We were down to my mom's four cats, but I missed having my own animal. I had grown up with pets and had had Bear and Miss Hissy for almost 10 years (4/5 years for Hissy). I missed having a pet of my own. My mom's cats tolerated me, but were clearly her cats by their choice. We made the mistake of visiting the same animal shelter that George had come from with Kirstin and Megan. We left there with three cats for me and two for them.
I ended up falling for three brothers that were 3 months old. They were named Zebediah, Zeke and Zane. Zeb was black with white whiskers and the other Z-boys were light gray with a faint darker gray swirl pattern on there sides and a faint dark color striped on their tails. The granddaughters took home Stormy, a gray cat similarly patterned to mine and a long-haired black Persian named Olivia by Megan.
Once home the Z-boys took on personalities of there own. Zeb would roll over and show his wares to any one willing to rub his belly. Zeke was a rascal and into everything. Zane was as zany as he could be. My Mom's cats slowly took to the new additions, some of them faster than others.
We tried to let the cats outside, but none of them could be trusted to stay out of the road, so their adventures came to a quick end. Fred though had spent much of his earlier days outside, so he became miserable not being able to go outside. He became moody and put on weight unexplainably (he topped out at 30 pounds), so we relented and began letting him go outside during the day, but not at night. Fred enjoyed going out while we worked in the flower garden to chase crickets. He would chase the crickets and moths all over the yard. He began to slim down (now only 25 pounds or so), but never more than a couple of pounds.
One day while out in the garden, I looked up to see the ornamental pine (about 10 feet high) shaking like crazy. Fred had gone up this small pine after a bird. You could hear the bird scolding him loudly and the tree shaking wildly (most of the branches were no thicker than a finger). The next thing I see out of the corner of my eye is Fred exiting the tree, amid loud chatter from the bird and a thud as Fred hit the ground.
To this day, I swear the bird pushed him from the tree. Fred was none worse for the whooping he took that day. Fred would lay in the yard which was quite steep; he would begin to scratch his back on the grass and next thing you knew he would be rolling down the hill, because he was so poofy. He eventually ran out of luck at the age of 3. We found him on Mother's Day 2006 on the side of the road across from our house. Somebody hit him, but never came to the door to tell us, even though we were home at the time.
About two months earlier, a week before Easter, someone had left five kittens barely four weeks old in a cardboard box up the road from my aunt's horse barn. It had snowed a wet snow the night before and been in the low 20's overnight. My aunt had called to have my mom come down and get one the kitten who she thought was going to die. When she got back, we heated towels in the dryer and wrapped the kitten in them in order to bring his body temperature up slowly.
Meanwhile, while I did this, she went back and got the rest of them from a cage at the barn, so we could feed them and keep them somewhere warmer than the barn. It took at least two hours of warming him with the towels before he was dry and wasn't shivering. We figured out that they had to be at least four weeks old, because their ears were standing up. We fed them a special home-made formula every few hours for a week before we started adding dry kitten food to the bowl of formula to add substance to their diet. We gave them names based on their features in order to update each other on who was eating, who wasn't, who was playing and who wasn't.
We did this in hopes of not becoming too attached to them, so when it came time to find homes for them it wouldn't be so hard. We named the one who almost didn't make it, Lucky. We named the dark copper striped one, Red. We named the tiger striped with a white tip on his tail, Tippy. Those three were male. We named the two girls Spot and Hoppy. Spot had a bull's eye pattern on her sides with a white chest and a copper colored spot on her head. Hoppy (likes to hop) was colored the same way as Spot, but without the spot and was gray on the chest.
