Kitty Vacant

It's sort of old news now, but Kitty is now back with us after spending a week in lost cat camp on the Eastern Shore a couple of weeks ago. Not wanting to lock him up in our house alone for three days without his life-coach of a dog, we took him with us to my mom's house for her second annual Memorial Day blow out. Unfortunately, Kitty took advantage of the opportunity to escape the room we were keeping him in, effectively fleeing one unfamiliar environment for the much larger unfamiliar environment of the great outdoors. We spent the rest of that long weekend looking for him, expecting to hear his keening any moment, but it never came.

We spent the next week working in Baltimore/Frederick, e-mailing missing cat posters to my mom for her to post around the area, and called the Eastern Shore Humane Society to make sure he hadn't been incarcerated. We drove down the following Friday evening -- I'd somehow figured I had about a 20% chance of finding him; he either stuck around the house as a fairly familiar place, or fell in with a gang of ferals and found a new life as a bad kitty.

We arrived around 11, exhausted, and after stopping along the side of Nanticoke Road when Janine saw an orange tabby in a ditch. The cat ran off after we pulled over (something Kitty would never do after Carter jumped out of the back seat), but a couple of local came out of a nearby house with a shotgun to make sure we weren't the folks that broke into their shed. I was resigned to turning in, and to the fact that we were going to wind up spending the rest of the weekend tromping through the briars looking for the cat. Janine wanted to take a few minutes and roam the immediate neighborhood, so I went out with her shirtless, calling the cat's name. And about five minutes later, we heard some plaintive meowing coming from the neighbor's shed across the street. Cat found. But man, was he bitchy after we got him out -- he kept us up most of that night banging his head against our chins trying to get us to pet him.


You've got a week's worth of massages to catch up on, you bastards! Get the hell up!