Good Kitties! Bad Dog!

Meet the newest members of the Smith household.  At left is Elsie Elise Foster Smith the Kitty, and on the right is Leo Smith the Kitty. They joined us on Saturday from the Animal Shelter and have been delighting us all weekend.  As Jill says, anything kittens do is cute. 

"Oh look at the kitties eating!!"
"How adorable, Elsie is digging in the litterbox"

Elsie seems like the outgoing fun-loving cat, and Leo may be the lover, though they both are very playful and cuddly.  Much cat cuteness.

Blossom spent a couple of days whining to meet them, and when we finally introduced them last night, Blossom was a good girl.  She got a few kitten hisses "How cute, they are hissing!" but she didn't try to eat them or herd them, and they got used to her pretty quickly.

She is not the bad dog referenced in the title.  Actually, this story doesn't technically have a bad dog.  However, I was riding my bike early Saturday morning along the Brushy Creek Park Trail, which is a lovely paved bike route that runs parallel to 183 heading north out of Austin.  It just opened a few months ago, and literally almost no-one uses it.  One branch of the route heads north about five miles, into Leander, and goes across a few cool wooden bridges.  On the way north, on the last bridge I passed a sad looking dog.  He was wet (it had rained the night before), and there was really no good reason for a dog to be here in the middle of almost nowhere.

I travelled to the end of the route and turned around.  I had a nice tailwind and was going 22 mph when I came upon the wooden bridge again.  The sad, wet, dirty dog was still sitting there, but this time I noticed he had a collar.  I had my cellphone with me, and so I thought "I should stop and try to call the owner."  The follow-up thought that I SHOULD have had was "remember you are going 22 mph and are now travelling over a wet, wooden bridge."  I think this one did come to me as my tires were skidding and I was meeting the bridge with my hip, then my elbow, then my shoulder, and finally my head. 

The dog ran away.  When I told my story to Jill, I said "after risking my life for him (or her), the damn dog took off!" She asked what had I expected the dog to do?  I don't know, come over and lick me to see if I was OK?  Go get help?  Actually, he may have gone for help.  After checking over my bike and seeing no major damage, realizing that while I was really scraped and bruised but likely not broken, and noting that I was really in the middle of nowhere and the only living creature around was the dog (who was now nowhere to be seen), I got back on my back and rode back to civilization.  I headed back to Cedar Park, where Jill picked me up.  Forty-eight hours later, I think I'll survive, with a couple of really nasty scrapes on my shoulder and elbow, a pulled muscle or two, and some bumps and bruises.  My body feels worse than when we got hit by the 18-wheeler.  Like maybe getting hit by a 24- or 25-wheeler. 

Looks like I can use a little kitten therapy! 

SIDE NOTE: everything kittens do is cute, except possibly when Elsie did her little kitten pounce onto my scraped shoulder.  Not so cute.