This continues the Frankie and Floki saga from July 2016. As far as Frankie’s sneezing is concerned, he has been doing that since we adopted him, and he continues to be a big sneezer today. Perhaps whatever allergy he has was acting up at that time.
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.
During our walk yesterday, it started raining, so we came home, but Frankie was not ready to go inside yet. Instead, we hung out under the carport.
We walked past the clubhouse this morning and Frankie noticed that the door was open. Naturally, being the curious cat that he is, he had to see what was going on.
Frankie spent a lot of time on our walk today chasing squirrels. At one point, he cornered one on a palm tree and decided to wait him out.
Unfortunately for Frankie, ten minutes is my limit for standing around staring at a tree.
I took Frankie for a walk Thursday morning. At the time I thought I should get him out there before the weather got bad. Unknown to me at the time the weather wouldn’t get bad for quite a while.
I saw on the map that the storm would pass us at its closest point around 3 p.m. We got a little rain and a little wind before then, but I was surprised by how mild it was. Then Frankie started to annoy me because he wanted to go outside. I never took Frankie for a walk twice in one day, but now, during the peak of the hurricane, he wouldn’t stop annoying me. I caved. I looked at the clock. It was 3:45. I looked out the window, saw the rain had stopped, and decided to take him out again.
At first, he hung around under the carport, not sure what he wanted to do, but then he decided to go.
After a while, the rain returned, so I picked him up and carried him home. He only hissed at me once.
To my surprise, the weather got worse after 6 p.m. By 6:30, the wind was blowing hard. Every ten or fifteen minutes, we would hear a loud bang from a tree branch falling on the roof. My next-door neighbor pointed out a tree across the street that had very large limbs broken off. It seemed just as windy at 9:30 when we went to bed.
In hindsight, three things happened that I didn’t consider. First, the winds trailing the storm are stronger than the winds ahead of the storm. This is because those winds travel across the water where no obstacles can slow them down. Second, the storm got stronger as it went farther north, so it was stronger at 6 p.m. than at 3 p.m. Third, the storm was a little slower moving than predicted.
The next morning, my wife wanted to go to the beach to look for shells, which are plentiful after a storm. We went outside before the sun came up, around 6:45. Even at that time I could see tree branches, big and small, scattered about our yard.
We thought there was a chance we would not be able to get to the beach. Sure enough, several police cars blocked access to the bridge. Later, it occurred to me that they needed to inspect all the bridges before reopening them.
We returned home just as it started getting light. On the way, we saw one home with its carport ripped off and lying on its roof. I took some pictures of the area near our house.
After taking pictures, I pulled some of the bigger pieces of debris from our yard and added them to the pile. I then went inside and found Frankie waiting to go outside.
I picked up Chris’s ashes from the vet today. I wanted to show you, so I took everything out and set it on a cat perch to take pictures.
Frankie jumped onto the perch, so I quickly put everything back in the bag before he knocked it on the floor. He was surprisingly curious about what was in the bag. It was almost as if he could smell Chris or somehow sense it was him. I don’t know.
This is the first time we have ever received the ashes from one of our pets. I plan on bringing him to our house in West Virginia when we go there in the spring. We have a fairly large backyard. I think that would be a good place to spread his ashes.
Frankie encountered a very small lizard Friday morning and quickly became bored with it.
Maybe it wasn’t enough of a challenge for him.
Bad Cat Chris 