Since we’re in Iowa for Joey’s brother’s wedding and I haven’t been home in nearly a year, I took the opportunity to head to Cedar Rapids just to go HOME.  Turns out I was a little homesick.

We met most of the clan for lunch at HuHot and ate way too much, then afterwards we just went home and sat on the back porch for awhile. A few hours later Pops said, “Let’s go look at the cows,” so I put on the girl boots (incidentally, those are actually The Kid’s boots?  I thought they were the girl boots) and tromped out in the field with Pops.

“Watch out for that wire, it’s live,” he said.  And he jumped over the fence.

Pregnant lady doesn’t jump over the fence as easily as she used to.  I almost nailed the hot wire.  Twice.

As we were walking around in the field (I slid on a cow pie and almost went down for the count, it was great) Pops got a call from one of his clients and wound up needing to go down to the office.  So Joey and I tagged along.  I sent some emails for Pops and Joey raided the candy stash.  About an hour later we were  heading back up 380 towards home again.

Mom was home making delicious taco salads, and when we pulled in she just about had dinner ready.  So we set the table and sat down at the table on the back porch and started eating.

That’s when we heard the cat.

There was a stray kitty, a gray stripidy one sitting on the steps to the porch sitting there meowing at us.  No one had ever seen it before.  His name was Bruce.

Bruce sat there meowing the entire meal, and every now and then one of the dogs would run over to try to get a good look at it.  Bruce would freak out and run down the stairs, but a few moments later he’d be back again for more.  (More of what…who can say.)

The Kid deposited some taco meat on the steps mostly when Mom wasn’t looking (as if she didn’t know, though, he wasn’t very quiet about it) and Bruce was so stupid and/or stray that he never even tried to eat it.  He just sat there, lower fangs out, panting and meowing at us.

I thought he looked dangerous because of the fangs.

After eating my dinner, I sat down next to the screen door, which was a few feet away from Bruce.  Ernie came over to look at him with me.  Bruce came up pretty close, but every time Ernie would sneeze, it would freak him out and he’d run back down the stairs.  One of the times he did so, he kept his tail in the air.

“Uh, Bruce is a girl,” I said.

“No, it can’t be.  His name is Bruce,” said Joey.

“First of all, I can tell he’s not a boy because I just saw. And how could you even know its name?  We’ve never seen it before,” I said.

“It looks like a Bruce,” Joey and The Kid said.  ”That’s his name.”

Henceforth, Bruce was a boy even though he/she was a girl.

Sometime after dinner he disappeared.  Probably never to be seen again.