Never Lacking Excitement!

After I finished running my errands today and had a late lunch, A came down to the house so that I could show her where to find Woody K.'s food and the plants that need to be watered and what to do with the mail. She brought a friend with her, well two friends actually. A and her friend C had a little cat with them that looked something like Woody. He was of similar coloring only this cat was a much softer orange where Woody's color is brighter. He looked to be about six months old or so. Just a neighborhood cat that follows them around.

When we were finished discussing business and how much she thought the job was worth (I think I surprised her on a higher note than she was thinking), the girls left via the front door but were back before I could get it shut behind them. It seems that Woody had chased the cat that they brought with them and he ran up a big 'ol pine tree next to my house. Unfortunately, the lowest limb on the tree is much higher than my ladder.

For the next half hour or so, one of my neighbors, the two girls and two little boys who just wanted to join in on the fun, tried our best to get the cat down. I got out my ladder and we tried to coax the cat to the lower end of the branch which in part hangs over the roof of my garage. My neighbor insisted on climbing the ladder but she never went up high enough so the cat could trust that he could get to her by coming a little farther. We finally gave up, as none of the other neighbors were home or they didn't have a ladder any larger than mine. She went home, the girls went home and I went inside. The young boys decided to stand watch.

About 5 minutes later, they were ringing my front door bell (actually, they must have been pressing it continuously as it never quit dinging), hollering excitedly that the cat was going to fall and die. I went back out and he had gotten way down low on a very small limb and looked near enough that I thought I might be able to coax him on over to the garage roof.

I opened the garage door again and pulled out the ladder and climbed as high as this scared of heights 60ish lady could go (one rung down from the very top actually) and grabbed hold of the branches and started trying to get him to come towards me and on to the roof. Nearly five minutes of this and I was ready to give up again and started down the ladder. Just as I was folding it back up, the boys hollered and when I looked up the cat was hanging by a thread as close to where I might be able to reach him as he had been throughout the ordeal.

So I put the ladder back up, climbed up one more time and started shaking the branch. The poor cat was scared to death and focused on me completely. I felt so sorry for him but still couldn't quite nab him. I inched out a little further than my comfort zone, while on a ladder with two small boys running around underneath, and pulled with all I had in me and the cat finally made the leap onto the roof. I had my reading glasses perched on the top of my head as usual and they were falling onto my face so off they came while I tried to grab the cat and bring him down. It took several tries and I think he left a couple of his claws on the edge of the roof as he really, really didn't want to let go. I finally wrangled both hands around him and yanked him off of the roof and down the ladder. The boys were ecstatic and I noticed that there was now three of them as the younger brother of one of them had joined the crowd.

We spent a couple of moments loving and hugging on the sweet little guy before I put everything away and came back into the house where I promptly sat down at the computer to blog about this event.

That's when I realized my reading glasses were still on the roof!