Injured cat

Yesterday sucked and was brilliant, too.

I like my rommate, Drea. We met in Permaculture class. Her dog, Harvest, is a pit bull/wire hair terrier mix, and is super sweet and playful with people and other dogs. We're pretty sure he'd kill and eat pretty much any other kind of creature, though, from rats up to horses. Which is a problem, because my roommate (who I'll call... Clare) has two very wonderful cats.

Harvest got after the older cat, last night. George was there to save the day and helped the cat escape before getting chomped on. But the cat did injure herself. Clare was quite shaken, and so I drove her and the cat to the pet ER. Long story short, the cat has some soft tissue damage, nothing serious or permanent, and some anti-inflamatories and some love is all she'll probably need.

But the drama! The rush of the dog to eat the cat, the kicking the dog across the yard, the "I'm a hero" attitude that showed up, the tension of Nicholas looking around the dark yard for the cat (which came home on its own), the heart-wrenching sobs from Clare's throat, first when she saw her kitty came back home and next when she saw it limping, the frustration over how the dog and the cat came to share the same space at the same time, the awkwardness of the short drive with a woman who I've already come to care about as she struggles to get herself calm, the hope the cat is okay, the relief that it is, all on top of the tension that was already part of the evening from starting to handle plain old roommate stuff that revolves around the cold hard fact that my kids are comfortable with a higher level of disorder than the roommates are... I was as wrung out as a pulped sugar cane stalk!

Xena said it well: "At least we started all this chaos earlier in the evening than we usually do. It's not even midnight, and we're ready to go to bed!"