OH! THE EXCITEMENT!

Our lives are always totally exciting, as I might have mentioned before.  And now it's time to tell you about all the very latest excitement that has been going on.

One of my most graceful sleeping poses

First of all, two of our foster kittens, Cooper and Michelin, got adopted.  So now we only have Dunlop.  We don't know why Dunlop hasn't been adopted.  Mom thinks he was cuter than his other two brothers, but in my opinion, one cat is pretty much like another cat.  Anyway, Dunlop has been out to PetsMart several times to adoption events, and he also spent two different entire weeks out there in a cage.  During the second week he was there, Michelin got adopted, so then Dunlop was all by himself for several days.  You should have seen how happy he was when Mom brought him back home!

Dunlop looking cute and adoptable

Any time Dunlop was at PetsMart, he got kind of stressed, which made him want to growl and hiss at people.  So maybe that is why he didn't get adopted yet.  At home, he hardly ever growls or hisses.  So we think he just doesn't like to be in a cage, and if anybody wants to adopt him now, they will have to come to our house and meet him here.

Anyway, Dunlop figured out on Wednesday that he is big enough to jump up on the kitchen counter.  Mom lets the cats get on the counter on one side of the kitchen, but not the counter on the other side.  Jason and Latifa, and now Dunlop, are very bad kitties, though, and when Mom isn't looking, they jump up where they are not allowed.

Latifa likes to jump from the forbidden counter to the top of the refrigerator.  Then she crouches there like a spooky little black panther, watching everything that goes on.  We don't think Dunlop has been on top the fridge yet, but Mom caught him on the counter one day, looking up there.  He is definitely learning bad habits from Latifa and from Jason.  But some bad habits he figured out all by himself, such as getting inside the dishwasher or the refrigerator when Mom opens the doors.

If Dunlop doesn't get adopted pretty soon, he is going to go live at the Humane Society and try to get adopted there.  At the shelter, he will have lots of other kitties to play with, plus volunteers to socialize him.  And potential adopters can see him out running around loose, and not in a cage.

One reason we want little Dunlop to get adopted is because we now have TWO NEW FOSTER CATS in our house, which means it is getting kind of crowded here!  The new kitties are not kittens.  They are maybe 4 or 5 years old.  Or maybe they are older than that.  They both came from a home where a woman had 25 cats, which she finally decided was more than she could take care of, especially after she got arrested for having so many.

Achilles

These two new foster cats are ragdolls, which is one of the 10 most popular cat breeds.  The lady who owned them used to breed ragdolls, but then she stopped breeding them.  She even got some of them neutered and spayed.  But she still ended up with too many cats.  Aunt Tania agreed to take 10 cats to start with, and maybe more later.  The two that Mom is fostering will be adopted out through Aunt Tania's group, DivaPets.  The rest of the cats will probably just stay at the Humane Society.

Some of the 10 cats were actually in good condition, except for having fleas.  They can be put up for adoption pretty soon.  Not all of the cats are ragdolls.  Some are just ordinary long-haired cats, and 3 are short-haired cats.  The ragdolls seemed to be in the worst shape, so Mom picked out two of them to foster.  Mom and Aunt Tania gave all 10 cats Greek names.  The two cats Mom brought home are called Achilles and Astrid.

Achilles only weighs 10 pounds, and he ought to weigh
more like 12 or 13 pounds.  Also he chewed a lot of his
hair out while scratching fleas.

So far, Mom has kept the two foster cats in a room by themselves, but I will try to tell you a little bit about them, even though I haven't really met them personally.  Achilles is a seal-point cat with a big head and blue eyes.  He is kind of thin, especially in his back end.  He doesn't have much muscle mass in his hips and back legs, so we think maybe he had to spend a lot of time in a cage.

All the cats had ear mites and fleas really bad when they arrived.  Achilles scratched one of his ears so much that he got what is called a hematoma.  If a cat has a hematoma, and it isn't taken care of, the ear will sort of get all wadded up, like a cauliflower ear.  This is what happened to Achilles.  Mom has spent quite a bit of time cleaning out all the black ear mite stuff from inside Achilles' ears, so they're looking better, but he still scratches them.

Astrid weighs less than 6 pounds, so she needs to gain weight, too.

Astrid is a lilac point ragdoll, and she had very, very bad teeth.  On Monday, she got a dental, and she had to have 6 teeth pulled.  Mom says that Astrid seems to be feeling better now.  She is eating canned food, which Achilles is also eating.  They get three meals a day, which doesn't seem fair, since we dogs only get two meals.  But Mom says she is trying to fatten the kitties up.

Achilles and Astrid are taking medicine because they have an upper respiratory infection.  Mom would have let them out of their room before this, but she didn't want the rest of the cats to get sick also.  Astrid is much shyer than Achilles, and she doesn't like it when Mom tries to clean out her ears and does other things like that.  So Mom might have to get Aunt Tania to help her do some of these things.

Astrid has a face that makes her look like she's pouting!

Well, this is getting long, so I need to stop writing soon, but I wanted to tell you what happened Thursday morning.   Mom was laying out all the pills for the dogs, and there were 3 or 4 cats on the counter where she was doing this.  She thought Dunlop might eat one of the pills, so she pushed him away, and somehow a little pitcher of water got spilled, and then MY DISH fell off the counter and broke into millions of pieces on the floor!  It was a sad and tragic thing to happen because that dish was black-and-white, so it was perfect for a black-and-white dog like me.

Mom took forever mopping up the water and then sweeping up all the pieces of my poor little dish.  I was afraid I might not get fed, since I didn't have anything to eat out of.  But Mom has a big collection of dishes for dogs and cats, so she just opened the cabinet and got out a yellow dish for me.  It's a taxi-cab sort of yellow, not a daffodil yellow.  It's not quite as special as my black-and-white dish was, but I have to admit that when it is full of food, it looks really pretty!

Sometimes there is so much excitement at our house that we all have to take a nap!