left behind

The kittens were safely dropped off at the Humane Society, the trap returned. It was such a relief to have the 3-day rescue operation over with, I was even in a good mood about going to the elementary school open house and seeing all the other parents I normally avoid. School events are great opportunities to teach the kids about one of my favorite things: the Irish Goodbye. Before the other families even got to their cars, we were halfway home and high-fiving. And then I glanced out the window at the rescue site and saw a kitten sniffing at the remains of the dead cat (which I did not move, because it kept the kittens in one spot and also I am a massive weenie). WE MISSED ONE. I pulled the car over, found a piece of garbage to serve as a dish, and dumped out my water bottle so she'd have something to drink until I could get back.

All evening I sat in the bushes with a rudimentary trap made out of a carrier rigged with string, but the kitten was too cautious to step inside to get the food. Gave up when it got too dark and the drug dealers started cruising slowly up and down the road, probably thinking about fire-bombing my car.

In the morning I was back at it with the carrier, and again the little cat was too scared to go inside. I came home for lunch, tired and frustrated. Mike felt sorry for me and bought a humane trap at Home Depot while picking up lumber for the deck. I hurried back to the road and found a drug dealer sitting in my spot, maybe thinking I had established the new pickup location. I pulled up right behind him and got out, and he panicked and sped away. I win.

 

The trap worked in less than 10 minutes. 

This little kitten is the sweetest. She was scared in the trap, but she sighed in relief when I picked her up, let me bathe her, and fell asleep on our laps. The kids are in love, she was a lot of work to catch, and I feel bad about leaving her behind, so we’re keeping her.

If the pendulum ever swings the other way and the universe starts sending me dogs the way it sends me cats, I’m going to have to move to the Yukon and start a sled team.

rescuer of small cats and mongooses

On the way to work on Saturday, I spotted some kittens on an empty stretch of road (one of those rural spots where people dump garbage/furniture/bodies and set fire to abandoned cars) and pulled over to help them. They did not seem interested in rescue, so after wading around in the thick bushes for a bit, I continued on to work.

Driving home in the afternoon, I kept a lookout for them and was sad to see a dead cat wearing a collar, but no sign of the kittens. I hoped the kittens had already been rescued while I had been at work.

They had not. The kittens were eating their dead mother when I drove by on Monday. I pulled over with food and water, and they scarfed it up, but I couldn't get my hands on them. Reinforcements were necessary, so I dropped a pin to the Humane Society, and they sent a very nice officer out to chase the kittens around with a net on a stick. She failed. The next morning she tried again, with bigger nets and humane traps, and failed again. Frustrated, she called to ask if I could drive down to Honolulu and pick up a heavy-duty trap and have a go at it, which I did.

And that is why I spent yesterday evening hanging out on the side of the road for 3 hours with a dead cat, hoping not to get hit by a truck or murdered by a maniac. 

 

I managed to catch one kitten and one very angry mongoose. The mongoose did not want to pose for pictures, so I just let it out and jumped back before it could eat my face. I counted three more kittens creeping out for food, but the trap wasn't sensitive enough for their tiny bodies and failed to deploy. I gave up when it was too dark to see.

This morning, Mike greased the trap and we caught two more. There is still one skinny baby left to catch, but he managed to eat enough food that he wasn't interested in taking another chance on the trap, so we'll try again in a few hours. The three little rescued kittens are snoozing in a carrier together until they're ready for delivery to the Humane Society. They're a bit traumatized, but they let me hold them and pet them, so there is good hope for adoption.

Now I smell death on everything; catching whiffs of it in food, on the breeze, on my well-scrubbed hands. And I'm angry at people who dump their pets, and throw away kittens, when surrendering them to a shelter is free. That poor little house cat did not deserve to die on the side of a rural farm road. 

I would change careers and become an animal rescue agent, except that I would immediately be in trouble for punching animal abusers in their fucking faces.

But let's be glad for the babies who lived. I hope they have long lives filled with soft laps and sunny windowsills.

Update: caught the last kitten! He’s the smallest, skinniest, and hissiest. Feeling satisfied that everyone is accounted for.

time is a wheel

When I was 14, I shared a traumatic event with a boy who was drowning. His trauma was that he drowned. Mine was that I pulled him out of the water and dropped his head on the concrete a little bit before the EMTs resuscitated him. We have stayed loosely in touch for the rest of our lives since then, without ever actually talking about it.

Last night, I took the family to see that boy perform at the Bishop Museum. 

Kanoho spotted me in the audience and said, “Holly! This girl here saved my life when I was thirteen!”  And he told the whole story. “Sorry to say I did it again a few years later in the ocean.” Kanoho! Your family is going to make you wear arm floaties.

I feel proud of the talented, good person he grew up to be, as if I had any hand in that other than smacking his head off the pool deck when we were kids. I'm glad he's alive. And I'm glad he's not a super villain I now need to destroy.

The kids are glad I splashed out for a yearly family membership to the museum, so we can go any time and bring guests for free. There will be a lot more evenings listening to music under the stars at the museum, and so much inspiration for painting. Solid spending decision.

Each tiny butterfly was a marvel

Never not impressed by the life-sized whale poised to crush all the museum-goers

The special exhibit, Taxonomy, with so many cool dead things 

This moving air wall has been up since I was a kid, and it’s still fantastic

BLACK LIGHT

Petition to make buildings like this again please 

What does it meeeeean?

POW! WOW! street mural is still up on part of the building 

In other news, my tickets to Chattanooga are booked, my hotel is haunted, and I’m all set to go on a librarian adventure in 4 weeks. Feeling good about things, which is a feeling I distrust. Wish for the best, but shop for personal self-defense accessories, as Napoleon said.

Leif turns 14

My youngest son is now a 14 year-old high school student with a job application in his backpack (he will do anything to avoid signing up for sports, and at least pushing a mop counts as exercise in my books). 

Love this kid. He got all his genes from his great-grandfathers and somehow has zero of my features, but I’m taking all the credit anyway.

The kids managed to bring home a non-covid travel bug, and spent the first week of school passing it between each other before it finally got me on the morning of his birthday. Threw down some Tylenol and made it happen anyway. 

The boy’s requests: cosmic bowling, homemade cheesecake, and dinner at the outdoor sports bar that serves good hamburgers (and where people smoke weed publicly despite it not actually being legal in our state, which at least means it’s less rowdy, as sports bars go). Leif is still a Lego fanatic, and while I was not willing to splash out $300 for the Stranger Things kit, I was willing to splash out $80 for the Strange Matter kit on aliexpress, and it was WORTH IT. 

He had a fantastic day, even though his brother broke his brain with a triangle-pieced Rubik’s cube (he can solve the regular ones in 10 seconds because he’s a cheater who memorized the algorithm instead of struggling and getting mad and throwing them like the rest of us).

Now I can lay in bed with a box of tissues while this 24 hour bug finishes with me.

How’s the fitness cult coming along?

Sticking to the program, stubbornly, even with a head cold. I've been cramming my workouts into the early and late hours, and faithfully following the meal plan (birthdays notwithstanding). Upping the volume of veg for 5 people has the fridge absolutely packed with produce, it’s ridiculous. 

My body is going through the deflated-bread-dough phase, and I’m feeling kind of bad about it. Trusting that it’ll adjust and I’ll look like a pro wrestler by Thanksgiving.

Wahiawa hills trail

The kids came home, tanned and jet-lagged, and threw a tie-dyed Led Zeppelin shirt at me. It's great having them back, and Billy came out from under the bed to apologize for thinking I had traded the family for a rotten kitten. We’re all sad about Sookie, but relieved to be back together.

The next day I was sitting by the Wahiawa water tower, posting this:

I am not a hiker. I am the decomposed remains a hiker stumbles across. After losing him, it only took me 30 minutes of picking my way down the steep mountainside and ending up in a stagnant stream bed to realize I was absolutely the kind of person who would trip on a root and break my ankle and get washed away by a flash flood, so I turned around to head back. On the way, I missed a turn and ended up at the mouth of a dark, overgrown cave. It was the kind of cave that would 100% have a dead body in it, and if anyone had been with me I would have gotten inside to have a look around, but I did not want to be the next dead body on the pile, so I did not do that.

The murder cave I did not investigate and end up skeletonized in

For about an hour, I sat at the trail head, contemplating widowhood and trying to decide how long to wait before calling a rescue helicopter.

He finally made it out, muddy, dehydrated, and suffering from heat stroke. He drank a gallon of water and had to soak in a cold tub to get his temperature down. 

This is the official trail:

 

This is the trail he went on:

 

Let's just zoom in on this bit:

the straight lines are where his phone lost connection completely

 

Hiking is silly unless it ends in a waterfall you can swim in. I want payment for my foolishness.

It is pretty, though. My corpse will leave a beautiful camera reel.

 

Trail?

 

this tree stump had nice hair

beautiful pool of magic milky water, probably full of amoebas

Trail?

 

Trail! 

(it was not the trail)

From here on, sticking to more popular routes, with lots of people to follow around/get carried out by.

… Except maybe to go back and find that cave with a big flashlight.

Sookie

Our sweet old fat cat died last night. She wasn't feeling well, so in the evening I sat with her, brushed her, and wiped her crusty nose. At bedtime she started having trouble breathing, got up to waddle under the bed, and collapsed, crying. I tried to help her, but she died as I ran to the car with her. I don't know if she couldn't breathe or if her heart gave out. We had a quiet ride to the emergency vet, and I made it all the way to the front doors with her before the crying caught up with me. Spent a long time saying goodbye, and went home alone at midnight with an empty towel. 

The kids come home today, I'm so sorry they missed her. But I'm glad they didn't see her go.

Sookie's story

14 years ago, I was giving birth to Leif on Maui around the same time Sookie was born on Oahu. Her mother was scared away by noisy construction workers mid-delivery, leaving two kittens behind. Those kittens were found by a teacher, who bottle-fed them for several weeks. When her dog killed one of the kittens, she was very upset, and brought the surviving kitten to her co-worker, my mother. My mother took the kitten to Maui to visit her new grandson, where I named her Sookie because I was reading Charlaine Harris books at the time, and she stayed with us. Sookie was a cuddly kitten who tried to nurse everything, and she'd make horrible slobbery noises in your ear, trying to get hold of your earlobes while you slept. Once I woke up feeling alarmed that something was wrong with my baby, and found her laying across his face, trying to push him off the boob while he flailed his little fists (she was DENIED). 

Leif and Sookie at 2 months

4 months, going for my mom's eyes

 

As she got older and rounder, she could sense when someone sat down on the floor in another room, and she'd come galloping out like a fat pony to climb on their lap. She was sweet and affectionate, and set the standard for how large our Thanksgiving turkeys needed to be, based on the "turkey shouldn't weigh less than the cat" scale of measurement. She was glorious. 

I will miss you so much, Sookie. 

Thwarting my vacuuming efforts last week

progress report

It has been 2 weeks on this maniac program. I didn't take a picture at the beginning because I was embarrassed, so this is after 1 week vs  2 weeks, wearing the same outfit.

"Pick a power pose," they said.

I am... almost imperceptibly flatter around the middle? I should probably start posing in a tank top instead of balloon sleeves. 

The program tells you to stay off the scale because this is a fluff-to-meat conversion situation, where you stay about the same weight but your size and density change, which is fine by me.

So that's going well, I think. It’ll take a few months, but I’ll be throwing hammers at people in no time.

Less well: the kitten knocked over my sizing glue while I was priming wood for a painting, and I didn't realize he had a blob of it on his ear until it had dried into a shiny leathery scab. Spent two evening slowly coaxing it off, feeling like I was peeling the skin off his ear. Now he's got a bald spot. Maybe the kids won't notice.

Kitten tax (no bald spot visible, phew):

solo

I have been getting a lot of texts with videos of my children driving boats and getting dragged at high speed on inflatable donuts, as well as a cute picture of Zenny posing with a man in a Frankenstein costume while holding a 6 inch knife*. I am glad they are having fun, and I am glad to be staying out of it. I’m the books-and-cookies parent, not the boats-and-knives parent.

Still, there are some things about being up there that I miss.

It's got me listening to Wolfmother and the Darkness again after all these years. Taking my rock credentials back from Harry Styles.

 

my credentials

In the evenings, I've been working on a tacky souvenir painting, thinking about cultural exploitation vs. cultural erasure. Enjoying the shadows and colors anyway.

 Slowly adding flowers, one by one. 

 

First pass, just getting color in there

The Thor fitness program is already starting to do something to my shoulders and pants. I’ll be getting trampled into the mud at a Spartan race in no time. 

(Maybe next year.) 

(On the weenie course.)

* “Frankenstein was the doctor, not the monster!” Frankenstein was also the name of the book/film, so don't sweat it.

"Check out my Matrix costume" 

"Actually, the Matrix was the code, not the man." 

 

The knife, it was explained to me, was  a retractable prop knife she bought at a gift shop, which I’m sure the public will note when they report a child running with a knife through Lake George village.

joined a cult

non-cult content:

A few months ago I was driving with the radio on, flipping stations to get to the oldies, and caught part of a song I had never heard before. How is there an oldies radio song I have not heard? It sounded progressive for an oldies. I tried remembering a few lyrics to google later, but I have the short-term memory of a pigeon, and could not find any song prior to the 80s with the combination of random words I tried searching for. It bugged me for months, every time I flipped around the radio stations.

Finally I heard it on a tv show, and sat straight up - AHA, THAT'S IT.

Folks, it was a Harry Styles song.

Yep.

 

So anyway:

Mike signed up for the Spartan race at Kualoa next month, where people pay real money to sprint for 6 miles and climb over muddy obstacles until they collapse and need a rescue IV. 

To be supportive/encroach on his hobbies, I finally joined the Chris Hemsworth Centr app he's been so nuts about, and infiltrated the manically-positive facebook community. While the family is in New York for the next few weeks, I am going at it full tilt; following the meal and workout plan to the letter while there is nobody around to complain about eating fish and pepitas.

Then I'm going to show up at the Spartan race as a one-person cheering squad and embarrass the man in front of all his workout friends.

It's important to have goals and hobbies.

Whiskers on his chinnigan

I was not having a good day. I had an upset stomach because I had eaten too many papayas, and I was mad at my husband about something stupid, so I was sitting at the reference desk staring blankly through my computer, mentally working out how to make ends meet on one income/relocate to Ontario, when one of my library preschoolers walked up and threw a skinny flea-covered kitten at me. “Want a kitten?” 

I have a few rules in life:

1. If someone you trust puts a drink in your hand, drink it (it’s either Christmas or something terrible has happened).

2. If someone puts a baby animal in your hand, take care of it.

3. Buy the good toilet paper and paper towels. 

So yes, I wanted the kitten. Damn it.

Having been manhandled by a 3 year old all his life, the little cat’s defense mechanism was to go completely limp and fall asleep. I wondered if he had been left in a hot car or carried around by the neck, he seemed too lethargic. I drove home with the little guy asleep on my chest. After a few cans of fancy feast and a flea bath, he reanimated into a regular kitten. The kids love him so much. Billy does not. Droopy is figuring out that he gets treats for being tolerant of the little guy.

The kids have named him Finnegan. “He has whiskers on his chinnegan. He pulled them out, but they grew innegan.”

Dafuq

We didn’t need another cat, but maybe I needed him right at that moment.