Finally, the deluge

It's raining. Hard. It's been raining since Wednesday morning, and they say it won't stop til Saturday afternoon. This means less guilt about showering, doing dishes, flushing the toilet. It means we can have a contained fire at the Halloween party this weekend. But still, there's a pumpkin shortage and the corn crops are small, and there are no local apples or pears at the store. This rain, it's probably not a drought-buster by any means, but it helps. It means we'll have water past Christmas, which was an iffy prospect before. But what happens when the taps run dry? Where do we get water when that happens? Let's hope the rain dance works.

Reading cats' minds

So my new kitty Molly has been living with me for a month now, and every day, she amuses me a little more. Today, I learned something new about her. Molly is not just any old domestic medium shorthair, she is some sort of jungle cat obsessed with dead vegetation. Well, really any vegetation in general. I thought it was weird that she likes to sit curled up in my plant by the window, which is on a teetery stand and is usually freshly watered. (If you have a cat, by the way, you can probably see what's coming. Window plant + teetery stand + wet soil = cat jumping out of plant and knocking it over, spilling dirt all over the place.)

But today, I witnessed two things I have never seen a cat do before:
1. She picked up a dead leaf in her mouth and carried it into another room, where she "hid" it under the coffee table. What in the world would a ferocious carnivore want with a dead leaf? I think she has done this before, as I have found dead leaves "hidden" under my desk as well.
2. I was eating a bowl of grapes, pulling them off the clusters of stems. Molly took a stem cluster from the bowl with her paw, picked it up with her mouth, put it on the floor and played very diligently and protectively with it. It's as if she had done so a million times and knew just how to bat, catch, and chew the stems. Where would she learn such a thing? Maybe in her previous life, she was a barn cat at a winery.