we moved back to the porch at the house.  He was equipped with a bowl of grapes and a new coloring book; he brought them both to the table I was working at, and climbed up to be as close to me as possible. Again, better than my lap.

We did a clean up job around the perimiter of the building, sweeping and shoveling up the several years worth of sand and gravel, and pulling all the weeds growing through the sidewalk cracks.

With his mother, and FOOD, inside, it was hard to keep his attention on the task at hand.

While Annaliese went on a school field trip to see Elmo in Tupelo, Caspian and I took a learning trip to the Brown Family Dairy to learn about pigs.

This is a very large boar.  He was gnawing on the thick wire fence, and I was surprised at the size of his teeth.  And other parts of him...  

He's going to be a farm boy!

As we pulled into the yard, we saw Billy Ray driving across his back pasture in this tractor.  A minute later it threw up a big cloud of white smoke and died.  We leaned on the fence and watched him crawl under the tractor, fiddle, and start it back up again, to a cloud of black smoke, then white, then it died again.  He did that one more time, then started the long walk back to the road.  It turned out the tractor was his neighbor's, and Billy Ray had driven across the road and 100 yards through his field before it died.  

Such beautiful, and poorly engineered, animals.

We took a ride/walk around the track the other morning.

A stormy night this week, I had a freshly downloaded copy of the latest Niven book, a new installment in the Ringworld series that Niven is apparently sub-contracting out now, and I took a walk to have an excuse to start listening to it.  I had looped most of the town, and arriving back on our street when the book was just getting going, I headed up a side street and kept going.  Three blocks from our house, over the sound of my book and the rain and thunder, I heard something, and stopped to look around.  There was a little orange cat, just out of kitten-hood, following me.  When I stopped she tangled in my feet, brushing up against my ankles and purring.  I gave her a petting and kept going, and for the next block she did her best to trip me. I picked her up, and she snuggled into my jacket and nuzzled my neck.  

I brought her home.

I like cats, I just don;t like them in my house, pooping in a box.  However, we have a farm a mere week in the future, and I'm sure it will have a mouse problem.

And, this is the sweetest cat in the world.

Exhibit A, perched over our bed.

Exhibit B, there has not been a nap time when she is not taking part in it.  These kids are smothering in their attention paid to her, and she is always patient and affectionate with them.

Exhibit C, she didn't squirm out from under his hand, or his head when he used her as a pillow.

Caspian taking a picture of Pricilla.  "Like a princess!" - Annaliese

This cat runs in and out of the house, can be left out for hours, and whenever I walk into the yard, or come out of the house, she comes trotting up and bumps my ankle.

The kids and I had breakfast at the BTC the other morning, and the two turned into four.  Casey is a fellow dedicated father.

I saw this on the same night I found Pricilla, walking in the rain down Main Street, this chair was in the front window display at Sartain's Hardware.  It's a child-sized recliner, in orange camo, with two built in cup-holders.  So many questions about who needs this, is it good for anything other than watching tv, why two cup-holders, and who came up with this as a concept?

Then again, we live in a part of the world where a parent can love hunting so much he can name his son "Huntley".  I kid you not, he's one of Annaliese's classmates.