E Friday and cats

Looks like it’s cat day here today. Up in Portland our granddaughter E picked out a kitten a few weeks ago. I understand it is a very friendly cat, wanting to hang around its people all the time.


Evidently Portland is a city known to be animal friendly. They had to fill out all kids of forms and have an interview before being deemed good enough to adopt an animal from one of the shelters. This kitty was not from a shelter but from an individual that had several kittens available, all raised inside with people contact so they were rather friendly.

At our house we have been having interactions with a number of feral cats lately. One female that has been coming by for years had a new litter of four back in the Spring and kept bringing them through the yard. They may have been living in the back corner behind our shed since we saw them so often (prompting B to try and schedule a cleanup of that corner of the yard). At one point she seemed to take off with three of them, leaving the smallest behind. B started feeding it, bringing the dish closer to the house, and sitting outside when the kitten came around. Eventually she moved it inside and we now have a new cat ourselves. As for the rest, we borrowed some capture cages from the local ASPCA chapter and ended up catching five feral cats including momma, her three kittens and one big male we had never seen before. A local agency offers free neutering/spaying for feral cats, so they all went through the procedure and were released back in the yard.

Ours is not nearly as friendly as E’s, being a feral cat for the first few weeks of its life. But it has gotten fairly acceptable to us, but still runs away when you move on it too fast. B is home all day with the cat, so it has gotten more friendly with her than with me, the stranger that comes in at night. Last week when B was touching up the trim paint in the kitchen and found that she had a supervisor. This cat is part Siamese, with the crossed blue eyes and love of jumping and being on high places. So of course she wanted the top step. B had a problem when painting the baseboard, the cat was very helpful and kept making sure the paint was drying properly, resulting in little painted kitty paw prints around the house. When painting up high she is content to just insure the job is being done properly.


And the name? Granddaughter picked out the name for our kitten, Puck, from a book she was reading. Her cat is named Myrhh, because it goes so well with purr.