dianaschnuth

I got a call from my husband yesterday while I was at work. That usually means something requires immediate discussion — failure of a major appliance, gutters falling off the house, that sort of thing.

Luckily, this wasn’t quite so drastic. Even so, it needed to be discussed.

He told me he had heard a scratching sound coming from outside the living room window, and looked outside to investigate. Long story short, the cat that’s been frequenting our property decided to have her kittens in the bed of pachysandra just outside the window. They’re big kittens, though, so she probably had them a couple months ago. Surprising that it’s taken us this long to notice.

The mama cat and her kittens, according to Aaron, are skittish and won’t approach him. That means they’re not considered strays — they’re feral. Wild. “Community” cats. That also means we can’t take them to most shelters or volunteer operations that would adopt them out, like Planned Pethood or the Humane Society.

So, the responsible thing to do would be to round up the mama cat and her three kittens and take the whole lot of them to be spayed and/or neutered (and eartipped to mark them as neutered ferals), then release them back into our yard where we found them. It’s called Trap-Neuter-Release, or TNR, and it’s apparently a common practice nationwide to control feral cat populations.

There’s only one spay/neuter clinic I know of in the area that does this. They rent humane traps for a returnable $60 fee, and charge $25 per spay/neuter. There’s a time commitment involved, though — going out to borrow the trap(s), setting the trap(s), bringing the trapped kitties into the garage for the night, driving them out to the clinic first thing the next morning, and going out to pick them up first thing the next day after their surgery.

I don’t have that kind of time.

It doesn’t seem like much of a time commitment, I know, but working full-time plus solo-parenting in the mornings — plus already having used up my paid time off on things like pediatric visits and the salon and oil changes and buying a new fridge — means I don’t have any time left to take feral kitties to and from the clinic.

The spot they found is actually quite sheltered — there’s a concave sort of corner of the house there that blocks the elements, plus the pachysandra is evergreen — and they all look well-fed, so either Mama Cat is a good huntress (birds and chipmunks abound on our property), or someone’s feeding them. Apart from making sure they can’t keep making more kitties, I’m not particularly worried about them.

But I still feel just a little negligent for standing by and doing nothing.

Twelve years and eight months ago, Aaron and I bought our very first car together.

We were engaged to be married in another six months or so, and we had shitty credit. We’d heard the commercials on the radio, though:

Do you have a job? Do you have $199? Then you could drive away in a brand new Kia!

We did drive away in a brand new Kia, after deciding that the new model with the CD player and no power doors or windows or cruise would be a better deal than the used one with the cassette deck and power everything. And after sweating bullets over our financing, which finally went through, albeit with an embarrassingly high interest rate.

Six months later, we put some 1,500 miles on the car during our honeymoon, and Aaron about killed his right foot driving all the way out to Massachusetts and back with no cruise. But we had a CD player!

Even with no cruise, though, that Spectra was good to us over the years. It didn’t have any major mechanical malfunctions and was always reliable (if not particularly powerful).

Back in 2010, the Spectra got bumped from our “main” car to our backup car when we traded in Aaron’s old Contour for a Kia Forte. That was a big step up, with leather seats and a sunroof and power everything.

It’s been a great car, too; our only major complaints centered around handling in winter and less usable trunk space than average due to the shape of the trunk opening. Also, the windshield de-icer that was the main impetus for going with the leather package was a big flop. It has so many other things going for it, though, that those were just minor blips in our overall love for our Forte.

We finally traded in the old Spectra this past weekend, not because it showed any signs of dying anytime soon, but because we were ready for a new “main” car with more cargo space and better handling in the winter. Turns out we picked a pretty good time to trade it in, as it was up to 94,000 miles and would have been nearly impossible to trade in once it rolled over to 100,000. After that, cars go to the buy-here-pay-here lot. So, we got a $500 trade-in for our Very First New Car that we drove for twelve years plus, and our beloved Forte got bumped to backup car status.

We were leaning toward Kia’s small SUV, and a test-drive of one of the other leading used crossovers they had on the lot sealed the deal. Alas, they didn’t have the highest trim package in stock — if they had, we probably would have bought it — but we did get a car (SUV? vehicle? What do we call it?) with all-wheel drive, a back-up camera, touch-screen UVO infotainment system, USB and auxiliary inputs, and a few other bells and whistles. No moonroof, though. Connor and I are disappointed about that (but not too much, overall).

Ladies and gentlemen, our 2015 Kia Sportage.

Once we consider trading in this car, Connor will probably be old enough to drive. Now there’s a scary thought.