dear daisy:
We have known each other now for five years or thereabouts. Oh, I'm sorry, did I interrupt your nap in my 'clean laundry' basket?

Where was I? Oh yes...I was reflecting upon our relationship. It has seemed, of late, to be a one-sided thing, a relationship of inequality, where one party (you) takes, and the other party (me) gives. I give you food, shelter, warmth, comfort and love, and you take all of the aforementioned from me. I have grown to accept the ways in which you have made your presence known in our home; the soiled carpets (three of them, one irretrievably so), the scratched stair treads, the hair, the hairballs, the pulled threads, the 'upchucks', the periodic "gifts" you occasionally leave in abandoned room corners..... the expensive vet visits (one requiring
seven enemas), your delicate digestion, how we have to mix metamucil into your smelly wet food (fish flavour only, of course!)....the fact that you won't even sleep in anyone's bed unless it's empty, and how you simply can't tolerate sitting in anyone's lap .
I have even accepted that I am at your every beck and call, your personal door-person if you will, letting you in and out and in and out throughout the day....Yes, I have accepted that you are basically the ruler of the house. And on any regular day, this would create within me a certain amount of resentment and thinly-veiled frustration. But not today. Today, to my unending amazement you caught a mouse. Today, you rule!!! Daisy, I salute you!

Your faithful servant, the hayseed.