Frustrated. Time, energy, ability, focus, all frustrated. Sleep 4 hours here, 10 hours there, never know how long I’ll be awake or how soon I’ll be able to wake, when I sleep. Weeks, now. Trouble getting ‘work’ done – podcasting on time, painting anything new, putting together videos, writing… Even thinking well, clearly, coming to anything.
Right now, as I write this, I’m having trouble sitting here watching a movie. That’s why I have the computer in front of me; sitting still for a movie wasn’t working. It isn’t a bad movie. My mind and body are simply … unable to focus.
Semi-nocturnal, lately, which has been causing problems, so Thursday night I went to bed at 10PM. Of course, I couldn’t sleep past 2:30AM, though I tried staying in bed another hour after. Got some stuff done in the late morning, but crashed for a long nap in the afternoon. Got up in time to finish the podcast before Mandy took me to the Sweet 16 party (formal dress) of the daughter of one of the teachers she works with. Couldn’t really get to sleep right when we got home.
Friday night around 2AM, as I was meaning to go to bed, I heard this noise coming from the ceiling. Like something moving around up there. I’d heard it before, but … this time is seemed to be accompanied by mewling. The sound of kittens. I resolved to peek my head into a nearby hole & see if I could see what it was, and after a bit of difficulty I managed to see that a cat had apparently had a litter of 5 kittens in my ceiling. For a couple of hours I thought about and tried to see if I could get them out through the existing hole, but that didn’t work out. Not getting into any details here, but if I could have done so without alerting Mandy/Rachel to it (they have a soft spot for cute things), I would have destroyed & disposed of the lot of them in the middle of the night. I went to bed with morning light coming through the windows. Slept until early afternoon.
Got up, checked with my dad (whose house I live in), broke a hole through the wall and extracted the kittens. Photos here. Found the opening where the adult cat had got in originally and sealed it up, so she couldn’t get back in and cause problems. Guessed the kittens were 2-3 weeks old. Bought some cat milk. Spent the next eighteen hours or so trying to get them to eat any of it. I guess kittens that age are supposed to be eating every couple of hours. In between hours-long fighting to get them to eat much at all (save the very eager one that gladly ate every time I offered) we tried to find them homes – asked our friends & family and everyone on twitter, Mandy blogged about it, called all the no-kill shelters she could find online (they’re all full up), and around 9AM Sunday morning I finally passed out, intending to get up again in a couple hours to try to feed them again. Thankfully, Mandy took care of feeding them the next couple of times so I could get some sleep. I got up in time to take them down to the Arizona Humane Society this afternoon, where I was told that since they don’t have a bottle feeding program, unless the kittens immediately started eating solid food, they’d be immediately euthanized, and would I like to keep them for a week and try to get them on solid food, myself? No. I just don’t want cats living in my ceiling. It was near closing time, and the entire staff of half a dozen women and young women -all quite susceptible to cute- immediately protested their euthanasia and got to work trying to convince them to eat solid food. A bit of quick paperwork, and we were out of there.
I’ll probably be up again all night tonight, at this rate. Maybe I’ll go down to Super WalMart and return the other container cat milk I didn’t end up opening. Should probably wait for tomorrow when I can stop by the Sam’s Club, too, to pick up the 5lb bag of shredded cheese that’s on our grocery list. Maybe I’ll try to sleep, or play a game of CIV:Rev. Maybe I’ll try to write a few thousand more words toward my book on being a MicroPublisher. Maybe I’ll just bumble around, frustrated & unfocused until I pass out.