World Cat Day? Pfft, I Don't Think So

When I first created this blog (just a month ago), I stumbled upon the Cat Blogosphere. It's been a great way to get my name out there and to check out other cat blogs. It's proven to be a good source of information, too, and I recently learned that such a thing exists as "World Cat Day," which is today. You know what I think?

Blasphemy.

We currently have 53 official cat days: 52 Caturdays (they come after Fridays and before Sundays) and now this World Cat Day. I don't know about you, but I'm pretty sure that my cats dominate the house six hours a day, seven days a week. As far as I'm concerned, every day is Caturday.

Anyway, in the spirit of WCD, I'm going to share the story of how I acquired one of my cats, Boom Boom. It's really a very interesting story.

About six years ago in the month of October, back when I was in ninth grade, this black stray cat started hanging out near our house. She had three kittens who were already about four or five months old. She was a very small, rail thin cat, and she became very friendly very quickly. In a matter of days from when we first started feeding her, she had let us pet her.

We (my mother and I) could tell she was pregnant, but we didn't have any idea how far along she was. We put a box and some towels out on the front porch (not the best place, but the only place she'd really hang out) and the next day, we found four healthy newborns. A week later, they all disappeared. Fast forward to the day before Thanksgiving.

It was a dark and stormy night (no, srsly, it was raining and thundering and it was, like, midnight). We heard scratching and meowing at the door. On the mat lay two soaking wet kittens with Mama (the mother cat) running around. I walked around the porch and found another one who had tried to scramble away. We brought them in and warmed them up. The fourth kitten was nowhere to be found and we thought something bad had happened to it in the month they had been gone.

The next day it was Thanksgiving. The turkey was in the oven, we had company over. Every now and then, my mother and I thought we heard meowing outside, but we just wrote it off to being crazy. As the day wore on, though, it seemed to get more real. When we went outside, we heard distinct meowing coming from the gully. It was the fourth and final kitten.

A gully (example) is sort of like a ditch or a channel in a semi-hilly area, caused by longtime erosion, usually from rainfall. It's more or less a small stream. The problem was that this area was surrounded, on both sides, but yards of very thick, prickly and thorny bushes and trees. There was no way we could access the area besides hacking and cutting our way through.

We spent more than an hour cutting only to find that the gully was incredibly steep from the side we were on. If the fire department wouldn't come for a kitten, they would at least come for us. My mother had considered sliding down the gully on a sled.

We went to the other side and find a more accessible area, though. After a bit more cutting, we were finally able to retrieve the kitten, safe and sound.

At first we wondered why Mama would leave her fourth kitten behind. After cleaning him up and putting him in the box with the others, the reason became obvious - he was almost twice as big as the others. When you're a big human, you might not notice the difference, but to a little cat like Mama, she very well might not have been able to lug him up that steep slope.

Boom Boom - Appropriately named.

Unfortunately, with three other cats in the house, we couldn't keep them all - only two. The others were sent to the shelter (sadly), but went to loving homes. The second one we kept, Foxy, only stayed with us for several months. One day, after insisting on being an indoor-outdoor cat, she simply never returned home.

Boom Boom is a very friendly cat and loves to wrestle with Nicky. A few years ago, he had a horrible ear mite infection that has since destroyed his ears (he can hear fine, but his ear flaps are really. . . ugly looking).

One of the weird things about this cat is that he has a fear of the dryer. . . which is problematic because that's where the litter box is. When he has to go, he creeps into the bathroom, hunkered down, ever so slowly. Even the slightest noise can send him sky rocketing in the air. Every now and then his fear has a serious relapse and he starts going potty outside the box in various rooms downstairs. Right now we have two litter boxes, one upstairs in the bathroom (by the dryer) and one downstairs. . . Our downstairs is all open, meaning you can sit in the living room and see the dining room. And such. Blech.

He's a good boy (for the most part). When he was a kitten, he loved to climb the curtains. That's something he hasn't exactly grown out of. At sixteen pounds, do you have any idea how many bent and broken curtain rods we've been through?