Miss Kitty has been gone since last Tuesday and I've been a wreck worrying over her. She's wandered off before for extended periods of time, but she hasn't done this in a very long time. I think all the visitors we had over on the 1st made her mad. This being the Halloween season, I get more angsty than usual about her being outside as a black cat. I also found that describing a black cat to someone who doesn't own one is hard to do. Any distinctive markings? Um, she's all black. She has a luxuriously long tail. There are some scabs on her skin around her neck under her fur. Her fur is more coarse than shiny. She's particularly petite. She meows a lot (I actually wrote that on a piece of paper and gave that to my neighbor). To the casual cat observer, she's just another black cat.

Rich has been very helpful in the cat search. He's been taking walks in the neighborhood and helping me look for her every evening. He even went out with me in the rain with flashlights and slicker jackets for almost an hour for us to look for her one more time. About halfway through the walk, I was losing hope. I just wanted her to come home and she wasn't coming. I was calling kittykittykittykitty all over the neighborhood and shining flashlights in all their shrubbery and under their cars but she was still playing hard to get.

And on the last leg of our trip, as I stood in the middle of the street and let out one last kittykittykittykitty she meowed back in reply. In a flash of soggy black fur, she came tearing across three yards and down the street to jump into my arms. And she was all full of purrs and snuggles and kneading my shoulder.

As recently as two hours ago, I was vowing that if she ever came home she was never going outside again. But given her surly behavior, we'll see how that goes. She's definitely staying inside until after Halloween. So we have three weeks of howling and growling and general kitty cantankerousness.

Miss Kitty gets a stern talking to (1.43MB MP3 - safe for work aside from cat growling)