Mom came home after half a day at work yesterday, claiming she wasn’t feeling well. Yet, there she is, outside, working in the backyard and making all kinds of noise. Does Tessa look bothered to you? Maybe from being woken up from her 5th afternoon beauty nap!
Sometimes, Mondays come with Monday-like things, things that don’t exactly go according to plan. Take Pia, for example. Monday is the same as any other day of the week to her. Not this Monday, Mom assured her before leaving this morning. As soon as Mom gets home from work, this ginger girl is going to get her backside clipped of the long, long fur she’s got going on back there. We know this is a futile attempt to, perhaps, help with her pooping on floors and blankets habit. One must start somewhere and apparently, sparkling clean litter boxes with the freshest of fresh litter ain’t cutting it for this ginger girl. A bald butt it will be. Wouldn’t you be nervous?
Elsewhere, Mom’s desperately trying to wrap up a 5 year backyard project that keeps getting derailed for this and that reason. Will it be done this month? This year? This lifetime? We’ll let you know, probably on some Monday.
In the meantime, enjoy this photo of Viola who’s happy she may never have to wonder what a shaved backside feels like.
A couple of weeks ago, we revisited the 2nd group of Colehaus Cats, the ones who came before our current (and sadly) last batch of cat family members. Let us share with you the very first official group of Colehaus Cats. We didn’t have a camera back then, and sometimes borrowed an Instamatic camera which we used only for, what else, cat photos!
Vince, a Turkish van, was found in an apartment complex parking lot during an ice storm, crying under a car and frozen to the asphalt. Wouldn’t you have taken him in? Years later, Ian was found with several litters of abandoned kittens in a field across town. Both became buddies probably because they both LOVED food.
As a kitten, D.K. (tragic name, we now know), rode 1456 miles mostly on Dad’s shoulder while Mom drove a broken-down mini truck to the Pacific Northwest. We got D.K. used to riding in a vehicle weeks before the trip and she took to it like a natural. One of Dad’s proudest moments, he says, is when D.K. was using a shoebox litter box on his lap while Mom was doing 65 miles per hour through mountainous curves. Not a single speck of litter was lost.
Sweet little Bob. We lost him to a bowel obstruction 9 days after he came to us. On day three, we rushed him to our vet when he seemed to be in distress and discovered he wasn’t an 8 week old but maybe a five week old and may have been force fed solid food before being weaned. Too tiny and young for surgery, they did so much to try to save him but in the end, we had to let him go. Just thinking of that time breaks our hearts all over again.
Mom, 64 other commercial insurance typists, and a facilities guy with a tall ladder discovered Pinks trapped in an inescapably deep window well alongside a big opossum. Naturally, Mom stepped up to take her in after which we discovered she was pregnant and very sick. Thus began Mom and Dad’s first foray together fostering kittens. All were adopted out to great homes and Pinks was with us for another few years.
Dots was named for her black and white dotted paws and toe beans. She was found living under the rental house we were at alongside a large family of opossums and they all seemed to get along great. A work friend who lived on a farm offered to adopt her into her family as a barn cat and that seemed to suit Dots well.
We adopted Arie from a neighbor who bought him as an Easter gift for a daughter too young to understand how to properly hold a kitten. Arie was a character who wore his own t-shirt, walked on a leash, and thought of himself more as a dog than a cat.
Ebony wasn’t our cat but a neighbor’s who’s new husband didn’t like cats and Ebony was tossed outside permanently. For years, he hung out and ate at our house, a safer haven, and we brought him inside one particularly harsh winter. For a long time after he passed, we’d catch ourselves automatically expecting to see him out on our front porch,
We had several cats that came and went out of our lives before the first Colehaus Cats family – Joey and Stimpy, two orange boys, Sakura, a lynx-point Siamese, Lyndsey, a grey tabby, and Geoffrey 1, a big mackerel tabby boy. Mom had cared for and was owned by several cats and kittens in the 80’s before she met Dad – Poochie, Puddy, Spot, both Darths, Milo, Buddy, LeKee, Kiki, and others. Unfortunately, none had photos taken of them but she remembers them all.
We can’t forget the In-Between Colehaus Cats, the ones who straddled the 2nd and current family – Seth and Maxx who met and briefly lived with Quint, Tessa, and Pia. If you’d like, you can see photos and read more about the Angels of Colehaus Cats here.
