I might be a catnapper

A few columns ago, I wrote about my job stream, including the occasional downside of converging deadlines. I had no idea what I was talking about until the last couple of weeks when some serious deadlines seriously converged. I've been buried under a pile of stress but saw a ray of sunlight yesterday... but the joy of the moment must have made me a little loopy because I then did what may well have been catnapping.

Yesterday evening, as I was leaving a friend's house, I saw a tabby cat that I see fairly often there - really friendly, sweet cat. But yesterday it was limping. My friend thought it might be a neighborhood cat without a particular owner, which was about all the invitation I needed to scoop it up and take it to the vet.

Over the course of the evening, the folks at Carolina Veterinary Specialists (they're a specialty vet by day, emergency vet by night) determined it was a relatively new, but still old enough to be healing, wound. The poor cat ended its terrifying evening with Rob and me dropping it back into the neighborhood where we found it.

We left the scene of our well-meant pet abduction with an image stuck in my head: the cat's owners, relieved to find their cat after an unusual several-hour disappearance and the cat desperately wanting to tell them about her strange abduction to a place with sterile walls, where they poked and prodded before dumping her out at the exact spot from which it was taken...