Hustling Update, 2024
A few months after I wrote the first and second post about all the many many different things I do, I started fostering kittens.
I. Love. It. So. Much.
That is the stunningly beautiful Cinnamon, one of the feral cats that I caught and socialised in 2023. Catching feral cats is definitely NOT something I plan to do regularly! I am the opposite of physically gifted/strong… but socialising cats is something I think I’m pretty good at.
So, fostering kittens is something I want to keep doing forever and ever amen. There are several down sides, including the cost and the cleaning (not so much the gross-out factor, but my physical body struggling with it). I do one day plan to be rich enough to hire a regular cleaner, so hopefully I could find a cleaner willing to scrub kitten poo off the walls (somehow the foster kittens always seem to get poo on the walls). Many cleaners refuse to deal with any pet stuff whatsoever, which is fair enough. But I’m sure I can find someone.
Fortunately, I have a really great babysitting job at the moment, and my health has improved recently (due to new meds) so I’m earning more than I’ve earned since I first became disabled in 2011. Amazing! Of course as a household we have a lot of financial things to catch up on from the cozzie livs crisis, eg I hadn’t seen a dentist since January 2022 and one of my fillings fell out. But things might be looking up financially?
Unfortunately my right knee has major objections to my babysitting work. I am seeing a physio and strapping it daily, as well as not sitting cross-legged on the floor (which is what made it start malfunctioning). But it’s a significant problem.
BUT one aspect of the “Castle of Kindness” concept from 2019 has actually come to pass. Actually several aspects have come to pass—sponsoring refugees; welcoming them into my home; having them play in my (blow-up) pool; running a food pantry with some emergency supplies (such as water)—but this is the first time that an element of that dream has helped me with my own pain/disability: we now have a spa.
It’s a blow-up spa, the cheapest on the market (under $600 from Bunnings, plus electric and chemical supplies which were about another $200), and it is surprisingly good!
Here’s my son showing the “4 person” spa (really it’s only good for one person, or 2+ who don’t mind having their legs tangled up) that he’s not allowed to go in due to his cast (he broke his wrist falling from a climbing frame at school).
I was really anxious that it wouldn’t be deep enough to help with neck and shoulder pain at all (but if I squidge down it works) and that having a ring of bubbles around the bottom would be useless (but actually the bubbles work really well), and that sitting on the bottom of the pool would be uncomfortable (it isn’t—our outside foam helps, but the buoyancy of the water is the main thing making it comfortable—and I can move around more than in a ‘normal’ spa, which is a good thing).
So in many ways I am living the dream.
Last but definitely not least, I started a cat cafe business in January! When I foster kittens, I feel strongly that it is my duty to take and share MANY kitten photos, and to invite my cat-loving friends over to play with the kittens (which is good for the kittens, and enjoyable to them). So to my mind it was perfectly natural, in a city lacking a cat cafe, to… well, to start a teeny little cat cafe in my house. I kept it as simple as possible, with very limited hours and no food or drink. A lot of cat cafes don’t serve hot drinks, because that’s obviously hazardous to both the kittens and to the hygiene of the humans. But a few people were offended on FaceBook that I had a cafe without coffee, and one person shared about it to reddit. That was perfectly fine until people who don’t understand how cat cafes operate (ie using only friendly/social/bored cats, and not letting humans pick them up or follow them into cat-only areas) decided it was animal abuse. That’s when it suddenly got serious. Long story short, although I never did anything wrong the cat cafe was shut and the kittens taken away. I’ve also gotten to know the RSPCA and DAS inspectors (which has actually been a positive experience).
There’s no good reason not to start the business back up again, after triple-checking that all my paperwork is in order and that there is an external person checking on the welfare of the cats/kittens. I love cats and I love sharing that experience with others. It’s also a great way to find homes for foster kittens. I’ll always have to deal with extra scrutiny (fine) and people online convinced that I’m evil and/or incompetent (I can live with that as long as they continue to be wrong).
I realised that with a designated space for the cat encounters, I might as well restart the escape room business too—people can do an escape room and a cat encounter in one day. And I put in a little shop to sell my books, Qusay Fadheel’s art prints, and maybe even some cat merch since I do take pretty good cat photos after all these years.
So that’s where a lot of my brain is at these days.
Felicity Banks 
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