Another day, another bunch of job applications sent off. That paranoid moment when you fear that employers disregard your application because you've got an unusual name and they might think you're some dirty furriner. I mean, that might not be the issue with me at all - I've got a pretty "safe" Germanic and English name anyway. I still take care to ( Read more... )

The shelter I work for also runs a little shop downtown where I get crazy discounts, so of course that's where I go to buy cat food and other things for Linni. Like the shelter, the shop is also staffed by volunteers. You can divide the numerous volunteers in this organization into three groups: There's the morning shelter shift (who clean and make ( Read more... )

Man, I've just got the best support group ever. I've got my family to calm me down, my buddy Åsmund to copy the relevant pages I'll need for my paper (on Monday though, so it'll be a tight fit but if I get a head start over the weekend I'll pull through), people send me things to cheer me up (leaper182's been sending me delightful snippets from her Lupin ( Read more... )

Thought: What is it that my journal has been lacking in these last couple of months?

Oh I know - shelter cats!

When I locked myself in today I found a little surprise nestled up on the reception desk between the adoption papers and the money box:


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So today I got severely beat up by a kitten. Then I spent three hours looking for it. A visitor to the shelter found it hanging upside-down Spiderman-style under a sofa. Then it disappeared again ( Read more... )

I got to name a cat today. I mentioned that considering we've already got a Cleopatra (complete with an "I BITE" tag on her collar) and a Cæsar (who's almost entirely recovered from the flu), it would only be natural to call him Antonius.

So Antonius it is:


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The most frequently asked question I get at the cat shelter is "Why is this cat here?" I don't know what people expect to hear, but most of our cats are strays, we are in the dark about their pasts. Some cats come to us because the owner has to move or because of allergies. Some of them write us long letters about what their cats are used to at ( Read more... )

The outbreak of cat flu is finally more or less under control, and in the meantime I've found that the specific type of flu we're dealing with is FCV, Feline Calicivirus, which is far less dangerous than FHV-1.

The only patient we have at the shelter suffering from the flu these days is the only adult cat unlucky enough to get infected, Cæsar. ( Read more... )

Case: There's an old geezer in Bergen who brags about hurting cats who walks on his property. Today my bosses at the shelter posted about it on facebook. People are understandably upset, but the variety of ways they react to it is driving me crazy ( Read more... )

Tough times down at the cat shelter - we've had an outbreak of cat flu. I'm still not sure exactly what kind (since cat flu typically refers to everything from kennel cough to H5N1) but there has been suggestions of FVR, or feline herpes. The infected kittens (the older cats were immune due to their vaccines) have been moved to foster homes and the ( Read more... )