Soft in the heart, hard in the head...

I work with waste oil. I unload it from trucks into large storage tanks, and load the blended results of that back onto trucks for our customers. It's dirty work. It's tiring work. But I like it.

I work the second shift, which is to say 4-midnight. I am alone on this shift from about 7 o'clock on. A few weeks ago, I was eating my lunch, and I saw a cat running through our garage. I can only guess that it was a stray looking for food. Several nights ago, I heard some piteous sounding meowing, and saw the source. A small kitten, several weeks old.

My guess is he was abandoned by the cat I saw a couple of weeks ago, or that she (assume the one I saw a few weeks ago was the mother) had gone to get some food and been waylaid by some other animal, or tried to cross the street, or some other ill fate.

This little gray kitten would not shut up, and basically made a nudge of himself. So I took to calling him Nudge. His meowing was quite loud, and more than a little distracting.

So there I am, Friday night, doing my job and hearing a kitten super-meowing over the sound of the radio and offering a slight distraction, and I did one of the stupidest things possible. I pulled a truck out of the building I work in, while it was still attached to the pump. The resulting oily mess took several hours to clean up, I destroyed three hoses, and did damage to a pump stand. The hose that was attached to the truck had dragged the pump stand several feet before breaking (and while driving the truck, I had no idea that this was going on. The 500 pound pump stand and the hose that is designed to put up with a lot of pressure offered no resistance to the roaring Peterbilt tractor hauling a trailer full of 7000 gallons of reprocessed waste oil), and spraying oil all over an interior wall of my building. The now broken hose offered a trail of oil that needed to be cleaned up as well.

I worked late that night as a result of my stupidity, which wouldn't have been a problem, except that I had a baptism to attend in another state, early the next day. I went to my niece's baptism with about 3 hours of sleep under my belt. Luckily, Redd drove, so I could catnap in the car.

Anyway, I had some extra work (that had nothing to do with my boneheadedness) to do on Sunday, so I went in in the afternoon to do it, and finally met Nudge face to face. The little guy was starving and had taken refuge in a broken down crane we have in our back lot. So I asked Redd to bring some cat food up, thinking I would feed Nudge, gain his trust, and come back the next day (today) to catch him, and take him to the shelter, since I could not take him in.

Well, I went up to collect Nudge, only to discover he had made his presence known to my daytime coworkers, one of which has taken him home. Aside from that, the hoses can be easily replaced, and the damage to the pump stand I dragged can be easily patched-up, so all's well, etc.

Except I got attached to the fuzzy little this-and-that.