In which my cat is blessed by proxy

[eve_prime]

Ever since seeing one on The Vicar of Dibley, I have always wanted to be in a Blessing of the Animals, so this morning I took D. to the fourth annual one at our neighborhood Unitarian Church (the one where he's attending Wizard Camp). I imagined lots of dogs, of course, and a few cats in cages, but also, well, birds and rabbits and reptiles and rodents. In fact, it was about 40-50 dogs, most of them highly stressed, and perhaps not more than four cats. There was suitable music, of course, and we heard a story about Raven and various personal reflections, and then came the Blessing. As suggested, we'd brought only a photo of Lillian, but it did get a blessing of waters collected all over the earth (the Unitarian version of holy water). The best moment was when we finished the final, traditional song, and a cat piped up, "Meow!"

D. went to a fabulous Hawaiian luau for one of his closest female friends (yes, his "girlfriend," who is now 7). As usual, the gender ratio was way skewed, but he was pretty comfortable. They had a 15' volcano in their back yard that "erupted" with dry ice, and they had an above-ground pool for the kids to play in, and there were lots of party activities too. Also they had a friendly 20-lb cat who looked much like a sheep! I liked the houses in that neighborhood.

I finished laboriously copying and pasting the data from the web survey e-mails into a file, then discovered I'd missed two, then found a very useful Outlook function that lets you export everything in a folder into a single text file, yay.