My husband and I are going house-hunting again. Did some of that over the past year and didn’t quite find exactly what we wanted, but we’re gearing up for another effort this spring. Our daughter will be graduating from high school, our son is already away at college, and it’s time to find a little bit less house and a little more land, hopefully with a view.

There are gorgeous views around here. This is one I found on a real estate website from a listing in this area. Those are the blue ridge mountains in the distance, looking toward North Carolina near Hendersonville, just a bit south of Asheville. We live in the foothills of them, which stretch down to the northern part of Greenville, SC. It’s gorgeous here, and we don’t want to leave. I really hope to end up with a place with a view of the mountains.

Yes, they both look sweet, but one of them’s a predator. Don’t let the giant powder-puff look fool you. The cat, Khleo, likes to chase and kill squirrels, mice and birds. Lots of birds.

Laura & Khleo

On Sunday afternoon, I was in the living room when my daughter started shrieking for help in the kitchen. It seems Khleo had captured a bird. A big bird! And brought it into the house with him. (Oooh!) And the husband was NOT home! Which meant, there was no one to get the bird outside except me.

Why do cats do these things to us? They look so sweet and lazy and cuddly, and then ours go out at night and turn into ferocious beasts! Honestly, Khleo is huge and lazy, with a belly like a giant powder puff. You’d swear he couldn’t run anywhere, much less take down a bird. But he can and does quite often.

He’s lounging on my desk right now as I write this, knocking pens to the floor and pawing at me, wanting me to rub him. And he hates it when I’m reading and he wants attention. He’ll climb into my lap and shove a book or the newspaper out of my hand with his head and then stretch out on my lap and wait for attention.

We adore him, and then he goes and brings small dead things into the house! It’s bad enough when he and Inky leave small furry dead things at the bottom of the steps in the garage, but in the house..? Oooh!

I’ve read that cats leave us these things as tokens of affection or that maybe that they simply think we’re incompetent to catch our own small furry things, so they have to do it for us. Sometimes I think my cats are just showing off. (Look! I caught another one!) They don’t eat what they catch. They just kill things and leave them for us. Maybe they’re insulted that we don’t seem to appreciate the gifts or their skill in catching things.

I don’t know. I just feel guilty about every small, furry creature that dares to come anywhere near our house.

I once spent two hours in Vegas. Just long enough to lose $20 and look around a bit. It was on one of those trips you only take in college, when you’re very young and will do almost anything. Two friends &  I decided that for spring break our senior year, we would go to LA to visit a friend who’d already graduated. Sounds fine.

The trick was, we had to drive. From Kentucky. I still remember that it was 2,200 miles, and we had about 10 days.

No one thought we’d make it. A teacher bought us a guidebook to Texas, telling us we might get that far in the time we had, and then we’d need some idea of what to do before turning back and coming home.

Well, believe me, you can get to LA within 48 hours by car if you hardly stop, and we hardly stopped. One of us drove, one kept track of the map and made sure the driver stayed awake, and one of us slept. It was a great plan.

Our only detour was the two hours in Vegas. Coming up from I-40, that meant coming across the Hoover Dam and then over the mountains. I remember seeing this strange, eerie glow in the distance over one of those mountains. It turned out to be the neon lights from Vegas. A very cool sight when you’re driving through the desert, to come upon that strange glow and then come over the top of the mountain and get hit with this huge expanse of neon lights, Vegas spread out before you.

It was about 2 AM when we got there, and the cool thing was, you couldn’t tell at all. Even at 4 AM when we left, it could have been 8 o’clock at night for all the activity going on. It was loud, bright, an assault on the senses really, and we decided two hours was plenty of time to be in Vegas.

We drove on to LA. Got there in about 42 hours. Everyone was amazed that we made it, especially the teacher who gave us the guidebook to Texas.

My two boys

I have never been back, but my husband and son have been planning their first trip to Vegas together for years. My son, the math whiz, has an interest in poker (in a very mathematical/probabilities sort of way). The two of them, shown here as John graduated from high school, hope to hit Vegas together as soon as John turns 21.

Most often from the world around me. The newest book came from a newspaper story I read on the Internet about an older manand woman in a nursing home falling in love. Sounds great, right? Except this was more like Romeo and Juliet. Their families objected to the relationship. Not sure why. We can only speculate. And the families insisted the two be separated, even going so far as to move one member of the couple to a different nursing home.

I thought it sounded unbelievably cruel, but then I’m a romance writer. Apparently, the two were incredibly sad without each other, even depressed. And I hate unhappy endings.

Enter me, the writer, thinking… what would be wrong with two older adults falling in love? How could anyone object to that? And if people did object, why? Ask that question often enough, and you get a story.

So, I discovered Leo Gray, 86 but lying and claiming to be younger, a life-long ladies’ man, already kicked out of three retirement villages be causing an uproar with the women there. Women who’d lived together happily for years were suddenly at each other’s throats because of Leo Gray. His poor nephew Wyatt Gray was thinking sedation, restraints and maybe some sort of anti-Viagra, whatever it took to slow down Leo and find a place that would keep him.

Leo’s newest lady-loves are Jane Carlton’s grandmother and great aunt, Kathleen and Gladdy, two women who’ve never, ever fought over a man in their entire lives, until Leo comes along.

It only seems natural for Jane & Wyatt to work together to try to keep Kathleen & Gladdy from being hurt and Leo from getting kicked out of yet another retirement village. But the old folks are not cooperating at all. They’re behaving more and more outrageously all the time. And then… they all end up running away to Vegas. To the Love Me Tender Wedding Chapel.

I won’t say more than that. Don’t want to ruin the surprise.