Of Cats and Conundrums

Where have I been all these months? Living, traveling, changing direction, and generally enjoying this ever challenging and rewarding phase of my life.

Now I am faced with a conundrum: a long-distance move is in the offing, and we are hosts to two senior cats who are not very movable. We would like to keep them as our family but have not been able to figure any way to get them across the country that would be safe for them and realistic for us. They cannot travel with us as we'll be driving for a couple of weeks, staying at different places each night, and certainly parking the car during the day (in hot weather) for possibly hours at a time. Then when we get where we're going, we will live in temporary lodgings for two or three months until we get a place of our own.

Finding new homes for them is not easy either. There are always many cats and kittens seeking homes, and senior cats are low on the popularity list, especially when one of them has takes a bit of extra care.

Clearing out years of "stuff" and getting the house ready for sale are nothing compared to our concern for these two furry souls who share our lives.


And then there's the tank full of guppies....

Clicking for Kibble

There's a young lady in Oregon who has fed a lot of hungry cats and dogs. Not by taking them food, but rather by using the power of the Internet to stock the shelves of shelters across the country with almost 110 TONS of cat and dog kibble.

Mimi Ausland is a seventh grader who believes in making a difference in the lives of shelter animals. Inspired by a website that donates rice to needy countries, she and her parents came up with FreeKibble.com and, coming in June, FreeKibbleKat.com. Every day you can go to the site, answer a trivia question about dogs or cats, and whether you get it right or wrong, they donate 10 pieces of kibble to one of 13 shelters in the US.  As of today, 319,821,200 pieces have been donated!

I learned about Mimi through an article in Cat Fancy magazine - read it here: Cat Fancy article about FreeKibble. I love the end of the article where Mimi is quoted: 

"Just do whatever you can do, whether it's doing a lemonade stand or setting up a site like this," she says. "Just get out there and help something or someone. Try your best to help."

So every day I'm going to FreeKibble.com and answering their question. I got today's wrong, but so what? The cats and dogs still get the kibble, and I'm telling other people about it.

If a seventh grader can make a difference, so can I. So this weekend I'll be searching for odds and ends of acrylic yarn so I can knit "snuggles" for cat shelters - if you haven't heard about the Snuggles Project, learn more here.  Kira and Pipsqueak will help, I'm sure.