I started working with Precious almost two years ago at the shelter "tricking" her into realizing that petting was awesome; before that, she'd been there three years, and a few people occasionally "petted" her with a brush, but I don't know that even that happened that often. When I started working with her, I began by brushing, and learned that ( Read more... )

This post is kind of a sandwich: cat-whisperer giddiness to start and end, with some oversharing about psychological trauma in the middle.

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I wrote the following at last Wednesday's Write Here Write Now workshop.

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The cat shelter where I volunteer has a pretty good supply of donated linens to use for bedding. In some cases, too good a supply: we have a plethora of comforters, and really not a lot of use for them. They are too big to go in cages. We have 2-foot-by-4-foot boards on top of the cages in the "Free Room" for the kitties who are allowed to roam ( Read more... )

I call Peter, my foster cat, the quaalude kitty.  He doesn't sleep any more than other cats, but even when he's awake, he's generally lounging, grooming, eating, or walking between those three activities.  Well, not so much walking as sauntering; he's pretty much never in a hurry.  Just now, however, he was such a perfect storm of insanity that I ( Read more... )

Okay, Peter is clearly not a cat. I'll give him props, he's very convincing: he grooms, he kneads, he acts like a loon around catnip, he has fish breath.  But I was working on some sewing projects today, for the first time since I brought him home, and I had two nearly-finished dresses floomphed on the coffee table.  He jumped up to lie on them, as ( Read more... )

I've been volunteering at a cat shelter since November, and while I'm a sucker for the scaredy cats, something about Peter, the most completely mellow cat in the "Free Room," just clicked with me.  I mean, yeah, he's adorable,  but so are most of the cats in the shelter, in their own way.  But there was something hysterical about his utter ( Read more... )