Fifteen Minutes of Delusion

Jezebel and her kittens are now residents of a nearby goat farm. Giving them away wasn't nearly as traumatic as it could have been. I don't think anyone even got watery eyes. Except maybe me, but I'll blame that on having just finished mowing the lawn. Yeah, that's it. I'm sure I got some dust or grass pollen in my eyes. The yard had grown very long with the cool rainy weather and the three weekends I was out of town, and vanity required me to cut it. I like to at least pretend to be a minimally competent groundskeeper when guests come to call. After I put Jezy in the cat carrier with her kittens, she sat down and sulked. I felt like such a heel - here I'd worked so hard over the last few months to build her trust, and then I betrayed it. Yes, I understand that it had to be this way and we were very fortunate to find someplace where the whole feline family could stick together. Still, I felt dirty. So I went and bought some ice cream. Cherry vanilla always helps...

If I had a searcher's license, it would be revoked for poor performance. Jezey had moved her kitties into a cabinet in the corner of the garage. I looked in there. Really, I did. But not very well. I figured it was too small of a space for four active kittens to hide. And mama cat wasn't in there at the time. She was in the box, acting like she was looking for her babies. Silly cat.

The cats are gone. I don't exactly know how it happened. They were in the box this morning. Anna went out to see them before school. She believes the garage door was down. Before Kara left for work, she told me that the garage door was down and I should probably open it before too long because Jezebel would need to go out and use the bathroom. So about a half hour ago, I went to open the garage door. Jezey was standing by the laundry room door, acting very anxious. I assumed it meant she had to go, so I reached over and hit the opener button, raising the door a foot or so. She ran out, but stopped just outside the garage door, looked back and me and meowed loud and long. "What is it?" I asked. Then I thought to look in the box - it was empty. I opened the garage door the rest of the way and followed Jezey, but she didn't go anywhere - just mewed loudly and paced around. I checked all of the obvious spots where she could have hidden the kittens in the garage, but came...

The Calico Kitty project has been underway for a full week now, and everything is going as expected. Mama kitty - aka Jezebel, aka "Tuckie's Friend" - is doing a great job at being a mother. She's always in the box with the kittens, except on the rare potty break. Tucker, meanwhile, is a sad caricature of sit-com style fatherhood. He comes into the garage once or twice a day to eat, and is absent the rest of the time. He seems scared of the babies, like he's going to be asked to change a diaper or something. The first time he looked into the box and saw the kittens, he did a double take and then ran out of the garage. The babies are growing big, and are extremely vocal when taken out of the box. One is just now starting to open her eyes. Anyway, it's hard taking pictures of tiny, squirming, mostly black animals. But you get the basic idea.

Well, it's finally happened. The little black girl cat who shacked up with Tucker is officially a mama kitty now. This afternoon she had 4 little kittens - one black and three calicoes, although one calico is mostly black. Just what we're going to do with the six cat's living in our garage is still to be determined, but we certainly won't be keeping them all. Anybody want a cute little kitty?