settling in

We have been in the house for four nights now. Aside from Lucy still being intimidated by its size and Mary being intimidated by the amount of crap three people have accumulated, all is going well. If you don't count the dog shit incident.
Let me tell you about that.
It is about 8.5 hours from Asheville to Marion. On Saturday we took a little longer. Mainly because we decided to take a break for lunch - usually we only stop for bathrooms and gas. Also we had an unplanned stop when Lucy decided to see what would happen when she touched the back of her tongue with her fist.
When she was a baby, people were always telling us that she looked like an Olsen twin. Now we know which one.
Anyway, by the time we got to Marion we were a bit done in. The only one who seemed unscathed was Sunny the cat.

We drugged him and put him in a cage. The drug wore off before we got to Marion but he seemed resigned to his fate and waited quietly for me to let him out. Or maybe I just had the music too loud to hear his complaints.
The previous owner of the house, Dave Rich, was waiting for us when we pulled into the driveway. I stopped in town to get some Champagne and Mary made some wrong turns so we got there at the same time.
Dave gave us the keys, answered a few questions about the house and left us to it.
I was worried about Sunny the cat, so I went back to the car to get him. I walked him through the house, up the stairs and across the length of the second floor, all the while marveling at the softness of the carpet. My plan was to release him in the large bedroom upstairs so that we could keep the doors open to the house while unloading the two cars.
"Tom," Mary yelled from top of the staircase, "are you tracking this in?"
I didn't think I would be tracking in anything. I had kept myself to the driveway while outside. I looked at my shoes anyway and of course stuck my finger in the substance on the bottom of my left sneaker.
"Dog shit!" I shouted forgetting that Lucy was standing next to me.
"What's dog shit?" Lucy asked. "Where do you get dog shit? What does dog shit taste like?"
I later discovered that the dog had dumped in the drive way. I will be looking for him. Believe me.