Went to Tom and Mel’s pot luck yes­ter­day, which end­ed up being a fun way to end an oth­er­wise very long day. I had the chance to use their minia­ture zen gar­den, and my god was it relax­ing. There must be some­thing in the sand or some­thing. I’d def­i­nite­ly con­sid­er get­ting one now if I ever found out what makes it so relax­ing, but I’d be scared of Dolores poo­ing in it.

I’m catch­ing Dolly up on the kitchen coun­ters late­ly. She’s nev­er had the gall to do so before. Nick’s the­o­ry is that she was real­ly bored and knew she was alone dur­ing the Christmas hol­i­days, so she just jumped up one day and learned that it’s pos­si­ble. She knows that she’s not sup­posed to because as soon as she hears one of us walk­ing to the kitchen, she’ll jump down to the floor and give us the hon­est kit­ty look. The one where she stands at atten­tion with the big eyes, head slight­ly tilt­ed to one side. Yeah. She’s an evil kit­ty.

I’ve been told that Dolly has calmed down now that I’m here. When it was just Nick and Allison, Dolly would jump on them and jump off right away, or go scratch­ing things like crazy. Or if they left to take out the garbage, Dolly would come crazy meow­ing at the door when they got back five min­utes lat­er as if they’d been gone anoth­er week. I had to comb her for a while, and must have removed about 10 times the hair I nor­mal­ly do. She’s back to her old self again, except she seems even more affec­tion­ate this time, with the head­but­ting and the lap nap­ping. She seems to want to keep track of every­one now, so she’ll only sleep where she can see every­one, such as on the couch arm if we’re in the liv­ing room, or at the junc­ture of our rooms if we’re in there.