EIGHT DAYS A WEEK

That's how I sometimes feel how much I can do. While, admittedly, late evening calls are rare, they do happen and one happened last week. I was watching a DVD and drinking wine around ten o'clock in the evening which is, to be truthful, a pretty regular occurrence when the phone went. The daughter of one of our regulars had seen a very thin kitten scavenging beside the bins at Macdonalds just over half a mile away down the road. While a long way from being drunk I'd be lucky to pass a breathalyser and I never under any circumstances drive after I've been drinking. So I told this lady if she could catch the kitten, I'd take it in. She went, checked, didn't see it, so next morning I drove along there and spoke to a maintenance guy on site. He'd been working since four in the morning and hadn't seen the kitten though he had seen a couple of foxes. Knowing of Animal Krackers, he said if he did come  across he'd let us know. But he never did.

Sunday morning is usually quiet but not Sunday gone. I got a call from a lady who needed to re-home a cat she'd more or less been dumped with. I knew about this one as Andrea had had hoped Elizabeth our new fosterer would take it on but I'd got in first with the four kittens. Feeling guilty, I contacted Elizabeth about it and she kindly agreed to take it on.

Then Carole rang in desperate need of food but there was a problem that, even though I had enough for her to last the day, the van was in use all tomorrow and later this morning by Susan. It seemed insoluble until Susan agreed to delay her use of the van.

So it was off to Pallion, an area of Sunderland not far from the river to pick up the cat, which turned out to be a pretty little thing, and then to Elizabeth's house at Dalton le Dale a few miles south. The four not really wild kittens she was fostering for us were coming along nicely, all four now playing together and purring when cuddled, so she took the cat cage they were living in, leaving free them to roam the spare room, and placed it in her conservatory. The kittens, although they'd recently been wormed, correctly so as results proved, they stil had a touch of diarrhea and we're waiting for sample results. Anyway, the cat, Tilly by name, was placed in the cage and is off for neutering tomorrow morning.  As you can she's very pretty but nervous -apparently she's had a bit of a rough time of it- and it's taking a few days for her to settle in.

And after that, the trip to Asda to buy cat food and empty the pet food donation bin, on to Sainsburys to empty theirs and off to Carole's to deliver it. 

Confession time. We haven't re-homed a cat for three weeks and we're getting desperate. We just can not take any more cats in. It's a shame because we have a lot of lovely friendly cats, almost all under two years of age, who would make great pets. Here are some of them.