66 TODAY

To be honest, I don't think birthdays are much of a big deal. After 60 the next big one is the century which I'll be really really surprised if I reach and am not really sure if I want to anyway. However I did think I'd mark today by giving myself a present. This is it.

I've given up the pretense that Arya was available for adoption, taken her off the cats fostered out and moved her to the re-homed list -see the new separate blog for it at- http://catsrehomedarchiveanimalkrackers.blogspot.co.uk/

I know she doesn't look anything special but sometimes you just click with a cat (or a dog or a person or whatever). With her it was a mixture of her friendly affectionate nature, the way she so quickly settled in with my other cats, the fact she'd had a leg broken which was fixed with a surgical pin which had to be removed and shortly after that spayed when she went into heat and in addition has a massive great big scab on her back caused by a flea allergy and been dumped to fend for herself until found by a family who contacted me directly and brought her here and she's only about a year old.  

But she really is the last cat I'm taking in for a long time. As I wrote a couple of days ago, I'm no longer going to foster any more cats. The Fluffy siblings upstairs are getting their second flu jabs on Monday and will be going directly to our re-homing centre after that. They'll be followed by Jeff the calico cat who raised a litter here. I don't think it's likely that the student I got her from in the first place will, despite her good intentions, will be coming back for her and sweet as she is I've just got to draw the line somewhere. So that leaves just Maisie and her three kittens and once they go there'll just be the six permanent residents here.

Maisie and her kittens seem to be doing well and I'll do an update in a week. For the first couple of weeks of their lives kittens are only marginally more interesting than babies -they eat and sleep but don't cry nearly as much.

Just out of mild interest, this is the 101st blog post this year and that's more posts than in all the previous years. I'm not saying this is a good thing as an indicator of how obsessive I'm becoming to exclusion of other kinds of writing I normally enjoy doing. Must think on this further.