Eight is less than Thirteen
Last entry, just over two months ago, I wrote about how I ended up with thirteen cats in my care:
*My two “actual” cats, Zipper and Zoom.
*Two cats I often cat-sit for a friend.
*The four Nature Kittens: Thunder, Midnight, Cloud, and Dawn (now aged twenty-three weeks).
*The Snack Pack of five, so they didn’t get put down: Popcorn, Caramel, Sprinkle, Violet Crumble, and Curly Wurly. They’re thirteen weeks old now and thriving.
I have found homes for Thunder, Midnight, and Cloud, so out of the Nature Kittens litter only Dawn is left. She is a beauty with a great personality, who purrs SO MUCH.
I have also found homes for Popcorn and Sprinkle, so the Snack Pack is now just Curly Wurly, Violet Crumble (his BFF), and Caramel.
Only four foster kittens! Totally manageable!
Except I’m cat-sitting again, so there are six temporary cats in addition to my own cats.
I have learned that there is indeed an upper limit to the number of kittens I want to have in my care at one time (I think four is good). However, I’ve also been through a LOT these two months and I never failed to give them food, water, clean litter, and lots of attention.
*The Snack Pack got cat flu. Two of them nearly died and they all had to stay in quarantine a lot longer than expected.
*I lost thousands of dollars in wages due to feline and human illnesses and injuries.
*Cloud suddenly declined, losing about a third of her body weight in two weeks. The vet said she was probably going to die.
They all recovered fully, even Cloud (who was tested for a bunch of stuff including feline AIDS… and she’s okay! She’s basically just a massive diva!)
*I got covid for the first time (yes I AM immunocompromised, thanks for asking!) and of course my whole family got it too. But we seem to have all fully recovered, which is great!
*Someone in my local area found five dumped kittens that were CLEARLY the offspring of someone’s house cat that they were too irresponsible to desex. I broke my thirteen-cats record when I took them in overnight. For one night, I had fourteen cats in my care! And of course I tried to think of some plausible way to take them in too, but I couldn’t—which is definitely for the best. So that was just the one night.
This is one of them:
I will soon be cat-sitting my friend’s pair of cats again (which of course I love to do), so I’m at eight cats altogether currently, which would be fine except…
*Twelve days ago I bent over to scoop out a litter tray and I felt my back go SPROING!!
It does that sometimes, and I wasn’t immediately terrified, even when it became clear I couldn’t stand up straight. I call it a “back injury” but it’s really a fibromyalgia flare-up. One of the fun things fibromyalgia does is just suddenly attack and take your disability level from your personal version of normal to “oh fuck”.
And so began the worst fibromyalgia flare-up of my life.
I’ve had fibromyalgia for ten long, often miserable years, but this…. the last twelve days have been worse than any illness or injury I’ve ever had. I’m definitely on the mend, with most days better than the day before, but I’m still barely able to walk or stand, and when I do I have about five seconds of being okay-ish and then the pain just gets greater and greater until I either lie down or start screaming. There has been a lot of screaming in pain lately. For a while, turning over or shifting position in bed was a kind of torture (but necessary, of course).
I can sit for a lot longer now, but after maybe ten minutes things get ugly (spasms, etc).
In the early days of this flare-up, there were several hours when I was lying down but the pain was still so bad it was like being in labor. The worst part by far is knowing that if this has happened once, it is likely to happen again. That terrifies me so much.
On the up side, my arms are fine. At first I wasn’t able to walk up the hallway to the Cat Encounter area, so my daughter would bring the kittens to me in bed. I’m now at the point where I can give them their food, scoop some of their litter (Chris does the rest), and walk back and forth from the Cat Encounter area (which has a couch for me to lie down on) at least twice a day.
It’s bleak, though. And my future is bleaker still. This flare-up is the kind of injury which makes a person change her life. But I’m not sure what I’ll change it to. I’ve already lost so much to this stupid disease and I have very little left to give. However, I have discovered an agency called OneLink that may be able to help me access some government services. I’m clinging onto that like a lifeline, because I need hope right now.
I’m also VERY EAGER to have slightly fewer litter trays to empty.
So.
I am eager to find homes for the last four foster kittens. Please share this post with your friends in the Canberra region!
They naturally fall into the very close bonded pair of Curly Wurly and Violet Crumble (both desexed boys, chipped, and double vaxxed); and the newly-friendly duo of Dawn and Caramel (both girls who are chipped and double vaxxed but Caramel isn’t desexed yet, mainly because I simply didn’t have enough money).
But they all get on well so any pair is possible. Or you can adopt just one (but you haven’t known true bliss until you own a pair of kittens that love each other—plus, without a furry friend they get very bored because all cats must be kept on your property in the ACT).
The adoption fees are equal to one vaccination + microchip + desexing, so for boys it’s $305 each (I go to Goulburn to make it cheaper) and for girls it’s $460.
Curly Wurly is playful and friendly, usually waiting by the door so he gets the first snuggles when a human comes in; Violet Crumble loves to gaze adoringly at people, carry toys from place to place, and rest his paws on things.
They are SO CUTE when they wrestle together! I have bought them collars so people can tell them apart.
Dawn (900164002269084) is a female tortoiseshell who purrs like a supercar and demands focused pats when I wake up in the morning. She loves climbing, boxes, and destroying things. Do not leave your toilet paper unsupervised! She is desexed and has been vaccinated twice. She is open to friendships with dogs and older cats. She loves belly rubs but/and is likely to wrap her paws and teeth lovingly around your hand. She gets on well with Caramel and doesn’t like to be alone.
Caramel (900164002269081) is a major snuggler although she is naturally nervous. When she is free to roam she comes and “checks in” on me every so often, purring furiously. She has the biggest eyes I’ve ever seen. She has a strong killer instinct and needs a lot of play time, ideally with another kitten.
Both Dawn and Caramel are experts at spotting me reading and inserting themselves between the book and my eyes in order to get guaranteed pats.
I am a teensy bit jealous of whoever gets to own them.
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.
