Frankie has always been fascinated by squirrels. I think he likes how easily they climb trees and wants to be just like them.
The other day he jumped up onto a tree in our yard.
I had to hold Frankie back from climbing higher into the tree.
The next day he was at it again. This time he chose a tree in the vacant lot in front of our house. Technically, the front of our house is the side opposite the driveway.
I hope he doesn’t escape at our new home, or we may have to call the fire department to get him out of a tree.
Frankie’s desire to go for walks has not diminished since we moved to our new home. What has diminished is what he considers his territory. I think he believed the entirety of our old neighborhood to be his. I was always picking him up and turning him around to prevent us from wondering too far from home.
Now he seems content to stay relatively close to home. We live on a corner lot next to a primary road running through the neighborhood. The back of the house is on a short, dead-end street. Our homeowner’s association consists of only six houses. We also each own a sixth interest in the large empty lot in front of our homes (see below).
Here is Frankie on a recent walk. So far, he has stayed on our short street or explored the empty lot. As you can see, he is already quite comfortable.
Here is a picture of the area I’m talking about. Our house has a checkmark. We typically Go out the back door by the street and walk past a few houses, sometimes to the end before turning around. We then walk around our house to the vacant lot, explore that for a while, and return home to the front door.
As we were preparing to move, my wife and I went through a lot of our stuff to decide what was worth keeping and what we should dispose of. I found the folder that we got when we adopted Chris. The date on the folder said 3/10/09.
I had estimated Chris to be about six months old when we adopted him, so I always celebrated his birthday on May 14, but I need to reevaluate that. Now that I think about it, I remember him being listed as five months old when I first met him, but a lot of time elapsed between that first meeting and when we adopted him on the fourteenth of November. It seemed like a month but the earliest photo I have of him is from early October and that was at least a week, maybe more after I met him. Also, I don’t know how much time had elapsed since someone wrote his age on his pen at PetSmart.
When I first saw the date on his folder, I thought it was an intake date, which would make him much older than I thought since he was in a shelter in Florance before being transferred to Myrtle Beach. After looking at his other records, I think maybe that is his real birthday or perhaps an estimated birthday.
If anyone can read this handwriting, please let me know.
The record above shows he was neutered on July 16. I read that kittens can be neutered as early as eight weeks but generally, they wait until they are four to six months old. If he was born on March 10, this date would make sense. The records also seem to indicate he was not captured as a feral kitten but belonged to a person. The name Marcia appears on the document instead of the name of a shelter. If Marcia was his person, I wonder what happened to her? I know Chris was adopted from the shelter and returned after one day because he was too annoying, but it seems Marcia had him for at least a month. I can’t imagine she would give him up at that point because he was annoying. Perhaps she got sick. I guess I will never know.
Update: After posting I decided to look up the name and learned she is listed as an agent of Care a Lot Rescue in Florance, SC. I thought about contacting them but the last record I could find for them was from 2013. I don’t know how to find them other than the address I have on the receipt. It might have been a small organization operated out of a home.
I took a video of Frankie and Floki when we got to our new home on Thursday, but I have had no time to post it until now.
Some of the stuff in the way was destined for the cats’ room but, for obvious reasons, we couldn’t put them in there until the movers were gone and the door was closed.
We closed on our new house a week and a half ago and moved in the day after Christmas. The actual process of preparing for the move started more than six weeks ago. Since we were downsizing, we spent much time getting rid of stuff. I call it a home enema because you get rid of a lot of . . . uh . . . stuff when you move.
I bet I made ten trips to donation centers. We also rented a five-by-five storage unit that we filled to the top with stuff going to our house in West Virginia. Even after all that, we barely had enough room in the new house for what we had brought. Considering our new home is a little over a hundred square feet smaller, I feel like one of those hoarders you see on television.
The movers were supposed to be at our house around nine in the morning. At around seven-thirty, Rose said we should lock the cats in the cats’ room, which we had emptied the night before. She worried Floki would hide and escape when the movers were here with the door open. Floki, as you may recall from previous posts, can read minds and immediately ran and hid behind our sectional sofa where we had piled all the stuff from the cats’ room in front of.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, a minute or two later, the movers called and said they would be there soon. We then had a mission to save Private Floki. It wasn’t easy but just before the movers arrived, Floki came out of hiding and Rose grabbed him. He kicked and screamed and twisted like a tornado, but Rose gallantly held on until he was safely locked away. I then put Frankie in the room with him just before the movers arrived.
They seemed relatively calm for a while but after some time Frankie had enough and wanted out.
We rarely closed those sliders, so they were a little hard to move. Also, one slider would catch on the other when it was almost closed, causing that one to open, so we had to leave both open a crack. Frankie discovered that and tried to take advantage of it to no avail.
When we arrived at the new place, we put the cats in the new cats’ room and closed the doors. These doors hung and had no track at the bottom so they could easily be pushed open. We knew that ahead of time and were prepared with some heavy boxes that we had brought on one of our previous four trips to the house, which is about an hour from our old house.
Even so, Frankie still tried to work out a solution for escaping his imprisonment.
Later that day, I took Frankie out the front door for a walk. The side by the road is considered the back. The front has a sidewalk and a large empty lot across from the sidewalk. Our house is on the corner lot.
He seemed apprehensive for a while. He just looked around and smelled the air. Eventually, we walked down the sidewalk past two or three homes before returning. We then walked across the sidewalk to a group of small trees and bushes. There, Frankie took his time smelling every one of them. Eventually, we walked further into the vacant lot where Frankie sat and took in all the sites. We stayed there for a long time. I didn’t want to rush him. I wanted him to remember where his home was and recognize the surrounding area. Unfortunately, I discovered my phone was dead so I couldn’t get any photos.
The next morning, I took Frankie out the back door so he would recognize that area. Unfortunately, across the street to the left, several men were making a lot of noise tearing off a roof. That freaked Frankie out a little, so we never made it out of the driveway. I will try again today.
So far, both our boys seem to be adjusting quite nicely. We brought two perches with us and they like to lie on them and look out the window. I will post pictures of that in the future.
Here is a photo from this day in 2009. It is young Chris on top of Tigger with Abbey in the background.
I know the quality of this photo is bad, but I thought the content was good. I have about twenty potentially great photos from this day, but I obviously had a setting wrong on my camera. Worse, I didn’t shoot them in the RAW format, so they are hard to fix.
Bad Cat Chris 