cats

On the last day of my spring break last Fri­day I hap­pily got up early to go fill in on Clean & Feed at Good Mews — I’d been miss­ing my Fri­day morn­ing ladies! After greet­ing Con­nie, Char­lene, Patty, and Karen, I popped my head into Intake to say hello to the new res­i­dents. Almost all the cages were full because we’d been the recip­i­ent of an influx from yet another hoard­ing case, though at least this time the kit­ties were still in pretty decent shape.

When I got to one of the bot­tom cages, I gasped. The cat in there looked star­tlingly like my IrisKitty, who (with a lit­tle help) I had res­cued off the mean streets of Nor­cross and who had been my beloved feline com­pan­ion until I lost her to can­cer on Christ­mas Eve, 1998. The only major dif­fer­ence was gen­der — this was a big fluffy boy cat. He was one of the intakes from the hoarder, and had been there less than 24 hours so we knew essen­tially noth­ing about him except for his name.

I took time out to get acquainted and give him some good snor­gles, which he grumpily assented to. As I cleaned the iso­la­tion room, I kept slip­ping back into Intake just to look at him and coo at him, in addi­tion to dis­cussing him with the shel­ter staff. At one point Dana told me that he is front declawed, which sent chills up my spine — Iris was front declawed when we got her.

I told DH about Mr. Boots and intro­duced them last Sat­ur­day. I went by just to visit him twice last week. On Thurs­day, Dana asked if I had put Mr. Boots on hold yet, and she wasn’t just jok­ing. DH and I talked a lit­tle, and Fri­day morn­ing he went up to the attic and brought down our larger cat car­rier with­out telling me, say­ing “you don’t want him com­ing home in a card­board box with holes, do you?” So Fri­day after­noon before leav­ing work I down­loaded, filled out, and printed an adop­tion application.

On “Catur­day” our first stop after leav­ing the house was Good Mews, where I walked in, greeted the coun­selors, asked who had been adopted so far today (two adop­tions and two “on-hold” by 1 p.m. — a good day already!), and told Lori the lead coun­selor that we were here to put Mr. Boots on hold, know­ing that he has to have some den­tal work before he can come home, and handed her the appli­ca­tion. She looked it over, has­sled me about for­get­ting to sign it , then signed the approval spot and took my credit card. That’s the fastest adop­tion inter­view she’s done in a long time, I bet — though when Michelle and Janet the tour guides com­mented, I dryly remarked that Lori has, after all, been inter­view­ing me for the past two years (that’s about how long I’ve been work­ing as an adop­tion trainee, then coun­selor, myself).

Of course we spent some time with our new fam­ily mem­ber before leav­ing. DH had brought in some Feline Gree­nies (aka Kitty Crack) and Mr. Boots hoovered them up with even more alacrity than our Sarah!!! We also brought the camera:

Don’t you just LOVE that grumpy lit­tle face? He adores chin scritches.

It will be a cou­ple of weeks before Mr. Boots can come home, because he can’t get his den­tal work done until they do another round of blood tests and make sure that the slight ane­mia was just a tem­po­rary thing. But I will be vis­it­ing him fre­quently to get him used to me, and I will prob­a­bly be utterly worth­less this com­ing Sat­ur­day as an adop­tion coun­selor since I’ll be hid­ing in the back the whole time snor­gling him ::LOL::.