Catching up.
Just stuff to catch folks up:
We lost Frodo at the beginning of the summer. My other buddy kitty, the kitten who was a warm purring weight on my side at night, who purred and napped with me all through all the health bullshit of the last few years, died the day after Memorial Day last year. He'd been having problems for a few months; he'd gotten diagnosed with a growth in his intestines. After talking with the vet, we opted for palliative care; Fro' finally got too bad and he went to sleep in the arms of his humans.
Well, we still have Scooter, our little foundling girl...um...our BIG foundling girl. But Scooter is more my husband's companion than mine, and the apartment was just too achingly empty with only cat. I ended up making a trip to Cat Welfare a couple weeks later, which is just around the corner from us, to visit the kitties -- Cat Welfare is a no-kill shelter -- and ended up taking home a bright-eyed, curious, rambunctious kitten named Faramir (Cat Welfare's name, not ours!). We'd wandered through the shelter first, playing with the adult cats & getting swarmed...but all the cats who showed interest in us were unadoptable due to various health & behavioural issues (unadoptable being the designation from the shelter, not us). We finally went into the kitten room, and this little orange kitten started meowing at me, LOUD.
Have I mentioned I'm a sucker?
Faramir being my editorial buddy:
But wait...there's more.
Bast, the almighty Cat Goddess, decided that two cats just weren't enough in our lives. Labor Day weekend, we discovered a litter of six feral kittens had been born out back of our apartment building; Mama Cat had taken over the locked maintenance shed, and the kittens were playing and living right outside our kitchen window -- we live in a basement apartment. To make the long story short, we attempted to take in the litter to socialize & find them homes...but for the four girls, it was too late -- they were too wild & too feral, and we ended up releasing them back outside. The two BOYS, on the other hand, turned out to be brave, cuddly little armfuls, once they got over their skittishness. One of my coworkers adopted one of the feral boys (Smokey), and we ended up with the other (Oreo):
The feral litter out back:
But during all the dealing-with-the-ferals, Bast played yet another joke on us -- at one point, the feral litter disappeared from out back, before we brought them in; we'd been trying to get our maintenance crew to help us, since the shed was locked. All we wanted the crew to do was unlock it, and we'd take care of the kittens. After the kittens disappeared, we made the rounds of some of the local shelters, including Cat Welfare, hoping that the idiot maintenance might have gotten in the shed without telling us & dropped the litter off.
And when we walked into the kitten room at Cat Welfare, a volunteer just handed me a kitten, saying, "here, you'll like her."...and this tiny black kitten fell asleep in my hands, purring.
Yeah. We're suckers. We ended up adopting her, too. A totally black kitten, with a patch of white on her chest that looks like a crescent moon...so we called her Luna:
For those who've lost track, this means we went from a two cat household, down to a one -- I still miss Frodo terribly -- and now up to a FOUR cat household: Scooter, Faramir, Luna & Oreo. And for such a feral wild boy, Oreo has turned into a total cuddly sweetheart...AND we're still feeding his feral sisters, who are still hanging out in the maintenance shed out back (note what I said about "suckers" earlier). Faramir goes back and forth between cuddly armful & total brat, while Luna is a loving HUGGER -- yes, she hugs us. She'll run up to us and throw her front paws around our calves, then run away again. It's not a pounce; she stands up on her back legs to do it, and hugs us for several seconds. Anyway, our three new fur-kids:
Faramir now, just at one year old:
Oreo the Barbarian:
Luna The Elegant:
Scooter, wondering where all these new kittens came from:
We lost Frodo at the beginning of the summer. My other buddy kitty, the kitten who was a warm purring weight on my side at night, who purred and napped with me all through all the health bullshit of the last few years, died the day after Memorial Day last year. He'd been having problems for a few months; he'd gotten diagnosed with a growth in his intestines. After talking with the vet, we opted for palliative care; Fro' finally got too bad and he went to sleep in the arms of his humans.
Well, we still have Scooter, our little foundling girl...um...our BIG foundling girl. But Scooter is more my husband's companion than mine, and the apartment was just too achingly empty with only cat. I ended up making a trip to Cat Welfare a couple weeks later, which is just around the corner from us, to visit the kitties -- Cat Welfare is a no-kill shelter -- and ended up taking home a bright-eyed, curious, rambunctious kitten named Faramir (Cat Welfare's name, not ours!). We'd wandered through the shelter first, playing with the adult cats & getting swarmed...but all the cats who showed interest in us were unadoptable due to various health & behavioural issues (unadoptable being the designation from the shelter, not us). We finally went into the kitten room, and this little orange kitten started meowing at me, LOUD.
Have I mentioned I'm a sucker?
Faramir being my editorial buddy:
But wait...there's more.
Bast, the almighty Cat Goddess, decided that two cats just weren't enough in our lives. Labor Day weekend, we discovered a litter of six feral kittens had been born out back of our apartment building; Mama Cat had taken over the locked maintenance shed, and the kittens were playing and living right outside our kitchen window -- we live in a basement apartment. To make the long story short, we attempted to take in the litter to socialize & find them homes...but for the four girls, it was too late -- they were too wild & too feral, and we ended up releasing them back outside. The two BOYS, on the other hand, turned out to be brave, cuddly little armfuls, once they got over their skittishness. One of my coworkers adopted one of the feral boys (Smokey), and we ended up with the other (Oreo):
The feral litter out back:
But during all the dealing-with-the-ferals, Bast played yet another joke on us -- at one point, the feral litter disappeared from out back, before we brought them in; we'd been trying to get our maintenance crew to help us, since the shed was locked. All we wanted the crew to do was unlock it, and we'd take care of the kittens. After the kittens disappeared, we made the rounds of some of the local shelters, including Cat Welfare, hoping that the idiot maintenance might have gotten in the shed without telling us & dropped the litter off.
And when we walked into the kitten room at Cat Welfare, a volunteer just handed me a kitten, saying, "here, you'll like her."...and this tiny black kitten fell asleep in my hands, purring.
Yeah. We're suckers. We ended up adopting her, too. A totally black kitten, with a patch of white on her chest that looks like a crescent moon...so we called her Luna:
For those who've lost track, this means we went from a two cat household, down to a one -- I still miss Frodo terribly -- and now up to a FOUR cat household: Scooter, Faramir, Luna & Oreo. And for such a feral wild boy, Oreo has turned into a total cuddly sweetheart...AND we're still feeding his feral sisters, who are still hanging out in the maintenance shed out back (note what I said about "suckers" earlier). Faramir goes back and forth between cuddly armful & total brat, while Luna is a loving HUGGER -- yes, she hugs us. She'll run up to us and throw her front paws around our calves, then run away again. It's not a pounce; she stands up on her back legs to do it, and hugs us for several seconds. Anyway, our three new fur-kids:
Faramir now, just at one year old:
Oreo the Barbarian:
Luna The Elegant:
Scooter, wondering where all these new kittens came from: