Rescue Me

Sometimes, I think Anne Frasier is using some sort of supersonic lazer-pointer-thingy to read my brainwaves. One of the things I've noticed since returning to the working world is that - gasp! shock! horrors! - you actually have to talk to people. So, while Lesa is reminding us that librarians are hipper than we think, Anne is talking about the loss of her verbal skills, as are many others.

And I can say for myself that librarians are, in general, more sociable than writers. At least, this one. I think I've talked more in the last week than I have in the last month. Well, if you extract overseas phone calls and my spouse from the equation, it's probably actually more like the past three months.

I think this is a good thing for me. I'm hoping that it makes the conference transition easier. Going from my extreme isolation/only-communicate-through-emails-and-blogs world to the mass of people always took a bit of getting used to.

Elsewhere, James has an awesome post up about the Dagger awards and various bar-related shenanigans. I could make all sorts of comments about the need to have Simon Kernick rescue you from being booted from the bar, but I'm too distracted with the shock that he's finally got his website updated.

And, in more local news, we have a stray cat that seems to be living on our property. I've thought this was the case for some time, because I would often see this cat sitting on our garbage stoop. This was always in connection with Chinook barking his head off and trying to break out of his pen. I'd also seen this cat drinking water from puddles in the lane behind our property.

This weekend, we spotted the cat hunting in our hedges. Then, Kevin partially dismantled the stoop when neighbourhood kids discovered that the stray cat was a mother cat, and had three kittens there, in a can. The neighbours took the kittens to care for them. Mother cat brazenly walked right past our dog pen and into our garage, presumably searching for her babies. Chinook went nuts.

Anyway, I feel pretty bad for her. You can't explain that her kittens are being cared for. We tried to give her some food, but she's completely wild. And it's hard not to worry. There are some people out here who trap cats and leave them to die. I suppose from that perspective, our property is a haven for this stray cat. Our dogs can't get out, so all they can do is bark. We don't have our own kids to torment her, and because our property had bushes all along two sides (plus trees) with berries we have a lot of birds, so she seems to be able to fend for herself okay.

But I'm still wondering if we left the shed door open just a bit if she wouldn't find it more comfortable in there...