Yesterday, I was bottle-babyless and it felt quite strange. I had to take hubby in for his cancer check-up, then he had an eye surgery scheduled and we had to drive clear to Portland which is three hours away. Normally, I would have just packed the little darlins and all their supplies and they would have gone with us- but we are sitting at high temperature heat and even with the air conditioner roaring, they wouldn’t have been comfortable. So a friend of mine took them for 24 hours.

They are back now and have just been fed and tucked in for a few hours. She loved the whole process, even getting up every 3 hours didn’t diminish the delight she felt in helping “the wee darlings!” They look good with the exception of MacBeth, the short haired gray. I have an appointment with Dr. Vicki Thayer this morning. She is a feline specialist who makes house calls- a rare find in this neck of the woods! She is so good and we have developed a friendship as well as a professional relationship with each other. I suspect that MacBeth should have stayed inside the queen just a bit longer. His rectum doesn’t appear to be fully developed and passing stool is so difficult for him. If you compare him to the other kittens you can see that he is from a different tom simply by his size, the fact that his eyes are still half-closed, his ears haven’t opened and his poophole is so tiny. 🙁 I pray I am wrong, but I ran into this a few years ago with a litter of cute, cute, cute manx-cross kitties and within 24 hours of bottlefeeding, I knew something was terribly wrong. They were all 7 rushed to the vet and none of them came home again. All were euthanized because they had no rectums, they had a hole, but it didn’t go anywhere. 🙁 He is at least pooping- but it is a long process and he cries are so horrendous, I know he is in pain. But I also know that if I just quit stimulating him he could die from that. Hopefully, Vicki will be able to provide me with the answer.

The cats, dogs and horses are in a state right now. We have had fierce electrical storms at night. Last night, the thunder actually shook the house! There were cats flying in all directions trying to get away from the noise and chaos. The sky was lit up with heat lighting, and there are now multiple forest fires around us, although we are far enough away from the hills not to be in immediate danger. The air is smoky this morning and the animals are on high alert. I don’t think we have seen the end to these strange storms.

Well, it is 6:30 a.m. and as much as I want to just crawl into bed, throw the covers over my head and pretend I don’t exist- I have to instead go and feed the horses, feed the dogs, feed the cats, bring in the cat litter, change out all the boxes! YAY! No more nasty sweet smelling cat litter- it has been all given away and replaced with Stall-Dry! My cats hated that litter that was given to me. What a shame too, a whole pallet of non-clumping cat litter that caused the worst case of litter box reprisals that this house has ever seen. The living room was the battle ground of choice and it is going to take me days to restore the room back to a normal scent. I don’t know what possesses some litter companies to put scents in litter! Cats don’t care if their litter doesn’t smell good before they use it- in fact, they Prefer it doesn’t smell at all! This stuff (which I won’t name publicly because the company was so nice to donate it to me) was so smelly sweet I knew I was in trouble when I opened the first bag. Most of it went in the horses stalls- with all the air traveling through the stalls the smell wasn’t the issue. But in the cat room and the house, the cats were pissed in a bad way and they sprayed and pooped out of the box for weeks until I managed to get rid of the stuff. No wonder the company couldn’t compete with the big dogs- they don’t know cats!