Sarabeth needs some suggestions!
We moved to this small town in Idaho a few months ago, and have been really struggling to get by; our neighbor’s adult son had a cat who is now the neighborhood “stray”. This cat is a very well mannered un-neutered male tabby. We cannot have a cat! My husband is allergic and our lease is very strict that there are no pets, under any circumstance.
So, we love our “DogCat” who comes around regularly to say “Hi!” and we’ve made sure he’s got a little box with wool blankets to sleep in on our cold nights… It’s super cold right now, like 20 at night, but no precipitation whatsoever… SO!!! Last night, after I put my kids to bed, I went outside to smoke, and here comes DogCat out of the bushes SOAKING wet; his tail, belly, everything! There was a small circle of dry fur around his mouth and eyes, but even his ears were wet.
So I went screaming for a towel and moved his “bed” into the bathroom at least until he got warm. He dried out and my husband eventually put him outside, and he’s fine today.
What I am thinking about: someone deliberately did this to the cat, and turned him out into the freezing cold to… freeze. He doesn’t “belong” to anyone. He’s a really nice cat. He’s un-neutered, so he sprays around the yard, but never in the house (not that I would have ever had a chance to watch him inside because, you know, I already said my husband’s allergic, and it’s not allowed per our lease… ~ahem~). But, even though he’s pretty happy generally, someone tried to kill him…
But, I’m so finished by the end of the day, I don’t even know how to go about finding him another home. Seriously, the town is so poor, I’m confident that euthanasia is the go-to answer for unwanted kitties at the pound. Do you have any other ideas or suggestions or do any of your readers have any ideas about how I can help this cat? I’m super broke, but I can’t stand this. We’ve done what we could to make him comfortable and safe, but we’ll get kicked out of here if we get caught even feeding him on our porch.
Sarabeth lives in Lewiston, Idaho, and added: I’ve been trying to think what else could have caused DogCat to get soaked, but we’re not close to the river, and everything else is totally frozen. I thought maybe he’d fallen in someone’s undrained swimming pool, but I smelled him as soon as I picked him up (thinking maybe someone gave him a bath???) and it was just wet, dirty cat, no chlorine or chemical of any kind.
So if anyone in that area of Idaho knows of any shelters that might be able to help out, or anyone anywhere has any suggestions for what she and her family can do to help this sweet cat, please leave a comment!
Saturday morning, Fred came upstairs to the foster room, where I was hanging out with the kittens, and asked if I wanted to go to the movies. I’m fairly sure – though not positive – that the last movie we went to see was Star Trek two years ago, and we were headed to Chili’s to have lunch when I checked my phone and found that I had a message from the shelter manager, and that was the day the ball started rolling that we got the True Blood Six.
Funny what you remember, isn’t it? (Please note that I may very well have made up that entire story in my mind. It might have been another litter of kittens completely; the trip to Chili’s may have been after a different movie. Honest to god, who the hell knows?)
So anyway, Fred made the offer and I jumped on it. Less than five minutes later, we were out the door and then on the road to South Huntsville to see Mission Impossible at the Imax theater. He was worried that we wouldn’t make it in time, but when we pulled up to the theater, it was almost 15 minutes before the movie was to start. There weren’t many people there, so we got our tickets, I got a drink at the concession stand, and then we went into the theater. There was no one else in the entire theater, which was AWESOME, and we were sitting there talking a few minutes later when the manager walked in.
They’ve been having issues with tracking on that movie and they had to do some sort of calibration, so the movie might start about ten minutes late, she told us. Which was fine with us, we had no problem waiting a little extra time. She left, I checked Facebook on my phone, Fred and I talked, and about five minutes later she walked back in.
She said something about the movie (I truly don’t remember what the issue was) and they needed the Imax people to do something, but no one was answering the Imax phone (I bet it’s big!), so basically they weren’t going to be showing the movie. Ultimately, we got our money back AND free tickets to see a movie in the future AND the $5 back for my soda. All in all, a pretty good deal.
I tried to convince Fred to kill time until the next showing three hours later, but he wasn’t up for it. We visited the book store, then went to Petsmart (not the one where my fosters are, the other one in Huntsville where the Forgotten Felines kitties are) to look at the cats, then started talking about lunch. Fred had mentioned Mexican food as a possibility, so we headed toward home with our eyes peeled for a Mexican restaurant.
We stopped at a place we’d never been before, and I hope to never go there again. The food wasn’t awful, but it was bland. From the very beginning the waitress looked at us like she wanted to gut us with a rusty fork – seriously, we didn’t have to do anything to make her hate us, she came to the table already wishing us dead. I couldn’t wait to get out of there.
Despite not seeing the movie and the blah food and the waitress who hated us, I actually had a good time. It was kind of like Date Night, only during the day.
On Sunday, I amused myself FAR too much. I have a tin of catnip that needed some sort of label so that I’d stop walking by it and saying “Oh, what’s in here?” and having to open it to see. I kid you not, I’ve had to open that tin and look inside at least six times since I put all the catnip in there. So I thought I’d look through Mister Boogers’s pictures and find a sufficiently hateful one, then I’d put “catnip” in script below it, print it out, and affix it to the tin with the wonderful substance known as Mod Podge.
I went a little astray from my original idea, but when I was done, I laughed and laughed like a big dork.
(Aside from the picture, it’s “nippe” that gets me every time. Seriously, I am typing this and snickering.)
I went by Petsmart on Friday when I was running errands, not because I needed to buy anything there, but because I wanted to see how Charlie and Patty and Everett, Sally and Lucy were doing. The morning cleaner was still there when I went by, playing with Everett with a feather teaser. He was his usual crazy self, flying around after that feather teaser. Charlie was watching from his cage, and Patty was in the litter box taking a bath. A few minutes later, the cleaner opened Charlie and Patty’s cage, and Patty heard the cage door opening and came out to see what was going on. I would have expected her to run to the back of the litter box to hide, so seeing her go toward the door made me happy. I’d say they’re adjusting okay.
(No Peppers adopted over the weekend.)
It took the Sons a few days to be comfortable with the idea of coming downstairs. Well, not Clay – Clay is fearless, and he was down and exploring pretty quickly. Sunday morning, Opie, Jax and Tig finally started coming down and looking around.
It’s funny, there’s always a pattern to the directions that fosters go when they’re set free. When they first get to venture forth from their room into the rest of the upstairs, they invariably head left into the bathroom, then come out and run into my bedroom, which is across the hall from the bathroom.
When they’re released into the rest of the house, they largely ignore Fred’s bedroom at the end of the hallway and head downstairs and straight into the guest bedroom. Since the guest bedroom sometimes doubles as a foster room (and the permanent residents enjoy hanging out in there the rest of the time), there are lots of toys and cat beds in there. Also, it gets some nice warm morning sun, so it turns into a favorite hangout for the kittens.
Opie, trying to decide whether it’s safe downstairs….
..or whether he should just go back upstairs, where he knows for sure that it’s safe.
Jax, on Fred’s desk. You see how high his tail is? He pretty much walks around with his tail up that high all the time.
Sniffin’ pencils.
Jax found a toy to play with.
Clay supervises.
Jax, mid-jump.
The leg kicked out to the side is just killing me dead.
Shall we dance?
He swings! He misses!
Sugarbutt likes to hang out on top of the fridge. He can keep an eye on all the goings-on, but the kittens can’t bother him (well, at least not until they get big enough to figure out how to get up there!)
“How YOU doin’?”
Previously
2011: No entry.
2010: No entry.
2009: We have Spanky, who is our Bathroom Ambassador.
2008: Dear Peoples of the Bitchypoo Readers
2007: I suspect this behavior will not go over well with the ass-showing Mister Boogers.
2006: Things you may not know about me.
2005: No entry.
2004: I put too much perfume on this morning and now I’m sitting here with the stank rays shooting off me in every direction.
2003: And on the way home, he recounted, word-for-word a conversation he, his doctor, and I had had, only he substituted the nurse for me, and had her saying what I’d said.
2002: Ever hear of “Shut up, Junior, that’s rude, and the next time you say it, you’re going to your room for the rest of the day”?
2001: I’m such a ditz sometimes
2000: I’ve turned into such an old lady.