Hope you and your furry ones are enjoying this lovely hot sunshine.  The cats here are pretty much flaked out and flopped a lot of the time.   It’s a bit of a challenge keeping them all cool when there’s so many of them, especially as there are several groups who need to be kept separate, and most need to be kept indoors.

our lovely Amber

Progress

There have been some exciting developments since our Spring Newsletter.  Our plea in that for additional committee members led to two of our lovely adoptive parents coming onboard: Betty’s mum and Mowgli & Lyra’s dad.

betty

mowgli & lyra

Following some tedious paperwork, and some excellent support from our hero Keith at Voluntary Action Sheffield we’ve finally submitted our application to be registered as a charity.   Fingers crossed that it all goes through ok.

Fundraising

We’ve had some very kind donations and support from a number of people and our amazing fundraiser Jenny (or “Anty Jennnny” as our Flipper calls her) has been apparently tireless in her efforts and imagination to make us money to support our cats.  She and Fiona organised another brilliant event at Strip the Willow in June …… huge thanks to “Strip” for letting use the venue for free.   Lots of fun quizzes and a brilliant music input from the up and coming  Max ….. he’s a brilliant musician and we’re waiting for him to be really famous so we can dine out on the story of him playing for our 8 Lives cats.

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Full

That’s probably the biggest news right now.  We’re absolutely chockablock full.   The lovely Tabbytha & Mowse we talked about in the Spring newsletter, having their babies together and all snuggling in a little box together …. well they now have 7 strapping kittens ready to go to new homes, plus Simon whom they adopted after he was found alone in a garden age about 5 weeks.

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Since they were all so happy together and we had a spare room …… we’d initially intended separate rooms for Tab & Mowse … we offered to take in two older lads who had been living on the street for a while.  They’d been fed by someone who was allowing them to shelter in her shed but was unable to let them into the house, and was about to be unable to feed them due to hospital treatment.   Jasper & Puddy arrived in a bit of a mess ….. greasy coats and poorly teeth.  It was lovely to have a bit of extra money through Jenny’s fundraising to be able to offer more needy cats a space.

puddy arrives

jasper arrives

It took hours and hours of grooming to sort their coats out.    Our vets were wonderful, especially the nurses,  who got the last of the awful matts out whilst they were having other treatment.    They’re both handsome loving boys now.  Just waiting for the right home …. not together though …. they’ve clearly had enough of each other whilst sharing the shed and now want to go their separate ways 😉

puddy settled

jasper settled

So then we were full …. but another mum and tiny kittens needed a place to go.

We initially said “no … sorry we’re full” …. but an hour or so later caved in .  Puddy and Jasper moved out the back bedroom to make space to them, I moved out of my bedroom to make space for Puddy and Jasper ……and Jenny loaned me an inflatable bed to put in the lounge.  Those kits have grown too now:

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We’re in the difficult situation of having a house full of cats and kittens, its the height of the kitten season so lots of little ones looking for new homes.   It’s summer holiday time so most people are thinking of going away rather than of adopting ….. and ….. most of our cats are black or black and white.   Sadly people don’t want that colour 😦   However lovely their purrsonalities are …. people don’t want to know because their jackets are “the wrong colour”.

Please, if you’re not colour prejudiced about furry jackets, share these guys …. they need to get settled into homes of their own so that we can take in more desperate bits of fur.

“The unpredictability of the weather, either no winds or potential hurricanes, made the Doldrums one of the least favorite sailing lanes back when all that ships had to power them across the ocean was their sails.”
Read more from WFMZ.com at: http://www.wfmz.com/weather/What-are-the-doldrums/186892

I’ve been a bit down these last few weeks, and this phrase suddenly came to mind.   It kind of sums up what I’m feeling at the moment in terms of 8 Lives.    We had a real whirlwind of adoptions February to April, and then over May and June the storm of getting our charity application submitted, and preparation for our new website.   Here we are in July, waiting a response from the Charity Commission and waiting for the IT guys in a far away room to shuffle our domain name across a bit of cyberspace at the other side of the world.

Meanwhile there’s a gathering storm a) of cats and kittens being found abandoned and needing rescue space …its the height of kitten season and b) a tornado of growing kittens around here who are rampaging through the house.  The Doldrum aspect of it is, I think, partly about it being holiday season …. people are focussed more on going away and having a well earned break than on adopting cats at this time of year.  Sadly I also suspect a lot is about our kittens being mainly black or black and white 😦  Ginger and tabby kittens attract much more attention ….whilst equally lovely kittens who happen to have jackets that are out of fashion are left behind.    So there have been a few enquiries about Tobias ……so long as he goes to a new home alone and doesn’t take along any of his monochrome mates 😦

Tobias

We’ve had some pretty disgruntled people who just wanted a tabby kitten and can’t see why they can’t simply adopt Tobias.  I guess you need to be on this side of the adoptions for a while to understand it.  It’s heartbreaking to see people rush to adopt the ‘pretty’ colours whilst ignoring equally lovely kittens …. or even more lovely ones….. just because they’re black or black and white.   I’ve seen people desperately trying to befriend a ginger kitten, whilst pushing away the little black one who is sitting in their lap ready to adore them for the rest of his little life.

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The black and white kits are adorable too but they’ve not had a look in either

timothy

xavier

timothy

tomas & timothy

minnie simon & tomas

minnie

mocha

So we sleep on our blow up bed in the lounge ……. and wait.  It’s a definite improvement on last year when we slept on the lounge floor and later on a deeply uncomfortable bed/chair, but it looks like its going to be a long haul.  The house is filled with some of the most lovely cats but in terms of adoption they appear to be too old, too timid, just too black.

puddy – too old

jasper – too old

mowse & tabbytha – too shy

xin – too black

kittens- too black

It’s becoming clear to me that there’s something about inverse proportions when it comes to cat rescue and blogging.  The more that’s happening in the rescue the less time there is to blog about it.

It’s the height of kitten season and is complete mayhem around here.  There’s been a lovely video clip doing the rounds on facebook that I’ve thought about often over the last couple of weeks. It shows a cleaner / nursery worker with  4 young  Pandas (watch it … its cute).  She valiantly but rather hopelessly attempts to sweep up leaves in the panda’s house whilst they relentlessly ‘help’ her with the task.   Translate this into rather less exotic circumstances and it could be us …. sweeping up cat litter with not 4 but 8 delinquent kittens.

Tobias likes to sit in the dustpan whilst Simon Timothy and Tomas play with the brush.  The younger kits like to play with the plastic bag I’m putting the rubbish into.  They randomly take it in turns to dive into the litter trays while I’m cleaning, kicking more litter around like they were playing in a sandpit.  If you put the litter trays into the context of the rest of the rescue its a little like the Forth Bridge ….. no sooner have I finished cleaning than someone has another wee …. and we’re off again.

Apart from exotic, and white wellies instead of socks, the big difference I see between me and Panda Woman, is that that appears to be her job.   I have a day job in the NHS which is nothing to do with cats … well not officially anyway …..

So 7am this morning sees me with the brush and dustpan scenario in the T and M kittens room, and then repeating it in the X Teams room.  Then try to get showered, dressed and ready for work.  As I’m sorting things out in the bathroom, two of them are wrestling in the bath, and another is playing with his shadow in the bath side.  Another is rolling up the bath mat and kicking it to death.  I climb in, rescuing both kittens and spiders from the water.  One kitten runs off with the body puff whilst another wraps herself in the towel.   I climb out the bath, trying not to step on kittens or their numerous toys, retrieve towel from miffed kitten,  and dry myself as various of them try to shin up my legs and onto my back.  Some of them make it onto the window sill and start throwing candles, clock and tea lights off and into the wash basin.  Stage left ….. other kittens sail their pirate ship down the stairs and crash it into the door.

All the time …. eye on the clock ….. how on earth am I going to negotiate this obstacle course and get to work on time.   There’s a couple of hooks on the back of the bathroom door and at the moment they’re more or less the only place on the house where you can put things and be reasonably confident no one will pee on them or cover them in cat hair.  So we juggle between work clothes, pyjamas and wet towels hanging up there. The clean underwear sits vulnerably on the floor or top of toilet cistern.  I come to get dressed and there’s a gang of kittens trying to kick my clean pair of socks to death whilst another drags my pants down the stairs.

I scramble to get ready and go to work with cat hair in my knickers and an annoying piece of cat litter inside my left sock.