Welcoming Lucy!

About a week ago we stopped by the Animal Welfare Society in Stellenbosch to see if they had any kittens (dangerous, I know). We’d been talking for quite awhile about getting a little fuzz-ball, and when we walked into the cattery and saw little Lucy we fell in love. She had climbed up the wall of the cage, meowing furiously, trying to stick her nose and paws through the holes to touch us. She has such a big personality!

Lucy and her litter-mates were found on the side of the highway with no mother cat, and the AWB bottle-fed and fostered them. Because of this she is extremely affectionate and used to people. She’s only 6 1/2 weeks old, but they wanted to adopt her out as soon as possible as the kennels are getting very cold at night and the foster mother was getting a bit fed up.  She was under observation for about a week, as they were worried that she wasn’t eating enough. When we called them yesterday they happily told us that the hunger strike was over, and that she was in fact now eating like a piggy! Lucy obviously misses her mom and the other kittens – she doesn’t seem to want to be away from us at all and has found a surrogate in one of our fleece blankets. She sleeps in the crook of your arm or any other warm place near you – right now she is curled up in the back of Nick’s sweatshirt hood while he works at his computer, in fact.

It was bitter-sweet getting a new kitty – while she is the cutest thing, she does make me miss my little Squeekers. But it is so nice to have a (very loudly) purring kitten in our house again. Not sure how Fang will take it when he next comes to visit, but he’ll just have to get used to her! At the moment she is so tiny she’s got to be far from threatening.

Ok, I’ll stop now – I don’t usually get this gushy, but she is so cute! I’ll let the pics speak for themselves.

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Squeekers and the Pink Palace

Squeekers has managed to make the move to full-time housecat happily, and continues to be our major source of entertainment (no comments about us being easily amused, she is damn funny!)

We decided to cat-nap her when we moved to our new place in August. After the 4th of July, she took to living in our house, adopting one of our pot plants as her litter box (stinky) and generally making herself at home. She’d head out every once and awhile – I’m sure to go and get her second dinner – what a piggy. When we moved, it turned out our neighbors had left on a 3 month vacation without making any arrangements! Nick and I had been wanting a kitten so…we cat-napped her.

There are a ton of strays around our new place (which one of our friends named the Pink Palace, though Nick is convinced it’s more red than pink….). So we decided we would keep her inside – the last thing we needed were mini-Squeekys running around. She LOVES to climb – we have a rolled up area rug we can’t bear to put down because it’s become her favorite climbing post. She also climbs the bars on the windows and generally sits anywhere where she can survey the room. She seems quite happy, sitting next to the stove watching us make dinner, looking excited when the DVD player makes its turning on sounds, meowing furiously from the window when she sees our car pull up.

Ok, enough about Squeekers – I don’t want to be one of those crazy cat ladies talking incessantly about their cat, but we really do love her! It’s nice to have he to entertain us – it can get a bit boring around here…

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Squeekers’ ‘dependence’ day

4th of July is officially Squeeker’s ‘dependence’ day. The neighbor cat (who we alternately called Mommy cat or Trouble) had had kittens a few months before – they’d come over to visit the house once or twice. On the 4th of July, I talked Nick into (reluctantly) BBQing hotdogs and hamburgers out on our porch – apparently it’s sacrilege for a real South African to ‘BBQ’ anything (they ‘braii’), especially hamburgers…but I digress.

We had a huge party, lots of food, people in and out and the doors wide open all night. We were zonked and decided to leave the remnants of the party out in the dining room for the night and clean up in the morning. We made sure Trouble and other furballs were out of the house, closed up the sliding doors, and went to bed.

In the morning, we came out to find one full kitten crawling out from under the couch! She had managed to hide away while we were closing up, and must have gorged herself on leftover hotdogs, the dregs of potato salad and hamburger buns to her heart’s content.

From that day on (not surprisingly) Squeekers was a regular at our house. We didn’t want to give her a real name, since she was the neighbor’s cat, so just made a comment on her chatty nature.

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