Thanks to everyone who submitted name ideas for Athena’s Olympians, both through the comments page and by e-mail. As is often the case, we ended up with many more good ideas than we have kittens to apply them to.

After plenty of waffling, we decided to stick with gold-medal winners, open it up to both past and present Olympians, and choose names that were either instantly recognizable or at least of current interest and/or not easily mistaken for non-Olympian names.

Got that?

So we chose:

Bolt (as in the Jamaican sprinter Usain, the world’s fastest human);

Flojo (aka Florence Griffith-Joyner, who died of epilepsy at age 38 in 1998 and still holds the womens 100m and 200m world records);

Spitz (as in Mark, who won seven swimming golds in 1972 and set the standard for Michael Phelps), and…

Rhodee, which is our pronunciation-friendly spelling for Kim Rhode, an American skeet shooter who won gold in London a few days ago.

OK, this one may be a stretch, but Martha thinks it’s cute, and we both agree that Kim Rhode makes really cool Olympic pins.

To see which of Athena’s kittens got which name, you can mouseover the thumbnails at the top of this page.

So now that we have the names, what’s the news?

Uhh, not much… on the kitten front at least.

Athena is chowing and nursing like a goddess should, and her tribe is packing on a few tenths of an ounce a day. So we’re cheering from the sidelines with no worries at this point.

Actually, we haven’t spent that much time watching the Olympians perform, because we now have a canine fosterling in the house. Homeward Trails is overloaded with adoptable cats and dogs, so we offered to take one or two of the latter for a few weeks.

And less than 24 hours later, I was on my way to pick up Scooby, who had just been pulled from a shelter in West Virginia, where he’d landed a day or two earlier after someone abandoned him in a park beside the New River.

Scooby might be the most affectionate and people-oriented dog we’ve ever met. When we’re downstairs, he’s always either milling around beside us or standing with his front paws on our knees. He’s a polar opposite to Chase and Khola (i.e. effervescent, submissive, and small), which makes him pretty easy to handle. But he’s also only a year old, and definitely needs training, both on-leash and off.

We hear Scooby is cat-friendly, and when I carried Reggie downstairs to meet him, Scooby wagged his tail. But Reggie (probably remembering Chase and Khola), wanted no part of a close encounter and fled upstairs as soon as I opened the door.

So like the Olympian kittens, Scooby is a work in progress.

filed by: TS

8 comments
previous	entry 575 of 870	next	go to entry: