Bachelorettes and Brewmeisters |
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Sunday |
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It’s been nice to have a bit of a break from kittens for the past couple of weeks while we auditioned gal pals for Orrie. Last weekend, we had Fifi for four nights while her foster parents were away.
She and Orrie loved each other, but it was an obsessive, high-energy attraction that exhausted all of us.
She just couldn’t leave him alone, and was constantly engaging him in wrestling play, which occasionally escalated into something resembling a fight. When we tried to put her outside without him for a break, she went bananas. We really wanted to make it work because she was such a cute friendly dog, but we realized that the relationship was unbalanced.
On Wednesday, I took the day off because we had tickets to the baseball game at 1 pm. In the morning, we took Orrie to the dog park that is about a mile from our house via the bike path. We hadn’t taken Chase or Khola to the dog park because they didn’t like other dogs, so we weren’t sure what to expect with Orrie.
Well, we shouldn’t have worried because he had the time of his life. There were a surprising number of people there for a weekday morning, and we enjoyed chatting with other owners while Orrie raced around with his new “pack.” We were pleased that he would pause every now and then to find us with his eyes, and when we called him, he would race across the park to come to us. He left with a big smile and a wagging tail.
This weekend’s bachelorette is Dahlia. She’s an American Foxhound who has been in foster since April. I guess she was so anxious at first that her foster mom couldn’t even take her for a walk outside without having her completely freak out. Her mom has done a great job with her, although Dahlia still has some nervous tendencies.
Ted was very wary of having a hound because of the baying. However, she doesn’t seem to bark as much as Orrie, and most of the time her barks or more like yips. We have heard her hound “voice” a couple of times, but it doesn’t seem like she uses it much. She and Orrie wrestle and play together, but it’s not frenetic like it was with Fifi. We’ll probably have Dahlia a couple of more days to get additional data on whether she will be a good fit for us.
Meanwhile, we picked up a mom and five kittens yesterday, and boy are they CUTE. Two are solid gray (one boy and one girl), two are gray tabby (one boy and one girl), and one is a buff boy.
Mom is being a Mata Hari by heading under the futon every time we open the door, so we haven’t really seen much of her, but she appears to be gray with some white or maybe a dilute tortie.
The kittens are about five weeks old and healthy and fluffy. Mom has clearly been taking good care of them. They came from a rural shelter in West Virginia, so they had a long car ride yesterday to get to our house. The kittens are quite noisy for their age – lots of meowing when we come into the villa. They don’t appear to be weaned, although we saw one of the boys nibbling at the wet food.
We often use a sporting event as a litter naming theme, but we are feeling so sad about our Nationals losing, that we don’t feel like using the obvious baseball choice.
Ted came up with an Oktoberfest idea, so we’ll call this crew the Brewmeisters. Can we get some help with appropriate names for Mom and two girls and three boys?
filed by: ME
