The misadventures of Kitty (or why I can't get a DAMN thing done around here)

For the umpteenth time, a service person has made an appointment to come to our house, but is unable to narrow their arrival down to less than a 5 hour window.  The service industry apparently has NO understanding of farming or any other stay-at-home enterprise, because they are convinced all you have to do is sit around in the house and wait for their arrival.  Around here, they have taken to calling you before they arrive, and GOD FORBID you not answer the phone, because that's all the excuse they need not to come...

Being the good-natured person I am (cough, cough) I decide to make the best of my time indoors and do something constructive and hopefully profitable like making jam/jelly for the final market on Saturday.

I make several lightening fast trips outdoors to collect apples and quince, running like a frantic rabbit between trees (my neighbors must think I am completely soft-headed) and settle in to prepare fruit.  I notice (slowly) that the indoor cat has been absent for the last 15 minutes or so, and then I notice that there is a cat outside the bay window in the kitchen that looks remarkably like our indoor cat.  Hmmm....

S--t!  I throw on my house slippers and fly out the door (again) to try and retrieve the cat.  She runs away from everything, so I approach slowly and she moves onto the front porch.  Not wanting to scare her further away, I run back inside the house to open the front door and coax her in.  Thankfully, she comes in, but as she passes by me, I notice she has something in her mouth.  Ick!  a mouse...

Before she can get the chance to drop the disgusting thing and chase it all over the house, I scoop her up and head for the bathroom, where I dangle her over the tub and shake her to loose the varmint from her jaws.  (The thinking on this, in case you are wondering, was that if she does drop it, the mouse will fall into the tub and be unable to scale the slippery sides, giving me time to do....something...)

Finally...

It's clearly dead.  Only now I have to wad up enough paper towels to protect me from actually feeling the mouse as I clean it up, dash the whole mess in the garbage can, put all of that outside the back door (no time to run to the burn pile lest I miss the furnace man!) and go back inside to scrub down the tub followed with a bleach rinse for good measure.

Finally back to the fruit, I resume peeling when I hear a strange scrabbling noise coming from the living room.  The cat is up on the PC.

No, she is not adjusting the connections.  Nor is she chasing dust balls, like I had hoped.  She is stuck.  Yep, stuck.  As in her claw has hooked itself into one of the teeny holes in the metal cover plate on the back of the computer and she can't get loose.

Believe me, she tried.  And I tried.  And there were six or seven really good tries where I grabbed a hold of her leg and maneuvered it forward to try and wrangle the curve of her claw out of the teeny hole.  (Kind of like trying to crochet with a fish hook...)  She hissed.  I hissed back. She growled.  I growled back.  Finally, I had to clean off the entire table top, pull the PC tower around so we could pull at a better angle, and worked her loose.

Forget putting all the stuff on the table and the PC back, my jam is boiling over.