Sigh.

We have a new cat.

I will give you the story as well as I can, based on the wildly inconsistent storytellers we have around here.

Saturday, I worked a few hours, helped a friend unpack, went to a meeting, then went back to work for a meeting. All told, I was gone nine hours. At some point in the middle of the day, I got a phone call from my reluctant husband. He inquired about my feelings regarding small grey kittens.

As it is, we have two-and-a-half cats, one of whom is on the verge of mental breakdown. Her fragile state has grown increasingly neurotic with the addition of each child into this household. Her current activities include sleeping in the sill of the kitchen window all day and staring out it between naps. My primary concern is that we will finally push her over the edge.

Our orange boy kitty is an in-and-out cat who pays little attention to the goings on of the bipeds in the household, except when his personal safety is of concern or those occasions in which the food bowl is *gasp* found to be empty.

And our half-kitty is an odd story, as any half-kitty story would be imagined to be. When we were newlyweds, free and yet unfettered by the shorties, a feral cat gave birth to a litter of ill-fated kittens under our house. Being sympathetic creatures, we put out a bowl of food for her. At some point, I finagled her into a kennel and took her to get her 'special surgery'. This is the one and only time I've ever laid hands on her. Dowlan will squeeze some flea medicine on the nape of her neck periodically. She is allowed her space, rent-free, in exchange for keeping the rodent population at bay. She's actually quite adept at this. But, she is emphatically NOT MY CAT.

Now that you've all been brought up to speed of personality defects of our existing feline population, it is time for Saturday's tale.

We have a neighborhood boy who is about eight and, well, not entirely versed in the skills of logical and rational thinking. He somehow came upon a cat (the details are hazy) and was not allowed to keep the cat. So he made a home for it out of a plastic tub, closed the lid on it, and tried to offer it up to another family in the neighborhood. Because they were out of town, he left the cat/box on his porch in the July Texas sun. Mind you, Saturday was the first day in weeks to *only* get up to 95 degrees, but this veritable blizzard was still not comfortable enough for a cat in a sealed plastic container.

Yet another neighbor saw him doing this and told him that he was not to do this, that the cat would die. He made the pretense that he was taking the cat home, but then circled back and left it there. My girls went over to see if they could play with the boy-who-is-out-of-town-who-unknowingly-had-a-cat-in-a-box-on-his-porch and found the woman removing the cat from the box after the extremely bright boy had left. The cat was a bit worse for the wear, but is thriving under the care of Doctor Dixie.

When I got home and heard the full story on how the cat came to reside in our home, I told the girls that I reserved 24 hours to make my final decision, and it was this: the cat can stay, as long as it is named the only logical name for a cat found half-dead in a box: Schrodinger.