Finally, a chance to sit and dork around with a keyboard for a while and bang out something that isn’t an e-mail about education requirements for physical therapists. Let’s just see what comes out, shall we?

I would have been at this a half-hour sooner if I hadn’t run to the corner mega-grocery to buy a tin of cat food, something I wouldn’t ordinarily done after I’d already put the car away, hung up my jacket and warmed up a pair of slippers. It was either that or shove a pill down Bonkers’ throat, though, and I hate doing that almost as much as he hates getting it done to him. That he’s gotten way too old for that kind of shit just makes it an order of magnitude worse, so rather than put him through that I shod myself once again, cranked up the O-Mobile and motored down the road to Copp’s to see what they had in the way of wet cat food.

And the answer is: Not much. To be more emphatic about it, what they have to offer is pathetic. Their selection of corn chips will make me dizzy enough to fall over and gasp for air, but as far as cat food goes they had Little Friskies, 9 Lives and I forget what the third one was. I started to read the labels so I wouldn’t buy anything with a lot of crap in it, but it was all crap, ingredients with Klingon names so long they had to print them in 0.0075-point font to get it all to fit on the back of the can, so I gave up and bought just one of the smallest tins on the shelf and promised myself I wouldn’t feed them the whole thing.

We spoil them with a dab of wet food just once a day because I can break open a capsule of Bonkers’ arthritis medicine and sprinkle the little grainy bits on the food, then mash it all together with a spoon so he doesn’t know it’s there, not that he would care. I could blow my nose on it and he’d still gobble it down. Boo gets a dab of wet food, too, because it just wouldn’t be fair to lavish such extravagance on Bonkers without treating Boo to a little of it, too.

Before I went to the store, My Darling B thought that maybe she could get Bonkers to take his medicine mixed with a teaspoon or two of fish broth. It should have worked. When she made chicken broth a week or two ago she gave him just a dollop of that and he lapped it up like a wino sucking the last drops of Thunderbird from a bottle, but as it turned out fish broth just isn’t his thing. He acted as though he couldn’t even smell it, screwing up his face at B as if to ask, “What the hell’s with this empty bowl here, you obnoxious tease?”

They were both just fine with the crap food I brought home from Copp’s, though. Both cats wolfed it down. That’s not a mixed metaphor, it just looks like one. After he was properly fed, Bonkers curled up in my lap after dinner, happy as a pig in mud, and was soon snoring loudly.

On a not unrelated note, we finally had dinner at Graze, the new brewpub on cap square. One of Madison’s best-known chefs, Tori Miller, moved his flagship restaurant, L’Etoile, two blocks south on Pinckney Street and paired it with a brewpub he named Graze. L’Etoile is an upscale restaurant; hayseeds like us can afford to eat there about once a year, twice if we come into a windfall. Graze is an upscale pub; the fare is high-priced, but not out of our range. I had a burger, B had the fish fry, both were wonderful. Hope we can go back soon.