Pay Day!

While my person (I call her Granny) was busy with her prayers this morning I took a little trot over to the horse pen next door. Yesterday there was branding going on there, cattle, not horses; we, the animals who live here knew it was going to happen the day before.
My dad, Sam knew it too. He bears a preternatural sense of things happening, both in the psychological and physical realm.
When Granny told him that we, (my wife, my editor and myself) were acting crazy he said, “Maybe the cowboys next door are branding.”
Granny said, “No, I don’t hear anything that sounds like animals being branded; maybe it’s gonna rain or something.”
I don’t know how he knew; he was 100 miles away from here, but he was right, only a day early. Yesterday was branding day, but there was no activity in the pen today; the cold rain seems to have kept the cowboys from there grizzly task. So I guess Granny was right too. Branding and rain. Shiver.

But the mud is still half frozen between my toes and my whiskers are a little frosty too, so I am gonna have a cup of joe-co while I warm up to the keyboard. (For those of you who don’t know what joe-co is, it is a cup of hot chocolate stealthily steaming from under the lid of a coffee cup. No one but the drinker knows it is cocoa and not a triple shot espresso. I learned about it when I was a freshman in college.)
I won't be writing much today; it's payday at the Barker. My pack and I have a few bones to pick.
Bones, joe-co, and a pack to snuggle away the coldest day in March. Not a bad day. Not bad at all.