Drama Shmama

Here it is... the latest drama du jul!!

Decide to take the day off on Monday to do some work at my sisters house and cook them a few meals while she's out of town having surgery for a couple of days.

Coincidence No. 1
My husband takes lillun to work with him in another town. She gets bored and calls me to come pick her up. Otherwise I wouldn't have gone outside of town.

Coincidence No. 2
I'm ready to book but H asks me to see the house he's working on which is a kajillion sq. foot house on the lake. So I take some time to do that and then leave (green w/envy).

Coincidence No. 3
On the way home I accidentally get into the wrong lane and say out loud "shoot ~ I did NOT want to go this way" but continue on anyway.

Coincidence No. 4
Driving the "wrong" way home I come across an elderly woman shuffling along the side of the highway about 100 feet beyond a car pulled off on the shoulder. I turn around and ask if I can help. She lets me and we get her car towed and I drive her home.

Observations:
She seems pleasant enough. Her clothes are not the cleanest. Her pants are covered in pet hair of some kind. She smells a little bit of cat pee or spray.

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So I sort of feel like I was led to her. After hearing from people that they never would have picked her up I also feel that my work experience makes me uniquely qualified and likely to handle this situation.
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As we drive she tells me about how she used to go to the Burger King every Thurs. How she met a man there who would sit and have a sandwich and coffee with her every week. She tells me that its her birthday and that she has no plans..... nobody to spend the day with. She slips me a ten, amid protests, and heads into her house.

My sweet lillun decides we should get her a cake and card. So we do and we go back. Her house was a little run down and I knew there was some sort of cat issue so I wasn't even sure she'd invite us in.

As we pulled in about 15 cats scattered in every direction. That's NOT a good sign. Wasn't sure she'd answer the door or appreciate the interruption, but she was happy to see us and invited us in.

We walked in to a nearly solid wall of stench. A heavy lung constricting odor of cat urine and waste. I didn't know what to do. We stayed all of 10 minutes before we made our excuses and boogied. But in those 10 minutes we all absorbed the odor and smelled of it ourselves.

The woman had just rec'd flowers from her only living relative who lives in another state quite far away. On the way home I stopped at the florist, explained that I needed to get in touch with the person who sent those flowers. With a brief explanation, they gave me the name and number.

I hemmed and hawed about calling the sender (S). Who am I to stick my nose in where it doesn't belong? As my 8 year old wondered...."what if S lives the same way?" Good point. Do I really want to get involved in this? What happens if they don't do anything? Do I have to then?

I decided to look up the full name and address by the phone number on smart pages. Then I started writing a letter telling them about the horrific conditions I found their Aunt living in. But I couldn't get it right.

On a whim I decided to do a search for their names on the internet and ended up finding out that they didn't seem the type of people who would live just like the elderly woman (E from now on). I even found an e-mail address. I e-mailed them. They e-mailed back.

They had just had that discussion about E. What to do they wondered? They didn't feel they could effect any change and didn't know what options were available. So I checked it out and told them. It was either get her to fix up the place and get rid of the cats or they'd have to take legal action to forcibly remove her from the home because she wouldn't go quietly.

Now I'm all wrapped up in this. S doesn't know how to broach the subject with E and sounds very timid. So I agreed to go see E, tell her that I'd talked to S and that S was going to take some action of some kind to fix the situation.

In the mean time I thought it through, made some calls, got some info. Talked again to S to say I'd like to see if E would be willing to give up the cats, let me help her to organize the clean up and repair (hire other people at her expense), and then start fresh with just one or two cats in a clean home.

So I ended up spending two hours with E last night as part of the process of filling her in on everything that had transpired since we'd met just 48 hours before. To prepare for that I bought Vicks Vapor Rub and smeared in and around my nose. It worked well enough that I could stay there all that time. But once it wore off I had to leave. I told her as much too.

I said: The Humane Officer is coming to take as many cats as they can get their hands on. If she doesn't start being proactive about shaping up her living situation, someone else is going to be making the choices for her. If someone else makes the choices, it won't be what she hopes for. Keeping the cats is not good for them, for her, or for the neighborhood. She's being an irresponsible pet "owner."

SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOo..... as it stands now. I will be going back this weekend to inspect the whole house (I've only seen the kitchen, living room, and dining room.), determine how much work there is to do, clean up a little bit of mess ~ papers and obvious poop, and get started on writing the specs to get bids.

What have I gotten myself into?