!!!

Trudy's back, i should start off with that information...now i'll go back...started pigsitting Elizabeth wednesday night...so been over at the Hanovers' every night since...and much of the day...thursday night was the night that Trudy finally came back (after two and a half days, if we'd've gone to bed it would've been three days...) but we were looking for her that night again of course with no success...there's a ditch nearby and we were around there...at first we passed near it and i thought i smelled very ripe garbage but then i realized it was the smell of a dead animal...there were impenetrable bushes right there before you got to the ditch so i figured something had died in the foliage...walking along the ditch i was shining the flashlight down into it (morbidly, of course not expecting to find her alive down at the bottom of a ditch...) i didn't see anything, but on my way back the smell hit me again...i noticed its range had a very fixed position...so right there i looked back over the edge of the ditch and sure enough right by the side of the wall was a dead, black cat...i'm staring there trying to figure out if it's Trudy or not, but i couldn't bring up her image in my mind, i could only see the features of the dead animal in front of me...i kept staring but i couldn't find a point of comparison...it'd noticed it the whole time, but the dead cat had a bit of white fur on its chest and neck (similar to Gato, but not as much white, although it's hard to tell when the animal's in a fixed position...i that's partially why i couldn't remember if it was Trudy or not, i saw that white and my mind had an association with Gato that was blocking me from discerning what i was looking at...) i'd noticed this streak of white from the first moment i saw it, or at least it was right there in my vision...but i couldn't make the connection immediately...also its tail seemed smaller than Trudy's but i couldn't be sure...its face and ears...i just couldn't tell...and i know it's hard to tell how the features of an animal that's been dead for a day at the bottom of a ditch correspond to how they were when it was alive...finally i forced my brain to remember that Trudy is all black...no white...i had to remember how she doesn't turn up in photographs...how when the lights are off all you can see are her eyes and when they close she disappears (another reason that makes it difficult searching for her when she's run away...i kept thinking while looking for her that i could be standing right next to her while she's hiding in the bushes, i could pass her hundreds of times and i'd never know) but before i figured out it wasn't her, while my brain was struggling to make the association, i'd almost decided it had to be her just on the odds...i'd told Mary Beth to go back home...she didn't see it, but when she knew there was a dead cat in the ditch and i wasn't sure if it was Trudy or not, she started back crying badly...when i figured it out i had to run to catch her shouting that it's not Trudy...a little later i was having some doubts...maybe it was paint on its neck...it'd noticed something white and chalky on the side of the ditch right there...maybe it wasn't the cat's fur...so i went back one last time to make sure...i got a long stick and climbed into the ditch (a medium-sized ditch...maybe three to four feet deep) and, not poked, but used the stick to brush the fur to make sure it was the actual hair and nothing on it...it was the fur...so all my doubts were relieved...however, while we knew THAT wasn't Trudy in THAT ditch, we'd reached the point where we couldn't really say "oh, she's okay, she'll just come back when she's ready" anymore...i still had the hope somewhere, but seeing the other cat took away any confidence in it...so it was when we were at our worst moment, not too long after that, that Trudy came back...just a little over the time that cats are "supposed" to stay away from home before coming back and just after seeing a dead, black cat that at first i couldn't even tell was her or not...right after we came back from the ditch the first time, we'd hear a faint meowing...we went back outside but there was no sign of her and we couldn't hear it anymore...then a little while after i'd gone to the ditch a second time we heard it again...we were in the breakfast nook area, by the window...it even had Trudy's voice...i figured it was either underneath the house or on the side...the basement's locked and we don't have the key to it...so i went to the side of the house to check, and there's one of those little half door things going to the crawlspace attached to the basement so i crouched down and started opening that when she walked up to me along the side of the house...so that's how we got her back...

so, moving along, everyone at work got overpaid on this paycheck...there was a nice, typical, huge mess and now we've gotta pay the company back...they pretty much paid everyone double...friday night i helped Paul and Shawna move...more friends that are just down the street from us...last night The Family Ghost practiced...Jacques hooked up the Synare to incorporate into his drumming on "Like Clockwork" and that was pretty awesome...afterwards we hung out at Brad and Sherri's for a bit...and all the while i'm back and forth to walk Pig driving all over the place...but it's fun...anyway, i've rambled on long enough...