It has been a long hiatus here at Marco’s web log, because there hasn’t been much news with either Marco or Big Tony. They are still getting along just great, and life with them has settled into a routine.
As for cat rescue, the room we were using for our “recovery room” was put into use, so we had no place to put any cats. Until...
Two more weeks, and she’s turned into a real kitten. She is now playing with the Cat Dancer®. Over the holiday, she will be fostered by a co-worker.
What a difference a week makes! Here are pictures of Tika (that’s what we named her) from today. I have edited out the red-eye and rebalanced the color for low light conditions. She’s actually beginning to look like a cat!
Here are her pictures from 3 December. From the second picture, you can see she was still very skinny. She weighs about four pounds now, and the vet estimates her to be three to four months old.
On Wednesday this week, I was supposed to meet Cathy at T.K. Noodle on Tully Road. I was about to go in to the restaurant when she waved me down from the parking lot. “Look what I found,” she told me. This seal-point siamese mix kitten was nearly starved to death, and had a really bad upper respiratory infection. Well, our plans changed. I went in to get our lunch to go, and Cathy took the kitten to the vet. In these pictures, you don't see how badly her eyes and nose were crusted over before the vet cleaned her up.
We picked her up later in the afternoon and took her back to the school, and I decided to re-open the cat room and put her in there. As you can also see from the photos, the cat is probably not feral–both Cathy and I were able to pet her and pick her up, and she just loved it.
Here are some pictures from just a few days later; she is beginning to look like a real cat now, though she’s still fairly wobbly. She eats like crazy, and is still very affectionate. I’ll keep updating pictures over the next couple of weeks. After she starts putting on some weight and gets cleaned up, she should be very adoptable.
As I was heading to the subway this morning, I saw some movement near some garbage bag. There were two kittens, probably no more than a couple of months old, rooting around in the garbage. I took my camera and got a picture of them. As I did this, a small group of people gathered. An old grandma-type woman grabbed the kittens by the scruff of the neck and held them up for me to photograph. Finally, an employee of the fried chicken restaurant grabbed them and put them into a milk crate, so I’m going to presume that he will adopt them out. I went by two days later, and the fellow was still taking care of the kittens, who seemed to be doing well.
I was in Seoul, South Korea, from 30 May to 10 June. I took a short trip to Daegu, about two and a half hours southeast by bullet train. I stayed overnight, and as I left the lobby of the hotel in Daegu, I could have sworn I heard a cat meowing. There was a girl fiddling with her cell phone, so I figured it was just a sound from a cell phone game. I walked out and turned the corner, and there was this stunningly gorgeous cat. It had the “should I investigate or run?” look on its face, but it stayed still long enough for me to get out my camera and take some pictures. Then the cat took off, but it didn’t matter; my day was complete at that point.
Jasper, the gray and white cat, was gone all last semester, and we figured he had become “coyote chow.” About a week ago, he just showed up as if nothing had happened. There's something wrong with his nose; it looks like it has been rubbed raw. Jasper is still semi-tame; he lets Cathy and me pet him.
Rocket, the tabby, has also become more tame in the past month or two. She got her name because she shot out of the cage like a rocket when we released her after being spayed. Cathy and I can pet her also. Some mornings she’s more interested in getting petted than eating her food.
The dark tortoiseshell in the last picture is quite possibly the momcat for Misha.
First, sorry that it has taken so long between updates. The last semester was very busy, and we had no luck at all trapping any other ferals. Three new ferals have come into our area: an orange cat, a dark tortoiseshell, and a very large cat that appears to be a Maine Coon and Siamese mix (at least we think so because of the blue eyes.) This cat is really big, and so its name is now “Minnesota Fats.” We think it may have been abandoned at one point, because it doesn’t seem as scared of us as the other ferals are. Here are some pictures that Cathy took of the big guy.
Within hours of posting the calico kitten’s picture at craigslist, we got a call from someone who wanted to adopt her. This family had been looking for a cat with just the right coloration, just the right age, and just the right size for a couple of years. They had even picked Patches as the cat’s name, and there she was. We took Patches over to their house yesterday afternoon, and it was just perfect. Patches didn’t even hiss; she just settled in to enjoy her new home.
