Happy Birthday and Welcome to the Family

I'd like to give a quick "Happy Birthday" to all of our upcoming November Birthday people; Grandmother Horne on November 8 (turning 80!!!), Memo on November 11 (turning ?!?), and my mother, Kathy Diffin, on November 27 (turning 29 again!!!!) I also want to say Happy Anniversary to my father and stepmother on October 28th.



There is great excitement around here for Halloween. Jack plans to be a knight in shining armor, and Suzanne will be a princess. Pictures coming soon!

I also have to tell you that we have a new member in our family. The kids have named her McKayla Boonky-Bonkers. She is an apparent stray cat who showed up a couple of days after Lucy left us. She kept finding her way into our garage everynight to sleep. She's very young, I suspect born this past spring and very skinny. She's as sweet as can be, she loves the kids, and is so affectionate, she's happy to climb up on your lap and go to sleep, so long as you'll pet her! After 3 days of petting her skin-and-bones I decided either she wasn't going to go home or she didn't have one to go to. So I fed her, which of course, means she's ours now. And to show her appreciation, she brings us a dead animal... everyday! While we know she means well, and we appreciate the population control (mostly chipmunks, moles, and a baby rat snake) we'd rather not recieve them as gifts everyday! She must have had a family at some time because she's not afraid of us in the least and she clearly wants to come into our house; (which WILL NOT happen because of Jack's allergies.) We feel this is the perfect family pet for us, no litter pan to empty, no scratching on our furniture, no worries about Jack's health, no need to find a caretaker for her when we go away, as she eats most of what she catches. We do give her table scraps every couple of days, and we allow her to sleep in our box of rags in the garage. I've checked her several times for fleas and I haven't found any yet, but I figure it's only a matter of time. We'll treat her at that time because I don't want our garage infested. Then there's the question of kittens and whether she'll have them or not. Whoever had her first seems to have cared enough about her to treat her against fleas so I'm hoping that they also spayed her. But I'm not ignorant to the probability that they didn't. So if we don't want to find a litter of kittens in our garage, I think we'd better do something about it soon. So that's the story of how a cat adopted us! Welcome McKayla Boonky-Bonkers. (Hee-hee, I think that's the funniest name!)