Never get attached to a stray cat

School's out for the summer.

Yay for kids!

Boo for parents!

Ok, that was mean.  Tanner's a pretty good kid who is annoying only about 62% of the time.  Then he goes to bed. (love you Tanner! ;)

Anyway, one of the benefits to having Tanner out of school is he gets bored easily.  How is that a benefit?  Well, when he gets bored, he'll find a project to work on.   His first project of the summer was "Project Boo Gate".

Boo Gate is a gate, specifically to keep the chickens off the deck to:

A.) stop them from pooping where I set my groceries on my way in the door and

B.) stop them from eating all boo kitty's food.

Damn chickens every chance they would get would be on the deck eating his kibble, which explains why he was hungry all. the. time.  We had been blocking the deck off with a trash can and a cooler, but that was getting old.   So Tan got out some lumber from the shed and started building me a gate - he only had to cuss about it 19 times and redo it just once.

It looks sooo much nicer than it did before.  Now if I could just talk that ever so handsome child of mine into painting it for me.

Did I mention he's handsome?  And funny?  And cute?  And smart?  And handsome?

So, what does this have to do with Boo?

Well, the morning that Tanner worked on the gate, Gene fed Boo on the way out the door.  At noon when I went outside, there was no Boo kitty around.  Normally he's out begging for another bowl of food.

He didn't come back in the evening either.  I started to get a little worried about him.

Then he didn't come back the next day.

Or the next.

And now I'm really worried about him.  He'd come home a week earlier with a huge puncture in his neck where he'd tangled with something.  I'd been treating that.  He's a scrapper and it's nothing for him to come home with a new scrape or scratch.  He's not scared of anything apparently.

I'd also been hearing coyotes crossing along the back edge of the property at night.  But he'd disappeared during the day so I was hoping he wasn't coyote bait.

I'm going to confess that I was sure he was dead, and kept getting all teary-eyed when I thought about how he'd bit it.  I was just hoping that someone around here realized what a sweet cat he was and took him in as an indoor kitty.

I went up the road and asked the neighbors if they'd seen him - no luck.  They knew him though as he always heads that direction at night.  Sometimes we'd see him laying out in the middle of the field.  Just laying there doing nothing.

You know.. like cats do.

So I gave up.  Boo was gone.  I had a Boo kitty gate, and no Boo kitty.   I found myself going outside just to look around for him.

Then a few days ago we had a rain.  It started out as a sprinkle and ended up a gully washer.

I left the back door open so I could see out.  Shortly after the rain stops, I hear....

mewmewmew.

BOO KITTY!

I went out to check him out (and hug him, but he rejected my hugs as he was hungry).  Effing cat was DRY. 

All this time he's been very near by taunting me.

"Oh, I'll show her feeding me the cheap cat food."

"I'm sure she'll miss me."

"HA.. can you hear her calling me?"

"OK, going in."

Damn cat.

I'm pretty confident that Boo Kitty was up the road on furlough and found some Girl Boo Kitty lovin.  And for that, and for taunting me, Boo Kitty is going to visit the vet for a little snip snip.

That'll teach him.

Now if we could just do that for men that wander off. LOL.

In the meantime enjoy all the Boo kitty pics that you didn't get to see while he was gone.

{horrible photo of my big fat head, but it's boo snuggling with me in the grass}

Welcome home Boo Kitty.