Ginger finally got cooperative enough for me to get some photos of him. :-)
He was very squirmy.
He’s like a weird, twisty rubber band!!! How the heck did he get his front leg like that?? :-D
Nicco wasn’t too sure what to make of him. :-D
Can you believe she’s about 2 months older than he is? She looks so tiny in comparison!
:-D
The Re-Farmer
The weather system has finally weakened and moved on. Over the next while, we’ll be slowing warming up, with a bit more snow predicted on the weekend (depending on which app I look at! LOL). With temperatures hovering only a few degrees above freezing during the day for the next while, we should have a nice, slow melt. We’re not expected to get into the double digits (in Celsius) until May. Which means no flooding, and no washing away of soil, and the still frozen deeper soil will thaw out slightly faster.
If things actually turn out as forecast, it will be pretty much perfect.
The outside cats are doing just fine in all this! When I came out this morning, I saw Butterscotch coming out of the bottom of the shelf by the sun room that we put rigid insulation in, adding more to the front to create a shelter for them. Creamsicle Jr. was in the middle shelf, sitting like a loaf in the opening, watching me as I changed out there water. I’m really glad that little shelter is working out for them.
The weather at least seems to have kept away the skunks, as there was still some kibble left in their food bowls.
Rosencrantz (in the foreground) has the densest, fluffiest fur! All the cats have their dense winter fur, but hers is so incredibly fluffy! :-D She would not let me pet her this morning, though.
Butterscotch, on the other hand, is looking rounder and rounder.
*sigh*
We’ll just have to assume that Rosencrantz and Junk Pile cat are also pregnant, but they don’t look any bigger than their winter fur would normally make them.
:-/
Anyhow.
In total, I would say we got about 6-8 inches (15-20cm) of accumulated snow in our area. The snow is so heavy and wet, it actually made shoveling the sidewalk a challenge, because the snow kept sticking to the shovel!
Meanwhile, we don’t need to actually go anywhere until tomorrow, so we’ve got another quiet day at home to catch up on things indoors. :-)
The Re-Farmer
Oh, we had a snuggly boy this morning!
The snuggles were after he aggressively attacked both my feet through the covers! :-D
But how could anyone be upset about potentially bleeding toes, when THIS face is looking at you?
Aaawwww….
*melt*
The Re-Farmer
I missed my morning ginger cuddles, but that’s okay. He got other cuddles!
That’s Keith on the left, and Cheddar at the top. Cheddar is the one that came indoors after we found him walking strangely, and could feel what we at first thought was a dislocated rib. It turned out he had somehow impaled himself with a stick, at about his armpit. It was surgically removed, and he never went back outside.
I still have the “cheese stick” in its vacuum sealed tube. And yes, the vet actually labelled it “cheese stick”. :-D
Keith came indoors some months after Cheddar, so all three of these guys are “rescued” yard cats.
Ginger is very close to Keith in size and shape, though Ginger isn’t even a year old yet – and Keith is not a small cat! You can see in this photo, a bit of why we would sometimes look at Ginger and think we’re seeing Keith!
There’s no mistaking Cheddar, though. He’s a big, hulking block of cheese, that boy!
I have a shelf against the wall next to me, when I am sitting in my office chair. The chair has a high back and rotates/tilts freely. Parts of the shelf are kept clear for the cats to use, including the very top, so they can take naps next to the ceiling. They’ll sometimes use my chair to get to the top of the shelf but mostly they get down from the top by jumping into the padded headrest of my office chair, then down to the floor.
I gotta say, when Cheddar is the one jumping down, and I’m sitting in the chair, I practically get whiplash! It’s amazing how much force that boy has when he lands, and the chair slams back as far as it can tilt!
Beep Beep even hopped up to check out the new boy.
She doesn’t like him very much, and ended up driving both Ginger and Cheddar away, so she could snuggle up to Keith and start grooming him. :-D
Also, this is why my bed is so hairy all the time. It’s constantly covered in cats!
Having brought Beep Beep indoors to have her babies last spring, this will be her first year of NOT getting pregnant. She seems quite content with that! She also seems quite content with her new life as an indoor cat. Even when she went into heat, she showed no desire to go outside to visit the (intact) boys in the yard. We don’t know how old she is, but I have pictures of her from when we made the drive out and stayed here with my dad, back in 2015, and she was definitely an adult cat at the time. That makes her a minimum of 7 years old. I would guess she’s closer to 10, and she would have had a litter of kittens every year of her adult life, until now. She is a wonderful mama, but I’m sure she’s more than done with the babies by now! :-D
Meanwhile…
Ginger’s surgical site is looking really good and healing well. He displays no sign of pain or discomfort, and it’s not slowing him down at all. Which is starting to be a problem, as he is exploring more and trying to get into things he shouldn’t be! We’ve been able to train most of the cats to stay away from/off of certain areas and, of course, he hasn’t learned that yet. :-D
There is some tension between him and some of the other cats, but not in any out of the ordinary way. Some of our cats are just more ornery than others, so it’s not just him.
He’s such a sweet boy!
The Re-Farmer
It is pure joy when the baby boy comes over for morning cuddles.
He doesn’t want to be picked up, and he doesn’t want to be held, but my goodness, he wants pets and scritches and snuggles, and he loves to roll and stretch and squirm on the soft, soft bed. :-)
If only we could get the outside cats even half that friendly!
This was the crowd that greeted me this morning. After I took the picture, I looked up and saw the sort-of-calico cat come running under the fence into the yard.
The Re-Farmer
Last night, we decided to close the other cats out for the night. Not because there were any issues with cats not getting along, the night before, though. The other cats are really liking access to Ginger’s food and water bowls (as well as his litter box). With the other cats around, he spent most of the night in his bed at the bottom of the closet, and by the time he came out in the morning, all the food and water was gone. He does the stairs to the basement really well, but I’d rather he didn’t have to do that because the other cats were too lazy to! :-D
The bonus was, morning cuddles with Ginger!
As soon as he realized all the other cats were out of the room and the door was closed, he jumped upon the bed and started roll and stretch and squirm, while demanding face skritches. :-D He did eventually go back to his “cave” in the closet for the rest of the night, but by morning, he was back for more cuddles.
After a leisurely breakfast from his still-full food and water bowls. :-D
I think he enjoyed the break from the other cats! He is certainly enjoying people time, too.
I was talking to my daughter about one of the things I noticed about him. He and his sister, Cabbages, are the youngest cats in the house. Yet he is bigger and burlier than her, and even his older sister (half-sister, I suppose), Nicco. The spice girls are both downright tiny compared to him, and even Tissue, who is about the same age as the older kittens, is smaller than he is. Our Ginger is a beefy boy! He’s about as big as his Aunt Beep Beep, who has been filling out since coming indoors. He hasn’t caught up to Big Rig, but then, Big Rig got her name because she was so much bigger than the other kittens. I don’t think he’ll get as big as Cheddar or Leyendecker, but I’m sure he’ll be at least as big as David and Keith, soon.
He was always a bit bigger than his brother, Nutmeg, but Nutmeg is definitely filling out, too.
So is their mother, Butterscotch (on the left).
Who is looking decidedly round in the belly.
*sigh*
Rosencrantz is another beefy one. If she’s pregnant, we might not even be able to tell until we start seeing kittens running around again.
Thankyou to Wolfsong for passing on the name of a vet that does a barn-cat spay day. It’s a long drive for the cats, but we’d be able to do 4 females for about the same price as the local vet doing only one, so it would be worth it. We will definitely be contacting them to find out when their next spay-day is. The only challenge will be to catch yard cats like Junk Pile (I haven’t actually seen her in a little while), and I’m sort of assuming Rosencrantz’s baby, the sort-of calico, is female. It’s not like we’ve been able to see her well enough to confirm, either way. Just like Junk Pile; we didn’t know for sure that she was female until she showed up with kittens following behind. In fact, because she never looked pregnant, I had thought she was a he!
At least we’ve been able to get the indoor males snipped for now, including Ginger. Can you imagine the poor boy being intact, recovering from an amputation, and surrounded by a house full of female cats in heat? LOL
The Re-Farmer
We got some furry visitors last night. :-)
They tend to show up near the end of the day, when the light makes is hard to get good photos! You can still see, at least a little, the growing antler nubbins on the deer on the right.
If all goes well, this will be the last bag of feed for the deer that we buy until the fall. Looking at the long range forecast, we’re expected to dip below freezing again, with snow on Monday (three days from now). They’re predicting 3-6cm. After a couple more days, the temperatures will be back above freezing during the day, though we’ll have below freezing temperatures overnight for a while longer.
I’m hoping we actually get that snow, and that it slowly melts. The deer should have fresh growing things to eat after that. We were supposed to have rain over the past couple of days, but once again I watched on the weather radar, as the system moved right past us. We didn’t even get a sprinkle.
Yesterday was a very lazy day for me. There is something about it being overcast that leaves me feeling like I’m ready to fall asleep, all day. Plus, with the cooler temperatures and hopes of rain, I didn’t want to be working outside with power tools. ;-) I did make a trip into town, though. Our darling daughter treated us to pizza for our anniversary. My husband and I celebrated 33 years together this month. :-) While driving into town to pick it up, there actually was a bit of rain, but it was nothing but a tease!
Today, I finally made the trip to the smaller city to pick up the last few things I wasn’t able to get during my Costco trip. They were actually sold out of cat litter, of all things! While there, I started chatting with another customer, who is also feeding a lot of cats. Mostly outside cats. He estimates he spends about $3000 a year on cat food – and spent another $5000 to get 40 cats fixed. !! That’s through some sort of program, where getting a female done is only about $80-$100, instead of the $350 we’re paying. I’ve had all sorts of organizations recommended to us, but either we can’t get through to them, or they don’t operate as far out as we are. :-(
(Oh, just got a phone call. The people who are adopting Two Face are on their way to pick her up. :-) )
While talking to the other customer, he mentioned using wood pellets instead of litter. I’ve heard of people using them, and talking about how much better it is, so I asked him more about it. It turns out that these are just the wood pellets sold as fuel for pellet stoves. He told me that when the cats use the pellets, they absorb all the moisture and break apart into sawdust. They also absorb the odor, so the only thing you smell is wood. When cleaning the litter pans, you simply dump out all the pellets in the pan and replace it with fresh – and the old pellets can still be burned. !! I don’t know that I’d want to do that. At least not in the fire pit (or a pellet stove, if we had one!), but we do still have a burn barrel. Or compost them, while burn bans are in effect. That would save us from having to haul those heavy bags to the dump. He told me the pellets are a lot cheaper, too, and they come in 40 pound bags, so they last a long time, too.
I think it’ll be worth trying it out. Maybe start with just a few litter pans, first, and see how the cats like it.
The conversation got me thinking about just how much we spend on critters. With the cats, it’s about $350-$400 a month in wet and dry cat food, plus litter. So, about $4,800 a year, on the high end. Plus the deer, which we do only for about 6 months, which works out to about $300 a year. Then there’s the bird seed, which we do all year, and works out to about $1000 a year.
Which we’re doing my husband’s disability payments.
Thank God for private health insurance!!
There are a lot of things we are doing without, to keep the critters fed. We include it all in our grocery budget. If, however, we were just setting that money aside, we’d have been able to save enough to replace the roof in only 2 years.
Now, we’re not going to stop feeding the animals, but we really need to find a way to address that expense. This is not sustainable. The problem goes back to my not simply being able to go out and get a job, since any income I would make would get deducted from my husband’s disability payments. If I ever made enough to bring that replace my husband’s disability payments, he would lose his insurance entirely (since he would no longer “need” it) – and he’d no longer have coverage for his prescriptions. So it’s a lose-lose situation. That’s why we had to be so careful when fund raising for Ginger’s vet care. We can accept gifts. We can’t have additional income.
*sigh*
Reducing the costs will help, which is why I want to try the wood pellets instead of cat litter. Cat food isn’t going to get any cheaper, though. It’s another reason why we want to grow and preserve as much food for ourselves, as well.
Slight interruption in writing this, as the people adopting Two Face arrived. As a thank you for Two Face, we were gifted with a bag full of brand new, still in their wrappers, Tupperware! Looks like the lady is a distributor. :-)
I hope Two Face is happy in her new home. We’re going to miss her!
Well, with the weather getting colder again for the next while, we’ll be slowing things down as well. At least, outside. Not so much, inside. The tray of bulb onions are now in the sun room. It’s warmer in there, but with the cooler temperatures coming, we’ve got them heated from below. By the time things warm up again, we should be ready to move more seedlings from the aquarium greenhouses to the sun room, then use the aquariums to start the summer and winter squash.
If all goes to plan, we should be ready to start direct sowing some things near the end of May, then do the final direct sowing and transplanting after our last frost date of June 2.
We’ll have a lot of work to do in between!
The Re-Farmer
I think Ginger is getting a bit spoiled.
After what he’s been through, I think he deserves it! :-D
I only saw four members of his outside family this morning.
Nutmeg has a habit of body slamming the kibble container as I’m filling the bowls, sending kibble flying everywhere! :-D Such a silly boy! I even got to pet him and Rosencrantz this morning.
Now if we could just get Creamsicle Baby and his cousin to let us come close. :-)
Oh, we got a call from the people who came to look at Two Face and Susan a while back. They’ll be coming over this evening to pick up Two Face and bring her home. They were originally going to pick her up on the way to an appointment for their dog, but had plans to do some visiting after and didn’t think she would like being in the vehicle for so long. So they’ll get her on the way home, and take her to a vet in a town closer to where they live.
Which means that, tonight, we’ll be back down to 16 cats in the house.
Time to update the posters to adopt some of the others. We still have another seven available for adoption.
Ginger, of course, is staying with us, and we’ve decided to keep his sister, Cabbages, and Beep Beep. Beep Beep was my dad’s cat, and I just can’t bring myself to adopt her out! :-)
The Re-Farmer
Ginger was playful this morning, and I was able to get a lot of pictures.
Some of them even turned out okay. ;-)
Last night was the first night we did not close the outer cats out, and I’m happy to say there were no issues. I think he spent the night in his favorite spot in my closet. :-D
In the morning, though, he came out and demanded attention!
I was not the only source of that attention.
Turmeric decided to check out her cousin, and yes – grooming happened! Yay!
Turmeric is a couple of months older than him, yet he is so much bigger! Her sister, Saffron, is even smaller. At only about 9 or 10 months old, he’s already looking like he’s going to be a big, burly boy! Maybe not the big slab of meat Cheddar grew up to be, but certainly as big as Keith. We’ve already had times when we’ll look over to see an orange cat curled up and thinking, “Aw, Keith is so cute! … Hold on. That’s not Keith!”
His aunt came over to give him a sniff, but he was far more interested in tackling my hand and chewing on my thumb.
He’s actually quite good at “chewing” without actually biting.
He was quite enjoying the comfort of a bed for humans, rolling around all over the place while his Aunt Beep Beep watched over him. He’s already heavier than she is, but Beep Beep has always been a tiny one.
Ginger has been busy, claiming the house. He’s been going into the basement, where he has discovered the fantasy land of food bowls and litter boxes. :-D He even joined the crowd when the girls gave them their wet cat food. He’d pretty much ignored the wet cat food we gave him when we first brought him into the sun room to await his surgery, but this time, he actually ate it. So far, I think the only place he hasn’t explored yet is the second floor.
The down side of his exploring is that he decided to jump up onto the dining table this morning. My daughter and I were nearby and managed to get him off without startling him too much, only for him to jump out of my daughter’s arms, back onto the table, skittering about, knocking over and breaking a large glass mug, before jumping down to the floor.
*sigh*
Ah, well. He’s still getting used to things.
We’re pretty blown away by how active and mobile he is. He has adjusted very well to the loss of the leg, and is doing pretty well adjusting to the indoor life, and all the new cats around him, too.
It’s very encouraging.
The Re-Farmer
It’s a lot hard to get pictures of Ginger, now that he’s joined the inside clan!
I was able to get this one, last night.
The other cats had been lured away, leaving Ginger and his new mouse on my very, very hairy bed.
He loves that mouse! I didn’t realize when I bought it, that it has a pull string to make it vibrate. :-D
Once again, we kept the other cats closed out overnight, to avoid any potential hassles while we were asleep.
Ginger has discovered the comfort of those things the crazy humans sleep on. :-D Several times, I woke in the night to find him cuddled up against me. He can jump up onto the bed himself, which is good. Later this morning, I found him going to explore in the basement, so stairs aren’t a problem for him, either.
I almost got to pet his brother and aunt this morning, but they were much more interested in the kibble!
His other brother photo bombed me, while I was trying to get a picture of his cousin! I am so tickled that I caught him while airborne! :-D
I’m happy to say that all the kitties seem to be doing quite well. :-)
The Re-Farmer
