I pretty much stayed home today because of all the snow. It finally stopped shortly after noon and they came and plowed us out by three. Then the wind started blowing and I figured that I had better take a quick run over to see Dick for just a few minutes and take him some clean shirts. I needed to be with him for just a little bit.

I got a LOT of little things done. I finished decorating and made some soup and wrote a couple of letters. Maybe I will even get around to doing Christmas Cards this week.

I read about a poor old dog that got left outside and its poor but froze to the sidewalk. Fortunately it was a really obese dog and after they used warm water to get it off the sidewalk, the Humane Society says he will be OK. They had a lot of advice about how to treat animals in the cold weather, one of them being to bang on your car hood to be sure that cats who sometimes will crawl onto warm engine blocks don't get hurt when the engine goes on by the fan and all.

It reminded me of my Sam cat. We had a beautiful black cat that we named Samantha. She was a really elegant cat and was well known throughout the California neighborhood we lived in. In those days, at least where we lived, cats roamed pretty much free, though Sam usually slept in the house.

One day I drove the truck and camper over to a local mini mart to pick up something. When I opened the camper door to put the purchase in, Sam shot out of the camper and took off. We were only four blocks or so from home, so after looking around and calling for a bit, I headed home figuring that she would probably beat me there.

She did not. We looked for her but could not find her and after a couple of weeks, I figured that she was gone forever. Then, one morning, I thought heard her and opened the kitchen door. There she was. She walked into the kitchen with her left side towards me and I could see that she was extremely thin. I immediately called John, a neighbor across the street to tell him that she was back. (John used to bring her fresh chopped liver from a restaurant that he worked at.) Then she turned around and to my horror, there was a scar about an inch wide that ran down her entire right side. So I bundled her up and ran her over to the vet. At first he was kind of suspicious of abuse but when I told him what had happened, he examined her and said that she must have gotten caught by a fan or fan belt under a car and crawled off and holed up until she was strong enough to come home. All he could do, as the scar was clean and healing was give me some salve to put on it. You know that scar healed so well that there was no sign of it after a while.

She was a beautiful cat.

Love

Mary