First, the cuteness!

I counted 35 this morning.

Of these ones, the two tuxedos on the left will watch as I pause a few feet away to take a picture, but as soon as I move closer, the start moving away.

Syndol, posing pretty in the middle, and the white and grey in front, LOVE attention. I can pick those two up and cuddle them, and they can’t get enough of it.

Hypotenose and the two orange cats are “touch and go”. I can touch them, but then they go! I am sometimes able to pick up the almost all orange cat and hold him for a bit, but he doesn’t like it and wants down quickly.

In other things…

I didn’t have anywhere to go today, which means I finally got some progress in the living room. Since it has been turned into a cat free zone, we’ve developed the terrible habit of shoving things in there, just to protect them from the cats. The girls even keep their laundry baskets in there, because when they have the baskets upstairs, cats will pee in them! 

The girls and I have been taking turns doing a little bit and a little bit there, but we’ve not had a day when we can just focus on it. The problem is, we don’t know where else to put a lot of things. There’s a reason they’re in the cat free zone! However, we’ve decided we’ll be doing our Christmas celebrating in the living room this year, and that includes any decorating.

We’ve done no decorating at all. Normally, we’d have the tree up on the door in the dining room by the Feast of St Catherine’s (Nov. 27) and decorations around the dining room by now, but with the kittens we have now, even having the tree hanging against the door (which we don’t use), several feet off the ground, it not going to be enough. 

For our non-traditional Wigilia feast on Christmas Eve, we’re planning to have all finger foods and do a Columbo marathon. For New Years, we’re planning on doing a fondue. It’s been ages since we’ve done fondue, and we have two pots. One is suitable for lower temperature fondue over a candle, like a cheese or chocolate fondue. The other has a gel fuel burner and a stainless steel pot for high temperature oil fondue, so we can cook meats or do tempura vegetables.

So however we arrange things in the living room, we need to make it so there is room for the food and fondue pots, all four of us can reach the food, and all of us can see the TV. We almost never use the TV – we’ve got an antenna and can pick up a few channels, or we can use the Roku, but we usually end up watching things on our computers, instead.

As I write this, my daughter has taken over and is now vacuuming, but I interrupted her. I checked out the bathroom window and saw a great pile of cats trying to squeeze into the cat bed under the platform. The thermometer in there is at 0C/32F, so it’s warmer that outside, but they’re enjoying the body heat. There is another cat bed inside the cage, but they aren’t using it, so I popped into the sun room to move it next to the bed they’re trying to all fit into. Most of the cats ran off while I was doing that, but not the one fluffy black kitten with the white blaze on his face. This one is more socialized, and learning to enjoy cuddles, so as I backed out from under the platform, I picked it up to hold.

And promptly got a wet hand.

He back end was wet and looking wrong, so I brought him inside. I held him while my daughter gloved up and did a thorough washing of his nether regions. As near as she can tell, he got a matt in his fur over his urethra that has fallen off, leaving a bald spot. She was able to clean other matted fur and found a small wound in the process. We put some antibiotic cream on it and put him back in the sun room, after drying him off as best we could.

If we didn’t already have so many cats in the house, we could have kept him inside to keep an eye on him, and called the rescue. The Cat Lady and her family, however, are in the middle of moving. Their house finally sold! I don’t expect to have any rescue related activity until next month, and certainly don’t want to send another sick cat their way! The vets keep finding all sorts of other problems when they get checked over.

Oh! I just got a message and some photos from the Cat Lady! One of her daughters has the flu, and she’s being cuddled by Muffin (who now has a new name) as she’s laying on the couch! So adorable!

She still won’t let the Cat Lady touch her, and will hiss and bite her, instead! She’s bonded with the Cat Lady’s husband, goes out to job sites, has strangers coming up to her in her fancy truck seat all the time with no issues, cuddles with the kids, but will NOT accept the Cat Lady, even after all these months!

Anyhow… I’ve been distracted!

Time for me to get back to work and help my daughter in the living room, and figure out what to do with the space!

Oh, that reminds me…

I finished setting up the “plug” for the air conditioning vent. My brother had cut a piece of 4″ Styrofoam for it, but it still needed to be trimmed. The vent pipe itself worked rather well to “cut” the edges as I pushed it in, then cleaned it up more.

Since my brother used a hole drill attachment to install the pipe, I had the round pieces from the wall, each with a pair of drill holes in them from when my brother first marked out where to make the opening. One of the holes is right in the centre. The circles fit perfectly inside the vent pipe. One of them is a piece of panelling from the inside. So once the foam was trimmed to fit in the vent, I used a small, round curtain rod that happened to be in the living room, to make a matching hole in the middle of the foam. I took a piece of doweling left over from when I made the outdoor kitchen model and flattened one side, then carved a recess in the middle. I looped some paracord around that, then strung the ends through the centre hole of the “ugly” disc, then threaded that through the foam. I used some double sided foam mounting tape to secure the disc of panelling onto the inside end of the foam, with the paracord threaded through the middle hole. The cord got knotted against the piece of panelling to hold both discs tight against the foam, then I made handle out of paracord ends. The whole thing fits perfectly into the vent pipe, and I can line the disc of panelling up with the wall behind it. I’m rather pleased with how it turned out!

When that was done, I checked on the luffa that was drying over the heat vent. It had started to get mold on the outside, before it got too dry for mold, but when I broke the outer skin off, I found the mold went straight through. No sponge, and no viable seeds. 

Darn.

It just didn’t have a long enough time to grow!

Ah, well. We’ll be trying again in the future, after I get fresh seeds!

Now… time to go help my daughter!

The Re-Farmer