Miracles, Volume 736

Ladies and gentlemen, lurkers and commenters and conscientious readers, a miracle has taken place in the life of your humble blogstress:

THE CATS ARE GONE!!!!

Yes, it's true: for the first time in eighteen months, one week, and four days, I am responsible only for my own cat and its associated byproducts. Words simply cannot render my joy at this fact.

This miracle had been building for about three weeks now; one evening, after opening in the front door after a long day at work and walking into the most oppressive cloud of cat-funk I have ever experienced, and after discovering the source of the funk piled on the floor two inches to the left of the litterbox's rim--a favorite trick of Sosa's--I called Tim and left a VERY irate and unpleasant message on his voice-mail, in which the words "animal shelter" and "this weekend" were mentioned.

He called me back the next day; claimed that his work schedule would keep him from getting the cats til that Sunday, but he'd found someplace he could take them and blah, blah, blah. (Every conversation with Tim to which I refer during this post should be assumed to contain large blocks of extraneous monologue on his part, during which he conveys vast qualities of utterly useless information which totally fails to be germane to the situation at hand. In my effort to divest myself of Tim's cats, I have heard about his work schedule, his friends' work schedules, his friends' study schedules, the state of various individuals' cars, apartments, and/or relationships; and infinite amounts of similarly fascinating minutiae which he somehow felt I needed to know. So when I mention talking to Tim, you should mentally pad the conversation with about fifteen to thirty minutes of needless details.)

Sunday came, and at about 6 PM he called me to tell me that the place he thought he could take the cats would not accept them without their immunization records, which Tim thought were somewhere among his belongings stowed in my garage, but which he could not swear were there. And since the friend who was driving him had to be at work at such-and-such a time, and it would take thus-and-so time to get here and back, and etcetera, blah blah yada...the cats were staying. "Next weekend, though, I promise," he said.

And next weekend came, and went, and no Tim, and Dr. J told me I was being a doormat and needed to follow through on this, which only made me more angry with Tim because, you know, I'm only trying not to be a bitch here, and it's getting totally taken advantage of. He called later that week and gave me twenty minutes about how he didn't want to talk on that phone because he didn't have any minutes left--I didn't even TRY to go down the very-obvious road that presented--and he would be out Sunday, no matter what, world without end, Amen.

Sunday came, and went, and when I tried to call his phone at about 10:00, I got the "subscriber not available" message. So I guess he shouldn't have spent twenty minutes telling me how he didn't want to use up his minutes, eh?

I tried again Monday, and got his voice mail, on which I left a snippy-yet-restrained message. He called back Tuesday and absolutely swore that he would have the cats out of my house by the end of the day on Wednesday--again, this claim was surrounded by twenty minutes of irrelevancies regarding the schedules of his assorted friends and co-workers.

I didn't believe it was going to happen, but it did! After several phone calls (each of which came at a crucial moment of the various reality shows I watch on Wednesday night, and each of which was padded in the usual way with extraneous information) he and his friend showed up at about 9:45, packed up the cats and begged a couple days' worth of cat food from me (he wanted litter too, but I was out), hugged me and thanked me profusely, and waddled out the front door, struggling under the weight of a combined 50-60 pounds of portly feline-ness. I closed the door, locked it, turned on the alarm, and picked up White Cat for a dance of joy.

So between the departure of the cats--FINALLY!--and the wonderfully-satisfying trifecta of reality-show eliminations that happened last night (Nnenna, from America's Next Top Model; Kellie "Ralph Wiggum" Pickler, from American Idol; and Stephen from Top Chef), I am a very happy girl. And Whitey is a VERY happy kitty-cat!