So, to make a short story long: One of the kids at the dojo was collecting pet stuff for a local animal rescue as his Eagle Scout project, and I donated many cans of moist cat food which we had on hand back when we fed Roark moist cat food because he had bad teeth and only seemed to get sustenance from licking the gravy; he passed away in 2023, but the cans of food were good through July of this year, so they would go to good use.
I guess June is pet rescue month or something because KY3 has been running stories about local rescue organizations, and when I saw the one to which I’d indirectly donated, I clicked through to its Web site and its associated Purina Petfinder site–jeez, Petfinder has been around for twenty years now–it was coming online when I was leaving my position with the digital marketing agency which handled some NPPC accounts but did not get the Petfinder gig.
So I clicked through, and I saw a black kitten:
I posted on Facebook that no one should let my beautiful wife see a picture of this kitten. Which is a little facetious, as she is the one insisting we’re topped up on cats at the moment whereas I, reading a book about people getting kittens and cats, think it might be amusing to have kittens again.
I even started testing names for the guy. I started with Dickens because that’s in the title of the book I’m reading.
Last night, in a weak moment, she said, “I call your bluff,” basically giving me permission to get that cat.
So I hit the rescue agency’s Petfinder again, and I looked for a kitten pal for him, and saw an orange tabby kitten:
As we just had conversations about orange tabbies being mostly males. And because it would be best probably to have a pair of kittens who could romp in the office during the integration period. And just in case it was permanent.
But then I looked at the process for adopting the kittens, and I thought, Oh, it’s one of those rescues.
It starts with an application, and then includes a house visit to see if your house is right for the kitten, and has a codicil that if you ever divest yourself of the cat, you need to return it to the same rescue, and…. Well, undoubtedly, a contract with lots of fine print.
You know, back in our Casinoport days, not long after we married, we looked at various rescue organizations to get a dog (these were pre-Petfinder days), and we contacted a rescue organization for golden retrievers, and someone from the organization brought Mallory, an adult dog with some health issue or another, to our house and shared the contract with us. I looked it over, and the fine print (it was all fine print) included exorbitant penalties–$1,000 for not telling them the dog died six years after adoption, for example–and despite this contract, we wanted to adopt Mallory, but the organization had already promised her to another family even when they brought her over to our house, so we could not. But, wait! A while later, they indicated the other family had balked, so we could have Mallory and her various codicils and addenda. We declined.
So, yeah, no.
The strays we take in don’t require an attorney to review the paperwork, so I guess we’ll wait for another cat to show up. And one will.
Which is a shame: The Artful Dodger and Twist would have been excellent names for this pair.
2 thoughts on “She Called My Bluff, And I Folded”