Ladies and germs, I would not ordinarily trouble 
you with such a thing, but I know we've comforted 
others in the past.

Yesterday was a minor-league pissy day all 
around, up to and including losing a cel at the 
last second which I should have just used BIN on 
(*thwack self*) because my machine chose that one 
moment to freak out.

But that happens, we all have had it happen.  No 
biggie.

However. 

Sometime shortly after that, we realized that our 
kitty Emily Pest, the feline vest, hadn't shown 
up to bug me for a couple of days.  As we started 
trying to find her and/or recall when we last had 
seen her we realized it had been several days. 
(When you have the schedules we have, it's REAL 
easy to lose track of stuff.)  

We searched high and low, knowing that she quite 
frequently finds a place to hide during the day 
and reappears when hungry.  No cat.  Every 
potential hiding spot in the house got turned 
inside out.  No cat.

It's finally warm enough around here to keep the 
windows open once in awhile, and it occurred to 
us that she may possibly have pushed a screen 
away from the window and jumped outside.

Even that would not be a crisis but for the fact 
that we live in a neighborhood that backs up to 
one of the few remaining "wild" areas of the 
city.  We get rabbits, foxes, skunks, owls, 
hawks, and coyotes frequently.  And Thursday, the 
front page of the paper had a story of a family 4 
streets over from us who had their poodle 
snatched and eaten by coyotes right in front of 
them.  Emily isn't a tiny cat, but she's not as 
big as a poodle.  

Then, as I was walking around outside trying to 
imagine where the foolish animal might be hiding, 
I found a big chunk of fur.  I took it back 
inside and showed the spouse, who proclaimed 
it "rabbit." (A possibility to be sure, as we 
have rabbits in our yard every year).  But it 
could also easily have been a chunk of fur from 
the underside of a grey-and-white tabby cat.

I won't bore you with the rest of our frantic 
efforts to locate her.  Suffice it to say that I 
think our cat has become lunch, and I'm very, 
very sad.  I never would have imagined that after 
11 years in this house, our 4-cat family would 
have dwindled down to just 2, and those the 
oldest...the Crotchedy Old Ladies.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do without my 
anime-watching lap rug.

Thanks for listening.