I agree with the straw – my day sucked!

I held a dead cat in my arms today. I was awakened by a phone call from my wife sometime around 7:30am. “There’s an orange cat on the side of the road on Front Street.” She couldn’t tell if it was one of ours (Tiger or Spot – affectionately known as “the Orange Brothers”), but I needed to go find out right away. My heart sunk super low as I feared the worst. I figured one of our guys was out hunting and got run over by a car. A crossing guard stopped the traffic for me as I crossed the street, scanning the side of the road. I didn’t see any cats at first, so I called my wife, who was still on her way to work. She tried to tell me where she thought she saw it. I was worried that I was too late and that Animal Control had already taken the dead animal away. I was about to give up when I saw something on the side of the road much further away than she had described.

I must’ve looked like a sad case, because my countenance was surely down and my hair was sticking straight up. I just wanted to bury our beloved pet before it was too late and keep my kids from seeing the worst of it. When I got close my already grieving heart was close to confirming my fear. It looked like Tiger. It was a soft and light orange tabby with tiger stripes on it. It looked slightly thinner than ours, but he was stretched out a bit. There was no collar around his neck, which made me wonder if it really was our guy or not. I knelt down and touched him. He was gone, but he hadn’t been dead for long. I rolled him over to see if it made sense to just carry him home, which is what I planned. There was lots and lots of blood on the bottom side. I decided to walk back home to retrieve a towel and maybe some cardboard to transport him back to our yard. I’d bury him out at the ranch later during the day. A policeman pulled up and asked me if it was my cat. I told him, “I think so. It doesn’t have a collar on, so there’s some doubt.” I told him I would go home and come right back. He said, “Sorry about your cat,” and I replied, “Thanks. Me, too.”

When I went into the backyard Spot heard me and came running. I was happy to see him. And then Tiger came running up! Man, I was so happy to see these guys alive. They got some extra special affection today. I drove back to the policecar to tell them that it wasn’t our cat.

That was a real stomach-turner and heart fluctuation for me. It’s no fun to imagine or fear your pet (a cherished animal) to be dead. The finality of death is so sudden sometimes. It makes you really grateful for what you have. “Thank You, Father, for these wonderful animals,” I’d say.

Not long after this experience I was outside petting the cats and “cleaning up” old texts from my cell phone. As soon as I deleted one text thread from my phone I realized, ‘You shouldn’t have done that!’ It had one of our writer’s notes from ACL Fest on it. I had finished my collaborative review last night – except for these paragraphs. I immediately called the customer service and was told that the text messages were gone forever once I deleted them. They suggested I call the carrier to see if they could retrieve them. They told me (when I called the carrier) that they could only give me the phone number that sent the text message and the time – not the actual text itself. “Thanks for your help. Goodbye.” I had to get off the phone fast, because I wasn’t too happy and I didn’t want to go through the small talk that finishing the normal phone call would take. “Thank you for calling blah blah blah. Is there anything else I can help you with?” and all that jazz. Now my heart felt that sense of dread and regret. I had lost some creative text that was not accessible. Trying to recreate the words was the best we could do now.

Oh boy, did I feel miserable this morning! That really sucked. Fortunately, I received a phone call from an old friend today (Brad Noah, formerly of Disciple) and we talked football and life and then football some more. I think we were on the phone for an hour. I was editing and making selections of photos I took at ACL Festival (which is somewhat mindless – I was looking at compositions and just choosing the best shots to post).

By the way, I really like my new camera. It’s a digital SLR made by Nikon. I already had some Nikon lenses from an older manual focus film camera and the price was right, so the Nikon D5000 was my choice. I sold a few things on ebay (like some micro football helmets, some car headrests and guitar effects pedals) and saved up for over a year for this thing. Even with the financial outlook at the magazine not being good, I made up my mind to save personal funds to buy this, because it would open up opportunities I didn’t really have without a good digital, auto-focus camera. I’ve told my story on this blog before, but I’d been through two separate U2 tours with a photo pass and miserable, out-of-focus, blurry results. I didn’t want to experience that again. Places like ACL Fest had rules forbidding “point and click” cameras in the photo pit, so this past weekend’s event was directly effected (and improved) by this purchase. Man, it is so cool to have the ability to take multiple shots at once. It’s like having an old-time motor-drive. I could take sequential photos of a skateboarder catching air out of a swimming pool now with this thing. It really comes in handy.

So, today was Day #2 of my new part-time Editor at HM Magazine experience. I had to oversee some school work with our kids today, volunteer for a special event with their piano teacher (which involves dressing up as Beethoven at a special recital event at the end of the month) and confirmed our oldest’s taking of the PSAT tomorrow morning. Both of them attend a “one day academy” type school tomorrow as well, where they get concentrated education on subjects like math, science, foreign language and some electives. It took me all day to get my inbox to empty and I was able to reply to several questions about ads and editorial (as well as upload the artwork files for our new Hard Music Magazine goat shirts).

Whew!

By the way, I promise not to turn this blog into a homeschooling blog. Honest!