Down and Rejected

My blog muses have abandoned me again. I don’t mind them taking time off once in awhile, but damn! It seems like they are off duty more often than on duty any more. The worse part about it is I can only imagine they are having much better time off than I’ve had lately.

I’m guessing my muses are deeply involved in drunken debauchery somewhere in a galaxy far far away.

As for myself lately, I’ve been working too excess and so afraid to take any time off. In recent times, my body seems to take the thought of time off as not a time to relax, but rather to crash and burn altogether. Seriously, I am considering never taking a vacation again as long as I live. 

At present our cat, Nyla, is resting in a sunpatch area of the living room. It may be my imagination, but she seems bored. We believe she misses Meredith, as we all do. Worse, our efforts to find a companion for her have hit a wall.

We thought we found someone for Nyla last week, but this week the manager at the shelter rejected our application. As she told me in our phone conversation yesterday, the manager was concerned about a lapse in not getting our previous cats to the vet as often as we should have. She said she could “forgive two or three years”, but her review with our vet showed a time period of seven years between appointments. I thought the vet most likely has the best records, but I told the manager that doesn’t seem possible. I’m sure that we had called the vet more often than she has been told. No matter, she was not allowing us to adopt the cat we had picked out, for whom we had already bought another litter box, and had set aside some actual and emotional time this weekend to welcome Nyla’s new companion.

Warrior Queen was out shopping when the call came. To say she was “not amused” at my news is the understatement of the year. I love my wife, but wow, does she give new meaning to the concept of a woman scorned! I can’t print her reaction in this blog, but I’ll let your imagination (like my muses) run wild.

We have had the hardest time adopting another cat this go-round. It’s not like we expect the prospective adoptees to have a five minute audition prepared, although the thought of a calico crooning a medley of hits from Cats is enough for me to choke on a hairball. This time, a number of them seemed downright ambivalent to being adopted. Usually at least one or two will walk briskly over to one of us and jump up as if to say, ”Here I am! The feline of your dreams!” Not this time. Our efforts to warm up to them could not rouse them out of their cat naps and apathy.

Our next course is to contact our vet to get an accurate accounting of the care she has given our children. We believe that the shelter manager’s judgment was based on incomplete information. Particularly troubling is a time period when the vet treated Kelly for his final illness in 2006, which is precisely in the middle of this so-called time lapse. Fact finding is in our immediate future, and then our search begins again in other areas. I would hope that we could have a good relationship with our local shelter again soon, but it would have to come after a certain shelter manager eats her words.

Woman’s scorn and all that, you know…

(Thank you for reading. Come back, muses! Oh, and come back sober this time!)