Back From The Dead!

I've been thinking about this blog a lot lately and decided it was time to revive it.  Things have changed a LOT since my last posts and I really want to document things.

First of all, to finish up Patty's story:  We kept Patty for about a week.  We didn't tell our landlord about her since we were hoping to find her a place ASAP.  However, our landlord entered our apartment without permission while she was there and she was in the bathroom.  To this day I have no idea if he found her, but the day after that, we panicked and took her to a shelter.

The biggest update of all:  We bought a house!  In January, we became homeowners.  It is a 2 family house, so not only do we have our own home, but we rent out our upstairs apartment to a guy with a sweet Pitbull and get nice income that way.  The upstairs apartment is 2 bedroom, and our part of the house is 3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, and 2 "storage" rooms, as we call them, because they aren't technically bedrooms, but have windows and doors.  We finally have enough space to foster and rescue cats as we see fit.  And let me tell you, we've been taking full advantage of it.

Right now, we OWN 6 cats, 3 chinchillas, 3 gerbils, and 1 rat.  At the moment, we also have 7 foster cats through Anjellicle Cats Rescue: 4 adults and 3 8-week-old kittens (we had 1 more kitten who just went home this past weekend).  And finally, we have a stray momma cat we took in, and the 6 beautiful 6-week-old kittens she gave birth to while in our care - I will give this family a dedicated post since they've had a rough go of it..  Unfortunately, the momma cat is FIV+, which complicates a lot of things in regards to finding homes for the kittens.  We are trying to put plans together for them right now and have been in touch with a few organizations.

In case you don't want to do the math, yes, that means we have 20 cats in our house.  But we have the room, we take care of them all, and almost half of them are kittens, which don't really count.  We also realized that 20 is our limit, even if they are temporary.  The individual feedings, medications, etc. just get to be too much, so that is how we arrived at this limit.  Also, I don't feed my own cats wet food, and with everyone else getting it twice a day, it gets EXPENSIVE and time-consuming.  No more, thanks.

I also have a room set up and dedicated to TNR (Trap-Neuter-Return), but I haven't gotten to use it yet.  We only did this for one female so far, and she wasn't very feral so didn't need the trap and cage.  Hopefully I will be more active in this arena soon, I've been putting it off too long.

So that's the current situation in our house.  I'll post again with pictures and stories for our residents in the coming days.