While it’s still -23 or -24C right now, with no wind chill, our high today is supposed to be a balmy -15C this afternoon. By the middle of next week, we are supposed to reach highs just below freezing!
For well insulated cats like Brussel, here, it doesn’t seem to make much difference how cold it gets! The less fluffy cats prefer to hang out in the cat house or the sun room. 🌞
My goodness, Brussel does look permanently angry, though! 😆
Speaking of warming up, the upside cats were so happy to have access to my room – and bed! – again last night! My attempt at napping before getting Soot Sprite was disrupted by their antics, so I was really flagging. I finally gave up and went to bed at 8:30, which is insanely early for me. I barely got under the covers before I was surrounded by cats snuggling against me, with 2 or 3 right on me. Butterscotch was in her usual corner on my bed again – she quite enjoyed her night with only Soot Sprite in the room, and wasn’t impressed that they were allowed in. She did allow Cheddar to cuddle next to her, while she used my hand as a pillow, and even tolerated our greasy grandma slithering off my hip and squeezing herself between them and my face, demanding pets. She is a skinny cat, and likes to take advantage of all the body heat she can borrow!
Unfortunately, she makes the most disgusting noises while grooming. 😆
I was so tired, though, I still managed to fall asleep and stay asleep until about 5:30! I can’t remember the last time I got more than 4 or 5 hours of sleep in one stretch.
That I managed to fall asleep at all, never mind sleep all night, is very unusual!
As for Soot Sprite, he commandeered my daughter and slept in her arms for a couple of hours. My daughter is, unfortunately, paying for all the squirming and crawling around under the kitchen sink the other day, and couldn’t lift her arms above her shoulders, then got stuck cuddling the little voidling for hour. He’s another one that has to borrow body heat from others!
I was able to pick him up early. He was completely quiet the entire time, from the clinic to bringing him into the house.
Then, as I went to park the truck, my daughter let him out of the carrier, and he went into overdrive. Not the reaction to expect from a still sedated cat! He was running all over the place!
He also had a whole series of cats following along, trying to sniff his remaining nibby bits as he ran around.
He has finally calmed down and, as I write this, is wandering around the dining room.
While at the clinic, I remembered to go through the list of cats they have on file with us. Some have been adopted, while others have disappeared or passed on. Turns out they had Potato Beetle as two cats – Potato, and Beetle! 😆
While at the counter, one of the staff came by and asked where we found Soot Sprite, and whereabouts we live. I was a bit confused by the question, and just said, in our yard. She was wondering if we were missing a kitten that looks like Soot Sprite. She recently found one!
It turns out, she is a neighbor! She lives off a road a mile north of us, so she takes a paved road, another mile north, to get to her place, rather than the gravel road past our place, So while we live on the same cross road, she has never gone past the intersection near us. I would have driven past where she is, but all the houses along there are hidden by trees, so I only have an idea of her geographical location.
I mentioned we have a lot of black cats this time around, and that the number of cats outside at our place ranges from about 23 to 37, so I couldn’t know if any wandered further her way. Now that I think about it, though, she did say she’d found a kitten like Soot Sprite. Any kittens his size and age have been staying close to the house. My guess is, it would be from another farm out her way.
Though it probably has the same daddy that produced so many mostly black cats at our place!!
Unfortunately, while paying for the neuter and claiming Soot Sprite, I completely forgot to ask her name. That’s not a problem, though. We’ll be back there again, often enough. They take good care of our felines!
We have 3 kittens that did not go for the spay day last time, as they were too small. Two male and one female, all siblings.
This was Pom Pom. We now call him the Wolfman. He looks like he’s going to be a big, shaggy boy! He’s already the same size as the older kittens and Toni.
I don’t know where Soot Sprite is right now, but he is still tiny, like their sister.
We call her The Beast, now.
The problem is, the boys are starting to… practice, shall we say… on The Beast. She hasn’t had her first heat, so there are no concerns in that regard… yet. But we need to act soon.
I got an estimate from the local vet, and ti get both males done, including extras like nail trimming, etc, will be just under $340. Which is what one female would cost. Without the extras, it’ll save us a few bucks.
Meanwhile, I asked the Cat Lady about the next cheap spay day. I got a response today.
They have one for this month, but they are booked solid. The next is Feb. 10. They will do males, but want at least one female in a group, since population control is the goal. These are only $75 per cat, with just the surgery and, if needed, treatment fir ear mites. No wellness check, tattoo or anything else. They just do as many cats as they can. This is on a day the clinic is closed, and the staff all volunteer their time to allow it to be so inexpensive.
I called the local clinic to book our indoor males, but to do both would be more than a month from now. I could book one next week. So I did that. We will bring Soot Sprite in. He may be the smaller one, but he’s been the more… active… one. So he is the priority.
I’ve since asked the Cat Lady to book us fir at least three cats in February. We’ll do The Wolfman and The Beast, plus Tissue. Doing Tissue is a risk, considering what happened before, but with us bringing her in, she might not panic so much. If possible, we will also snag the fluffy tortie from outside.
This clinic tries to have these spay days once a month, though, so if we can start trapping female yard cats, we might be able to start getting them in, too.
I don’t know how much of this the rescue can cover, though. Donations are lean, with so many people struggling just to pay the bills and feed themselves. I have to assume we will be covering it, ourselves. Or, should I say, my daughter probably will be. Hopefully, she will have plenty of commissions!
I had a much interrupted and sleepless night, so my daughter is sweet enough to head put into this for me.
Funny enough 😉, the yard cats aren’t really eating much of the food outside, so it’s mostly the food bowls in the sunroom that need topping up.
The sunroom still manages to stay Warner than -10C, even overnight. The heat lamp helps, of course, but so does the sheer amount of feline body heat!
We don’t have much to complain about, though. These temperatures are more typical for our winters. The areas hit by this year’s polar vortex were reaching temperatures from -40C to -50C last night. Plus, a lot more snow than what we got.
Amazingly, the long range forecast not only has us warming up noticeably after this cold wave, but we were even supposed to get highs bately below freezing!
Yeah, we’ll see about that.
As for me, I need to get some sort of sleep. The first half of my night, I was kept awake by the pain in my left hip. It’s actually worse when I lie on my right side, which is a switch. I finally gave in and took some ibuprofen. I’m out of my arthritis acetaminophen, but it didn’t actually help my arthritis much. Back to the more general version when I restock.
The other interruption was the cats. Nor that they were being rambunctious or anything. They were sleeping pretty soundly. I did have the usual trying to sleep right on me, or jammed up against me, etc. With my various aches and pains, though, I need to shift positions often.
It’s remarkably hard to roll over with the weight of so many cats on top of my blanket. Two of them weigh more than 20 pounds each, and most of them do not move, even as I’m shoving my legs right under them and rolling them around.
Which adds the unexpected problem of pajama pants. With the extra weight on top of the blankets, the pant legs end up twisting around until they are bunched up under my knees. I kept having to get out of bed to stand up and untwist my pajama pants.
What a strange problem to have!
I did get some sleep, at least. Especially when my husband started feeding the cats, and I suddenly had a bed again. Once I was free of cats and could fund a comfortable position, I fell asleep so fast and so hard, I never even heard when my husband came in to do the few food bowls in my room.
So I’m feeling pretty wasted right now.
From the looks of my bed, though, I’m not sure it’s worth trying.
Shadow has taken to cuddling me at night, but his sister, Tin Whistle, has taken to having a party on my daughter’s bed.
While she’s in it.
It’s gotten so bad, the girls are looking at building a door. The upstairs is two rooms, and we only ever had a curtain over the opening between them. If they want to get any sleep, they need to make a door to fit.
Plus, we need to get these teenagers adopted!
Beyond that, we are having another quiet day of domesticity. I expect to be heading out tomorrow to do put shopping for New Years, and run other errands.
It’s such a gorgeous day, today. Clear blue skies, sunshine and temperatures just below freezing. T-shirt weather! 😄
After getting back from my mother’s, I tried to settle at my computer to watch some videos while I had supper, then do a blog post. Found myself having all sorts of images and videos not wanting to load. I thought it might be a browser issue, but it was just as bad when I tried others.
The rest of the family is not having any trouble, so it wasn’t our internet. While going through my computer, trying to find a cause, I realized I had almost no storage left, and almost all of it – over 1.7 T – was taken up with image and video files! I only have 2 T of storage.
[correction: I have 1.79T in storage. 1.29T was taken up with image and video files.]
I emptied my trash, which was mostly deleted trail cam files, and I’m now transferring things to my external hard drive. Later, I plan to do some clean up and clear temporary files out. I hope that makes the difference!
I take a lot of pictures.
My daughter, however, took this one, while I was out.
Toni is healing up nicely and doing great. When we first brought her in and she was recovering from her amputation, we kept her isolated in my room. Once it was safe to let her out, she had zero interest in coming back. Lately, though, she’s started to come back into my room and will stay there, even overnight. Sometimes she’ll cuddled with the kittens, or will get into wrestling matches with Clarence – who is starting to be bigger than she is! Mostly, she seems to just enjoy being on my bed.
While doing my morning rounds, I was surprised to see there was actually still a bit of kibble from last night. Which means, no visits from the racoons! I saw only about 23 cats when I did a head count.
I did find one other, though, just towards the end of my rounds, and it was a sad find. I was coming around the west side of the house, and could just see the tail end of a cat under the cat house. That in itself is unusual. We see them going under on that side, or peeking out, but not lying on the ground. Even before I moved around a piece of insulation we have under there, to see if it would move, I knew it wouldn’t. I can see that it’s a tabby, but that’s it. We’ll have to pull it out later and cremate it, but it’s too windy to get a burn going.
I find myself wondering if this was the result of injuries from a cat fight, just because of how and where I am seeing it. I won’t be able to see if there are any obvious injuries until we get it out.
I didn’t have much time to think about it, either. We had a tow truck booked to get the truck. I’d called CAA last night to make the arrangements, making sure to tell them the tow could be done in the morning. I was told they would release the call at 8:30. Once a tow company accepted the call, they’d let us know and give us an ETA. Once that was arranged, I messaged our mechanic to let him know what was arranged and asked him to check the fuse box along with changing the battery, just to be on the safe side.
I got an automated call just before 8am, with an estimated arrival time for the tow truck at 60 minutes.
He got here before I finished my rounds! I thought I had at least another half hour, so I hadn’t unlocked the gate, yet.
Getting the truck was a bit of an issue. He could back up to it, but only at an angle, because of trees. The truck, however, was also parked at an angle, so it worked out. What he ended up securing it just enough at the front of the truck, to get the road. Once on the road, he unhooked it, drove around to the other end, then hooked it up and secured it properly from the back.
As he was pulling in, I went to put the truck in neutral. I turned the key to light up the dash, so I could see the display, but there was nothing. No dash lights or any sound at all. That battery was stone cold dead! I still put it in neutral; I just couldn’t see to confirm.
I hadn’t had much sleep last night, so once that was gone, I was going to try and get a bit of a nap. I ended up messaging with my SIL, which reminded me to send some photos for my brother that I took this morning.
I couldn’t close the garage door last night.
The top of the frame has been slowly sagging, so when we open and close the door, it hits the frame. That’s why there are pieces of metal under it; they help the door slide across without getting caught and damaging the wood. Over time, we found we’d have to push the door inwards in the middle, so the handle could clear.
Now, it just bashes onto the frame. While I could probably push the door inwards and get it past, that’s just going to make things get worse, faster. You can just see in the picture, to the left of one of those pieces of metal on the frame, that there is a crack in the wood. That crack is getting bigger.
I think it can actually be fixed, still. We’d need to jack the frame up until it’s level again, then secure and support it from the inside. We might not even have to remove the door. Once the frame has been raised back to where it’s supposed to be, the door can be closed, and we’ll be able to access the inside of the wall and roof above. The problem is, we have absolutely nothing to do this with. My brother has the tools needed, and would know how or where to get the things he doesn’t have.
Anyhow; he now knows about it, and might be able to come out some time before Christmas to fix it.
That was my conversation with my SIL when I should have been trying to sleep. 😄 Of course, there were various interruptions during my attempt to get some sleep. Mostly involving a Snorri, using me as a bed! At one point, I decided to check my texts, just in case. Sure enough, there was a message from the garage, saying the truck was ready! It had come in half an hour before I saw it. For some reason, my phone doesn’t give me text notifications. 🤔 He sure got that done fast!
So my daughter and I headed out to get the truck. My daughter just dropped me off and headed home. Since I was in town anyhow, I did an errand and got some gas (the prices have gone down to 149.9¢/L) before heading home. I’m glad we had the cash from selling those scrap cars! Otherwise, we wouldn’t have been able to get the new battery until next week, and the truck would have been sitting in our yard the entire time.
It cost less than I expected. Our mechanic wasn’t there at the time and I only talked to one of his staff, so I couldn’t ask details, but clearly he found no problem in the fuse box. He charged me for the battery, but not for labour! When my husband looked up batteries for our year, make and model, the retail prices start at $250, for a mid range quality battery. Even including taxes, we got a better price by getting it through our mechanic.
As much as I would have preferred to wait until next week, I’m glad we got it done, and that we were able to get it done now!
So that means tomorrow, when the dump is open again, we can FINALLY do a dump run! We’ll also be set and safe for when we do our stock up shopping next week. Yes, there are other fixes that we are discovering – it’s a well used 2011, after all! – but they are relatively minor and do not affect the safety or function of the vehicle. Everything identified during the safety inspection got done before we bought it.
Meanwhile, we are supposed to warm up again, even reaching a high of 0C/32F tomorrow. We’ll have one day with a high of -8C/18F, and then warm up again. In fact, in the first week of December, we are supposed to reach highs above freezing. How many days above freezing changes with the app I look at, but they all say we should be getting at least a couple of days above 0C/32F in early December.
This may turn out to be the nicest winter we’ve had since moving out here!
Three of the four siblings, cuddling (The Beast was napping somewhere else).
Pom Pom is getting so big!! You can really see the difference between him and little Snorri. Even Soot Sprite is getting pretty big, finally, but it’s sometimes hard to tell Pom Pom apart from the older tabbies, as they run around.
I’m happy to say I was feeling better by the end of yesterday, and back to my normal routine this morning. I counted “only” 33 cats outside this morning.
Having the critter cam in the sun room is… interesting! I turned the motion sensor on in the evening. I didn’t realize just how often those racoons have been going in there! Mind you, if I hadn’t been chasing them off, over and over, they probably would have just gone in once, eaten all the cat kibble, and gone.
Part of the problem is, I forgot to feed the outside cats while it was still light out. It gets dark so early right now! Racoons are diurnal, but they tend to be out more at night than during the day. I don’t know where they have a den, but it’s clearly within earshot of kibble hitting metal containers!
It was mostly one or two that kept coming in. At first, I could use the two way talk function to shoo them out but, after a while, they started to ignore that, so I had to get up and chase them out. Eventually, I need to move on to other tasks and couldn’t be watching the live feed constantly. By the time I could check again, there were a whole bunch of little videos showing three or four of the buggers, coming into the sun room and eating all the kibble.
At least they weren’t destructive about it. It was the cats that knocked over the garbage can, not the racoons!
With so many racoons, though, we will have to do something about them.
My husband is starting to talk about learning how to tan fur, and use his leatherworking supplies to make winter hats.
Not that we’re in a position to do anything that permanent. Too many cats in the way.
The sun room is really busy at night, that’s for sure. The cats are constantly going in and out. During the day, it seems to be almost always empty! That will change as the weather gets colder, I’m sure.
While we hit 8C/46F yesterday, today’s high is supposed to be only -1C/30F. Still very mild, and I’m quite appreciating it. Especially the bright sunshine. A good day to finally make a run to the dump, once it opens this afternoon!
We were supposed to reach a high of 4C/39F today. We’re at 7C/45F right now! It turns out we hit 7C/45F yesterday, too. The snow is melting away, and it feels like spring!
Before I go on, though, we must first have the cuteness.
Snorri is just enveloped by David! The Beast (aka: Tiny) is bigger than Snorri! He’s all fur, so he looks bigger than he really is. I have to be so careful at night. He has a thing for curling up behind my neck, or on my legs. He’s so light, sometimes I can’t feel him there at all, and I have to check if he’s on or behind me before I try to roll over.
He does have a thing for necks! If he can get at one, he’ll climb right up any convenient human and settle into a neck, purring.
Snorri’s eyes are still really leaky, but he’s most definitely getting better. I hope he’ll start getting some meat on those bones soon! He certainly has a good appetite.
When feeding the outside cats this morning, I did repeated head counts. I kept getting 37, though I did get 38 once. I think I double counted someone. All the usuals that sometimes show up later were there – Rolando Moon, Brussel and Sprout, Broccoli, the orange and white, both Adam and Driver, Judgement – plus the ones that are almost always here; the printer babies – all the white and greys – the orange tabby, Hypotenose, Syndod, this year’s lone calico and tortie kittens, etc. Then there are the black cats and the grey tabbies. We have so many gorgeous cats this year!
One of the places I put a bit of kibble is in the space the smaller cats use to get under the cat house. While trying to count, I spotted a little white face, eating at the opening. I could only see a bit more than the nose and mouth, so I couldn’t say for sure if it was one of our usuals. There is one white and grey among this year’s kittens that I thought it might have been, but when I went to count the cats in the sun room, he was there. I can’t think of any other small, white faced cat that it might have been. I also spotted a couple of tabbies that I wasn’t sure of. It’s entirely possible they’re from this year’s kittens that are just bigger, and we were bound to have kittens from litters the shier mamas kept further away, finally starting to show up on their own. These ones are adult sized cats, though.
Well, no matter. They are welcome to food, water and shelter! Even Sad Face has become a permanent fixture. The next time there’s a cheap spay and neuter day, I hope we can snag him!
How bizarre that the visiting tom we kept having to chase away because he was so aggressive to the other cats, is now more approachable than all the female yard cats. !!
With so many cats to feed, it’s no surprise that we were running low on kibble, so today I made a trip to Walmart. When I got there, I found that Black Friday sales have already started. Another bizarre notion. This is a US thing, since we have our Thanksgiving on the second Monday of October. Meanwhile, Black Friday doesn’t even happen in the US until the end of this week, but Canada has Black Friday, too, and the sales have started already.
I was able to juggle the budget a bit and take advantage of some of the sales. Along with the cat food I was there to get, I was able to get things like a case of 24 cans of tomato soup at 77¢ each – easily the best deal among the things I got, since those cans now cost closer to $2 each. One of the things on my list, however, was not on sale. Butter. Even their house brand butter is almost $7 a pound! It would be cheaper to buy whipping cream and make it.
I didn’t buy whipping cream, and got only 1 pound of butter. We’ll just have to use the ghee more often, until our next big city shopping trip. The next time we’re at Costco, I’ll have to stock up on more butter than usual. Another of their big buckets of ghee wouldn’t go amiss, either!
Once I got home and we unloaded the truck, I had to feed the outside cats early. I was just going back to park it in the garage when I saw a couple of cats under it; one jumping up into the undercarriage somewhere, and another jumping up onto a front tire!
Yes, I make it a practise to bang on the truck before starting it.
The sound of kibble was enough to get them away from the truck, though.
In other things…
I called my mother last night, and it was like talking to a completely different person. She went from yelling and raging at me the day before, to cheerful and pleasant. I asked how she was doing, and she went into her usual complaints about her breathing; this time, she tried to blame it on the macaroni she ate. *sigh* After she went on for a while, I more specifically asked about her mood. She was all ready to act like it never happened, and she was never angry or said all those horrible things to me. We talked about it for a bit, and I tried to stress with her that if our vandal starts calling her about me, it’s because he’s trying to cause problems between us. She did try to defend him again, saying he was just telling her what’s going on, and I had to tell her, he has NO idea what’s going on. She quickly changed the subject. She didn’t quite apologize, but she did seem to try and make amends, in her own way.
I told her about our plans to get the hand pump on the original well serviced, so that we can then change the well pump and have back up water if something goes wrong. It took some time to explain to her why the well pump in the house needed to be changed at all. It has been changed in the past, but that was more than 20 years ago. The foot valve in the well, however, is original and some 45 or so years old – I think it was dug in 1974, but it might have been the year before. She couldn’t remember the exact year.
So she’s happy with the plans. Her only thing was to tell me to talk to my brother about it first, and I told her, I talk to him about everything. No living person knows this place better than he does. He was old enough to actually do a lot of this stuff alongside my dad. My other brothers were still too young for much of it, and some of it was done before I was even born. My sister is older, but she wouldn’t have been allowed to be part of this stuff, even if she were interested, because she is female. My mother then started going on about how great my brother is, and what a good job he’s doing with the farm.
Just the day before, she’d yelled and hung up on him when he called her out for how she allowed our vandal to manipulate her and treat me like crap.
She was like a totally different person.
Meanwhile…
In checking the trail cam files, I could see our vandal trying to figure out what was going on. The day the guys where here to pick up the vehicles, I saw him pull into our driveway while the gate was open – but not far enough to be trespassing! – to turn around, then slowly back down the road, so he could better see through the trees to where we were. I even remember seeing a vehicle backing up on the road, while the guys were jacking the truck out of the dirt and putting tires on it. On the trail cam files, I saw our vandal go by again, later on. Then, after the guys were gone and the gate closed, I saw a different vehicle pull into our driveway and turn around. From another camera, I could see that the driver of this vehicle was a mutual friend he’d clearly gotten to check things out.
On today’s file check, I saw our vandal in the morning, slowly driving past our driveway, then slow down even more as he drove past the bushes, trying to see through them to the other scrap vehicles.
Needless to say, we are no longer fake locking the gate.
It amazes me how furious and possessive he is about the junk. Yeah, some of it was his, but he abandoned it years ago, and neither vehicle that was taken had ever been his to begin with. The ones he’d left are in such bad shape, they aren’t even good for parts. Just the scrap dealer. Which is why he dumped them here, instead of keeping them on his own property. He was using this place as a garbage dump.
So we’re going to have to keep an extra eye on things for the next while.
Something else we might be able to keep an extra eye on is the sun room critters. My SIL gave us a camera. It was a Superstore freebie for purchases over X amount of dollars, and they had no use for it. It’s one of those little security cameras you can link to your phone to keep an eye on things through a live feed. It is not an outdoor camera, but if we can set it up in the sun room, we should be able to confirm what critters (most likely racoons) are knocking things over in there during the night. If it could handle outdoor conditions, I’d want to set it up facing the cat, kibble and water shelters, so we can see what, besides cats, is eating all the kibble, and sometimes knocking the heated water bowl right out of the shelter! Having a critter cam in the sun room, however, would be a good thing! It mostly comes down to how the device is powered. If it’s USB, we’ve got nothing to plug it into in there. We just haven’t had a chance to even take it out of the box, yet!
Who knows. I might be posting critter cam pictures on here, soon!
She took a break from squirming and worming around and actually posed for me!
Like the kittens, she is recovering just fine from surgery. I managed to get a look at the incision site, and all is clean and clear.
Our new addition, however, is comically difficult to photograph.
This is the best of many attempts.
Our phone cameras simply do not want to focus on that fuzzy black fur! Especially when we try to get a photo of the face.
We’ve settled on a name. Almost.
We have a tendency to stick to a theme with names, if we can. Like the calicos: Cabbages… Broccoli… Brussel and Sprout. Then there was Rosencrantz, Nosencrantz, and Toesencrantz. That sort of thing.
With an all black kitten named Soot Sprite, someone suggested another sprite name; Brownie. I loved the sprite theme idea, but … well … this is a black kitten.
Then I heard a wet, snorking noise behind me, and I was inspired.
Snorri.
Snorri is one of the Huldufólk – Icelandic sprites – living in Gimli, Manitoba. My daughters and I have been in their attic home, and even got to meet Leo Kristjanson some years before he passed away. We even already have a cat named Freya (aka: Grandma), which is the name of another of the Gimli Huldufólk.
The girls have also been talking about names, and they have been thinking of using Hunter. A friend of theirs has an almost identical cat named Fisher, so they thought that would be funny. But they like Snorri, too.
When the girls were tending to Snorri/Hunter yesterday, they took a look and determined we had a female on our hands. Considering how difficult it’s been to socialize the females outside, this was good news. One less pregnant cat, next year!
Except…
Well, I took a good look this morning, and I’m 99% sure we’ve got a male.
The problem is he, or she, is so tiny, so fluffy and so black, it’s really hard to see!
As for his first night indoors…
I woke up during the night to find him sleeping on my hip.
This kitten has settled in like he’s always been indoors. Even when another cat gets nervous and hisses or growls, he either ignores it, or responds by head booping them.
On being introduced to David, David immediately started to groom the new baby.
As I write this, Snorri/Hunter is curled up and sleeping near Cheddar. Cheddar is sleeping in the little cat bed I got from the dollar store.
He’s bigger than the cat bed, so it’s quite amusing to see.
I have yet to see Snorri using a litter box, but my daughter noticed sawdust under his feet when she came to see him this morning, which suggests he’s at least been in one. I’ve not found any messes anywhere, either.
As for settling in, that has been pretty much instant. He’s been spending most of his time on one corner of my bed. For a kitten that was still a bit stand offish while outside, he’s done a complete turnaround. If you so much as walk close to him, he’ll start purring. While walking past him one time, I reached down to pet him, and he immediately rolled over to let me pet his belly, and started grabbing and playing with my fingers.
Which is how I now know that, along with a white patch on his chest, he has a white patch on his belly, near his hind legs, and one white armpit. 😄 Most of the time, though, he’s loafed, and we can’t even see the white patch on his chest. He also has a pair tiny white stripes at the base of his tail, right over his … brown eye, shall we say.
He’s also much tinier than we thought. It’s all that fluffy fur. He is mostly undercoat, and is more of a long or medium haired cat, unlike his siblings, Soot Sprite and Tiny, The Beast. Those two are short haired cats. He’s more like his brother Pom Pom, who is practically all undercoat with long hairs sticking out.
Snorri is actually smaller than Tiny. !!!
He’s so fluffy, he looks bigger, but he is most definitely smaller, and all skin and bone!
Now that he’s inside, he’ll be getting wet cat food regularly. When I did their morning feeding, he was right in there with all the others, milling around the food bowls laid out on a towel on my bed, along with the other kittens and Toni, as if he’d always been there. A full belly and an eye wash later, he was more than content to go for a nap. Hopefully, we’ll get him healthy, and some meat on those bones, in short order.
By the time the Cat Lady and her family have moved and settled in, he should be ready for adoption. I think he will be snapped up rather quickly, too!
