Saturday is a special day... it's the day we bail water out of the basement

First off, we are now sans cat number two. The neighbor's cat wasn't coping in our environment (i.e., she wouldn't willingly go downstairs so we couldn't move her litter box to the basement) so Ben took her back to the neighbors'. I have recouped a small smidgen of sanity. No more upstairs litter box, no more stressed new cat to worry about. And Dori's back to her bloated complacent marshmallow self.

Yeah, so Hurricane (or was it tropical storm?) Hanna visited our neighborhood Friday night. Not too much wind, but we got about five inches of rain. Ben and I spent a few minutes in preparation on Friday rolling up carpets and stacking everything on the couches and moved them to the center of the basement. So Saturday morning Ben went down there to check things out and of course the basement had flooded. This has happened at least two times before. A couple years ago we caulked up the floor around the wall where it leaked before and that stopped one leak. While we were sweeping the water out the basement door we could see two or three spots on the other wall near the floor where water was squirting in. Makes me wonder how much water had backed up behind the basement wall. At least we know now where the other leaks are, so hopefully before the next deluge we'll have it fixed.

By Satuday afternoon it had stopped raining and the basement had stopped flooding, so we went out and visited Ben's grandparents. Around four we walked down to their neighborhood park for one of Henry's friend's birthday party. It was nice and sunny and super humid. Ben brought his grandparents' dog with us. She's this morbidly obese poodle/Jack Russel terrier hybrid, what I think people call a jackapoo. Ben tried to run with her on a leash once and I think she almost had a heart attack after about fifty yards. Henry took the leash and led the dog up the play ground equipment and took her down the slide with him a few times. Then Ben took her back to his grandparents' so she could return to eating and lazing around and borrowed a walkman so he could listen to the NC State football game. I told him he didn't need a radio- he could know how bad they were doing by just listening to the boos and collective forehead slaps of the spectators at the stadium down the road. Henry had a lot of fun, ate a hot dog and candy and cake, and got to smack a pinata.

Today was nice because we're back on the morning shift at church. Every September our Branch shifts schedules with the two other wards meeting in our building. So for the past two years we've been on the sacrament-meeting-last schedule, which really wears me out because Henry has already been trying to behave for primary and his Sunbeam class, so sacrament was almost always a huge trial. Today, as we will from now on until next year, we had sacrament meeting first. I was very happy because Henry was very good for the most part. The about ten minutes into the gospel doctrine class I was asked to sit with Henry in Primary because he was acting up. Then he didn't want to go to his sunbeam class and cried and pitched a fit, so I brought him with me to Relief Society. I warned him it would be boring for him because everything was in Spanish but he didn't care. I figured he'd want to leave after a few minutes and rejoin his class, but he didn't. He sat there very nicely beside me and I didn't have to say a thing or make him sit in my lap or anything. In fact he was all cuddly and cute. I figured he must be getting sick or something, but as soon as we got home he stripped down to his underwear and started running amok. Probably the time shift has messed with his internal craziness clock. Oh, well. We'll see what happens next week.