She's five years old. And she's been sulking since morning, right from the time she entered my home. Not quite what I'd expected foster parenting to be - I mean, sure, I had excpected tantrums, and sobbing, and a distant stranger. But Minoo has come with a different set of stress symptoms atogether.

She's sneaked under the bed, and lodged herself between a high suitcase and the low bed panelling, and refuses to come out. She also refuses to eat or drink. It would have been a total crisis situation except for the fact that she does at least meow in conversation once in a while. And she lets herself be scratched with my outstretched hand after I slither my (nearly) three decades old body at ground level. Then she suddenly comes alive and maneouvres her head and neck so that I get the spots right. But that's about it.

I wonder how many more hours to go before she'll fell confident enough to venture out, and whether it will be possible to vaccum out her hair from our black bag when she does. I hope it happens before her five weeks at my place are up. For one thing, if she doesn't get back her spirit and enslave my husband soon, he may veto all my plans of adopting a cat by end of this year!

The Bill in me

Today I had excellent jam from breakfast, with compliments from Shangri La. They'd actually given their compliments a month ago, to my friend who was staying at their fancy hotel. But the freecycler in me couldn't let the cute little bottles of marmalade and honey get cleared away with the room breakfast when I visited her.

My friend encouraged me to pick the goodies and was glad to see her money recovered. (She would have picked them herself had they been sugar-free)
I don't think Shangri La cared.
But my husband, as usual, is the problem. He thinks this amounts to stealing. In fact, he thinks this everytime we are out on vacation when the magpie in me collects matchboxes and stationery with glee, therefore at those points of time he frowns as menacingly as he can, which given his lineless forehead, isn't half as scary as he imagines it to be. So I continue.

Besides, his opinion on morals doesn't carry water given that he's a banker. And not just any banker - but a banker working in credit derivatives. For the uninformed, let me just say that Warren Buffet considers what he sells "time bomb"s. Me thinks his snooty highness finds two-dollar robberies beneath contemplation and would be quite delighted if I stole the whole Shangri La itself.

Anyhow, his opinion is quite dwarfed by a celebrity endorsesment I have just uncovered. The marvellously funny Bill Bryson, whose 'Notes from a small island' I am currently reading, candidly reveals his pocketing at an expensive hotel. I am a bit dubious about his being as Scroogy as he sets himself to be in the rest of the pages, [given how rich fans such as me must have made him], but in any case, it is nice to knaow that I and Bill have at least one thing in common. And I intend to keep it that way.