Happy Halloween!

The crawl of a thousand miles begins with a single roll

James rolled over for the first time today.

Today, rolling. Tomorrow, crawling. The day after that, “Dad, can I borrow the car keys?”

The Coyote project, day 2

So, we took the stray kitten to the vet yesterday. She is not, in fact, two months old, she’s seven months old, according to Dr. Ahmed, based on her teeth. And that means she hasn’t been hungry for a week; it’s been a good long time since she’s had good access to food. The two young work kittens at Ellis Truss, Lucy and Ethel, are about her age, but probably weigh half again as much as Coyote.

She got an antibiotic shot for her battle wound and we get the fun of giving her kitty penicillin for a week — we’re old hands at this, after having an elderly cat for years — which she fortunately doesn’t object to strenuously.

I’m placing a Found Pet ad in the Daily Press/Hesperia Star. We’ll see if anyone’s looking for her. Given how long she’s been hungry, I’m skeptical.

In the wake of last week’s fires, the adoption channels are currently filled with animals that either escaped or were outright abandoned by Lake Arrowhead residents. It’ll take months at least before things return to normal.

In the interim, I think we’ll just hold onto Coyote and find her a home, if we need to, later on.

She’s still staying in the nursery — and is doing fine — until we get her vaccinated next week. I also want to get a chance to see if she’s got any health issues.

The Sound of Young America: Another reason NPR isn’t quite dead yet

In the past, my brother Joel has said he really wasn’t high on KCRW playing so much music. NPR stations weren’t supposed to be like that, was his reasoning.

So Joel’s probably not the audience for the shockingly young and lively Bryant Park Project morning news show from NYC. But at least they don’t play much music.

In contrast, The Sound of Young America plays a fair bit of music, as well as interviewing subjects not typically heard on NPR and spending a lot of time on edgier entertainment subjects than is NPR’s wont.

To me, it represents a sign that when the golden-throated old guard at NPR has retired to their porches at last, NPR itself won’t need to be put out to pasture, to absolutely puree a metaphor or two. (I’d include the midday Day to Day new magazine on that list of good shows, but their movie critic is way too pleased with himself and what he believes to be his sense of humor.)

In any case, in the era of podcasting, Joel and I can both create our own ideal NPR stations, especially since NPR has jumped into podcasting in a way no other media entity has. So he can have lots of talk and news, and I can weave together music and opinion from KCRW, interesting news shows from New York and dope-smoking pop culture shows from Santa Cruz. Win-win.

Code name: Coyote

So, we’ve got a house guest staying in the baby’s room. (James sleeps in his Pack & Play bassinet in the master bedroom and sometimes sneaks into the big bed.)

This little tortoiseshell cat first showed up last Monday after the school board meeting, hungry and desperate for affection, trying to dart into the house when Jenn opened the door to the Domino’s Pizza guy. Our best guess is the cat is about two months old. We figured she’d gotten lost after being let out of a neighbors’ house. Jenn fed and watered her, and the kitten left around midnight.

Saturday night, she showed up at our back door, this time with a cut over one eye, filthy and dirty and missing a patch of hair where someone had decided to claw her. She was starving and trying to get in through the back door or the master bedroom window. Clearly, she hadn’t been home since we last saw her, and given how she wolfed down a can of cat food, and then tucked into dry food and then gulped a whole bunch of water, hadn’t been sleeping, eating or drinking well, either.

Given that there’s a big stray tomcat in the neighborhood who looks like he’s won more than a few fights in the neighborhood — not to mention actual coyotes in the area — we brought her in the house. Not wanting to expose Hanna and Lucky (not to mention James) to fleas, ticks or worse, we put her in the nursery, along with her own litter box and food and water. (The tomcat stopped by our back porch about 90 minutes later.)

Today, after I attend the opening of Canyon Ridge High School, we’re going to take the cat (code-named Coyote) to Hesperia Animal Hospital, get her cut cleaned up, get her the basic shots and have her checked out, flea-dipped, et cetera. Then we’ll look in the Daily Press and on local utility poles for ads looking for a missing tortoiseshell cat. If that doesn’t work out, we get to figure out whether we want to try to integrate her into a house with a pair of two year old cats and a baby or place her with the animal foster system that we originally got Hanna and Lucky from.

Jenn’s trying hard not to get too attached to Coyote, although she was the one who figured out (or guessed) that the cat showed up on our doorstep on Saturday, two years to the day Motley Sue passed away, which is certainly a weird sort of coincidence.

The cat’s very sweet, and I’ve already brought Lucky in to check her out briefly, which went off without incident, but it’s too soon to know what we’re going to do here.

In any case, she’s a cute, sweet kitten. If you know who she belongs to, let me know.