Kitties
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Okay, I've sunk to a new low. I've written a webpage about my cats.
Here's the saga so far:
Originally, we tried the Humane Society of Montgomery County and the Washington Animal Rescue League to find a kitten to adopt. Both of which you would figure just jump at the chance to place a kitten or cat in a new home when someone wanted to adopt an animal.
If you answered, "Yes." you'd be wrong. The local Humane Society insists that you give references from a local vet(s), have two in-home interviews with the prospective owners and demand that for any juvenile animal (those under a certain age), a human adult must be home at all times.
What?!
Not only is it insane to ask this but pretty much impossible to achieve. Everyone I know works for a living and while kittens do need social interaction and attention from their owners, most kittens sleep most of the day away. Montgomery County, MD, just plain old sucks when it comes to owning a cat. As of 4 years ago in the town of Rockville, MD, if the Animal Control people saw a cat or new mother with her kittens outside, even if one had a collar, it would be caught and almost immediately put down without anyone trying to contact the owners or find a home for the little ones. Including kittens. This is just plain sick. I don't know if this law is still on the books, but knowing how anal-retentive this county is, it wouldn't surprise me.
And the Washington Animal Rescue League (WARL) makes some wonderful screw-ups, too. We tried to adopt one of their kittens but were told no, we couldn't. While it was written into our lease that there was a designated spot for adding pet information, WARL required a notarized letter from our leasing agent that said , "yes, we were allowed to have pets in our apartment." If it's listed in the lease agreement, why require a notarized statement? Our leasing agents (a group of screw-ups themselves, they lost our paperwork 3 times in two years, but that's another story unto itself) couldn't get anything notarized, due to their main holding company's policy of letting employees off property during work hours and so forth. I have some very explicitly descriptive phrases for all the parties involved, but I know some kids may read my page so I won't list those phrases here.
Anyway, we finally found alternative avenues for getting my girlfriend (now, wife) a kitten. It was either a kitten or a baby. Kittens are much easier to deal with at this point in my life. 'Nuff said.
Here's who and what we have:
Karma. She's
the oldest at just over 2 years of age. We got her as a "little
sh*t" of 8 weeks and two days from a local pet store (Pet
Doctor). Should've known she was an imp. The first night we had
her, she tried to knock over a pizza box. We think she's mix between
a British and Russian Blue due to coloring, size and personality
quirks. Example, she actually likes water, but under her terms.
She sometimes jumps in the shower with me. Bizarre kitty but very
much a love-muffin at the same time.
Onyx. (a.k.a. Neurotic-kitty) We got her as a playmate for Karma, so that we could get some sleep. Also, it helped to get a kitten into a good home (from a rescue organization called Alley-Cat Allies, a group of great people who trap feral cats and if adult, spay or neuter them, and if kittens try to place them in a good home. They never destroy cats unless they are too sick or old to survive comfortably.) and paid back a major debt to Bast (Egyptian Goddess of Cats). She has turned out to be a striking cat. Pure jet-black, with screaming yellow eyes and huge teeth, moves like a large jungle cat, everyone notices her, that is if you can see her. We figure that due to fact she lived on the streets before we got her at 3 months of age, she is terminally gun-shy of humans and xenophobic. She talks to us every morning saying, "Feed me. Go away." She deems that sometimes only I can touch her briefly. Oh, and she knows how to yodel, which she proved at 3 a.m. on my wedding night. I'll post a photo of her whenever she stands still long enough for me to take her picture.
Banshee
(or Ban Sidhe if you prefer the Gaelic spelling). Karen
wanted another kitten. We fought on this. She won. Either a kitten
or a baby, she wanted either one right now. A kid would take a
couple of months to work on so the kitten was the path of least
resistance. We found the only pet store in this county that sometimes
sells kittens. Karen got lucky and I felt money slip out of our
bank account. Wasn't too wild about the sellers as they are more
than a little rough in handling their critters and not empathetic
to their creatures feelings, but felt we needed to get the little
girl out of a not-so-great situation. We've since found out that
she is either a culled Siamese or mom bred outside her breed and
the breeder needed to get the offspring out of there. I personally
couldn't care less, I'm happy to have a kitten again. But as a
friend of mine who has owned Siamese cats for over two decades
once said, these cats are called fur-covered lungs and some other
not so nice nicknames for a very good reason, they're LOUD! This
one is no exception as she proved the point the first night keeping
us awake until 4 a.m. by screaming in our ears. She has since
calmed down (a bit) and let's me pet her from time to time. She
is a cutie, and looks to be an lilac lynx-point.
Meg. To be fair to Banshee and because I was really not that happy with the pet store we got her from, I made a deal with Karen. If they had only one kitten left (3 days after we got Banshee), we would get her as the pet store really gave me the heebie-geebies and really wanted to do what my conscience as telling me to do (I'm sure Bast had something to do with it, tho). So, they had one left. I paid for her as this was my idea. Another black kitty. And we hoped a lot friendlier than Onyx. Co-dependent would be a more accurate description. She really reminds me of a phrase from a comedy sword stage-fighting acts from the RenFests, " bold, yet stupid." She really doesn't fear anything and wouldn't understand fear if you explained it to her. We named her Meg from one of the Xena episodes where she runs into a look-alike, but this one is a massive flirt who thinks she knows how to fight. Doesn't fight all that well, but thinks she does and then flirts when it suits her. That describes our Meg to a tee.
Oh, she likes to chase bugs that are way out of her reach (i.e. the ceiling) by taking running starts off the furniture and leaping 5 feet into the air. As I said earlier, bold, yet stupid.
The youngest ones are about a year and 6 months old and have been spayed. I know some people blanche at the idea of neutering an animal (my dearly departed maternal grandparents for example), but sometimes being cruel can be kind. Think of all the stray animals you've seen while driving or possible pets that have ended up as road-kill on the side of the highway. We're not planning on breeding our cats, so this helps keep the animal population down. My dearly departed maternal grandparents had so many cats that they couldn't feed themselves nor the cats, so either one or both suffered. So, unless you have a pure-bred animal, show animal or know for a fact you can find homes for any litters, do the right thing and have your pet fixed.
Thus endeth Jim's rant & rave #36(b). Make
sure to collect the whole set.
2/27/02
Okay, some updated shots of the girls:
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New kitten alert!!! New kitten alert!!!
This one wasn't our fault this time! We were on vacation in Orlando, Florida, with my folks the first week of July (by the way, NEVER go to Florida in July... it's hot, humid, and sticky, which makes you cranky and irritable and you have to interact with a whole bunch of tourists who are cranky and irritable because they're hot, humid, and sticky, too.) Well, we were out to dinner on July 3, 2003, and we had this dirty, orange ball of fluff come up to us and say, "Take me home with you." No, it didn't talk, except for meowing, it just seemed like it. What can I say, we're soft and squishy when it comes to four-legged ones. The kitten was so filthy with dirt, fleas, and ear mites, that we were suprised to see that it had a lot of white coloring in its fur. Very striking pattern too, full of swirls, but I'll talk about the markings later.
On July 5th, we finally found a vet as almost everything in Orlando closed up for the Fourth of July. Checked the kitten out for worms (check, ewww), ear mites (check, yuck), feline leukemia (negative, whew!) and male genitalia (check???!!!).
It seems that orange tabbies are almost always male. It's one of those sex-linked colors, like why calicos are almost always females. He made a 22-hour car trip home to Maryland without a fuss. In fact, he slept most of the way home. He's turned out to be a little trouble-maker, so after much deliberation (for all of 20 seconds ), we choose the name "LOKI." Yes, he's named after the Norse god of mischeif. Remember the swirled patterns in his coat? Well, they resemble a Nordic rune called Laguz, which symbolizes water and travel, among other things. I talked to a friend who knows runes and he said that this cat is very affectionate (check) but flip-flops on being lovey-dovey and being aggressive (check). The runes deal with being very fluid on emotions. Sort of makes sense in a way, water is usually tied to emotions, just like in Tarot card the cups (which hold water) reflect emotional states. Okay, enough being esoteric... here's a few photos of our newest mouth to feed.
This shot was taken milliseconds before he pounced my camera
Loki in his native habitat... the inside of a dishwasher. I swear that we didn't put him in there, he goes in it whenever we open it up to take out the dishes.
1/20/04 - We took him to the vet last Saturday. He now weighs 12.31 pounds! When we first got him, he weighed 3.5 pounds. Believe it or not, he really doesn't eat like a pig. However, he is an annoying little s.o.b. when it comes to getting his soft food in the evenings. We found out from our vet that male cats need some soft food every day to keep any urinary tract infections from happening. I didn't know this, but I'm always learning something new about my "furry children."
