The plan was, we'd drive down to LA on Friday, spend Easter weekend and a couple days down there, and bring back up with us Pico de Gato, the cat that showed up at our place late last summer, when Lancelot was still alive and kicking and his heart was still beating with hate for other cats. It wasn't tenable to keep Pico then, so we had him, in the euphemism, fixed, and brought him down to LA to Lauren's mom's place to live with (at current count) 5 cats and 5 dogs.
Last night, the plan changed.
I had misgivings all along, because I thought that Pico would have learned habits that I'd want him to unlearn, and that would be difficult: hanging around on countertops, tabletops, high shelves, and so forth; going in and out at will; pouncing on random four-legged passersby. I didn't realize until last night that Lauren's misgivings were as serious as they were: she wasn't sure she could have Pico around and not feel some reserved guilt about Lancelot.
So we remain, for the moment, catless. The plan now is to adopt two kittens, raise them from kittenhood, give them their human names, teach them the ways of the world, love the tar out of them, etc. After driving up from LA today, we tried to find kittens at the Stanislaus County animal shelter (a fairly miserable place, but they're better than they were a couple years ago) and a pet store in Turlock that used to have kittens for adoption. No dice, or in any case, no kittens. Just a lot of sad cat faces in cages in a smelly room in Modesto.
(For the record, I hate animal shelters. I can't stand being near them, let alone in them. To me they represent the worst of human behavior - our fantastic capacities to regard life as cheap; to disregard other beings, and especially their suffering; to hide, discard, deny, and ultimately dispose of the evidence of our worst failings; and to treat the world and everything in it as here for our momentary pleasure and consumption with no thought of the consequences.)
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