Why I got exactly zero work done today

Fridays are usually low-word-count days, because on Friday I clean house. It's a hangup from being raised Adventist, I guess - but it's as good a day as any to get the homestead in order; so I go into Friday assuming that maybe I'll scrape together a thousand words, and I'll call it a win.

Not so today. Today started the usual way - Greyson wiggling happily beside my bed, snorfing me awake because OMG IT'S TIME FOR YOUR DOG TO GO PEE and I'm like, "Thanks for the heads up." We went for our usual walk, I fed the kitty and opened her curtains so she could have her sunbeam time, and I started the housework marathon.

Around noon, the husband and I decided to take a break and go grab some lunch. Wendy's sounded good, and we have one near by.

This fateful culinary decision turned our day up on its head.

We parked in the lot and walked toward the door, where we spotted ... something. Something about the size and texture of a child's winter mitten, blown up against the door jamb and inexplicably surrounded by French fries.* And we started walking slower ... and slower ... because something was not ... quite ... right about the mitten.

In fact, it was not a mitten. It only rhymed with mitten.

At first we thought it might be dead, and in pure horror, I reached down to touch it. It lifted its head and gazed at me with one eye, the other having swollen shut. It looked away despondently, gazed at the ground and sniffed listlessly at a French fry.

My husband freaked out. "JESUS CHRIST it's a KITTEN! What...what do we DO?" And I was all, "I DON'T KNOW!" but I knew we couldn't leave it there, so I picked it up and wrapped it in my sweater.**

We climbed back into the car, all plans of lunch aborted. The kitten didn't make a sound, except to sigh and settle down like this was only the most recent unexpected catastrophe in its short little life, and it figured all this would soon be over one way or another. So once we were seated, and we had successfully retrieved a not-dead but sick and injured kitten, we talked our way to the next obvious course of action: we drove over the river to Spainy's vet.

The Cat Clinic of Chattanooga is really the office of one single very nice vet, who was actually absent when we arrived. She'd had a hole in her schedule, so she'd run off to tackle an errand ... but the people who worked there gave her a call and she turned around and came straight back. God bless that woman, I mean seriously.

I won't bore you with the twenty minutes of terror, wondering if the FIV/FIP tests would come back negative - or if all we'd done was give this kitten a nicer place to die than a goddamn Wendy's; and I won't go into how calm and weak the kitten was, and how I was worried that one of its legs didn't work right, or how it finally started to purr in my lap.

I'll just give you the verdict and the end result: Tests came back negative. Female kitten, about 5 weeks old. Weighs one pound. Head/eye injury that had become infected. Bad case of fleas. Rather malnourished.

She is beautiful, though. Vet says that the stubby tail and head shape, combined with the excessive fluff, indicates some probable Persian ancestry someplace. The little girl was treated for fleas, worms, and the eye infection - and given her first round of kitten shots. And long story short, within a few hours of my frantically tweeting and FB'ing about the wee tiny newcomer ... she'd scored a home.

Her new mom comes to pick her up tomorrow afternoon, and in a funny turn of coincidence, she's the daughter of one of my professors at UTC.

So tonight I have a tiny gray fluff-bomb hanging out in my bathroom, tummy full of gooshy food, eye looking a bit better ... lounging on towels that are placed upon a heated tile floor. (I turned on the floor for the first time ever, because she didn't seem too interested in the bed we made for her.)

And all's well that ends well.
Except that I sure as shit didn't get any writing done.





* And this is what utterly broke my heart - someone had seen the kitten there, and had wanted to make a kind gesture, but it was so dumb and furthermore it meant that people had been walking by this injured, baby thing, and just LEAVING IT THERE for God knew how long. I still kind of want to cry just thinking about it.
** Yes, I brought a sweater. It's cold in that Wendy's.