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swapping cats
Wednesday, July 14 2004
It was yet another day of unexpected driving around. It started with, of all things, a cat exchange. Yesterday, for a trial SPCA fostering, Gretchen had brought home Spock, a four-year-old cat. Evidently the poor guy had been having difficulty finding a home because of his shyness and relatively unattractive appearance. He's a makeshift quilt of a cat, seemingly stitched together from a bucket full of feline pieces, possibly with a few raccoon parts as well. The reason for adopting Spock was to get a new playmate for Clarence, who has been pining for Maxwell since his disappeared the night of the Red House Party. But Spock proved to be too neurotic and shy for our household. You should have seen me extricating him from beneath a shelf in the teevee room today. He stuffed back there behind the hydronic blower fan for the upstairs bathroom and I had to poke him with something to get him out far enough to grab the scruff of his neck. He complained for the whole ride back to the SPCA, but he seemed much happier once he was finally there. That's when the exchange happened. Gretchen had picked out a playful four month old tiger kitten with white socks for us to adopt formally. His name was to be Julius, in honor of Gretchen's great grandfather. When I arrived, Julius was being something of a cat room terror, going up to every loose cat in turn and either attacking them or otherwise provoking them. I could see why Gretchen had fallen in love with him; he had a good balance of cuddliness and wild punk rock attitude. He also seemed intelligent; I'd wager that he already knows more about Indian religions than Britney Spears does. I took the little guy home and he immediately vanished behind the dryer. It's normal for cats find a place to hide for a period of time after being moved to a new location.
Later on I paid a housecall to a house where the father was making his son a Viking shield out of wood. I don't advertise my services anymore, but there's been a deluge of calls of late, mostly established customers and word-of-mouth referrals.
This evening on Dug Hill Road we had a power outage that lasted a couple hours. Bereft of the Internet, I was reduced to reading the New Yorker by candlelight. The Meatlocker People (who were also suffering from the outage) came over just after dark and we showed them our kitten (using candles and a flashlight). Then we all went down to the Hurley Mountain Inn for drinks, but I was the only one who really drank very much. The Meatlocker People told us about a couple of properties they looked at recently in the Rosendale area. I'd had no idea they were in the market to, you know, settle down here. It's great that they want to live in this area for the long haul, but I'm sad they're contemplating living someplace other than Dug Hill Road. Then again, they do live in a sunless meat locker, so I can understand their desire to find something a little better and less depressing.
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