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Lucky Stripes

Wednesday
1/2/2013

On the Friday before Christmas, I dropped Chimay off at another Homeward Trails foster home. Here’s what we heard from her foster mom while we were away on vacation:

I just got home and Chimay came waltzing into the kitchen on her own after being groomed by my cat Lenny. Then she proceeded to rub her head on baby Lenny, one of my fosters, and is staying close by me the whole time. She is unsure about me reaching out to her to pet her but much better than when I left when she was hissing at me!!! She LOVES the other cats though!!!

Awwwsome. Sounds like Chimay is on the right path.

We spent the weekend before Christmas cleaning the villa and trying to trap the raccoon that was building a den under our house. At 5:30am on 12/24, an hour or so before the taxi arrived to take us to the airport, I found him (or more likely, her) snoozing inside the Havahart trap I’d set in the bamboo next to our house, only a few steps from the villa window.

I set the trapped coon aside and spent ten minutes driving a few 2-foot-long rods of rebar into the ground to block her hole. That complemented the 25 rods I’d already driven into the ground on either side of the hole. Then I laid cut bamboo stalks behind the rebar to form a wall, dumped a wheelbarrow full of dirt on top and packed it down, and capped the 8-foot rebar barrier with two heavy planks and cinder-block slabs.

When I was done I rapped on the cage to make sure the groggy coon was awake, then opened the door. She took off like a shot into the bamboo. We headed to the airport relieved that we were less likely to come home to a pregnant raccoon under our house, whose smell alone would drive Della (our Treeing Walker Coonhound) nuts all winter.

Our week in Santa Fe was great, as always. We snowshoed unbroken powder in the woods at well over 11,000 feet, hiked across five canyons on a cloudless day to the ruins of an Anasazi pueblo on the Pajarito plateau, hung out with resident and visiting friends, and drank lots of hoppy beers, good wine, and to-die-for margaritas. We’ll post a shot or two once Martha downloads what’s in her camera.

I guess that means we’re officially recharged and ready for furballs. So we picked up seven yesterday afternoon, along with a well-fed tabby mom-cat named Angel.

Though Angel is still keeping the milk-bar open, all seven kittens are weaned and well into the romping and wrassling stage. They conquered the villa high ground within minutes of their arrival.

Six of the kittens belong to Angel. The seventh is an older black kitten named Jayden, who was happy to be integrated into Angel’s brood. (Sorry for the weird lighting and lame pix – the battery on our normal camera died so I grabbed Martha’s pocket camera, which can’t keep up with kittens.)

Two of Angel’s kittens are tortie sisters with distinct markings, one is a dark female tabby with medium hair, and the other three are lookalike brown tabbies, two girls and one boy. Luckily the weights of this last trio differ enough that we can distinguish the two females, if only by scale.

And since we brought this pack home on 1/1/13, we’re thinking of calling them the Lucky 13s, and naming the individual kittens after various lucky talismans and charms. But that’s as far as we’ve gotten, so we hope we’ll find some name suggestions on the Comments page!

filed by: TS

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