DomeCat Tails

Cat rescue tails!

Written By: Mickey - Aug• 20•11

Sad, sad day. KC, one of the two original DomeCats, passed away today from lung cancer. When nurturing rescued cats from the street, we know we will lose more than the average person by sheer percentages. Doesn’t make it any easier.

Sometimes people ask me how we stand the sadness when we lose one of our babies. Sometimes they say, “Well, you have the others.” Yes, it’s hard. There’s no way to make it easier, and just because we experience sadness more frequently than others doesn’t mean we’re used to it. We’re sad. We’re teary, friends called and comforted us with their loving thoughts. We lit a candle and we shared KC stories.

Harold remembered “Racey KC,” when KC was young and used to take off at top speed, running through the house, up and down the stairs, until he wore himself out and sat there, staring at us, panting. Then there was “football KC” who would talk his adopted brother Smudge into something naughty and then sit beside Smudge, smiling at us and purring and pointing to Smudge, saying, “It’s his fault; he’s the brainiac, I”m just a jock.”

There wass the purry boy who sat at the top of the cat tower in the kitchen, purring, purring, purring as we served up supper.

KC will be missed. We miss him already. He was very much loved.

 

 

 

 

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Griping about the news

Written By: Mickey - Jul• 21•08

I got my Bachelor’s degree in Journalism, specializing in print news. Then, and still, I hear the TV broadcasting folks complaining about how hard it is to cram a news story into the three-minute sound bite. I generally sympathize, but yesterday I was listening to a news cast.

The story was that there was some kind of electrical problem–a transformer had blown–the electrical company blamed it on the transformer company, and the transformer company blamed it on the county, and in the end, people had no electricity. The story revolved around a lady who’d complained to the station to try to get help.

But here’s the kicker for me. The reporter’s only got a few minutes to do a feature on this story, and about one minute of the time is spent with this breaking news: ANOTHER fellow who is without power was interviewed, he didn’t want to be on the air, but “He also wonders what will happen.”

I think that may be Pulitzer Prize material.

That’s my gripe of the day. Guess we should all be grateful that’s ALL I have to complain about this morning.

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How can I help?

Written By: Mickey - Jul• 16•08

Sometimes (okay, not often), people ask me how they can get involved in cat rescue. That’s sort of like asking how you can swim in the ocean–you jump in!

Of course, not everyone wants to load up their home with cats, not everyone has a bucket of money on the back door, and not everyone has time to spend in volunteering for hours. But cat rescue–or let’s say pet rescue in general–has so many more aspects. You can dip a foot in the ocean at any point along the shore.

The first thing to consider is how much time, how much money, and how much energy you want to put in it. What part of the idea of rescue enticed you?

Here’s what rescue can be like:

  • Sitting alone in your car for a few hours with binoculars or a baby monitor, watching and waiting for a feral (or stray) cat to enter a trap so it can be altered and vaccinated
  • Fostering cats (or dogs) in your own home, treating them like your own, feeding, socializing–sometimes strays from the street may have lost some of their social skills
  • Helping at a shelter or adoption agency–helping to clean cages, set up adoption cages, help with adoptions, walk dogs
  • Help to socialize cats or dogs–pet, play, walk, cuddle
  • Help to socialize kittens and puppies–kittens from feral moms can be socialized and tame and make fantastic pets, just as if they were born to your own kitty, but they need help from people
  • Helping to pick up animals from foster care or a shelter and take them to adoption sites
  • Bathing dogs, grooming cats
  • Recovering cats in cages in your home–when feral cats are trapped and neutered, they, like any other cats, need to recover from the surgery and vaccinations before being returned to their homes
  • Cleaning litter boxes, cages, and traps
  • Feeding feral cat colonies
  • Writing website “bios” for animals
  • Taking photos of animals
  • Marketing
  • Writing brochures, flyers, or emails
  • Distributing flyers
  • Calling to do follow-ups on adopted animals
  • Website design or maintenance
  • Research
  • Filing

One way to find volunteer work is to put an ad on www.petfinder.com, or just to go to the local PetsMart or Petco on both Saturday and Sunday (different groups come each day to each store) and talk to them, see if their values are the same as yours.

Dog, cat, horse, ferret, even turtles–there’s a rescue group for you. Some rescues focus on purebred animals, most take in any animal, some specialize in certain “looks” (Tuxedo Junction rescues from shelters, and specializes in black and white tuxedo cats), or kittens (Purrfect Pets specializes in kittens), and some take only owner-relinquished animals, others take only street strays, others only “pull” from shelters. So you can find your interest, your favorite animal, and your desired length of time to spend–from a few hours now and then to a regular volunteer committment on a weekly basis.

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The Dome Cats arrive

Written By: Mickey - Jul• 04•08

First there was a dome, a geodesic dome, somewhere in the woods outside Houston. I had long been a fan of Buckminster Fuller, and Harold and I had planned to buy some land and build a dome. One day I told my coworkers at lunch that we were looking for land in order to build. The guy next to me said, “What kind of house are you going to build?” Now who asks you that?

When I told him, so pumped up with excitement that I pulled out brochures from dome house companies and dimensions and financials, he just shook his head. “Don’t do that,” he said. “My neighbor has one and he’s been trying to sell it for three years.”

That was all she wrote. We talked to the neighbor, and six months later, we moved in. It’s not the fanciest dome in the world, nor is it the largest, but it’s ours. My sister said, “It’s lke a hobbit house.” Yeah, maybe. But it’s our hobbit house, and we love it.

So we’d lived in Pasadena for 16 years. Now if you know Houston, you know of Pasadena. I say “know of” because most folks drive through Pasadena. It’s a path, not a destination unless you are one of the thousands of refinery workers who toil in the refineries every day and all through the night. I used to have a shirt with the slogan, “I’m from Pasadena, I don’t smell a thing.” The rest of Houston has less than flattering things to say about Pasadena. “The air is always greener” is the least of them.

But we moved, and at that time, we had three cats, KC, the original boy, who is a beautiful white short-hair with a laid-back attitude toward life; Smudge, a short-hair brown tabby whose gang name is “the architect” because he’s always inspecting things like the ceilings, the beams, the doors; and then there was Shadow, or “the doctor,” who wasa Johnny-come-lately to the household.

Shadow was a beloved indoor pet of the folks in the house on the corner of the next street. Then they moved and left him behind. It was a rental house, and the new folks just let Shadow stay there, out on the patio. But he came down to our house to eat and hang out at night. We walked over to his new owners and asked, “Is this your cat?”

“Yeah, guess so.”

“Does he have a name?”

“No.”

“He comes down to our house every day.”

shrug

Then the house caught fire, they moved, and Shadow found himself once more without a family, twice in about three months. So we scooped him up, took him to the vet, picked him up with the moving van and took him to the new house. Welcome dome, Shadow!

Thus were born the original three Dome Cats.

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