Yesterday as we were walking back to the dorm we heard some pitiful little squeaks coming from a drainage hole in the side of the building behind some bushes. We looked in and found a tiny pair of eyes staring back at us. We lured him out with some tuna… he was so hungry that he didn’t care to notice Jessica sneak up from behind and scoop him up, though he sure hissed at her lot (not very fierce). We took him back to our apartment for more tuna and some warm milk. (He was tiny, and really scrawny, but got real friendly after Jessica held him for a while. We named him Morris (after the dorm) and put him outside when we went to bed (with some more tuna). He woke us up with his meowing at 5am this morning. We can’t keep him in the dorm, and had decided to put him up on the internet with all the rest of the stuff we’re selling Jessica felt bad about putting a price on his head, but I didn’t think making $5 on a free cat was a bad deal… besides, we had to recoup the tuna expenses!).

But this afternoon the a/c repair guys from maintenance adopted him as their “shop cat” and he now lives in luxury (with real cat food even) at the Central Plant. We’d love to have a cat, but it’d be hard to sneak one over the Canadian border in August (nevermind importing a cat to China… and we’ve all heard what happens to those cats! =)
 

Today I (Joel) received a distinctly West Texas education. You’d think after 8 years in college I’d know how to answer this question:

“What should you do when it’s 40 degrees C outside, you’re driving your ’77 Nova at 45mph with the windows down because it’s short trip and the a/c takes a while to kick in, and you see (and smell) a large hairy carcass formerly belonging to a now-unindentifiable animal dead-centre in your lane 10 meters ahead? It has not yet been flattened. Should you:

c) try to straddle it, driving directly over it so that (in theory) your wheels pass by safely on either side, even though the suspension on your car gave out years ago and you already ride mere inches above the ground?”

I opted for “c”, and the results were… instantaneous. Even if my aim wasn’t off and I hadn’t nailed it with the driverside tire, we ride so low that it would probably have got hooked on the underside anyway. We had to smell that thing all the way to our small group meeting and back. People like my younger sisters already think our car is nasty – I’m afraid I can’t really argue with them anymore, at least until that stuff cooks off in the Texas heat.