The Hissing of Summer Lawns

Since this is such a frequent posture to find Buster in, Alison and I thought he might like to try going out in the backyard with us. Only problem is, there are a lot of cats in this neighbourhood, most of whom (or which, depending on your views re. cats, consciousness, and grammar) are really really tough. Like one of them has an eyepatch and spits tobacco out the side of his mouth before he meows. We were worried that if something freaked our admittedly quite freakable little friend out, he might run away somewhere to hide and not come out for a few days. So Ali picked up a harness for him at Canadian Tire and we gave it a try last weekend.

Unfortunately, Buster was not too into the idea. Kind of like how horses are not too into the idea of firecrackers. After a lot of struggling and even some hissing and biting (I'm not naming any names), we got the harness on him and he slunk around the house backwards for awhile. When we decided he was used to it, we opened the door to the backyard and tried to coax Buster out, but he just looked at us like we were insane. So Ali kind of pushed him and I kind of pulled him and we got him a few inches out the door. It seemed like all he wanted to do was eat the grass immediately around him, so I tried to encourage him to explore the more interesting portion of the yard away from the door, and when the encouragement fell on deaf ears I started pulling him out into the open by the leash and that was when he slipped right out of the harness and ran back into the house. Not a nature lover, apparently.




In contrast to Buster, the humans of the house have been spending quite a bit of time in the backyard. Our electric lawnmower sort of blew up a few weeks ago and it started getting pretty wild back there while we waited for our landlady, who had completely forgotten about it as it turned out, to bring us a new one. This week she brought over a brand new push mower. I excitedly put it together and ran out into the yard with it, as I'd never actually used a push mower before. It's a lot easier than I thought it was going to be, though it does definitely take longer than an electric. Nice and quiet, though. I'm kind of into it. Keith from upstairs was also into it, and in fact took over and finished off the job after I'd only done about a third. Then when he went back upstairs, we found out Buster really doesn't like seeing people go up and down the back stairs. He (Buster) started making this crazy loud noise at him (Keith) that only got crazier and louder when I tried to show him (Buster again — I really should reconstruct this sentence instead of propping it up with distracting parenthetical pronoun identifiers. Oh well, it's not like this is spoken English or anything. I mean, you can just go back to the last open parenthesis if you lose track of where we were in the sentence. God! Don't be so lazy.) that there was nothing to worry about, by going up the stairs myself. Eventually it started sounding like he was saying, "I love you!" but in a tone of voice like a psychotic deaf woman who didn't speak English would use. It reminded us a lot of this dude.

Oh yeah, and in softball last weekend, the Bellies what are Painted Yellow slaughtered the Kelly Gruber Experience 13 - 8! In the second game, anyway. We actually lost the first game 12 - 6. But those guys are the best team in the league and completely humourless. They were the ones who went home in the middle of a game last year when an argument erupted between the two teams. So this win was incredibly satisfying. Meg forced a spectacular out at home plate, and Sarah had a record day with two outs made at home, one fly caught in right field, and a string of hits and walks at bat. She was pretty much levitating by the end of it. And the best part was that it was Tim, our founder and leader in absentia, 's birthday that day, so happy birthday to you, Tim.

- Andrew