The scene: our house, this morning. Dave left for work, and less than 5 minutes later, I went to take a shower. I took my clothes off, then I heard something strange. One of our cats, Beaumont (the big, brave boy hunter cat), was yowling a very distinct meow. It was sort of a muffled sound, and one that I have come to know well; it loosely translates to, “Quick! Come see this neat dead thing that I’m carrying in my mouth and want to give you as a gift!” Since I was alone in the house, I went to see what was up. This was very, very stupid of me. As I started to come down the stairs, Beaumont flew past me with – yep, I guessed it – some tiny thing with feet sticking out of his mouth. I screamed, because no matter how many times this happens, I am still not used to it; and even though Dave hates it when I scream, I cannot help it. (See, honey? I really don’t do it for attention, I even do it when I’m alone in the house!) Beaumont ran into my office and dropped off his “gift,” which turned out to be a teeny tiny bird, which was not so much dead as it was still frantically fluttering around and leaving feathers all over the damn place. Somehow, amid much flapping of tiny wings and me shouting obscenities, I managed to separate the cat from the bird. I grabbed the cat, ran down the stairs, threw him out the back door and slammed the door on him. (Just in case you were wondering: on nice weather days like today, we leave the back slider door open a few inches so the cats can come & go as they please. Probably a bad idea when I’m going to take a shower. Probably a worse idea to advertise that we do this on the Internet.) And let’s not forget that I was naked for all of this – so um, hi, neighbors! I really hope you were all at work, but please feel free to send me your opthamologist bill if I inadvertently caused you to bleed from the eyes.

Ok, population of the house is now me (still naked! hello!), the bird, and Teenie – who has never hunted a damned thing in her life and I don’t think she would honestly know what to do with a bird if it flew up and pecked her on the nose. So I wasn’t worried about her, but little Miss Birdie (I don’t know that it was a female, but that what I called her) was definitely injured, and I didn’t know how badly, but she was hiding under the trunk in our living room. I called my vet, who referred me to a different vet – a mere 15 miles away (gee, is that all?) – where they would take in injured wildlife. Fantastic! But I’m still naked, and oh yeah, sort of greasy! I called my mom, who reassured me that I would not be a horrible person if I took 20 minutes to shower and slap on some make-up before I took the bird to the emergency clinic, so that’s what I did. I put on my gardening gloves, caught the bird in my living room windowsill, put her in an Amazon.com box, draped a towel over the top of it (thinking it would calm her if it was dark – I have no idea if it helped or not), and drove off to the vet’s. They took her and said they were pretty sure she’d be ok, so I left a generous check for their donations-only wildlife center, and that was that. On the way home, I stopped at the pet store and bought collars with bells to put on all of the cats, because I’m fine with them killing mice (lesser of two evils – I don’t want mice in my house, soooo….), but the bird thing? Not cool.

End of scene.

Moving on: The phone interview today has turned into an in-person interview on Monday. This could be good, but I’m not letting myself get *too* excited about it, since that didn’t work out well for me in the past, and besides, I’m still not sure that I understand exactly what this job entails. But apparently I impressed someone, since they still want to talk to me after the phone interview. We’ll see.

Meanwhile, scary stuff over in Houston with this hurricane. My brother lives there, but he’s evacuating tonight, and going to stay with our cousin (Cat’s brother) in Austin. Apparently he’s mostly just packing up his clothes and his guitars – I’m not sure he cares about much else.