I'm back online. I'm hopeful that I won't just use my time to surf compulsively as much. I'm going to try to do useful things. I'm not playing any more online roleplaying games.

Over the summer, one of my girlfriend's cats ran away. It was previously feral and getting a bit old. She got used to letting it out in her small back yard, and one day it just disappeared. She hunted all over for it, put up signs and asked her neighbors. After a month, she pretty much gave up hope. I thought it might have been killed by a fox in the woods behind her house.

A few months ago, a neighbor reported that an orange cat matching the description of her cat had been seen around their house. They periodically left out food for it.

She finally got the thing last week. It was her cat. It had run away seven months ago, and somehow it survived outside all that time. Best as she could figure out, it was living in a drain pipe. Over the winter, we had a week where the temperature was in the single digits and sometimes in the negatives. It's pretty amazing that the cat survived. It lost over half its weight, had an abscess on its face from a fight of some sort, and had an intestinal parasite and at least one viral infection.

So there. I've written a blog entry instead of just compulsively surfing. Yeah me!