A two-day pass.
The Outdoor Cat is enjoying a couple of days away from her prison. Well, perhaps "enjoying" isn’t quite the correct word. She’s off at the Animal Hospital, being spayed.

And she certainly didn’t enjoy the preliminaries – the removal of food by 9 p.m. the evening before surgery, and the car ride over. She started looking for dry food snacks around 3 a.m., and let me know that she couldn’t find any, and registered a louder protest when wet food wasn’t provided to her at 7 a.m.

She saved the strongest protest and accompanying struggle for being put into the cat carrier (a five-minute process) and the car ride to the vet. She seems to view all car rides as possibly ending up at The Pound, or more likely the rendering plant, and she kept up enough of a running commentary that I didn’t bother turning the radio on, because she’d have drowned it out.

She got through the surgery just fine. (“We discovered that she was in heat,” the vet reported, “so that’ll be an additional $19.35.” Not entirely sure why it costs more, but I suppose it’s better to discover she was in heat by having the operation rather than by having her running around outside, looking for boyfriends.) She’ll spend tonight at the vet’s and come home tomorrow to recuperate for a day or two before going to her new home.