My 4th

My 4th wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. On the 12-minute drive home from work, I remembered my protest against the Sheehan hunger strike, so I pulled into a grocery store. I got an apartment-dweller's holiday meal -- prepared baby-back ribs, potato salad, baked beans and fresh corn. But I put a little work into it. I roasted the corn on my indoor grill, added shredded chedder to the potato salad (a recipe I got from my late mother-in-law) and churned butter for my corn. Sweet revenge. Oh, dessert -- strawberries. As for my cats, Guenevere, the black cat, just faded away like the shadow she is when the fireworks started. But Ginger wasn't as graceful. At the first big boom, she jumped out of my lap and dashed into her laundry basket den so fast that it rolled over. She got tangled up in the cat mat I put in there and kept rolling till the den came up against the fish tank. Then she disappeared too -- after first dashing in all the four directions of the compass. I woke up briefly at 3 am to find them both on their mats on my bed. Crisis over. Some channel must have run a Rawhide marathon, because I woke up this morning to find 13 episodes on my TiVO. I'd forgotten I even programmed that show into the unit. I must have done that years ago. So, I'll be doing that today as I eat leftovers and wait for a call about my car. I'm getting some odd messages on my computer. I wonder if someone in another apartment is piggybacking on my wireless signal. I'll have to look into that too. Anything to avoid cleaning the apartment.