Catastrophe Averted

My main character will, in fact, live to see another day. Not sure yet about the person she was trying to save - we'll see what happens.

I avoided most of the ridiculousness and I think there may well be just enough crackers in the world to handle that quantity of cheese.

Speaking of cats...what do you mean we weren't speaking of cats? Anyway, now we are. So. Speaking of cats, there is a gorgeous stray kitten/young cat (I'd put her at under a year based on size and mannerism) wandering around my house and our neighbors these days. I would love to adopt her, except for the whole "Me or a cat, your choice" ultimatum that goes along with being married to Tim. (It's not that he's mean, mind you. Nor does he hate cats. He just has this fondness for breathing that, honestly, I think he takes a little too far sometimes. I'd let him use an inhaler as often as he wanted. For whatever reason, he's not buying. So not cats for me.)

A friend at work has suggested that we try to make her into an outdoor cat. I've bypassed all my snarky little comments about the fact that I don't need to make her an outdoor cat given that she already lives outdoors and considered how I might go about this. Obviously step 1 is to put out food. This is the point where I run into issues. Any food I put on the ground where she could get to it will be promptly scarfed by the girls when next they are out in the yard. So, if I put it up high - say on the table that's on the deck that we manage to use two or three times a year - that would be safe from puppies, but there are two issues: she doesn't yet get close enough to the house where she would ever know that it's there, followed closely by the fact that our bird feeder is hanging from a post on the deck and it somehow doesn't seem right to try and feed a cat right by a bird feeder. Call me nuts if you must.

Having this gorgeous little cat around though has made me remember how desperately I wanted a cat when I was in Kindergarten and 1st grade. And by desperately here I mean "more than life itself." My parents did all they could possibly do to avoid getting a cat, up to and including getting a dog (whom I loved, mind you. He was such a wonderful dog. Except for the one little problem: he wasn't a cat.) When I would see stray cats walking home from school, I would catch them and carry them home. Then I would make a little bed of leaves under the lilac bush in the backyard (right by the gate) and put the cat there, ask it to stay, and then go see if my parents would let me keep it. They never said yes, and the cats were strangely never there when I got back. (Go figure. Looking back I kind of feel bad for those cats. But gosh I wanted one.)

We finally did get adopted by a stray. Patches (I was young, she was a calico) came to the kitchen door and actually hung around long enough to tug on the heartstrings of my mom, who promptly put out a bowl of dog food for her. At which point we were all goners. It was a very short matter of time before she was inside at night and off to the vets for a checkup and shots. And before we could even discuss the whole spaying issue, I was in heaven. Because Patches brought with her a litter of six adorable kittens. We only got to keep two of the kittens, we gave away the others. Dusty and Patches disappeared, thanks in no small part to the evil next door neighbors who will, I think, roast in hades for having the hardness of heart to capture a cat with tags on that they knew belonged to a child next door, take off said tags, and take the cat to the pound. The pound that put animals down after a week. We managed to rescue Midnight, the other kitten we kept (Dusty and Midnight were the kittens, Patches the mom) from the same treatment. And Midnight was with us a good long time, passing away when I was a Sophomore in college. And I have wanted another cat ever since I came home for fall break and wondered aloud where Midnight was and my parents finally had to tell me she was gone because they hadn't been able to figure out exactly how to say it on the phone previously.

So now I'm trying to figure out if there's a way to find another little girl who desperately wants a cat and talk her parents into adopting this little gray cutiepie. Because the temperatures are starting to drop and I'm worried about her.