Attention, those of you in the Phoenix/ Scottsdale, AZ area residents – two cats who were abandoned by their owners desperately need a safe home, whether it be a temporary foster, or a loving forever home.
ALSO, if you are in northern New Jersey, Eastern Pennsylvania, or that general location, either (or both!) of these cats could be delivered to you later this month, if you’re interested in either (or both!) of these sweet boys. Go read here for more information!
Please help if you can – and please spread the word!
You know you want a Crooked Acres holiday postcard. YOU KNOW YOU DO. You better hurry up, you’ve only got ELEVEN days to get your name and mailing address to me! (And yes, of course I’m happy to send cards to other countries!) Send your name and mailing address to hollydays@gmail.com .
I’ll take names and addresses until December 20th.
If you’d like to send me a card as well (never ever required, but always appreciated – I don’t keep track of who does and doesn’t send a card, I promise!), send it to: Robyn Anderson, PO Box 461, Athens, AL 35612 USA.
Enter to win a copy of this adorable book, here! You can enter ’til 3 pm Sunday. I’ve got two copies to give away, so your chances are good! Again, go here to enter.
What camera did you use for those closeups? They’re great. And what kind of non-electric heating pad do you use for the kitties? I think you mentioned it recently, but I can’t find the entry.
The camera is a Sony SLT-A55; I bought it after I dropped my A100 a few months ago. (I swear dropping it was an accident, but I sure do love my new camera!)
And the non-electric (self-heating) bed for the cats is called a “Slumber Pet Thermal Cat Mat“; I got a bunch of them off of Amazon and they’re quite popular with the cats! I should add, as a side note, that the thermal mats make a crinkly noise when the cats step on them (I think they’ve got Mylar or something similar inside – it reflects the cat’s body heat which is what keeps them warm). It doesn’t bother my cats, but keep it in mind because it might bother more sensitive kitties.
When I see your photos of Rock Star, Tina Turner always comes to mind.
“What’s cluck got to do, got to do with it?”
I cannot watch Sons of Anarchy! It’s a great show . . . but my blood pressures goes up 200 points and I find myself holding my breath . . . . um . . . . lol
TELL me about it! We just watched the season finale and I swear I thought I was going to have a stroke!
What kind of geese is Fred looking at? I’m considering getting a pair myself, to act as guard dogs for my poultry. I have a psychopathic neighbor kid climbing the fence and messing with them, and while I am working on locks, camera, ect., I’d also like to fix her wagon with geese. I can’t use my dogs as guard animals or I wouldn’t have any poultry left, and I happen to have a friend with more geese than she wants. I think they’re Chinese, but I’m not sure.
Fred reports that he’s looking at Embden or Pilgrim geese. Though I still don’t particularly want a goose, I did read that Pilgrim geese are relatively calm and sweet-natured (unlike whatever the hell kind of goose it was that bit me on the ASS several years ago when we were feeding ducks and geese), so I could probably live with one of those.
I hope that you get some geese that are particularly good at biting kids on their asses, and I further hope that you are able to document the said ass-biting to share with us all. 🙂
Wow, Elwood is a uh… um… thick cat, isn’t he?
Jake Sprat can eat no fat, his bro can eat no lean. Heh. Actually, although Elwood is a really big cat (and getting bigger by the second, it seems), I really don’t see him eating all that often. He’s not nearly as aggressive when it comes to food as the much skinnier Jake is. Of course, Jake runs and plays more than Elwood does, so perhaps we need to get Ellie Belly on an exercise regimen.
The Grinch. That’s who Jake reminds me of in your banner.
(I was 9 years old when I spotted the resemblance between the Grinch and my father. Every time we point it out to someone new the response is always the same: A puzzled look, a slight gasp and widening of the eyes, and a hasty and embarrassed, “Oh, now, that’s silly” type of denial, followed by frequent sidelong and trying-to-be surreptitious glances. We were banned from watching The Grinch for two or three years because he’d get so bent at how funny we thought it was. So, the moral of this comment is, your cat looks like my father. I’m so sorry.)
I’m pretty sure I speak for everyone when I say I would like to see a picture of your father, please. (But we also understand that perhaps that might get us ALL banned from watching the Grinch, so maybe not!)
Ok…you seem to have knowledgeable and intelligent readers…anybody out there know where I can buy…
(1) a heated water bowl…something solar that does not require being plugged in.
(2) a heated shelter…again, something that does not require being plugged in…my feral cat feeding station is in the middle of a field with no access to power.
Any suggestions would be appreciated : )
Oldcat has this suggestion: Maybe what you need is a battery powered weatherproof converter that gives you normal power in the field. Then you can just get normal outdoor pet items.
Maybe campers have that kind of stuff.
I myself have no ideas, but I know you guys out there must have some suggestions – we’re all ears!
Who says you can’t train cats?
The funny thing is that I didn’t actually realize I was training all the cats to go to their different places for snack time. It was just through several days of taking the big Peppers upstairs and not letting the little Peppers in their room, and then putting the little Peppers in the guest bedroom with their snack (and not letting the big cats go in there) that the cats all figured out where they were likely to get their food, and staying there. Kind of neat, isn’t it?
This makes me wonder what each individual kitty sounds like. I picture Alice with a dainty little kitten mew, Miz Poo with a loud but loving meow and Stinkerbelle with a gruff, throaty mrow!
This gives me an idea – I’m going to do my best to get each cat’s meow on video and make one video with each of them meowing!
I can tell you, though, that Alice actually sounds almost exactly like Marty in this video:
Which is why Fred is 100% convinced that Marty and Alice were from the same litter.
Also, if you watch the Snackin’ Time video and forward to one minute and 59 seconds, you’ll hear a high-pitched “Me-ewwww!”, and that’s Stinkerbelle. She has quite the imperious meow, that one.
You’re right about Miz Poo, though – she certainly does have a loud but loving meow!
Robyn, I met a guy named Marty at the vet’s office on Saturday that has 35 cats!! Well — “only” 32, really… he has four of his mom’s on a temporary basis. So, 32 permanent indoor cats, almost all rescued from the street or from abusive situations. He showed me pictures of all the cats on his cell phone (they looked healthy and happy)!! So there you go, another person you can refer to when someone questions how many cats YOU have… hey, it’s definitely not as many as are at Marty’s house!!
(and then)
I just had to correct the above statement, before anyone accuses me of being mathematically challenged. Reading the above, you’d think the cat total should be 36 — but I should have said that Marty has “four of his mom’s animals on a temporary basis”. And the animals from mom consist of 3 cats and 1 dog. So… the cat total is 35 🙂
My newest best friend Marty, you mean?
“How many cats do you HAVE, Robyn?”
“You know, it’s funny you ask that, I was just thinking about my best friend Marty. Would you believe he has 35 cats in his house right now? Boy, I could never imagine having that many cats, but they all seem happy!”
Have you ever noticed that we people who have TOO MANY cats will always qualify the answer? “Well, I HAVE 13 cats, but two of them are outside most of the time and one of them is kind of feral, so she spends all her time on top of the kitchen cabinets and only comes down to eat and use the litter box. Actually, they can all go outside during the day, so it’s not like ::embarrassed laugh:: we have 13 cats inside all the time, because THAT would be complete lunacy!”
I’m still overwhelmed by the care that goes into snacktime at Crooked Acres! (Speaking of which, it was great to see that shy beauty Stinkerbelle in action.) And how many times daily does your dishwasher take a beating?
I only run the dishwasher once a day, at bedtime, believe it or not. I do wash the cats’ snack dishes, too, or if the dishwasher is full, I wash them by hand. Usually they’ll all fit in the dishwasher, though.
My DVR is filled up with all the Walking Dead episodes from this season i haven’t gotten a chance to watch a single one 🙁
Well, don’t be too sad – you’ve got ’til FEBRUARY to catch up. February. Seriously. I object!
Are you or Fred watching American Horror Story? I’m loving that one too.
We watched about half of the first episode. Fred wanted to keep watching it, but I wasn’t feeling it. We may give it another chance at some point. Pretty often, we don’t get into a show when we first watch it, then we give it another chance and end up falling in love with it. Case in point: we didn’t care for Arrested Development when it first came on, and then decided to give it another try once the series ended, and have since watched the entire series at least twice.
Can Newtles Bing BE any funnier??? 😉
This made me LOL. Newtles Bing!
The drawing of the rescue kitty reminded my of this photo from Good Morning Kitten of itty-bitty wittle ‘Stormy’.
Oh my god. So so so so SO CUTE!
What’s the Walking Dead?
Zombies! I’ve never been a huge fan of zombie movies, but I really like this series (which is based on a comic book, or so I hear.)
I like Friends, too. Robyn, why not just buy the dvd’s? or is there no storage space for dvds?
There is storage space for DVDs, but I’m all about the instant gratification. You meant I have to GET OUT the DVD and put it IN the player and then SIT ’til the menu pops up and then CHOOSE the episode? I don’t want to do THAT!
Although I did recently figure out that I could buy the entire series through Amazon and then watch it on my Kindle Fire. I am very tempted.
I have to say thank you. I adopted my cat as a 4 or 5 year old, and so I never got to see her as a kitten. Now I have, because she looks EXACTLY like miss patty! Although in personality she’s more of a Miz Poo. She has no truck for other cats.
::fume::
“She. Is. TOUCHING. ME!”
Miz Poo is no fan of Miss Patty – but you’ll note that Miss Patty is not fazed in the slightest.
Stress runs in the family.
Hanging out in the foster room.
It’s CORBIE TIME!
“What?”
“You can’t move this basket up to the foster room. It’s MINE.”
I may have mentioned in the past that one of the toys we have for the cats is a mink tail. I got several of them from my sister many years ago – someone gave them to her for her cats to play with, and they weren’t interested so she passed them along to me. My cats and fosters always really liked them, would carry them around and growl at the other cats and just basically act like the mink tails were their prey.
So then.
When I got back from Pennsylvania last month, I noticed that the cats had a renewed interest in one of the cat tails, they were playing with it all the time, carrying it around, and so on. But one day I happened to take a close look at it, and. Um.
It’s not a mink tail in that picture with Corbie. It’s a squirrel tail. Apparently, at some point while I was gone, the cats caught a squirrel in the back yard and, shall we say, separated it from its tail, and brought the tail inside for super fun playtime.
A squirrel tail, for some reason, grossed me out in a way that the mink tails don’t, and thus I tossed it out the door (the side door, not the back door. They can’t get to it in the side yard.) They were SO mad at me, but they got over it next time snack time came around.
Previously
2010: Internet issues.
2009: I HAVE THE SOLUTION FOR YOU!
2008: Fred laughed and laughed and laaaaaaaaughed, because it’s always funny when someone else is the idiot, isn’t it?
2007: Miss Stinky Seethes.
2006: No entry.
2005: It’s the little things that amuse us, obviously.
2004: Mister Boogers does his Donald Trump impression
2003: FUCKING spam.
2002: Are you an innie or an outie?
2001: No entry.
2000: No entry.
1999: God, the smell.