Changes
Well, there have been some changes around here, due mainly to the fact that I couldn’t stand the silence of my apartment without Encore.
I knew within 24 hours that I would have to get another pet, as I felt just desolate without him around. And while I knew I could never replace my faithful friend and companion of 14 years, I knew I couldn’t be alone.
I started at a shelter not too far from where I live, it’s in a pet store and has a huge cage contraption called "Kitty City", so I found the shelter woman and told her I was interested in getting a kitten. I wanted a black male. She told me I couldn’t have one because I was trying to replace what I had lost and that would be bad, so I’d have to get a different kind of cat.
Excuse me??!!??
This is my life, my preference and my "theme". I have always been into black cats, have a big collection of black cat "stuff" and it’s a choice that I like and want to live with. This woman from the shelter didn’t know a thing about me so I thought it was a bit over the top for her to impose her restrictions and values on me.
Obviously I left without a cat. I don’t think they had any black males anyways, but I don’t think I would have wanted to support that shelter just because of her attitude! It’s not as if they’re giving them away, they cost $95 each!
From there I went to the Buddy Dog shelter, but because it was a holiday (Columbus Day) it was closed.
My mother had remembered a pet store in Sudbury that I wasn’t aware of, and she thought there was a shelter there.
This had a room that you could crawl into and play with the cats. It was so nice to hold a living furkid and play with them. They did have one male cat who was black, but he was almost a year old and that was just a bit older than what I was looking for. I want to be able to train them – as much as anyone can train a cat- just a bit.
This pet store had another branch in a nearby town, so they sent me there to see what they might have.
This store had none at all BUT one of the women who ran the shelter was there. I told her what had happened to Encore and what I was looking for (Black, male, indoor, neutered, not declawed) and Dee (who was with me) said that watching the woman it was as if she was checking off her approval list in her head as I spoke.
The deal with getting kittens under six months from shelters is that you have to take two, so they won’t be alone all day. This was more than I had bargained for, but something I could live with. I’d often wished I had a companion for Encore.
This woman had just been given a mother cat, one male kitten and two females, all black. Because no one wanted a black cat! I wasn’t all that interested in having a female, and she said that there was a 20-week-old black angora that someone was trying to get rid of, and maybe I’d want him.
Sold. Two boys were going to enter my life.
That was on Monday so the cats had to be taken to be neutered before I could get them. This meant a week or so.
This was one of the longest and loneliest weeks of my life. I really can’t begin to describe how sad I was and how silent and miserable I found the apartment to be. I found every excuse not to come home and got very little sleep. I know this sounds stupid and pathetic, but that is how it was.
I was able to get "the boys" on Saturday morning. (I was there before the pet store opened!)
They are the cutest things. The little guy is about 12 weeks old and full of the devil. His name is Bravo. I brought him home, showed him where the food was and where the litter box was, and he thought this was swell. He owned the place.
The older guy is closer to six months old. He’s really beautiful with a big fluffy tail. He is very skittish and it took ages for him to come out of the cat carrier, then he found a dark place to hide. His name is Broadway.
Yeah, I know I like theater names.
So I’ve had them for two weeks now, and initially I was a bit concerned that they would never get along. There was a lot of spitting and hissing for the first couple of days. I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to say that the fur was flying.
It appeared, however that Bravo (the little one) was winning most of the skirmishes. He’d get to higher ground and when Broadway went by he’d leap down on him. Very tricky guy.
My last words each morning as I go out the door are "Don’t kill one another while I’m gone". So far they have managed to survive and I think they’ve reached some sort of truce. They still have this long bout of chasing and wrestling each other, but that seems to be more playful than adversarial.
I’m just glad to have friends back.
Listening to: Broadway’s leading Men
Reading: Pay it Forward
Weather: 53, sunny
Trivia: Where are the rocks from deepest in the Earth found?
Most rocks found at the Earth's surface were formed within a few tens of kilometers of the surface. But in some places, there are "magma pipes" (vertical tubes of molten rock) where rocks that were formed much deeper are brought to the surface. The rocks from the deepest known source are found on Malaita Island in the Solomon Islands northeast of Australia. Scientists there recently found diamonds and other kinds of crystals at the top of a magma pipe that could only be formed at pressures of 22 gigapascals (more than 217,000 times the air pressure at sea level). That pressure is only found at depths of 700 kilometers or more (435 miles). According to the scientists, the rocks found in the magma pipe on Malaita were broken off and carried to the surface as the magma moved upward through the Earth's mantle.
Cool word:vandal [n. VAN-dl]
Someone who destroys or defaces public or private property either willfully or ignorantly is a vandal. Near synonyms include: wrecker, saboteur, hooligan, delinquent, plunderer, looter, destroyer, and pillager. The first vandals were a Germanic tribe, which in 455 A.D. sacked Rome. While this was perhaps the pinnacle of their destructive
behaviors, the Vandals earned a reputation as destroyers of civilization for looting and sacking during this period. The word vandal appears in English in the mid-1500s. It commemorates the Vandals whose name was from the Late Latin vandalus, likely a
Latinized tribal name derived from the word wanderer.
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ARIES
What begins in a negative sense will boomerang in your favor. Focus on humor, versatility, use of intelligence. Sagittarian plays outstanding role. You could be making some important decisions that will affect your finances and long-term security, and you might be feeling a bit more confident about your future right now. There's no urgency to take immediate action, but it is important to examine several options for the future. Take the time to put more thought and effort into an important family or health concern. Speaking of health, have you taken the chance to eliminate some of your bad habits yet? All you have to do is think positively and expansively when you set about tackling some tasks you want to complete. You can obtain whatever you want as long as you go about it in a way that presumes you will succeed. It makes more sense to believe you have the right to obtain your heart's desires than to presume things are against you. You can gain from negotiations and business deals or loans.