Y’all remember Kelly, who comments here often, who adopted a senior black cat (Norm!), and is awesome. She left a comment last week, saying:
My arm is healed, my company is gone, and I told my husband that I don’t care if he wants to or not… We are fostering. I have an empty room in my house (pretty much empty of everything but a couple of nightstands). Wood floors, huge windows, french doors that can close them off from the permanent population. I’m going to scout craigslist for a rug to cover the floors and we have an old cat tree in the basement that I’ll bring upstairs. What else do I need and what should I know before I start? I’ve had cats my whole life and yet I feel like I don’t know what I should be doing to get the room ready for them.
I’m doing the total unexpected (for me) and asking for kittens. You all know what a proponent I am for the seniors. They will always have a home with me, which is part of the problem. I fear they will be here longer than kittens and I will have a huge difficulty giving them up. Also, I don’t want to disturb the senior permanent population more than necessary and kittens can be locked away in a way that I wouldn’t want to do with older cats. A blog or a facebook page may be in the plans if this goes well. I’m thinking “Teeny Tiny Tabby Town” Let me know if you come up with something better!
I cannot tell y’all how much I am looking forward to Teeny Tiny Tabby Town (T4!)! I can’t think of anything to suggest at this point (my excuse is that my brain is still fried from my vacation. How long can I use that excuse, do you think), but I know there are lots of other fosterers who read, so y’all jump in and give Kelly some suggestions, if you can think of any!
So, my vacation is done and over, and I’m still struggling to get this house back in shape. It kind of helps to have the kittens out running around the house, because they like to follow me around the house and snoopervise, so if I’m annoyed by whatever housework I’m doing, I can grab up a Nom and get some kitten snuggling in.
When Fred and I got home from the airport, all four of the Noms were hanging out in the computer room. They all ran from me at first, but it didn’t take long before they were coming around, sniffing, and trying to decide if I was going to be mean to them. They decided I might be okay.
Razzie on the Room with a View, and Sugarbutt above her, in one of the many cat beds in the computer room.
They REALLY like the cat tree in the front room.
A LOT.
The girls on the cat tree, and Newbery all “Oooh, a box!”
“I should check this out!”
::FLOOP!::
“WHAT?”
Did I mention that they like the cat tree?
A LOT?
Fred reported that while I was gone, Logie would climb up on him when he was watching TV in the evening, and she’d march and purr and eventually flop over on her side and purr and purr. He said she was “Just like Mikey!” (Aka Mike Teevee from the Wonkas, who we absolutely loved. It’s a very good thing that the people who adopted Gus decided that they wanted to adopt Mike too, because he surely would have ended up staying with us.)
Fred’s still calling Logie “Whipper” due to her tail-whipping ways.
Yesterday afternoon I was sitting at my computer when the doorbell rang. I went up and looked out the window to see that it was our next door neighbor. When I opened the door, he turned around… with a tiny brown tabby in his arms.
“Is this one of yours?” he asked.
It wasn’t.
He’d been outside fuming over the mole trail in their side yard when he looked toward the road and saw this tiny tabby walking hurriedly alongside the road. It came down onto our lawn and hid by a bush, and he was worried that it would go back into the road so he made sure he was between the kitten and the road before he approached it. It got scared and ran into our front flower bed, where he caught it. The kitten appeared to be in pretty good shape and was scared but not terrified. He wasn’t struggling to hold onto it.
I told him I’d take it (I mean, whatcha gonna do, right?). But as it turned out, his mother (who owns the house next door) had been wanting a kitten, so he was going to see if she wanted it. He was just making sure it wasn’t one of ours. Fred talked to the mother yesterday, and she said that she was planning to keep the kitten, and his name is now Tiger. (I’m guessing he’s about 5 weeks old.)
This is the same guy who found Dorothy, by the way. I’m starting to think he might be a kitten magnet.
I spent a good long time looking in all the places I could think of where more kittens might be hiding (we have a bit of an issue with people dumping cats and kittens in the field across the street, stupidly believing that they’ll run free and take care of themselves because they belong in the wild, RIGHT? Grrrrr. Oh, it makes me SO MAD.) I didn’t find any, but I’ll go out again in a bit and look some more.
That kitten was seriously lucky, because our road is busy during the day, and the traffic goes by here fast. I shudder to think what could have happened to the poor little thing.
I wish Maxi could relax a little. What a stress ball.
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Previously
2011: No entry.
2010: No entry.
2009: Scheming.
2008: BRATS.
2007: I think the shirt is broken, though. No one ever offers me chocolate!
2006: No entry.
2005: No entry.