Kitten Tragedy

 We lost one of our kittens, the black and white one, Steve.

He had been sick for at least a week but he was a strong boy (we thought) and life has been heinously busy and we didn't even have a vet...

We put him back in the barn with a heated cat house and gave him succulent wet food and water and love but he wasn't eating well and he didn't look good...

So Monday night I decided I would take him to the vet the next morning, which turned out to be too late. He was gone on Tuesday.

His brothers (the two black cats) were also showing signs of the illness by then so I did find a vet (our old one has been difficult to schedule with) and took them both in. They have some upper respiratory infection.  They got a shot of penicillin and antibiotics. One of them, Morro, looked super lethargic but today he looks better.

I feel very sad and guilty about Steve.  I have been SO busy lately; we have had dental appointments and college stuff and all that.  I just missed that he was so sick.

We will miss him. Yesterday was a pretty lousy day as I found out he had died at about 7:30 a.m. and then every kid who came down was told, and everyone was sad. He was the favorite kitten of several of the children.

As Kevin says, life with pets isn't always the fluffy fun stuff.  Sad things happen.  Animals often hide how poorly they are feeling and I really did not realize how bad off Steve was.

We rescued the kittens from a woodpile after their Mom went missing and Steve had a great life, but it was too short.

Rest in peace, Steve.

Oh, and after all that work to get the sun room cleaned out, it is now a kitten haven again. We decided to have all four in the sun room for now to keep an eye on illness and to make it easier to administer medications.  The girls (the orange ones) SEEM Ok but they have been around their brothers a lot so it seems like it will be a miracle if they don't get it also.  If so, we'll make sure to intervene quickly.

Kittens are Outside!

 We made the transition. Our barn kittens are now outside kittens.

We sprang for collars plus little dangly tags with their names on them.  The collars are reflective.

I bought a heated cat house for winter.  Moonbeam, our biggest fattest cat, thinks it is quite nice.

This Week in Pictures

 

I nobly took the kids to a park yesterday morning.  Well, the younger three kids.  We met Lydia with the two children she is nannying. I am not posting their pictures because I do not have permission. It was a lot of fun, really.  There were other families that came and went and the kids had a great time.

This is our sun room.  We moved into this house 15 years ago and the sliding door at the end was a disaster at the time. You can barely see it through the new door; it was all opaque and ugly. Kevin and the kids worked very hard to put in a new sliding door. Also, we moved out a climbing gym and the cats, so the sun room looks amazing right now! 

Kevin is really good at projects like this.  It is incredible how gifted he is!

I am happy that most of my kids love to read like I do.  

Neighbor kids have been over a lot with lovely weather lately.  They like to play these complicated neato games.  Rose and the neighbors' 4 year old love to draw in chalk on the floor.  Awesome.

Cats

 And just like that, all the cats have been fixed!

No babies, no MAKING babies.

As I said in the previous post, it was an ordeal because of this and that, but yesterday I took the three boys to be neutered at a lower cost facility.  They emerged full of beans; they seemed very relaxed about the whole thing.

We will be transitioning them out of the barn in the next week or so. The plan was always that they would be outdoor cats and they are VERY ready to be outdoor cats. Every time we open the barn door, they surge outside now with enthusiasm.

I let them out this morning to roam a bit.

There is one more, Peach, not pictured. She is all orange and scurried off to hide under the fifth wheel.

They are truly just so cute, and also so ready to be out and sniffing at everything.

I just bought a heated cat house for our front porch because winter is coming.  It has a heating pad and two escape doors.  It sounds lovely. We have two other tubs which are insulated and warm so the cats should be fine.

Busy Week

 I was looking over the calendar for a few months ago and April was frankly amazing.  Just day after day with nothing scheduled thanks to the coronavirus lockdown.  I know a great many people found the whole experience depressing but I loved it. I am an introvert by nature but of course with 10 other people around all the time, I never get lonely.  

I really do not like having to dash around a lot outside the home.  It stresses me out.  So those weeks of peacefully getting up every day without having to go anywhere was very freeing.

Of course, that was delaying the inevitable; we still had to deal with dental appointments and eye appointments and the like, so the blank days of April and May have given way to busier weeks than usual.   That has definitely been part of my anxiety though I am happy to report that I am doing better. I think starting up school stressed me more than usual  this year and now that we are in the groove, I am calmer.  Isaac is doing great in college, which is to say he is just doing his thing.  He is a self starter and just toils away to figure things out. He is even managing his chemistry lab class with aplomb, which I find most impressive since we never did much formally in the way of labs.

We are dealing with CAT PROBLEMS :-). As many of you may remember, we adopted 5 kittens found in the woodpile of some friends around the corner.  They are charming and adorable and in every way wonderful. They are also mixed gender; namely, 3 boys and 2 girls.

We arranged to have a low cost spay/neuter facility get them fixed 11 days ago.  The morning we were supposed to bring them in, I got a cancellation call because someone tested positive for coronavirus at the facility.  ARRGHGHHH!

They are 6 months old so at the age when breeding is just barely possible so we separated them by putting the girls in the barn and the boys stayed in our sunroom.

I made phone calls and scurried around and managed to find other places to get them taken care of, though not until later in October.

Then we got a call from the original place and they were able to work the two girls in so they were spayed this week.  Hooray!  No baby cats!!  The boys are being neutered at the end of the week. So all that is good.  It is involving more driving around than is desirable but that is life. Far better to cope with coronavirus interruptions than actually have coronavirus so, yeah.  No whining!

What else, hmmmmmm....

Oh, my next book is being released this coming week. It is called A Fortuitous Fall.  It is funnier than my last books thanks to one rather oddball character.

I made over $5000 last month on writing!  That is CRAZY.  However, the Banished Uncle (my last book) is falling steadily in the Amazon charts so if I were not launching another book, this month would be way lower no doubt.

So the key to making money writing is, not surprisingly, to keep writing.  I write quickly and I have about ten million ideas so yeah, I can keep doing this but of course I also have a busy life with kids and husband.  So I keep praying for wisdom about balancing my responsibilities.  I will say this, though -- writing clears my brain and helps me stay sane so there is that.

But I will also say this, God and Kevin and the kids are my main priority so I will keep working to keep my life in balance.