Made in Richmond

I was going to do a whole post of things wrong with this house-the things that drive me crazy and make me want to cry. However, despite the title of this post, I decided to be grateful that I have a house and (sort of) have the funds to make improvements to it. I’ll just leave it at that.

Ross and I often sit and wonder what song we could blare out of our speakers to get back at the damn teenagers who blast their hip hop music at all hours of the night (we also often get our dentures mixed up and gripe about the cost of milk these days). After much deliberation we decided that this song would be the best way to stick it to ‘em (just imagine it blasting at full volume with us playing the air guitar on the porch):

The feline friend has been removed. It turns out that it was under the porch, curled up on the board connecting the porch to the house. I discovered it by pulling the lattice work off of the porch (it turns out that it was just kind of stuck there, not really nailed, as is typical of our house). I peeked my head in and saw a little kitty face looking back at me. After much patience and a can of tuna, I finally got the little meowing creature into a box. See, the thing is, animal control won’t pick up a stray kitten unless it’s contained. They, the professionals, won’t pick up the kitten. But, they will let *me* pick up the kitten. Awesome.

So, the furry, CONSTANTLY MEOWING little bastard is waiting in our bathroom for the authorities to arrive. They said they would be here “as soon as possible” which in the City of Richmond means “Congratulations! You now have a new kitten!”

Seriously. The meowing. Seriously.

*UPDATE*

A very scary-looking representative of animal control just showed up at our door.  Honestly, he was huge and smelled of many cigarettes.  Anyway, he came in, picked up the kitten, started rubbing her belly, and she immediately stopped meowing and started purring.  He then proceeded to talk to her in a baby voice, asking, “Are you hungwy?  Where’s your mama?”  Seriously, one of the most ridiculous/awesome things I’ve ever seen.

(major bonus points to anyone who knows where that is from)

I came home from the gym tonight to find the living room in disarray and the large flashlight set in the middle of the dining room table. Such signs indicate that Ross was looking for something, didn’t find it, and then wandered off to watch Star Trek: Voyager on his MacBook.

After a fabulously un-annoying conversation consisting of me yelling at/asking Ross so nicely why the living room was jacked up and then us both screaming that we couldn’t hear what the other was saying, I heard a teeny tiny sound that answered my question. The sound, my friends, was the tiniest, most pitiful meow you have ever heard.

We live in the city. Stray cats LOVE the city and they especially LOVE to have their stray kittens in, on, or under various parts of the Catrow estate. During our first month here one of the local strays decided to deposit her young under our back semi-porch. That was cute for about 2 seconds because every time Shooter would go outside he felt he needed to sound the alarm, alerting me that RUFF RUFF SOMETHING NON-CATROW WAS IN THE VICINITY RUFF RUFF RUFF, A THOUSAND TIMES RUFF!!!!! Anyway, the kittens eventually went on their way, terrorizing the city, getting into things, and depositing their own litters in various nooks and crannies.

After hearing this pitiful meow, I grabbed the flashlight and headed out to the front porch. I needed to find out for sure that it was a kitten, because kittens are cute. In the case the it was, say, a meowing rat trying to disguise itself as a kitten, I would need to prepare myself to be horrified and disgusted. I looked around and couldn’t really see anything. So, I did what anyone who has been in kindergarten would have done: I made the sound a kitty makes. Yes, friends. I knelt down in the wet grass, in the rain, in the dark, in my gym clothes, holding a flashlight pointing under my porch, meowing at an unconfirmed kitten. I’m sure it was amazing.

Well, my meow was immediately answered by another meow and I knew it was a kitten and not a rat. So then I went inside and came up to bed. Why didn’t I do anything to get the kitten out, you ask? Because I live in the city and I know that if you find a cat in the city you must assumed that pure, rabid evil runs through its cutie-pie veins. It’s just a means of self-preservation, not a display of cruelty. I mean, it’s cat. It’ll figure it out.

I’m going to keep pretending that you are not there as long as you keep not busting through my ceiling and keep not eating my face of and/or clawing my eyes out.

Regards,
Your tolerant, appreciative downstairs neighbor

I love living in the city. Seriously, I do. But, there are two things that I would call “undesirable” about my surroundings: birds and cats. Here’s why…

We don’t really have what you would call darkness in the city. Street lights run all night. Street lights that stand right alongside trees. Trees with birds. Birds who think the street light is the sun. Birds who consequently chirp 24 hours a day. All day and night with the “GOOD MORNING!!! HELLO!!!!! GOOD MORNING, NEIGHBOR-FRIENDS!!!!!”

First of all, I hate cats unless they’re kittens (like my kitten named Boots who Ross will never let me get so I ended naming my MacBook Boots instead). My hating of all things feline kind of puts our city cats at the top of my shit list, even above having to trim your fingernails and people who somehow believe that throwing cigarettes out of the window isn’t littering. See, a lot of cats in the city are stray cats. STRAY AND CRAZY. They cry and fight and cry and fight and cry and cry and cry all night long. Except their crying sounds like babies rather than cats - babies being thrown into boiling hot water.

If I were a super hero, my power would be “selective deafness.”