My Cat Is Wierdly Evil, by Adam Grigg

First, when it wants food, it begs and begs until your head almost explodes; and then it barfs up these hairballs all over the place, and usually exactly the same place where we step, where we sleep, or mostly in any unexpected place. You never know when you are going to step in puke.

And now, about the cat being irritating: if you let the cat out just before you go to bed, it wants back in at 2 am. Most of the time, just when you get calm, the cat knocks something really large over and you have a gigantic mess to clean up.

To sum it up, the cat is just one of the strangest cats ever. If you are nice to it, it will be nice to you, but that doesn't subside the barfing. My cat is just weird.

Editors note: This was written by corespondent Adam Grigg nearly a year ago, but due to a filing accident was just recently rediscovered.

Bandit "Bad Ass" Enforces Dog-free Zone (provided dog is no larger than himself) by Amy Abeln

Hermosa, SD- Abeln arrives home from work. Bandit Big Ears comes up to greet her. He follows her to the door when along comes a little Manchester Terrier into the yard. Bandit Big Ears sees said dog and immediately decides to confront dog. Fur stands on back and tail as he chases dog on his tiptoes. Because he has sized up said dog and has figured out that dog is the same size as he is and he has chance of beating him. Bandit chaces dog out of the yard and dog runs away in fright. Bandit comes strutting back in triumph and figures that he is a bad ass now. He looked for the dog the rest of the day.

Mike and I Were Almost Amish Yesterday

So we have a convertor box for the TEEvee and the DVD player, and one or more of the cats chewed through the adapter cord. Back in my day, replacing a jack just meant going to the store and buying a jack, however, because "techmology is very important in our world today," adaptors now come with a host of plug-in's and warnings about not reversing the polarities, or one will blow out the electricity for the entire tri-county area.

So Mike took the be-chewed adaptor to the Walls of Mart, and the electronics dude gave him forewarnings as mentioned above about the doom and destruction he would wreak upon the earth were we to buy the wrong adaptor.

Last night we ventured back to WalMart with the entire convertor box to make sure we did not flirt with the apocolypse. On the way, I wondered if we would get a clerk who would look at us askance and just be like, "Um, yeah, you just need this thing. It's $3.99 American dollars. You can take it to the counter and they'll ring it up for you."

My worry was that the initial dude just freaked us out and that buying the jack wasn't that big of a deal, and that by bringing in the entire convertor, Mike and I would look like we had just ridden our buggy three hours into town to ask the worldy ones if the spirits inside the little black box that bring the evil talking pictures into our home had perished.

"Is God punishing us for when Michael Patrick took up the saw that is fueled by the oil of Satan at Abraham's barn raising last fall?" we would beseech the freaked-out clerk. "Would the people inside the box return if we read enough scripture?"

"Does it make God angry that we look to the demon cube during His harsher winters when our fingers are too numb for cross-stitch or whittling toys for the kinder? We fear He will not heed our prayers; prithee, will you tell Him that we only gaze upon This Old House, and only after He cast away the Baywatch?"

Fortunately, we got a gearhead clerk who was excited to tell us about the features on our new adaptor and why we had chosen the perfect jack for our television-viewing needs. So last night I saw "The Jerk" for the first time. I know -- I'm the last American child of the 70's who hadn't seen it. I can't believe I lived a life without knowing the horrors of kitten juggling.