Icy Sunday

I got to spend all afternoon at Grandma and Grandpa Stewart's house on Sunday. Freezing stuff was falling from the sky and caused our house to get dark and cold. My people said something about not having power, whatever that is. They decided that little Lily wouldn't enjoy spending time in a cold house, so we packed up and went to Grandma and Grandpa's. I don't see what the big deal is. I spend every day in the cold, dark basement. You don't see me complaining about it. In fact, I enjoy it. Anyway, I love going to Grandma and Grandpa's because they have a big fenced in back yard I can run free in. It's great. I can sit on their deck and survey the neighborhood and then take off down the stairs when something looks interesting. However, the cold icy stuff put a damper on my outside time while we were there this time. Bummer.

Nine Easy Steps For Properly Eating A Snowman

I received a tasty tennis ball snowman for Christmas. It turned out to complement the duck quite nicely. I have learned a few lessons over the years about how to properly devour a new toy. Being too aggressive may scare the people and result in a shortened period of enjoyment. There is an art to this. I will attempt to share my knowledge with this short tutorial based on my snowman.

Step 1: Give it some time and space. Attacking a new toy too quickly may result in a scared and unsatisfying toy. I concentrated on my duck for a couple of weeks in order to make the snowman feel safe.

Step 2: Build some trust. After giving the new toy some space, you can now start to establish trust. Without trust, you will never be able to get close to it. I did this by snuggling with the snowman during naps.

Step 3: Start slowly. Nibble on less painful extremities. With the snowman, the first thing I did was rip the puffy ball off of it's little hat.

Step 4: Incapacitate the toy. After this step, there will be virtually no chance of escape. I chose to remove an eye. The poor little snowman was only able to stumble around in circles after this step.

Step 5: Don't get scared if the toy screams. During the eyeball removal, the snowman let out a few squeeky pleas for help. It caught me off guard and I backed off for a day or too. In retrospect, the screams only prolonged the agony for the poor guy.

Step 6: Remove the vocal chords. In order to keep things quiet, I tore a hole in the back of the snowman's head and removed the squeeker. No more screams.

Step 7: Remove guts. I proceeded to remove the tasty insides of the snowman. Unfortunately, everytime I pulled out a nice snack size pile of snowman guts, my people would clean it up. I need to be more discrete in the future.

Step 8: Finish it off. Just to make sure the snowman was really dead, I removed it's head.

Step 9: Proudly pose for a picture with your conquest.

Basement Retreat

I've learned that the basement is a peaceful retreat. If I sleep on the couch down there then Greg can't kick me off their bed in the middle of the night and Katie won't wake me up when she gets up to feed Lily. I also can't hear Lily crying when I'm down there. I come up in the mornings to say hi to everyone and let Greg feed me then I head back down there for an early morning nap. When I sense that it's light out, I come up to sun myself on their bed. What a rough life.

Electric what??

A package showed up the other day. My people opened it up and got excited. They started saying my name a lot and using words like "boundaries", "containment" and worst of all "training". Greg got out an outline of the property boundaries and started drawing a line around it telling Katie where he was going to put the wire. What?! Did they just purchase an electric fence?? I'm not sure how I feel about this. On the one hand, I won't be able to roam the neighborhood anymore. On the other hand, maybe after they install this they'll actually let me out of the house once in a while to enjoy my own yard. Hmm...I need to decide if I'll humor them and let them "train" me or if I'll continue to bolt and just risk getting shocked. Decisions, decisions...

Scary Duck and Gross Nose Stuff

So, the duck that I've been tearing apart since Christmas squeeked at me last night. That was NOT cool. I'm not sure I'll be chewing on it anymore. Maybe if enough time goes by I'll forget it squeeks and will tear into again.

Lily has a stuffy nose right now. She sure does snort a lot. She screams bloody murder when my people use the bulb like torture device to suck the snot out. Poor thing. I should teach her my trick of getting in one of their faces and sneezing. That's a great way to clear everything out and it doesn't require having anything stuck up my nose.

New friends and more Tigers

I would like to say hi to Thor, a new commenting friend. We haven't met, but I have heard a couple of stories and received this picture. It would appear that the Mighty One just finished devouring Frosty the Snowman in this shot.

I wanted to watch my favorite basketball team play last night, but Greg got distracted. He kept talking about watching a bowl of fruit in Florida. It didn't sound very appetizing to me. If there were a bowl of tasty cats, squirrels, and rabbits, I would watch all day long. Anyway, he finally turned the game on in the second half. I was quite pleased to see the Tigers beat Mississippi State and improve their record to 11-2. I hear that one more win and they will have matched last year's sorry performance.

Tigers

I've been a little depressed for the past couple of days. My beloved Tigers failed to beat the Beavers in the Sun Bowl this past week. They lost by one point (38-39) when Oregon State went for 2 pts late in the game. Everyone knows a Tiger would destroy a Beaver in real life. I place all the blame for the loss on my people. They left the house prior to halftime and turned the TV off. How did they expect me to cheer for our team? They know I don't have thumbs. I can't hold the remote and surf like Greg does. I'm positive that my cheers would've made a difference.