*sniff*

Still no kitty.

We've only had one call about her since the last post I made and that was a second call from someone working at the nursing home that called about the cat that looked nothing like Avie two weeks ago. This was evidently someone other than the two ladies we met and talked to there before. They called to say they thought they might have our cat there, only they hadn't seen him in a little while and he actually looked a bit different than the cat in the picture. Yep. They said all that. I assured them that he wasn't our cat, but neglected to mention that I thought I'd seen him at the pound.

Speaking of orange cats, the other night before bed I went into the garage to close the garage doors and otherwise secure the house. Before doing so, I thought back to the number of times that Avie had gotten herself trapped in the garage by sneaking in there before I shut the doors for the evening and then not coming out of hiding and making herself known before I managed to get back in the house. We'd find her in there the following morning, no worse for wear but certainly annoyed that she had no soft place to sleep. She did this with such frequency that we just started keeping a litter box out there. So, as I went to enter the garage, I thought to myself how wonderful it would be if I opened the garage door and found Avie waiting on the top step. She wasn't there when I opened the door, but when I triggered one of the garage doors to close, I saw another cat come flying from around my car and flee the garage through my car's bay door. It was another orange one. That was last week.

Last night, I was awakened at 3 a.m. by the sound of a meowing cat from outside. I was instantly awake and my first thought was that it was Avie, come home to us and crying in the rainy night. Then I realized the cries were coming from the direction of our next door neighbor's house, or perhaps further down the hill, and not from our back door. Still, I got up and went out on the back deck to make sure. I listened for a while, but didn't call out to the cat for fear of waking the wife and causing her to freak out that Avie might be home if I was up calling to her in the night. As I returned to the inside of the house, though, I saw the wife come down the hall.

"Did you hear the cat?" she said.

"Yep. I don't think it was Avie," I said.

"It sounded like her," she said.

So, wife already awake, I went back on the deck and called out to her for a few minutes. No kitty turned up, though. I imagine it was the orange one.

The other day, while driving near the area where Avie disappeared, we had the depressing realization that even if she was trying to get home, we have a small river running through our town which she would have to ford. The mental image of the cat running up and down the western bank, looking for a way to cross, but finding none, brought tears to our eyes.

Meanwhile, more serious drama has been afoot Our friends who were keeping Avie for us are now splitting up. Not over Avie, of course, but due to unrelated, ongoing troubles. It's very sad. I've had a handful of friends divorce before, but this is probably the first ongoing, active, friends in the same town you live in divorce I'll probably be a witness to.

In fantastic news, though, my brother-in-law has returned safely from Afghanistan. We'd been trying to time our trip to Key Largo to coincide with his return, but he assured us that any plans we made to that effect would nehehehever come to pass, cause that's just how the Army works. And, indeed, his return wound up being a week later than originally scheduled, though that was due mostly to the Icelandic volcano. We're headed down this weekend to do a mother's day/brother-in-law's day combo celebration, with many biscuits and much chipped beef gravy scheduled to be consumed by all.