Friday (pissed-off) cat blogging

For the last year and a half, since he showed up at my front door in the middle of a January blizzard, the freeloader has been the only one of my kitties permitted to go outside. He's been the stay-at-home type the entire time, apart from a couple of overnighters when he could not be bothered to come inside, and has hung out in the shrubbery surrounding the house as well as the wind-row of pine trees behind my next-door neighbor's house.

Yesterday, around four o'clock in the afternoon, I looked out of my window after hearing a couple of cars roar by on the adjacent road at speeds of at least seventy miles per hour (in a forty-five mile per hour zone) and saw MY cat running across the street from the opposite side of the road just as fast as he could as cars passed from both directions seconds after he made his mad dash to my yard.

Grounded. For good. It's official.

All of my kitties now live indoors, including the freeloader. After losing Monchy so recently, now watching this wonderful cat put himself into harm's way in the extreme and realizing that a few seconds either way, a misstep or a trip and stumble as he crossed and I would have had to clean his splattered cadaver off the road made the call easy. He is not going to be happy about this decision of mine, but I love him too much to permit that to happen to him, and I love me too much to put myself through that kind of heartbreak.

I'm on my way to the hardware store to get some kind of fencing or screen to reinforce and catproof the back patio. Even if he can't chase birdies and bunnies and squirrels, he will be able to get some fresh air. That will be his outdoors post from now on, and it will just have to be good enough.


And no, this isn't him, although it's a dead ringer for him:
http://icanhascheezburger.com/2008/08/01/funny-pictures-toilet-papr/