Early in the week, Brother Jay called us over to do some yard work. When we got there he was making some meat pies and told us he had been hearing a crying kitten for days outside but couldn't figure out where it was coming from.
As we soon found out, Brother Jay hates kittens. There's a whole flock of stray cats in his neighborhood that just keeps growing and growing. He told us the cops used to drive around and shoot them to keep the population down. Brother Jay told us that he catches them and takes them for "a ride in the country". I didn't know what that consisted of, but I assumed he just killed cats for fun. He told us we should try and catch some cats if we see them so we could take them for a ride in the country.
Eventually, we got out in the yard and started working on putting a post in the ground. While I was digging the hole I saw a cat out of the corner of my eye about 20 feet down the yard. I pointed it out to brother Jay and he told me just to throw a dirt clod towards it to scare it off. It was standing about three feet away from a chain link fence, and when my dirt clod hit the ground behind it, it jumped up into the middle of the chain link fence and bounced back past the point where it had jumped. Brother Jay says it's going to haunt him for months that he didn't record it.
Later in the day, we found the crying cat, and it was about 14 feet up hiding in a gutter. Every few seconds it would wander out on to the roof, start sliding and fall off half way but catch itself and climb back up. Elder ostergaard and I stood underneath it, hoping to catch it when it fell. Brother Jay handed us his cultivating rack that he had been using as a cane, and told us that one of us could rake it off the roof and the other would catch it. I got stuck with the responsibility to catch it, which was probably the most intense moment I've ever experienced. Eventually elder ostergaard caught him and started taking him off the roof, and got the cat so it was hanging by 1 paw like an action movie star, and then it fell to into my hands. We took some pictures, and before we knew it, Brother Jay had his pet carrier (5 gallon bucket) in his hand. He snatched the kitten from us, threw it in the bucket and told us to get in his car so we could take them for a ride in the country.
We got in the car, screeched out of the driveway, and went out into the fields. We saw a little farmhouse coming up, and he told me we were going to stop, drop, and roll. So he pulled over, I emptied the kitten onto the side of the dirt road, and we left. So in the end, taking kitties for a ride in the country consisted of finding the kittens a better home with a better chance to survive. So that was a relief
Other than that, nothing much happened. It was a good week.
I love being on a mission, the Marshalltown ward is awesome and it's a great place to be a missionary.
I love you all!
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