Quarantine: De-Loccer

Four days a week, Owen and I have lunch together.  We used to go outside and eat on our “deck”, such as it is, but now it is too cold for that, so we eat indoors and then go outside for some exercise, and rosy cheekiness, and to give Maple some yard time.  Plum is an indoor cat only, but sometimes we start the excursion by being Plum’s rickshaw-walla and bring him outside to sniff the breezes.  I don’t put him down, and he purrs the entire time he’s out there.  He seems to appreciate a brief change in scenery, and if I hold him up to any kind of greenery whatsoever, he will eat it.  It’s his party trick.

Owen and I are currently in the midst of a tournament for a game we call de-loccer.  It is kind of like soccer, and kind of like football, and it involves a lot of cheating and shoving and laughing.  The best part of the game is that you never know when the mahogany snitch might come and grab the ball and run like a bullet in increasingly large circles.  If you are losing, you can call on the Snitch to do just that and shake up the game a little.  Maple is surprisingly fast, considering that her legs are about four inches long.  

 

We have two very close together trees we use as goal posts:  if you kick the ball in you get 2 points, and if you throw the ball in, you get a ha’point.  This usually causes one or both of us to burst out into the holiday song sung by muppets and involving a ha’penny.  You know the one.  The last time we played, it was 12.5 to 12 and I was victorious.  Need I explain that the victor gloats?  Today Owen won by 2.5 points.  The game is over when Owen is due back in virtual school, or I need my afternoon coffee, whichever comes first.  We feed the birds on the way in, and usually have to go get a spoonful of peanut butter to lure in the hound dog, who is convinced that the seed and nuts newly strewn on the picnic table should instead be in her gullet.