A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

It's my birthday! I intend to spend it doing pottery, reading, and working on a very special secret project which I will announce shortly.

If you would like to make my birthday extra happy, please chip in to support the cats of 10th Life. This is a cat rescue and trap/neuter/release operation in Bulgaria. They will send cats anywhere in Europe, and can probably send them outside Europe as well. I have visited it multiple times, and can personally vouch for it.

I was there earlier this month, and got to pet lots of rescue cats, many of them disabled or otherwise special needs, and even got to live with a rescue kitten for a while!

Meet Ezra, the very bitey pointy-tailed kitten. He was rescued from attacking dogs, and was too young to go into the general shelter.









If you donate to 10th Life, please comment or email. I will update this post with an adorable cat photo for every comment and email I receive, so keep watching this space.

10th Life particularly needs recurring monthly donations. A small monthly donation would be better than a large one-time one, as then they know how much money is coming in and can plan. They are really in need of money now, as they spent a lot on a massive trap/neuter/release operation which was followed by a cat who needed extremely expensive emergency surgery. (He made it!)

If you have already given to 10th Life and have some left over and really want to send something personal, which I may or may not review in a timely fashion or ever, here's my Amazon wish list.

And, of course, birthday art, fic, and general wishes always happily accepted.

I had been idly contemplating keeping the racist afterword to use as kindling for my woodburning stove, but Alex had a better idea.

I am currently on vacation in Bulgaria, where I had dinner with two friends, one of whom runs a cat shelter, Tenth Life. He very recently got permission to set up a trap-spay-release program for stray cats in Varna. If you read no further, please click and give them a donation - preferably, a recurring monthly one. That's what they need to keep their cats in food and litter and rent and so forth.

Kot (his nickname, which means cat) is twenty-one and has been rescuing animals since he was sixteen. His latest rescue is this adorable hedgehog, which was hit by a car and can't be released back into the wild as he's blind:



I visited his cat rescue, which he established two years ago when he was nineteen. It's now an official NGO with twenty volunteers!



If you like any cat you see, Tenth Life can transport it to you anywhere in Europe. Possibly also to America or other non-Europe parts of the world. The Facebook Group has the most up-to-date cat information.

Here is Kot feeding a sweetheart of a mama cat.



I got to play with all the kittens but this darling in the cage, who is being isolated till his eye infection clears up. He jumped around in the cage, watching the other kittens and playing along.



Except for cases like that, the cats all share the same space. It's a Wonderland for cats, with lots of shelves and secluded areas they can retreat to. There are seven cats at the moment, but some were hanging out in the quiet areas so I didn't get to photograph them all. Here is Piggy the cow cat along with the other two kittens.



Kot is amazing at rescuing cats that others give up on. He nursed a teeny gremlin of a kitten back to health from a severe bone infection that made a vet despair; Aya is now a fine healthy cat with a limp. Here she is impersonating a dragon on my chest:



Here are some before-and-afters of cats I didn't meet, which have already been adopted. Descriptions by my other friend, who adopted Aya (the gremlin-turned-dragon):

"Bashir, a cat who was either thrown out or lost, and who almost died on the street due to an autoimmune disease: he couldn't eat, wash or protect himself, and was starved into near translucence. he got treated, fed up, successfully survived dental surgery, and now dominates his new family"





"Old persian dame Varya, who me and kot personally took away from the sea garden. adopted, but she and the adopters' cats didn't make friends despite everybody trying really hard, so - re-adopted."





I personally vouch for Kot, whom I've known since he was a teenager, and I've visited the rescue myself. It's an official NGO and the cats are very well cared for and loved. I can also attest that Varna has a LOT of stray cats (plus the odd dog and hurt hedgehog) who need this service.

And if you want to adopt a cat, maybe you can! Tenth Life transports cats to Europe, and other continents are also a possibility. Sorry Kot, I would love to adopt Isis but I don't think my other cats would approve.

Once again, please click here to Tenth Life give them a donation, ideally monthly. They accept PayPal, Visa, and other forms of donation. And please signal-boost this post!

The woman who gave me Alex and Erin (pictured) has adopted a mama cat and the five kittens she lugged in. I promised a while back to help her pay to get all six of them fixed. She just now hit me up, in the same month that my laptop, car, washing machine, and shower required expensive repairs.

If anyone would like to help me cover the stray cat expenses, my PayPal is Rphoenix2@hotmail.com. (NOT gmail.) If there's any excess, I'll pass it on to her for cat food. She now has eleven cats.

I will send cute kitten pics to anyone who will help me put with this.

ETA: Cat fixing is paid for, with a bonus to go toward feeding them. Thank you all so much! I'll put up adorable pics shortly.

This morning Alex dove between my ankles and bolted out the door. He's better at predicting snow than that groundhog. I'm now lugging bundles of summer clothes to the shed and winter clothes to the house.

Also this morning, I saw the coyote sniffing around my chicken coop. At 11:00 AM! Very odd. The raccoon was out in the day, too. They were both acting perfectly ordinary so I don't think it's rabies or any other disease. Maybe just the darker days?

It's the beginning of my second year in the house and will be my second winter. For all of Crestline's flaws (there are exactly two decent restaurants), I love it here. There's something beautiful and new on my land every day, there's wildlife, and there's always some pleasant physical job that needs doing.

Today I planted two blueberry bushes and the last of the native plants from the native plant sale, put down a few more rocks on the paths I'm making, bundled all the chickens but Uncatchable Sally into the chicken tractor so they can munch on weeds, dumped cardboard over some ivy to get rained on tomorrow, and am taking a brief break before I lug the outside furniture cushions into the basement for the winter.

Both cats repeatedly escaped my previous barricade, so I gave up on keeping them in the loft and instead constructed this elaborate barricade to keep them off the WET CONCRETE. If you can't tell what it is, it's the open front door (there's also a glass front door which is shut and locked), a folding table, a step-ladder, and a bunch of water traps.



To hammer in the DON'T GO THERE, I repeatedly showered water on them every time they went near it.

This morning I went downstairs to guard the barricade while I waited for the floor-layers. I took a photo of it to post here...

...and with no warning whatsoever, Alex took a flying leap, at least six feet high, and sailed over the barricade.

THANK GOD, the concrete had dried overnight.

Even better, the fact that the concrete is dry means that once the guys return, I can lock the cats safely in the laundry room. I couldn't before because the only access is via the bedroom, which had its floor ripped up and covered in concrete.

While I was sorting my pantry items, Alex pounced on a cardboard container of chicken broth, puncturing it in multiple places and sending broth spurting in all directions like severed arteries.

I later caught him perched on a step-ladder batting at my refrigerator magnets which he normally can't reach.

Not to be outdone, Erin waited till a cupboard was completely filled with neatly sorted pantry items, then took a flying leap into it.

More under cut. ( Read more... )

Alex is very intrigued!



More cats below cut. ( Read more... )

1. Chef Nourish refunded my money (minus $23 for the two gross meals I already received.) Also, my Yelp review is still up. I'll take that as a win.

2. The bookcase saga continues. To refresh your memory, one of a set of two matching bookcases arrived without the unique bolts needed to put them together. The seller refused to send replacement bolts. Amazon said they were a third party and not their problem.

I finally got the seller to tell me the name of the manufacturer of the bolts, and inquired with them. They promptly replied to tell me to take it up with Amazon. I told them Amazon wouldn't help, and got this reply:

Yes, they are a third party and we do not sell products to Amazon. They sold it to you, so they take responsibility. They should send you a new bookcase.

ARRRRRRGH. I sent them an email repeating that Amazon told me to take it up with the seller, and the seller told me to take it up with the manufacturer. At that point, either taking pity on me or wanting to stop getting messages, they promised to send me more bolts. We'll see if they ever arrive.

3. In the meantime, I gave in and ordered a replacement bookcase from the same people (I know, but it's a matching set). They sent me the matched set (i.e., two).

While attempting to drag them inside, Alex bolted between my legs and was down the stairs in literally seconds. In a panic, I rushed after him.

I should mention at this point that it was late at night and I wore only a very skimpy nightshirt with nothing underneath. Also, since I'd been in my chair at that moment, I did not have my crutches with me, something whose implications only dawned on me when I was at the bottom of the very dirty stairs I had just literally slithered down bare-assed.

With no other choice, I slithered to Alex, who luckily hadn't gone far and was lurking under a nearby bush, grabbed him, and then levered myself back up the dirty stairs, still bare-assed and now with the additional weight of a cat. Let's just say it was not the most fun thing ever.

Goddamn cats! Anyone got any ideas on how to keep Alex from bolting again? Other than locking them out of the living room every time I open the outside doors, which is not remotely practical due to the layout of my apartment. I live near an extremely busy street, so I really don't want them escaping.

The bookcases are still outside my door, so I have no idea whether or not they came with the bolts.