So, another reason why I should limit my jaunts out of the area is closely related to the health of my pets...and the one that suffered greatly during my time away was the youngest of my pets and the sweetest, my big orange cat baby. Dan reported finding blood in the cat's urine once, thought it was an anomaly, found it again, and discovered after a visit to our vet that our cat had seven bladder stones blocking his pee pathway. The surgery had to be done in Mandeville, cost nearly as much as our car repairs back in February, and now has me wondering if I should set up a PayPal donation button for the Cat Baby Fund to help cover the costs of getting our fluffy family member healthy...but there's a recession going on and we as a nation can't even deal with the health care costs incurred by the ailments of fellow human beings, forget ten-plus-year-old cats.

When the big guy came home, having been a mild-mannered patient ("the most laid-back one he'd ever seen," reportedly said by the vet who did the surgery), Dan told me the only sound emitted by the fluffy guy was a mighty hiss aimed at our dark gray tabby, who only wanted to welcome him home. Hey, he wasn't feeling well. Still isn't. We are armed with small syringes of painkiller to inject between his cheek and gums and Clavamox to ward off infection while he heals, but he certainly won't be himself for a while.

"That's not nice of him," my son stated upon hearing about this bit of rudeness. "Just like V____ (a girl in his camp and his school) was not nice to me!"

"Ummm, this is the V____ you like a lot?" I asked, then instantly wished I hadn't.

"Yeah, I like her! But she didn't want me to give her a hug. And she didn't hug me back. She treated me badly, just like the sick cat treated the tabby. The tabby doesn't deserve that, and I don't deserve V____ not being nice to me," he said with such gravitas, this six-year-old with a huge gap where his front two baby teeth used to be.

"Look, kiddo," I tried to explain, "not everybody wants to be hugged all the time. Sometimes you have to give people their space. And this works for cats, too. Our orange cat is in a lot of pain, and he didn't want to have our tabby in his face at that moment, because he doesn't feel good."

"But V____ let G____ (a camp friend for many years) kiss her! And he also kissed R____! And..."and this is when I suddenly realized I didn't want to have this conversation, at least not when my entering-first-grade child was still this young and talking as though he were in junior high and oh dear God I'm not gonna listen any more lalalalalalalaaaaaaa....

At the door to our house, Dan asked the little guy another question about V____ and got this answer from our budding Casanova:

"Oh, I know she likes me. She just doesn't think she likes me."

Yeah, that'll get him far in love.