I am fine. Things are like, sucky-busy recently. I received a really nice email whose point was essentially that I seem out-of-sorts. I am. I hope to be back in-sorts soon. Basically, I am getting too little rest, and too much work; I am exhausted.
I have a vacation (a real one) coming up in less than a month, and I hope to catch up on sleep then. :-)
I had a pleasant surprise the other night as I left Eviljob; the remaining members of the Kittypants family (Rhett and Cookie’s litter) were at the feeding station. I guess the cold weather drew them out of hiding to get food asap. There was the black one who looks like Cookie, an all blue one that otherwise looks like Rhett, as well as Breakfast and Blacktoe. So the entire litter (except for one who vanished early and I could not find) seems to have made it. I guess that is good. I don’t know what I can do other than feed them; I haven’t had time to trap (there is no way on Earth I could get back within 24 hours to check the traps), I have nowhere to farm them out, and I cannot take them in – I have a full load myself, plus a FeLV-positive cat outside.
I was taken to task by someone else earlier for not bringing Harry indoors. I acknowledge that in some respects it may seem irresponsible. I explained that (1) in all bluntness, Harry is not my farking cat, and I have gone above-and-beyond for him in making a home for him, feeding him, getting him medical treatment, and vaccinating all MY cats for FeLV (well, almost all—Romeo was deemed too sickly to vaccinate), risking my kitties getting fibrosarcomas and such when another owner would have just taken Harry to Animal Services, where he would have been put down; (2) I have FIVE other cats that ARE my cats, and they are INDOOR cats. Bringing Harry in puts *my* cats at-risk; (3) Harry never goes anywhere other than my front door and the courtyard that surrounds my front door/front room area, and the courtyard has a brick wall with a gate around it. Sure, Harry could get out by going in-between the brick and the gate, or by jumping up on the wall and over (the same way he wandered into my courtyard)…BUT HE DOESN’T. Only rarely does he leave the courtyard area to walk down the path to the driveway to meet me at my car, and then he walks right back to the front door area with me. When he suns himself, it’s in the courtyard. When he poops, it’s in the courtyard. Other neighbouring cats and dogs don’t come into my courtyard, which is one big reason that I think Harry stays—he has food and water, and no one messes with him. When the weather is bad, he has protection from the rain and hot sun, and when it gets cold, he stays in this area that is right by my front door where I made a shelter for him complete with clean blankets and stuff, that I can (and have) put a heating lamp by if the weather gets cold enough. That area by my front door is a recessed concrete area (almost as if the architect had once intended there to be a second or different entryway) and the roof extends well beyond the front stoop area, so he has no wind, no rain, no sludge, no snow, no *anything*; the wind cannot blow anything of note into that recessed area, and when Harry is in the shelter, he is *fine*. I could put a folding chair and a card table in that recessed area and not be seen from the front of the house. When it has gotten very VERY bad, I put him in my garage (which he hates, by the way; he loves it in the courtyard. This week it is supposed to get bad enough that at some point he’s probably garage-bound, though).
So don’t worry about Harry. He’s out there as we speak full of Clavamox (yes, he’s back on it) and some other drug (I think it is a steroid, or a decongestant), with his heating lamp on; he has had a good dinner, and he is probably asleep by now. I need to see if I can find a home that takes in FeLV-positive cats, and as long as it passes my inspection (I will not just dump Harry off into some hellish cat nightmare where he gets locked in a cage for all eternity, fed ‘sometimes’, and cuddled NEVER. I’ll be damned if I’m going to see Harry on an episode of Animal Cops; if that’s the alternative, he’s staying right where he is), I will be more than willing to re-locate Harry and pay for his food and vet bills and whatnot. Sure, he’d be best off indoors. It’s just not going to be MY indoors, ‘cos I have *my* babies to worry about. Don’t be angry at me, be angry at Harry’s previous home, the one that let him get infected with FeLV and cast him off. I’m doing the best I can with what I’m dealt over here, and when added on to everything else I have to do, it’s a task to sterilise everything and launder constantly and wash myself and my clothes in-between petting Harry and going in to my cats. Plus, when I have had to totally clean – disassemble his shelter, clean it completely, do Harry’s laundry, clean the front stoop, walkway, and walls, and replace everything (I do this so that my front door/courtyard area isn’t teeming with virus) the past five to ten times over the past few weeks, it has been pretty damn cold. Plus, I am so very NOT brimming over with the time to do all this.
Sigh.
I have to get some sleep, but I will catch up on my stuff and all later. :-) I’ll deal with other emails and crap tomorrow, or something.
.
No comments:
Post a Comment