Tuesday

With the animals, and with Ed you never know what you're going to wake up to.

He is momentarily up in the early morning, rumbling around, making just enough noise to wake me. I glance at the clock. Animal feeding time is coming up. I give up on the idea of more sleep.
You know, you need to fix the cage: the opening is not large enough for both kitties to go in comfortably.

He had lugged the animal cage to the porch. Now that the two young kitties -- Calico and brother, the last offspring of Stop Sign -- are hanging out on the porch, we feel that we have an obligation to catch them and take them to the vet for spaying and shots. They are the last holdouts and at almost 6 months, they are quite capable of getting pregnant (my guess is that Calico is a girl).

On the one hand, trapping the kitties should be easier: the shed cats mostly stay out of the porch and Stop Sign insists on having her own bowl of grub. So you can put their dish right inside the cage. Too, she sometimes takes off for a few hours to prowl around. She is a true feral: she never stays in one spot for long. She goes off for a day, two days, five hours. It varies.

Once the little guys get in the habit of going in the cage to eat, Ed can set up the door, pull a string and shut them in. So far though, Calico is resisting. I thought perhaps Ed should open the door more, giving her more space to wander in.

This morning, he mumbles something that sounds like he's in agreement and crawls into bed. I'm up feeding the cats. And I notice that Stop Sign is away.
Ed! So long as you're awake (ha ha), this is a good time to adjust the cage door.
He asks -- should I set up the trap?

We have a confluence of good factors: Ed's up, Stop Sign is away, the kitties are hungry.

Half an hour later, he has accomplished that awful job of shutting the door on the two innocents. You throw a blanket over the whole thing and they quiet down instantly. He gets in the car and drives them to the vet.

At breakfast...





... we talk about how to treat their release. In the summer, we let the teenagers out in the sheep shed for the night. (The recommendation is to keep them indoors at least for a day, until they recover somewhat from the surgery.) They were so terrified -- of the unfamiliar shed, of the unfamiliar us -- that they hid in weird places all over the shed and once we opened the door, they flew out at lightening speed. (Since then, we trained them to go for their food into the shed by way of a cat door and though they are on the prowl a lot, they consider the shed their home, hence the name "shed cats.")

Releasing the kittens in the winter is going to be a problem. If we let them out in the porch (a place that they heretofore believed to be safe), they may flee. These are very cold nights. After surgery, in the wild, they may not survive.

And we have this idea: maybe they should become shed cats. Why? Well, it's not as if Stop Sign treats them with any gentility.  So feeding them when she is around is always tricky. And here's the bigger problem: they like to climb up the screen netting. That's darn good netting, but it wont survive their constant clawing at it.

Still, we don't fully understand cat thinking. These kitties seem okay in the presence of the shed cats and thus far, the shed cats have displayed a sweet temperament toward each other, toward us, and even toward Stop Sign and her kids. (It's she who claws at them and shoos them away, nice mama that she is.) But will they be able to learn the shed routines? Will they know to exit when nature calls? Are we asking for trouble?



The day is cold and I stay indoors. Mom paperwork, with a sprinkling of travel daydreaming and a healthy allotment of time for reading. It's a good morning.


And a good afternoon! Filled with grandkid antics.

(Sparrow likes to dump out all the puzzle pieces from all his rubber puzzles into one big heap; Snowdrop patiently helps him fit the pieces into the right frame... then hides the puzzles so he wont do it again. Repeating a toddler's game again and again can be exhausting!)






(She plays with a ball, so he must have one too!)






(the man who would be king...)






(She wants to draw...)






(He likes to... do stuff that makes us all laugh.)





The animal clinic calls to let us know that they did not have time to do surgery on the kitties today. Poor guys, huddled in a cage for such a long time! Ah well, it gives us another day to think of what's next for them. It's a very cold night. At least we know the littlest guys are warm. And together.

In the evening, after dinner, Ed says -- gorgeous, watch this.

He plays me a youtube that just makes me smile. It's a lively lecture on Possibilianism. After it, we "argue" over which one of us has a more open mind. Which one, when asked, is more likely to answer "I don't know." 

Day is done. Goodnight clouds, goodnight cold air. Be kind to the kitties when they come home tomorrow eve.