Kittens!

I hope that everyone who happens upon my humble blog has had a lovely Thanksgiving.

Mine was just fine, if uneventful. Thanksgiving is not my favorite holiday, mostly because I am not especially enamored of traditional Thanksgiving food. Turkey? Eh. As long as it's not fried, that is. Stuffing? I can take it or leave it. Mashed potatoes? No thank you. The only dish I muster a great deal of enthusiasm for is the pecan pie, or, more specifically, the sugary sweet praline filling between the pecans and the crust. Delicious. However, the holiday is an excuse for drinking at normally off-limits times of the day, and so I started my day off with a couple of big mugs of coffee spiked with amaretto before moving on to red wine midmorning. (Of course, how good it actually was is negotiable, because my mother does not listen to reason in the you-get-what-you-pay-for-where-alcohol-is-concerned department and so it was not DiSaronno but some random brand that cost a grand total of $2.99 after the mail-in rebate. Class class class.)

We had Thanksgiving dinner at my grandparents' house, which is approximately 50 feet, no joke, from my parents' house. I spent the better part of the day trying to trick wild kittens into captivity. Let me explain: when I say that I am from the boondocks, I mean it quite literally. Our backyard is the woods. Live deer often visit, and there is a widespread rumor that a large brown bear has been marauding through the neighborhood. My grandparents have an assortment of sheds in their backyard where they store items such as boats and wheelbarrows and tractors and my old Power Wheels pickup trick. In one of these sheds, there lives a family of wild cats. Not wild cats as in vicious pumas or ligers or anything, but normal adorable cats that just happen to be feral. The strange part is that they all bear a striking resemblance to our cat Thomas, leading me to suspect that perhaps he was not adequately neutered and is now on a mission to multiply the cat population of Keene, NH exponentially. However, this theory was functionally disproven when I saw the mother cat, which is as big as your average cocker spaniel and has markings to suggest that it could be half zebra. I asked my cousin Mike, who has a degree in wildlife management, what types of animals could mate with cats, to which he replied, "other cats." But regardless, whatever its provenance, that cat is at least four times the size of Thomas. There's just no way.

Anyway. There are kittens. Of a variety of kitten ages. Specifically, there are two very small kittens, one black and one gray, and I want one. My grandmother has been putting out kitten chow for them to eat, and they've become adorably fat and spoiled and now will perch on her back porch and wait to be fed. They're too young to be stuck in their wild ways, and they've gotten used to humans, so they'd make perfectly good pets. I'd have to take them for shots, but all kittens need shots, not just ones that have been found in the woods, and a free kitten is infinitely better than one that's been paid for. Not to mention I'd feel a sense of accomplishment at knowing that, thanks to my wiles and quick reflexes, I'd caught my very own cat.

I had a plan. I cut up some turkey into little teeny tiny kitten-friendly bits and put it in a dish. I figured if they ate enough of the turkey, the tryptophan would kick in and they would pass out in an exhausted, furry pile on the indoor/outdoor carpeting, thereby enabling me to tiptoe outside and select the one of my choice, or both if I so pleased.

I probably don't have to tell you what happened next. It didn't work. Maybe kittens are immune to the drowsifying effects of tryptophan. Maybe the cream that I also gave them in a Tupperware saucer coated their little tummies and prevented its absorption. In any case, I remain hopeful that between now and Christmas, I will come up with a foolproof kitten-catching strategy. They are SO cute, there are not even words to describe their preciousness.

In other news, the physician's assistant I saw Wednesday gave me a cortisone shot, which is a potent anti-inflammatory, in an effort to get my sciatic nerve to chill the eff out. Which leaves me to wonder, why didn't the doctor suggest that two weeks ago? It may or may not be working. I haven't decided yet. Either way, my right deltoid is killing me, because they have to shove a giant needle deep into the muscle tissue so that the cortisone will be absorbed properly. It was less than enjoyable. I'm looking forward to getting back to my place, where I have a comfortable bed that doesn't cause me severe muscle spasms every time i lie in it for more than four hours so that I can make an educated decision as to my comfort level. If it doesn't work, the PA also prescribed me about triple the amount of Vicodin that the doctor did. Party on.