Yesterday: After some moping and reminiscing over past cats at dinner, Dad and I got off our asses and did something constructive. See, we figure that whether Merc comes back or he doesn't and we acquire another set of cats, we should minimize kitty wilderness jaunts (especially at night). We're both of the opinion that an 100% indoor cat'd be problematic for various reasons, so we're striking a happy medium and building an outdoor cat pen. We already have an old dog pen, so all we had to do was disassemble it, drag it across the yard and up a small hill, level out a 10x10-ish area of hill behind the porch, and reassemble. Bit trickier than it sounds - accounting for clearance, the area between the side of the porch and the steep drop-off into forest is a tad less than ten feet. Well, it was before I landscaped the hell out of it.

Once we'd gotten the entire pen put together, I realized I'd left the leveling tools on the other side. Fortunately we'd left some space on account of laundry vents, so I was able to shoof through sideways. Felt a bit like I was LARPing Primal or Beyond Good and Evil or something. 'Y know that 3-D action heroine thing where there's a long thin gap in the wall and they need to ledge-walk their way through. I say female 'cause I've never seen a bloke do it, but then again the only action game blokey hero I've played as is Naked Snake (who admittedly does do the ledge-walk routine and a belly-crawl thing but I'm pretty sure he doesn't squeeze through walls at any point). And Link back in the N64 days. Aaand Fox from Starfox Adventures and Harry Potter from the Chamber of Secrets game and it's been so long since I played that I can't actually remember whether Harry does the tunnel-shuffle or not. I do remember him ledge-walking at some point.

Still needs some more leveling done to make the bottom of the pen secure, and some wire over the top. We're planning on adding a tunnel/cat door set up so to allow feline auto-transfer between pen and porch, a cat tree or two for climbing purposes, a healthy amount of topsoil and grass seed 'cause it's just bare soil right now, a flowerbed 'cause they're gonna find a place to poo out there and we might as well make it less obvious and more purty, and that's all that's been decided on so far. It might be cool to set up a ledge around mid-way.</a>

Today: I again ventured forth into the wonderful outdoors in order to reconnect with my muse and replicate that amazing feeling of accomplishment and pick delicious fruit. A mosquito flew up my nose.