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When I took that photo of Felix, I was sitting in the grass in my front yard.

Which is something I’ve learned to do only since Grandniece starting coming over for weekly play-dates with Felix.

Yes.  Just sitting in the grass, enjoying life.  How unlike me!  I’m supposing to be sweating in the hot sun with a chain-saw or a brush mower, moi.

Although I went out with a purpose:  to take photos of Felix (since I tried sketching him but he will not hold still for five seconds!) for, yes, of course, another coloring book for Grandniece, not because she really appreciated the first one, but because I think my latest, persistent episode of depression may have something to do with the fact that I’m doing absolutely nothing creative now, since I finished the first coloring book.

Or these circumstances may be completely unrelated.  How should I know?  I’m not God.  If I were God, I wouldn’t be sitting around in the grass enjoying life; I’d be handing out depression and war and tsunamis and religion like they were candy.

Anyway.  To return to the story.

 I’m sitting in the grass in the front yard, enjoying life, when a big pick-up pulls onto the grass across the street, and when I say it pulls onto the grass, I mean it completely pulls off the road and drives about 30 feet along the shallow ditch.  Truck stops.  Dude gets out.  Two little boys get out.  They proceed to look at the horses in the meadow.

Dad picks some grass and tries to get the horses to eat it.  “Here, horse, want some grass?”

The horse doesn’t.

So there I am sitting in the grass, thinking various thoughts.  Such as: I know what horses like.  They like carrots.  And: I have some carrots in the house.  And: I wish I were a nice outgoing, friendly person who could walk over there with a bag of carrots and help those poor people out.  And: That might be a good thing for me to try.

So I went into the house and got the bag of carrots.  Walked across the street.  Dad with little boys was still trying unsuccessfully to interest the horses in some grass.  “They like carrots,” I said, walking up behind them.

I fed the horses some carrots and talked about horse hierarchy.  Another car stopped in the street and people asked about stables offering horseback riding.  A friendly exchange of “I dunno.”  Car drives away.  I ask Dad if little boys would like to feed carrots to the horses.  He asks little boys.  Little boys shyly say no.  I say, “I don’t blame them, horses have pretty big teeth.”  I put away the carrots and turn to leave.

I hear Dad saying, “Come on, guys, time to go home.”  One little boy says, “I don’t want to go.  I want to stay here.”

I return to my house.  Utterly friggin’ exhausted, headachey, almost shaking.

Yes, you see.  Simple, casual, friendly human interaction friggin’ exhausts me.  This is not a result I choose or have any control over and it’s not a moral failing on my part.

But it circumscribes my life.

Sigh.

In pickle news, the jar of Claussen garlic dill pickles that has been sitting at the back of my refrigerator for about two years was suddenly called into action yesterday evening when I was overtaken by an urgent pickle craving.  The jar in question reportedly contained one and one-half pickles, which after two years had lost their crunch but not their delicious flavor.  The craving continued to rage, however, and this morning an additional jar of garlic dill pickles was purchased.  Four of those pickles have now been entirely consumed.

That’s all the breaking news.  We now return you to whatever the hell you were doing before.

But the lead-up to the dead bodies, where Larson intersperses accounts of activities in Galveston (both general and individual), biography of Isaac Cline, politics at the national Weather Bureau, and the building and approach of the hurricane, reads like a thriller.

 I also have, on my kitchen table, another book by Erik Larson:  Thunderstruck, which appears to be about Guglielmo Marconi, his development of the wireless telegraph, and how it assisted in catching the murderer, H.H. Crippen (of dismembered-wife-in-the-cellar fame).

However, Marconi and Crippen will have to wait until I’ve read the biography of Queen Elizabeth I that’s waiting in my bookcase.

 I have abandoned the struggle to read A Fly for the Prosecution: How Insect Evidence Helps Solve Crimes.  This guy may be a leader in forensic entomology, a hard worker with a damn strong stomach, a genius with an infinite capacity for taking pains, and all the rest, but he sure writes a boring book.

It’s like buying new clothes.  So much fun to buy in the store, and then you get it home and realize that you already have something like it that you almost never wear.

Anyhow.  Tomorrow my sister and grandniece are coming over to play with my new kitten, which I was hoping my niece would adopt but apparently she’s back-pedaling on that, so I may end up keeping him.

I’m sure my failure to give him a name is a reflection of how ambivalent I am about having another cat, after almost 2 years of restful catlessness.  So far I’ve only been calling him Friggin’ Idiot Cat, due to his typical cat-like behavior of sneaking around my feet, trying to rub himself against my ankles, when I’m walking through the yard, thus forcing me to do silly half-jumps and semi-stumbles to avoid (a) stepping on him or (b) falling on my face.  Half-jump, semi-stumble, “friggin’ idiot cat!,” walk, repeat.

But yesterday evening, after talking to my sister on the phone and hearing how Niece seems to have changed her mind, I started thinking maybe I’ll call him Felix.

For my many thousands of fans who aren’t psychic, I found this kitten in the unpeopled north end of Mud-n-Flood Park a week ago.  I had taken Dog #2 there for a walk in the evening.  I heard a series of plaintive, cat-like meows and I went to find their source.  Turns out they were cat-like because they were coming from a cat.  He was sitting in a fallen tree and making a lot of noise.  I thought maybe he might be a far-wandering cat and belong in one of the not-so-nearby houses, but night was approaching and I didn’t want to leave an eight-week-old kitten alone in the woods.

According to the local humane society, nobody is looking for him.  Chez moi, he doesn’t wander at all, sticks close to the house, wants to be an indoor cat, all of which makes me think he was in the park because somebody dumped him there.  Friggin’ idiots.  How hard would it have been to take him to the humane society?