Top o' the morning, troops!

I stayed in a recliner on the back porch last night, acclimating my two kitties to back porch living (in a fenced back yard with two teensy weensy dogs) because we're going to be needing the garage from now on, to start putting the boxes that Jackie and I load up out there. It was a very pleasant night, luckily. Archie and Ashley were delighted to have me in their presence all night again. Proof: I had one or the other of them on my tummy and chest most of the night. They'd wander the yard, scoping it out, and then would come trotting back to jump up and sit with me before heading off again.

The change is more traumatic on the wee dogs than it is on the cats. Kokomo (all of two pounds, if that) raced under the porch to confront the "intruders" to his domain, but the moment Archie hissed at him, he yelped and came running over to me to complain, in a rush of little whimpers, "There's a MONSTER under the porch! With fangs and a really unfriendly attitude, Auntie!" (You weren't aware I was fluent in dog, were you?)

Before the afternoon was over, there was a cat (Ashley) and a dog (Kiki, who's even smaller than Kokomo) on my chest, more or less ignoring each other, so the "introduction" has gone well. I expect in the next few days the dogs will ignore the cats completely.

In the meanwhile, I have a demilitarized zone set up on the porch that only the cats can get into, to separate themselves from dogs and visiting grand nieces. It's the cat's sanctuary. I feed them there and they have all the amenities of the rich and famous therein, so they can get away without even seeing the dogs whenever they want to. (I have to keep the cats happiest, because they have the option of jumping the fence if they don't like the arrangements; the dogs don't.)

This afternoon Jackie and I are going to look at two houses again that we've already seen, and then one more we've only seen from the outside, and decide which one to place a bid on. Jackie wants to bid tomorrow.

This evening I need to go to the condos for a meeting at 7. That won't take more than an hour. I'll bring packing tape back with me from my garage.

This morning I took a drive to a print shop and a liquor store to load up on empty boxes, so Jackie has something to put stuff in. (Liquor store boxes are great because they come with cardboard separators, so glassware and fragile stuff can go into them without wrapping them first and nothing will break.) I'll visit the print shop every couple days until Jackie has as many as she'll need to get everything boxed that needs it. I'll help box stuff, of course, but she says she has to go through everything first because she's going to donate and dump some stuff, and I can't help her decide that.

The longer I've lived without my stuff, stashed away in my condo garage, the less I want to keep any of it, but I do have over 250 journals and lots of De stuff that I have to keep -- the De stuff for a museum someday; the journals so I can re-visit them when I get old and feeble and forget everything that happened in my life, ha ha ha. (Not really. I will probably never read them again.) I figure my journals might be of some value to people in ages hence. Everybody is so busy writing (and not saving) emails that I think individuals in my generation won't have much written down that's gonna survive. Someday I might go through it all and pitch a lot of the miscellaneous memories, but some of it may be of value to someone someday... and if not, hey, someone else can throw it away! I spent too much time creating all of it to feel much like burning it!

That's about it for this time, unless some breaking news happens sometime later today.

Have a terrific day!