My mouse is possessed. It opens things that I don't want to open when I click once and it makes me click a whole bunch of times to bring things to the front or to open things I want to open. I'm not sure what this means but I'm going to drop kick it into the catbox if I can't get it to work properly.

Speaking of the catbox, the war is on with the cats. Yesterday I scooped another 5 pounds of cat shit out of the front -- where I'd sprinkled the pepper flakes. So I figured I was too timid and applied a super-duper layer of pepper flakes and this morning the whole area is scratched up again and filled up with cat shit. Not like one corner -- like the whole area. What is up with these stupid cats? My next humane approach is I'm going to turn it into mud. The spot is under the eaves and the only dry dirt around. Other ideas include ordering some of those prong things that you put in the dirt that they don't like stepping on. I bet these cats would just move them out of the way.

On Thursday Bob and I both had the day off and I said we should make sure to take time out to do something fun and not just get involved with our usual projects. We slept in and read our books and then we went to lunch and took Bob's car in for an oil change while we went to the Grocery Outlet (Bob calls it "weird foods"). I documented this all with my camera but I don't feel like frickin with Photoshop with my mouse on the fritz.

We went to Frenchman's Bar trail and walked to Vancouver Lake. The weather was perfect and the scenery gorgeous. The cows were getting fed and some of them were galloping from one field to where the feeding was going on. I've never seen a cow gallop before. Also a ton of birds, I think mostly Canadian geese, were hanging around one field making bird racket. We saw some people picking some sort of small red fruit in the park -- crab apples?

We did our grocery shopping and then I invented a great dinner. There was a recipe in the paper I wanted to try but I didn't have half the stuff and I had other stuff in the fridge I wanted to use. I sliced a half tube of polenta into 9x11 dish and spread it with ricotta cheese. Meanwhile, I sauteed an onion and garlic with a can of tomatoes and scraped that on top of the ricotta, added the rest of the polenta loaf and then covered it with fresh mozzarella and then a sprinkle of Parmesan and baked until bubbly. It came out excellent. The only similarities between this and the recipe from the paper are the 9x11 dish, the mozzarella, onion and tomatoes. Bob said it was one of the best dinners I ever made.