Well, no sooner than I sit down to catch up on the blogosphere when the real world intrudes once again. First, it’s my wife reminding me that the Ziggy kitty (pictured) has a vets appointment for her recurring skin allergies. Poor thing bites herself silly, down to exposing raw flesh, due to her allergic reaction to fleas. We’d taken care of the fleas, but now we have to give her weekly baths. Ever bathed a kitty witt tiny sharp little claws? It’s one of my favorite things.

Then, while I’m down at the vets, wife calls to remind me that mother-in-law is due to arrive out our apartment. No sooner do I hang up with wife than mother-in-law calls to tell me she’s there at my doorstep.

Now, you’ve got to understand that mother-in-law [MIL] had fifteen kids, of those my wife is #5 (or “Deduction Five”, as I like to call her.) Since MIL’s youngest has finally left the nest (age span of the 15 = 44 to 22), MIL has now decided to gallivant around the Pacific Northwest. She’s got kids in Seattle, Portland (us), Salem, The Dalles, and Boise.

So, whenever someone is making a trip, she hitches a ride. She just got done with Seattle, now she hopped a ride from #11 to meet up with us here. We’ll do a trip to Salem to visit #13. Then at the end of the month, she ride with us back to Boise as we attend our 20th high school reunions.

Read that again: at the end of the month. That means, for the next two weeks, MIL will be crashing on my couch in our dinky two bedroom apartment with me and the wife and the two kitties and the one dog and the no air conditioning and the high pressure front that’s finally lifted Portland’s continuous rain cover and brough us our annual two weeks of actual mid-90’s temperatures.

Don’t get me wrong. I love MIL. She’s a wonderful person and very easy to be around. But then there’s wife + MIL, and that’s not always fun. This will be an interseting two weeks, capped off with an eight-hour road trip.

I guess I’ll have to spend some after work-hours time at the office to catch up on blogging. Has Bush fired Karl Rove yet, or has the standard been raised to “they’re OK in my administration just so long as there are no actual videotapes of them fondling a donkey’s testicles during a bestiality show in the Oval Office with three interns proven to be underage Guatemalan prostitutes pimped by the illegitimate son of a foreign Nazi officer who hid in Argentina.” What DO you have to do to get fired in the Bush maladministration… tell the truth?