“One small cat changes coming home to an empty house-- to coming home”

Thursday, June 16, 2011

We were up at 6:00am. But, today, the cats were wrestling on the bed and playing. I think everyone knows it’s the last day of travel.

I made breakfast. As we were eating, Sheila begged for a bite of toast. She doesn’t really “beg”, but sits and stares at my food. As I take a bite of toast, she watches. I was talking to her and she never took her eyes off of my food.

Charlie said that when we get home, her “bites” will be cut back severely. We’ve been more lenient with giving her food from the table on this trip. While visiting, we allowed her to have handouts. He said we were going to weigh her too. She reminded us that we needed to weigh ourselves! He said, “Yes, I will weigh myself so I will scare myself into doing something about it”.

We decided that we would officially declare our vacation over on Sunday night. Then next week will be soup and salad week. We are planning a trip to our favorite Mexican restaurant before the vacation is over!

We paid $4.39/gal. this morning before getting on I-15 for home. Driving along we saw a sign for gas at $3.89/gal. It seems to be all over the map here. What is waiting for us at home?

We were driving for about 20 minutes and up ahead we saw something that looked like either smoke or fog. I guessed smoke until we got closer. I rolled the window down and the air was really cool. Then when we got closer, we could see it was fog. Not so thick that we couldn’t see. The sun was shining through too. I turned the A/C off and the vent on and it was pretty cool.

The fog did get a little thicker as we drove through it and it blocked the sun. Charlie officially declared the end of OUR summer!

We came to Temecula and stopped for gas. It was 68 degrees. Gas was pretty normal: $3.89/gallon.

We arrived home around 12:30pm. Mr. Creme met us at the front yard. He was glad to see us. Since we’d been gone so long, we decided to leave the three cats in the RV until we went into the house to say hello to the cats we left behind. Sheila came in with us. She was so happy to be home.

The cats in the house, Jezibel and Lexi were fine. Ellie was hiding upstairs between the bed and the wall. We checked on her and tried to get her to come out, but she wouldn’t. We saw she was fine.

In the garage, Debby was in her cat tree and was agreeable to being petted. Toby was in his bed on the patio. Bridgit had been putting him out in the yard each morning and then back in the garage in the afternoon.

After giving each cat attention, we brought Jonesie, Jason and Kaci inside. Almost at once, it was as if they had not been away for a month. Mr. Creme came in the back door and as I herded him through the house, Jonesie ran along beside him and tried to ride on his back, just as he’d always done.

Bridgit came over when she saw that we were home. We were very happy at the job she’d done, taking care of our babies. She genuinely seemed to have enjoyed it. The only problem she had was a broken sprinkler head in the front yard, and she and our other neighbor, Mr. Pat, took care of it.

Ellie started meowing loudly from upstairs and I went up. When she saw me, she ran to the door, apparently finally believing we were home. I picked her up and she was really congested. She has asthma. We gave her one of her pills and Charlie held her for a few minutes to calm her down. She then went into my closet.

When I fed the cats later, I went to get Ellie out of the closet and feed her. She was breathing freely and ate all of her dinner and wanted more. We feed her as much as she’ll eat because she does not have a weight problem. Her metabolism burns it off pretty well.

Charlie started going through the mail and came across a jury summons for himself. He was supposed to report for jury duty this week! When he tried to call them to let them know he had been on vacation since May 10 and didn’t get the summons, he discovered our phone was dead. So he used his cell phone. They re-scheduled his jury duty for December. Thank goodness they had not sworn out a warrant for his arrest for not reporting!

We called to report our out of order phone. They couldn’t fix it by resetting it, so they will come out tomorrow. While we were gone, they upgraded our equipment, so I think our phone got messed up. Our DVR is also messed up. We tried unplugging and resetting it, but it didn’t work.

So, we are home and it’s nice to be here. The weather is cool, typical June gloom. It’s overcast in the mornings and the sun comes out in the afternoon. Temps run around 68 degrees. Quite different from the 90's and 100's we just came from.

We had such a nice visit with our families. It already seems like so long ago since we were there.
We had no more problems with the RV. Since the gas gauge no longer works, we kept a close eye on the odometer and started looking for gas when we had reached 80-90 miles. We did average around 9 miles/gallon coming home. There was quite a bit wind in the desert.

More later.........