So! The weekend!

Let's see ...  Friday night I got in quite a heated phone argument with the woman who does the scheduling for the clinic that is doing the altering of the barn cats.  Long story short, she wants to get all the cats trapped and altered on a schedule so compressed that it's simply not possible unless she wants to come and trap the cats HERSELF, which she is not about to do.  I may have made a breakthrough yesterday in getting slots in a clinic closer to home, and I'm keeping my fingers crossed, because this woman is frankly kind of a loose cannon.  A very RUDE loose cannon. *ahem*

(And let me just say, nutjobs are the norm and not the exception when it comes to rescue.  I don't know why it attracts so many crazies; it just does.  This is the SAME woman who insisted we could trap the cats several days early and just ... leave them in the live traps until date of surgery.  Ummm, NO, honey, NO THAT IS NOT HOW WE DO IT HERE IN CIVILIZATION. *cough*)

So!  Saturday morning it was off to the adoption center for my weekly cleaning shift.  An acquaintance of mine who is a refugee from a different, yes-crazy rescue was interested in volunteering with her teen daughter, so they came in to help me clean (SUCKERS!) (kidding), and to meet some of the other volunteers and the dogs and cats and rabbits currently in residence.  Hopefully, they'll be coming back again.  While I was there, another friend of mine dropped off some old blankets and comforters (and oh boy, do I have a story THERE!) for me to use in trapping and transport, and then in the afternoon I was running errands.

But I almost forgot!  While I was as the adoption center, two adult brother cats came in, a beautiful long-haired orange and a gray tabby, both Hemingway cats, and names were needed. We all thought as hard as we could, until I blurted out "Happy and Scrappy", and Happy and Scrappy it was.  I'm sure that given more time, someone could have come up with something much better (Pawzilla now comes to mind, ha), but their intake files were being prepared and they needed names RIGHT THEN.   Dear Happy and Scrappy:  Don't worry, I'm sure your adoptive families will come up with the perfect names for you.  Oh! and I spent a great deal of time with one couple who had adopted a kitten from the center a couple of months ago and were now looking for a companion kitten (We always suggest that people adopt kittens in pairs, and they NEVER LISTEN - ha)(they very often end up coming back, though, for Kitten #2), and by the time I left in the afternoon, they had filled out their paperwork and were getting ready to take home another cat.  Woot!  (Technically, I'm just there to clean, and the center isn't even open to the public in the mornings, but if I am cleaning the cages out on the store floor and someone has questions or wants to see a particular cat, I always indulge them if I can, and that is how Weasley the orange and white kitten got himself a home on Saturday, and joined his sister Hermione.) (Insert back-pat here.)

The plan WAS that the tree was coming down on Sunday, but then I got a call from another friend on Saturday night, wanting to know if I could do lunch on Sunday.  This is a friend who I do not see nearly enough of, so I said sure, the tree can wait.  hahaha we'll see if it still has any needles left on it by the time I finally take it down. :)

Sunday was lunch with my friend, and she is also active in rescue and was interested in seeing the barn cat setup, so I called the barn owner and we headed up there, as I needed to pick up some carriers anyway.  I showed my friend the barns and the trap setup (I leave the traps in place, just not baited or activated, so the cats get used to them being around)(if there is someone reading here who is active in trapping and thinks that's a BAD idea, please let me know!), and the barn owner invited us into the farmhouse for a visit.  And this is when in a turn of events that it would take WAY to long for me to explain, the barn owner and my friend ended up singing a rousing rendition of My Melody of Love.  In Polish.

Well, I mean, anything else was going to be a letdown after THAT, so Sunday afternoon was just spent doing all the weekend odds and ends that had to get checked off the list, and before I knew it, the weekend was over.  And the tree is still up.  Maybe next weekend?