Lisa.  Tall, long-legged Bakersfieldian, grilled cheese with the crusts cut off and french fries dipped in thousand island dressing Lisa.  She who gets me coffee with three creams and four sugars. She who dots her i’s with hearts when she takes messages. She who tells me to, “Forget about that fat hog” when Binkus makes me feel like some dumb mule working the trails in the Grand Canyon.  She, I’m happy to announce, who’s been practically begging me to come on over to Alcatraz for a play date with Booby Muffin. Besides an extremely bewildered IRS auditor last year, no human has ever been to my nest.

Sure, it’s spacious.  Comfortable? Check.  Yes, it’s climbable from the ground, Booby Muffin does it all the time you nimrod!  Done with your line of questioning? Good. Because I’ve got a nest to clean. Lisa’s coming over this Saturday.  Yeayah.

Frankly, the nest is a mess.  Booby Muffin’s in her summer shed and the birds that nest in the tree above me must be molting. There are feathers and fur balls everywhere, not to mention that nasty yuck that little Booby coughed up last night during sunset. I had to give her a talking to about it. There were little downy feathers in there and it upsets the neighbors when my new pet kitten eats their young.  We’ll smooth it out though, don’t worry. Those birds mate like sailors on shore leave.

So it’s a spring cleaning of sorts, but I’ve realized that I live like a barbarian out here on the rock. I don’t even have a table, a pillow, a lime squeezer - so tomorrow I’ll buy myself out of bachelorhood at the megastore everybody seems to visit when they need to pick up a few hundred basic home essentials. Oh, I got it at IKEA! Isn’t it unique? It was only thirty cents!  Those Swedish meatballs are to die for!

Barney, the night watchman here on Alcatraz, has agreed to help me with a carrying vessel in which I will transport my haul. I saw him working on it earlier. Think Santa’s sleigh made from a lawnmower bucket and bungee cables. We’ll see… Barney’s been working the night shift for twenty years so he hasn’t exactly convinced me he’s an engineer and executioner of ideas. He gives me peanuts sometimes though. But they make me fart. Don’t tell Lisa.