It was once such a beautiful jade plant.

For years and years in the window by my front door I've had a jade plant, a piece from my mom-in-law's ginormous jade tree, a piece that grew to be a lush and beautiful plant.

This week, in a matter of days, the plant has been almost completely denuded of leaves and some of the major stems have been broken.

In a remarkable co-incidence, now that the weather has gotten colder and they're not so keen on going outside, Binky and Savannah have found that the window where the jade tree sits provides a wonderful view to the goings on in our yard and bird feeders.

The window sill is a tight fit for two growing cats but as you can see from their innocent expressions, any malfeasance which may have happened to my jade plant is clearly the work of foreign elements. Neither of them would sit on my jade plant in order to get a better view. Oh, no, neither of them would ever be that uncouth.

Go have cats.

I thought we were through with health crises for these two cats, but I thought wrong. Binky and Savannah love to chase each other at breakneck speed through our house, chases ending with them having spirited wrastlin' matches.

They go full throttle and it's hilarious to watch, or it was until the night Binky decided to take a shortcut over our wood burning cookstove, which was on, badly burning one of his paws. How he managed to leave the other three paws unscathed is a mystery to me.

There were some bad days while we waited out whether or not the paw would become infected, but Bink is clearly a cat with lives to spare, and he's pulled through fine. Let's see, as I count it, between the respiratory virus and the paw, that's two lives down, seven to go.

And since she's not one to let Binky steal the spotlight, Savannah developed a problem with her nictating membrane, her "inner eyelid" as it were, said nictating membrane only retracting part way when her eyes were open. Don't think that didn't look weird.

The vet said this was an indication of either parasites or intestinal problems. We had her treated for every parasite under the sun and held our breath because we just don't have the money to start doing high tech cat medicine. It took two weeks, but the nictating membrane retracts now.

Altogether now: WHEW.

I would be ever so grateful if the two fuzzbutts would not tap into any more of their bonus lives for a few more years. I am getting entirely too ancient and rickety for this kind of stress.

Our four cats (yes, we have four cats and yes I know that officially makes us Crazy Cat People and thanks ever so much for pointing that out) seem to have worked out a modus vivendi.

Zubby, our biggest and oldest cat, simply pretends that Binky and Savannah don't exist. He stalks around the house and property like a big, shaggy, slightly menacing lion and completely ignores them, as if they were ghosts. They have the great good sense not to provoke him.

Savannah and Enid genuinely like each other and Enid tries to play with her. Unfortunately, Enid is much bigger and heavier than Savannah and when they start to wrassle it always ends with tears and hissing from Savannah. At least there is still basic good will there.

Which leaves Binky and Enid. What we seem to have right now is a wary truce. I thought things were going pretty well, but this morning I saw Binky take a completely unnecessary swipe at Enid as she ran past him out the door. She stopped in her tracks and if I hadn't intervened there would have been a throw down right then, right there.

Let's just say that I haven't packed my blue beret away yet and leave it at that.

As I write this it is snowing hard. After a very long and gentle autumn it looks as if we're heading into winter now. Neither Binky nor Savannah has developed much of a winter coat so I'm guessing that their interest actually going out into the big outdoors is going to drop to nil in about ten minutes.

Four cats in varying states of denial jammed into a tiny log cabin for a long Canadian winter. This should be interesting.

--Marn

Mileage on the Marnometer: 1308.74 miles. Done. Now I can log me some of them there Road Runners, eh?

Goal for 2005: 1,250 miles - 2000 kilometers