What's with the weather? I suppose back East you'd call this Indian summer. Temperatures in the 90's, though it gets cool at night; summer vegetable plants in the garden finishing off with a few last items; in my side yard, the biggest raccoon I've ever seen getting bolder and bolder (Food and clean water being harder to come by?).

I thought we'd seen the last of the super hot days, and I had put away the tank tops and shorts. I should have known better. Good thing they were only in a bottom drawer.

Misty can't decide if she wants to be indoors or outdoors, so she stands on the threshhold and meyowls, twitching her once-luxuriant but now quite ratty tail. I, as her dutiful servant, stand there and wait for her to make up her teeny-weeny, so-called, soi-disant mind.

Who said I was going to retire? I have a full-time job awaiting me as a hand maiden to a cat or two.

I once read a book on reincarnation which posited several levels of attainment before the final union with God, the Universe, and everything. The last incarnation was to be a cat and after that incarnation, never to be bound on the wheel of birth, death, rebirth again. Sometimes I look at that perfectly self-contained, totally independent, narcissistic creature and wonder....

Animals accept the world just as it is. Only humans could invent the concept of sin. How do we have the arrogance, the hubris, to believe that we are the apex of creation, and the earth and all its inhabitants created for us? Sometimes I'm ashamed to be human. (Shame is a human construct, too--goes along with sin and guilt).