I appear to have been adopted by the ugliest, scrawniest, scruffiest stray cat in town.  I've seen him around the neighborhood before; one day last month he took a nap on my patio, and looked so skinny I was afraid he had lain down to die.  That's when I started offering him kibble whenever I saw him.  I can't leave cat food lying around, because there are approximately 27 stray cats in the three-block radius, and that's not to mention the possums and raccoons, but in the past week this particular stray has been in my carport nearly every time I leave the house or come home.  So I've been able to put his kibble down in front of him, and now he trots up purring and head-butts my knees when he sees me.

This morning I repaid his obvious affection by shoving him into a cat carrier and taking him to the vet.  He had a wound on one front leg, which started bleeding again yesterday.  He seems to drool a lot, which I'm told may mean there's something wrong with his teeth.  What I'd guessed might be flea eggs on his fur turned out to be nits.  And if he decides he can't forgive me for this and runs away as soon as I bring him home, it'll still be a public service to have gotten him fixed.

If he sticks around I think I'll call him Guido.  He looks like he probably knows some guys in Jersey.

It took us a couple of days to get around to the conference with Preacher Man after all, but this morning I managed to snag my boss at a time when Preacher Man was in the library, and we told him his writing on library materials was unacceptable and to stop it immediately.  It went better than I was afraid it would; he was very subdued, and didn't deny that he'd done it.  He claimed he had asked if he could buy the large print Bible, and was told that we only sell library materials when they are withdrawn from the collection and given to the Friends of the Library for their biannual book sale; he didn't go on to say that he had deliberately defaced our book in the hope that we would then sell it to him, but I definitely got that impression.  He did offer, more than once, to buy it from us; he now has a Bible that someone gave him, but he's put in a lot of work on ours that he doesn't want to have to do over on a new book. (!!!)

He also told us that he had been marking passages in the daily papers so that people reading them later in the day would find it easier to pick out the important bits.  He didn't explain how his exceedingly offensive annotations would aid that purpose.  Seriously, I don't even want to type one of the words he wrote on the paper before carefully replacing it in the proper spot on the rack for the next person to use, and I am not usually squeamish about the seven words you can't say on TV.

I would have been happy if that was the end of the matter. He stops writing on our stuff, and I never have to speak to him again: everybody wins.  But he's the type who can't leave a sore spot alone, he has to pick at it, and so he kept coming back up to the staff to ask how we can tell if somebody writing in a book has a library book or a personal copy, and if we're going to require him to show us what he's working on every day, and if we're going to do the same to other people and on and on and on.

Gah.

The good news is that tomorrow I'm spending the whole day at a catalog demo, so I won't have to see this guy at all.