22 JAN 26

It's a busy night in cat land... Mr. Cheese maybe sensing that his boy is going to be gone for awhile... suddenly decides to embark on a great mouse hunt... he emerges from the dark and the night with not only one mouse... which Oxbear captures in an empty rotary tool kit box and returns to the elements around one o'clock in the morning... but a second mouse at dawn stuffed in his jowls and also still quite alive... “ME-OWWW!” he screeches... apparently looking for his boy in abject dejection... “ME-OWWW!”... with no one available to accept the palatable offering of fresh mouse... Cheese releases the small rodent and it runs off into some place I can't find...

Puck meanwhile... unaware of these dealings... texts safe arrival from the fort at 2:34AM before shutting down his phone for some unknown duration...

A little short of sleep that morning trying to focus on my heavy to-do list... while Yali is busy whirling and whirling and whirling an X-Acto blade pen attached to a power drill... while Patience sits at the table with tears in her eyes missing Puck... she later distracts herself reading aloud recipes for white loaf bread and cake pops from her cookbook before tearing another page off the wall calendar counting down all the days till big bro returns...

Afternoon and Oxbear and Yali are busy burning bark and stuff in the yard in the chill... some guy drops by to see if we'll sell him the old shed still tilted at an angle from the tree roots cracking skyward last spring... because the shed has basically become Yali's he agrees to the deal and finds himself a little cash-heavier on that cold afternoon... he's also asking to buy himself some cologne...