Eleven cats is, as anyone can agree, far too high a number. So two or three weeks ago Mom went about placing a classified ad in the Enquirer to give them away. I can highly vouch for the effectiveness of Enquirer classifieds. Within the first day, we had given all but two of the nine kittens away. Various people came and went and took them. Meanwhile, Mom’s own adult cat was sick.

We still don’t know what the cat (“Fiona”) had, but she’d had it since the previous night and it was obviously terminal. We knew she was sick then when she came staggering into the living room, looking seriously drunk, and fell over. Dad put the cat in his lap and consulted with Grady Veterinarian hospital about euthanasia. As it breathed laboredly, he discovered that Grady was charging an absurd ninety dollars to put a cat down. So Dad decided to let nature take its course and let it die in his lap. He also decided then not to tell Mom about it, because there was nothing she could do anyway and if she knew she would take the cat to Grady and, prior to euthanizing it, rack up an even bigger bill finding out what was wrong with it and that it was incurable.

But she didn’t. She got up and staggered into the kitchen a couple times, and then eventually ended up in my room. I discerned her intentions and picked her up, but it was too late and she passed water the whole time I was carrying her to the front door. We left her outside that night.

The next day a person came and picked up one more kitten. The last one we saved for ourselves. We didn’t hear anything of Fiona until Micah and his friend Matt discovered her lying on the garage floor bleeding from the mouth. At the same exact time, Mom pulled up in the driveway and they ran yelling to her about the cat. I couldn’t do anything to stop it, because I was in the bathroom. I felt helpless. Before I could even get out, Mom, Matt, and Micah left, and moments later Dad pulled in two. It all happened so fast. “You missed it,” I told him, and said what had happened.

He called up Grady and tried to dissuade Mom, who was there by now, from euthanizing it for ninety dollars. He couldn’t stop her, though, and Mom got her put down.

So now we were down to one kitten and my cat, Helen, which were the ones we were keeping. Dad buried Fiona in the back yard. The kitten, whom Micah calls “Oreo” but I’m thinking up another name for her some time, is very small and wiry and nervous. But she’s funny and really bouncy. It’s a hoot playing with her.

A few days passed and everyone kept noting that they hadn’t seen Helen for a long time. Indeed, since the day Fiona died, she hadn’t been seen at all. I figured she was out doing hunting somewhere and would come back in a few days. But she didn’t. She never came back. I really liked Helen, too. She was probably my favorite cat I’ve had. I’ll miss her. It seems unfair that two cats should disappear from the house in the same day. I can’t help but wonder what happened.

So, ultimately, now we’re down to one cat—the bouncy one.

In other news, I took a tiring creekwalk last Sunday to the railroad. That creekwalk was fun, but I suspect you’ve all gotten tired of reading descriptions of creekwalks, so I’ll condense it. Micah and his friend Josh Hardwick (who’s immensely stupid [“When’s noon?”] and can’t say his r’s right) came along; we went through Caldwell Park and stopped at the nature preserve; we got to the railroad. At the railroad we waited a minute in indecision whether to go to another, further railroad, because we thought the one we were on didn’t get trains, and while we were trying to figure out how to get there a train came on the one we were already at, so we stayed. I waved to the conductor and he waved back, and I watched the whole loud train pass. I really like trains. I want to ride one someday soon. We waited another while to see if another train would come. We were about to leave and one did. This one was carrying cars, but I couldn’t see them too well because I wasn’t on the side of the train that the boxcar doors are. I could just see their dim outlines through the boxcar vents.

And then we walked home, which was tiring again.

Lately I’ve taken to listening to Beatles songs. I can listen to all of them that I want, because I found a website that has about every one they ever sang up for listening, and it has lyrics too. My favorites are Eleanor Rigby, Penny Lane, I’m Only Sleeping, and Come Together. If you want to listen to Come Together I suggest doing it here instead, because this site has a nifty animation that I liked that goes with it. I’ve been inspired by this music to draw a couple things. I drew a picture of Old Flattop, for instance. Also a line in Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds (which I know can be shortened to “LSD”) talks about “a bridge by the fountain / where rocking horse people eat marchmallow pies”. And I thought, “Rocking horse people. Now that sounds really interesting.” An image search, though, only yielded one picture, [Note from 2017: link broken long ago] and that one I didn’t think was just quite satisfactory (though I guess it’s still pretty good–and bizarre, but that’s there before the picture’s even drawn), so I made my own of that. It is also really weird.

Tonight we have the big concert and I hope Mom and Dad are home in time to see it. I forgot to tell them about it, so I had to call Dad up. Mom I couldn’t reach because she had already left work. (She works, currently, at DRC, which grades essay questions on standardized tests.) So I hope for her sake she’s on her way home. She’d hate to miss it. I have to be there at 1945, so that gives her a good two hours. For the concert I had to bike up to Radio Shack and specially buy some new minicassettes, because I was all out. Micah will be in the audience with the minicorder. Until then,

Judas Priest may certainly have been a rock band. But I wasn’t thinking about that at the time. What I was thinking of is how people used to say “Judas Priest!” when they got mad. It’s one of those phrases I think we should bring back, along with “More power to you” and “I haven’t seen you in a month of Sundays!” I said it more or less randomly, because that’s how I wanted to end that post.