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Snowball II has another family!

Posted in Crazy Wisdom on Monday, August 15, 2005 at 2:18 pm by flerly.

Had a nice quiet weekend for a change. No company. No travel. No demands. We sat on our asses and watched a bunch of Firefly episodes. We played a little tennis, and JT finally found the time for some car maintenance he’s been trying to do for over a month.

I also spent about an hour on the phone with my San Diego frewtnut niece, cursing her for causing my cravings for carne asada and guacamole which I haven’t been able to satisfy locally. She rattled off a quick recipe over the phone, and so today I have for the first time ever made my own guacamole. I guess another first was the little pot of live cilantro we bought over the weekend in the course of buying stuff for my Monday Mexican night. No harm in sampling my work with chips for lunch, too, and I’m fairly pleased.

Another first for the weekend… our cats are all now labelled. This is probably silly, considering these are indoor cats, but since I was getting a tag for Sam, I went ahead and splurged the $5 to get the other two cats some tags — and some collars. You see…

Last Saturday morning I was out sweeping our front porch waiting for the cousins to arrive, when I was surprised by a man and his little daughter out for a walk. They timidly approached me to ask if I was the lady who put food out for the cat that lived around here. I described Sam, since he was indoors stuffing his face at the time, and they said that was the one. They explained that they weren’t sure where he lived, since they saw him all over and he didn’t have tags. They knew there were lots of stray cats around, but he seemed to be very friendly, so they thought he might be a runaway and not one of the feral, garbage-area cats. I’m thinking, he’s hugely fat people, how could you think he was a stray! They went on to tell me that they took walks about every day from their apartment, way down the hill on the other side of the bridge, usually up to the four-way stop and back. Apparently for a while, they’ve been running into friendly Sam playing around in the bushes by the four-way stop, and he’s come right up to the little girl and enjoyed being pet. After a while, Sam started “walking” them toward our front door, with that leading thing he does — walk a bit, look over his shoulder at you, if you seem to follow he’ll take a few more steps. He then proceeded to tell me that they had now modified their walks to come find Sam around our front door to pet him. They had noticed the food and water dishes outside our door, but again, since “he didn’t have any tags” they “weren’t sure whether he was a stray”. Thus, they finally got the nerve to just ask if he was actually our cat or whether we were just feeding the strays, giving me the distinct impression that they had been debating taking the friendly cat home. “He’s just so sweet to her, letting her pet him, and she loves it,” the man was explaining, and clearly his daughter (whom he was carrying on his shoulders) was disappointed that Sam was inside today. I, however, was glad. Then, with perfect timing, the cousins pulled in, walked up and greeted me with hugs, and the man excused himself and walked off without any further conversation.

Sam used to wear flea collars, but since I’ve been using Revolution, we haven’t bothered with any collar. I had THOUGHT that he pretty much confined himself to our front porch and parking area, since anytime we’ve ever walked by the window at the front door, he sees us and comes running. When we moved in, we had to provide a photo and description of him to the apartment managers, in case he were ever “found” and needed to be returned home. I guess I just assumed in the middle of this huge community, he’d be pretty safe. I never considered kitty-kidnappers I guess.

Anyway, now Sam has a top-of-the-line, light-reflective, break-away collar complete with an ID tag with his name, our apartment number, my name and our phone number. Silly me not to realize that it would take a collar to distinguish Samuel from one of the skinny, feral, skiddish, dumpster-kitties that are way too shy to come up to someone’s front door for food and prefer eating cat food that the nice (but crazy) lady provides for them in the big pan under the bushes by the dumpster, but I don’t really think that was the case. Sam is just lovable, and I guess these people seemed to be looking for a nice, fat, free pet (as opposed to a fat-free pet, I guess).

Then, mostly just for fun, even though they are not likely to be kidnapped (by strangers, at least — I’m keeping my eye on cousin Jenni, though), the indoor cats also got ID tags. For Motley we just added a tag onto her bell-collar — which she is just fine with, since it’s even more noise she can make tearing through the house. Kitty, however, is plotting to kill us in our sleep for her pretty pink collar with it’s little pink heart tag. She did start out, afterall, as one of those feral dumpster kitties, which we rescued, so she’s never exactly been typical or sociable, and she’s certainly not used to collars. Phase one of her plan seems to be to annoy us to death by lying on our bed and scratching her neck all night, causing the collar to jingle incessantly. Having witnessed her sleep for hours without “itching” on the futon or my computer monitor WITH the collar, I’m pretty sure it’s not an allergy. Nope, she’s just annoying us. Damn smart cats.

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1 Comment

  1. skjarl has made a Comment

    omg omg omg don’t let them steal my cat!!!!
    dirty, filthy cat thieves!!!
    Come to think of it though, Sam tried to adopt another family in North Carolina. I almost didn’t find him. I had to aggressively hunt him to get him in the cage. He REALLY didn’t want to leave. [sigh]

    Well, thanks for the collar. Can you get him tagged with a GPS unit plz???? Kthx.

    August 16, 2005 @ 3:56 am

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