Behold the lovely and talented Coco Bear:

As you can plainly see, her main talent is sleeping… usually about 23.5 hours a day (+/- 30 minutes). On Christmas Day, however, she decided to hit the road – probably due to the 35 house guests we had, although perhaps she just got tired of being chased by our foster puppy. She’s an indoor cat, but she does make occasional forays into the great outdoors, usually in the spring (she’s an avid bird watcher). But on Xmas day, it was colder than a polar bear’s toenails. She didn’t come back that night, or the next, or the next… She was outdoors in single digit temperatures, completely MIA, for nearly two weeks. I kept looking for her, to no avail, and was convinced that she was a goner – no house cat could survive that Arctic blast. This past Friday, my wife saw a dead black cat on the busy street near our house – we feared the worst for Coco Bear. But on Saturday evening, she showed up – looking a bit gaunt but seemingly none the worse for wear.

If cat’s have nine lives, I think Coco is down to seven. Unless she managed to build a kitty shelter in the woods out of twigs and leaves, and capture her own food. If that’s the case, we should change her name to Coco Bear Grylls.