A smelly predicament...

I woke up this morning and headed for work at my customary 5:55am. I'm never fully awake and kind of zombie walk to my car. This time when I got around the corner though I was fully awakened by a black and white friend. A skunk... He was sitting right at my drivers side door so about 5 feet away. I don't know who was more surprised... him or me!?! Now... the next thoughts that went through my head occured in the blink of an eye. My first thought was to run away screaming like a little girl. My next thought was to run away... but scream with a more "manly" tone. That thought was then followed by SLOWLY backing away, not breaking eye contact. All reasonable thoughts with their own merits. However, I did get one last thought. This could be the lil bastard that tore up my lawn last fall in one night... AND he was going to make me late for work!! So... with that in mind, I did an extremely brave and moronic thing. I started trying to shoe it away by waving my arms, stamping my feet and giving little charges. This in turn led to the skunk turning it's back to me. Now in a normal animal... this would mean I had won and it was running away. However, skunks are NOT normal animals. By turning it's back to me, it essentially said "You are about to have a VERY bad day". As I saw the skunk slowly raise it's tail, new thoughts went streaming through my mind like "Gee, I sure hope I have a lot of tomato juice in the house to bath in", and "hmmm.. I wonder if the bomb sniffers at work will alarm when I walk through them?". But the main thought I had in my head was "Why oh WHY did I not run away?!?!". As the tail reached it's maximum hight, I swear that the skunk turned to look back at me and grinned, then I heard a little "pfft" and a lil cloud of smoke rose from the butt of my would be tormentor. Then ever so slowly, the tail AND the face of the skunk began to drop with the realization that he was out his ever so powerful poop juice! Armed with that knowledge, a new sense of bravery engulfed me and I charged this animal a 20th of my size!!! He skittered under the car, rolled under my van and dashed into the road. For once in my life, I wished we lived on a slightly more busy street... like the QEW or maybe the european autobon. Oh well... maybe next time he'll get hit for not looking both ways.

So that's my story and I'm sticking to it...

I'm Shaun McLaren. Thank You and Good Night.

Welcome Isis

Well I know it is a bit soon after Nikki's death, but I found I really missed having 2 cats around. It just didn't feel right. So we headed to the pet store today and got Isis. She had 2 other sisters there who were black and beautiful but they reminded me too much of my first cat Mindy. Plus I think Kat would have confused them too much with my inlaws cat Charlie. The other plus with this beautiful cat was she was VERY good with the kids and very social.

Here are a few pics of our newest McLaren. Ramses and her are still getting aquainted but I'm sure they will be best of friends shortly enough. In the meantime, his nose is a lil out of joint.

New Things Going On...

A couple new things going on the home renovation front.

1. FINALLY doing the fence between us and our neighbors. We had waited on them to finish up their landscaping before we built the fence so it would not get wrecked. The fence itself is only 4 feet high because we actually LIKE these neighbors. I'm kind of just picking away at it but when it's done, our backyard will be nicely fenced in to keep the rug rats from scampering off!! Not that they would do that right now!

2. Deb ripped up the old carpet in the dining room and we're going to replace it with peel and stick tiles. It was becoming combersome to have half our dining room table on carpet and the other half on parkay floor. The changes will only be temporary since we hope to have the entire main floor redone with ceramic tile (except the living room which will be a nice carpet) in a few years time.

That's about it for home reno's again. I also picked up Tiger Woods 09 for my 360. LOVE IT! It looks SO cool on my big screen!! You can actually see individual blades of grass :) Even my old man liked the game. I showed him how to play it and he ended up playing 11 holes before I suggested he go upstairs and see his grand kids before they went to bed!!

That's about it folks!

Everyone here is doing well. Patrick and Kat are growing both physically and mentally every day! I wonder what they are going to do or say when I get home from work!