5 posts tagged “honey”
I'm at work today, not sniffling too much, but still really worn out (if co-workers catch me in the hall to talk, I'm going to start drifting to the nearest place to sit down if they chat more than a few seconds). I'm not vouching for the speed of any work, but I can get some done today. The worst is the odd time I have to cough. Then it is TEH OWCH! My stomach muscles are all very sore from prior coughing, and my back still aches as it's been doing non-stop for five days now. Anybody got a remedy for that? The Advil and Tylenol (not together) haven't really done the job. It's not just a muscular ache, but it hurts just to lean back, or pull a shirt across the skin.
Cat update - remember Honey the ever-so-sweet and pregnant trapped cat I had for a few days? I saw her the other day at the clinic where she's being fostered. She's even rounder, still waiting to have those kittens, and she ran right out to see me when she heard me and we had some lovely pats and rubs and she let me put my hands on her belly. Then when I was leaving, she wanted to walk out with me. Man, if I had room for another cat of my own, she'd be the one. But it means she'll probably take no time to be adopted herself once her kittens are born and weaned.
...photos, or an opportunity to take my own photos of Honey after she's had her kittens. I went to pick up her carrier today after work (and brought a box of chocolates to express my personal gratitude to the staff for taking her in), told them the feral cats have a fan following on my blog, and the vet tech said for sure there could be pictures. The tech said she's had a chance to get out of the cage and wander around the back area, and they expect her to pop in about a week.
Here's how the Honey-cat story played out today:
In the wee hours of the a.m., I heard lots of scraping/rustling sounds from her cage. On and on and on. I got up out of bed, checked to see if she had a litter box obsession going on, but she'd been trying to claw a towel I'd draped on top of the cage into the cage with her. So I put it in the cage with her (she already had a big, folded towel to sleep on. Back to bed. More scrape, scrape, scrape. Me back out of bed. This time she was after a folded towel on top of a box beside the cage. I gave her that one, too.
When I got up with my alarm, it occured to me, maybe this is nesting behavior? I googled it and restlessness was one of the signs of impending birth.
I brought her to the vets, and instead of just dropping her off, waited till someone could check her out to make sure she could still be spayed. The vet had a quick look at her, squeezed her nipples to see if milk was starting to come, and since it wasn't, announced that Honey would get a spay/termination. This was also the vet's first opportunity to see how sweet and tame Honey is.
Some e-mail discussion between a few of us in the rescue group ensued once I got to work. There's no foster space available for Honey. The fretting ensued. But, long story short, the animal hospital decided during the day that a) they're not going to spay her (I guess further examination proved she was farther along than the vet thought earlier), and b) they're going to keep her till her kittens are born, and c) they're going to foster mom and babies there at the clinic till they're weaned and all adopted out. Honey as well as her kittens.
I'm so happy this is all going to work out. I go to that vet frequently with the trapped ferals to be fixed, so I'm hoping I'll get a chance to see Honey and her kittens once they're born. And maybe get a photo to share with my peeps.
Today is very sunny and spring-like in T.O. I ran a couple of errands, then parked myself in a cafe to write. I wrote this sentence, then thought of another place in the novel I can use it that will make it the absolutely perfect callback and actually laughed out loud that I came up with it.
A game of “pocket mouse” is where you find it.
And now here's a better picture of the sunny-tempered Honey. You can see her pregnant belly rather well in this one.
My recovery room is opposite my front hall closet, which has mirrored doors. So when I open the cage and sit in front of it to give her some attention and she comes out to me, she often catches sight of her reflection behind me. She stops and stares every time, because she hasn't recognized it yet. Too cute. If I'd seen her do this before I named her Honey, I'd have named her Drishti, which I've been considering for a cat anyway, because it's the Sanskrit word used it yoga for "gaze point", the spot you use to stare to keep steady while in a balance posture. But there will be other cats.
In a way, you could say I've got kittens staying with me, but they all still efficiently packed inside their mom. This is Honey, who was just trapped tonight.
Bad photo, wonderful cat. She looks like Caramel from last fall, but she's even lighter in color. The volunteer who trapped her and I both think she's less than a year old. And she's visibly pregnant, but hopefully not too pregnant to have a termination with her spay early next week. I named her Honey because of her golden color and because she's really sweet. The trapper said she was patting her before she went into the trap. And when I opened the trap into the mouth of the cage, she took a hard right to go out of the cage door and started past me for the hallway, as though she were thinking, "Oh, is this my house now?" I gently guided her back the right way, and she didn't mind me touching her, either.
She started eating right away, because pregnant feral cats never get enough to eat. (Now that it's spring, our group has been trapping a lot of pregnant cats. Which is better than having to try and catch mom and kittens later, which is what I expect to be doing at one of my colonies next weekend.) Honey finished all the wet food I gave her very quickly, so I decided to give her a can of kitten food. As I leaned into the cage to scoop it into the bowl, she rubbed her head against my hand. Awwww. And after I left her to eat, when she finished that, she meowed through the closed door to tell me she was done. When they meow, that's telling. It means they've established a relationship to humans. Only tame cats and kittens meow. Later, even without food in my hands, she was happy to be petted and get head rubs. We appear to have a really tame one here.
On the down side, for those who were following the saga, Bunny's sister Sophie had to be let go. She was not going to tame up without months and months of work, and even then she could have been problematic on moving from the foster home to a permanent home. And the time and resources it would have taken could better go to getting a succession of other cats spayed and neutered and through recovery. Her trapper/fosterer was sad to see her go, but Sophie goes back out there spayed and vaccinated, to a more comfortable life than pumping out kittens every few months, in a colony that gets fed and monitored for injury or illness by caring people.
So that's Caturday coming to a close here in Toronto. It's been a full one.
