Normally I find cats reasonably intelligent and seldom stupid.

However, as I drove up the driveway this afternoon there was Bad Cat, perched happily on top of the Jimmy in the driveway. Perfectly logical, since cats like high places, except that it was RAINING!!

Dumb Cat.

However, I had no trouble getting her inside to eat.

She showed me another new trick--she jumps up and gets on the (sloping) wooden railing by the stairs, then climbs up it till she's on the level part alonside the porchlet. I'd better check periodically in case she's using her claws too much and splintering it.

I think I got in some quality time this afternoon at the coffee shop. I decided to quit reading for a while and see about re-writing the "sample" chapter. It started flowing out fairly smoothly, but I put in a couple of phone calls to see if I could get an idea of how many pages double-spaced go into an average chapter. Or, how many words. This book project needs to be at least 35 to 40k. I can think in terms of 30 page term papers (which are about the length of journal articles) of which I have done many. From the way I'm going on the sample chapter I don't think I'll have problems making the minimum.

The person for whom I've done a couple of small proof-reading tasks at work is going to find that there's payback on that. Anyway, it's the scholarly thing to do and she can critique it too, telling where I am being dense as a post. And someone for whom I once proofread an entire book is going to get her turn to proofread at the very end. (I know this will not be as interesting as the novel, but you owe me.)

Having a project like this is a great way to procrastinate on dull household stuff!