House-sitting!

I will actually be pet-sitting tonight, in the very eastern part of Longmont; my charges are Sammy, a large black and white long-haired cat, and Max and Ginger, a brother-sister duo of Bichon Frieses. It's 22 outside with partly cloudy skies, and both kits are sitting here with me even though the patio door is open (I'll close it in a minute, if they're not going out again). The rain and snow that were predicted for last night and this morning stayed in the south and southeastern part of the state. So we're still dry.

If one can trust the genealogies that come to us through the histories of time, both my husband and myself were related through the daughter of John of Gaunt and Katherine Swynford - Joan Beaufort. I am currently reading a new book by Alison Weir about the life and times of Katherine Swnford, and I find it fascinating. Besides the fact that she flouted convention, was intelligent, talented, took control of her own life, and was considered dangerous by her enemies, she was the mother of the Beaufort family, and through them the ancestress of the Yorkist kings, the Tudors, the Stuarts, and every British sovereign since. - Just call me "Your Ladyship" - I'm joking, of course. I read somewhere that thirty or forty years ago a study was done that showed more than 275 million people could trace their bloodlines back to John of Gaunt and Katherine Swynford!

One of my regular clients is going to add some chickens to her menagerie, so I'll have two households with laying hens after April. After walking the Irish kids yesterday, I had a 10 minute wait at the bus stop, so I was idly standing there, watching the traffic go by... a dog barked to the east of me, and I immediately identified the dog as Gus, who lives on Topaz. Then a few other dogs joined in, and I realized that I have been in the neighborhood so much that I could recognize 10 dogs by their barks - and there's only one of those dogs whose name I don't know... Ah, the joys of dogdom!