You know
how they say when you make a life change, you shouldn’t try to make too many at
once, because you’ll be overwhelmed and you’re setting yourself up for failure,
and all that? Kind of like New Year’s Resolutions: If you say you’re going to
eat healthy and work out every day and take up the piano and learn Russian, and
you try to do all that on the first day, and by the end of the week you’ve
abandoned all of it, because it was just too much all at once.
Yeah.
Life doesn’t always allow you to stagger things out.
Remember
back in late August when I went on my nutritional cleanse and suddenly felt
like I was spending all my time prepping food and eating food and washing the
same few dishes over and over again? As timing would have it, something else
had come into my life that demanded a chunk of my attention. Two somethings,
actually.
Short
version: a friend’s mom was moving from her house to a small apartment, and for
various reasons her two cats had become mostly outdoor cats and were shy and
not quite semi-feral, but not exactly come-when-you-call cuddlers, either. As
hard as they tried, my friend et al couldn’t find them a home. The no-kill
shelters were full, and the regular shelters didn’t want 6-year-old cats that
hid when strangers were around.
And Ken
finally said, “We should take them.” I want to make it clear that he was the one with the big honkin’
S for Sucker!
on his forehead. (My S was small and dainty, because all I had to do was agree
with him.)
We
already had a side yard that was walled off. When the previous owner made a
deal with the neighbor on that side to build a wall between our houses, they
built it so that there was a back wall cutting off our back yard from the side
yard. Then homeless people started sleeping in the nice sheltered side yard, so
she put a gate to cut off the side yard from the front yard. Had I been around
to weigh in on all of this, I would’ve said “wall off the front yard from the
side yard, ya boneheads, and leave it open to the backyard” but I was not
around and my wisdom could not be shared.
Thus the
side yard had become something of an unused jungle:
We hired
someone to remove all the foliage, and then Ken (because he is the engineer
of awesome) put lattice up all along the
wall between the houses, and across the gate as well, and filled in all the
little gaps where a skinnier cat with delusions of escape could get through.
And he
built a multi-story cat condo out of a wooden crate once used to ship our
belongings back from Wales:
And thus
Teddy (aka Teddy Boy) and Zip (she of the ability to zip past you at warp
speeds) came into our lives, to live in the cat run on the side of the house.
They’ve
lived with us for just over two months, and if I could bring these
cuddle-bunnies inside, I would in a heartbeat. (I can’t, because Grimoire would
make their lives a living hell and Eostre would look at me with her enormous eyes as
if it say “You’ve replaced me. Farewell, cruel world.” and never sleep on the
bed with me again. I know this because we tried bringing in another cat years
ago.) ‘Cause, yeah, they’re so shy and unfriendly.
Here is a representative picture from today:
When I
went out there, Teddy was by the gate, yelling at me to get my ass in there.
Zip was, for perhaps the first time, outside of the condo waiting for me. (She
can still be skittish at first—or, if I’ve been sitting there for an hour and
make a move to get up, she often freaks out and bolts. Because somehow me
sitting there is fine but me moving my leg is ohmygodstheworldisouttogetmerunawayrunaway. But then she comes right back. Silly kitling.)
So if you
call and I don’t answer, it’s likely that I’m out in the side yard, with purring
kneading cats on my lap. At least I’m getting a lot of reading done!
