Friday, August 11, 2023

Knitting with a Kitten: Petfinder Post

Well, first of all, kittens. If you can't adopt these kittens, share their photos with people who can. 

Here are this week's picks of the cutest kitten photos in the Eastern States. If you live in a Central or Western State, Petfinder has a page for you too; the site tends to behave badly when the same computer is used to visit a lot of different pages in one day. If you live outside the United States, your country should have a network similar to Petfinder, which is US-specific (but shelters near the borders may allow international pet adoption). 

Zipcode 10101: Morning, Moon, and Mabel from New York 


What caught my attention on the main page is that, after describing the three gray tabbies as identical, someone proceeded to mix up their pictures. This is the photo that identifies the kittens in terms of their social roles (though no claim is being made that they're social cats. They are being trained to wear collars so people can tell them apart if they decide to act out of their usual characters. Morning is the one who pushes forward and demands attention, even shoving the others aside to get extra snuggles. Moon has a sligtly darker coat. Mabel is the one who sits back and watches. 

Mabel? Does everyone remember The Pirates of Penzance?

"Yes,'tis Ma-a-a-a-a-a-abel!
Poor catless one! Though we were surely strays,
We're here to care! Do not despair,
Poor catless one!
Poor catless one! If purrs and cuddles like ours
Can help you find true peace of mind,
Why take them! They are yours!"

 Zipcode 20202: Terp from DC 


He would have been another lonely and lonesome Traveller, like Serena's beloved adoptive brother. Like Traveller and Serena, he originally had siblings, but lost them. Then he found himself in a foster home with other kittens, and they've been bouncing and poucing, snuggling and snoozing, together ever since. The foster family would consider separating him from his foster sisters. 

"They say they'd let me go, to live with someone I don't know,
Leave my friends behind? What is the matter with their mind?
Don't be cruel to a heart that's true.
My friends and I are small! You'll find room for us all.
To watch us as we play will brighten up your day!
Don't be cruel to a heart that's true."

I don't know that he looks more like Elvis than he does like Greivis (Vasquez), but if you'd rather watch a cat play than listen to one sing, adopt Terp and his foster sisters as a purr-ball. 

Zipcode 30303: Athena from Atlanta     



She's one of a four-kitten litter. They've been called Athena, Hera, Hermes, and Zeus. I think Greek "gods" might not be very good role models for cats...whatever, They have some British ancestry and look wider-framed than the average American kitten, even now. Does not mean they'll be hard to keep trim and healthy, but some people will see them as fat, anyway. If not overfed they should stay amusingly chunky but not fat. Athena is actually a pale torbie; if you visit her web page, some of her photos show that part of her coat is pale orange.

Y'know, Georgia shelter staff really making picking the cutest shelter animals within 100 miles of Atlanta an easy job. All I have to do is pick a category and scroll and click through pages until I see a picture that looks like the appropriate kind of animal. This is good, though, when it indicates that shelter staff are too busy caring for and placing the animals to have time to snap great pictures! All four of the Greek-named kittens' pictures looked like cats, which made them exceptionally well done for that page.

We are four kittens, all natives of Georgia,
In search of humans to drive out of their doldrums,
Racing and chasing, bubbling and squeaking,
All over our new homes.
If we pounce on your toes while you are sleeping,
And knock things over because it's fun to break them,
Know, humans, what we're old enough to spare you (from)--
We use a litter box.
If you seek happiness in a home with kittens,
Do not place objects up on shelves or pedestals,
And knit in one place while we're on another place:
This is the Kittens' Rule.

Which leads us into the knitting.

I've been fascinated by this photo I found on HowToMeowInYiddish.blogspot.com: 


Google Lens says it's a real variety of corn called Glass Gem. You can buy seeds at Wal-Mart, which has a photo similar to this one but not identical. Many images posted at "The Meow" are memes that have been kicked around the Internet so long it's hard to guess who posted them first, but this one might be PBird's very own.

I had to knit those colors--especially after going to Wal-Mart and finding five skeins of dark red, blue, and gray mottled "Puzzle" yarn on sale. The yarn, knitted in garter stitch, really looks a bit like the more sedate-looking ears further from the camera. It will make a great stripey blanket with odd bits of black, purple, navy, and also pink, green, aqua, and orange, in between the bands of red, blue, and gray.

And what have the cats to say about all this knitting? Nothing at all. They've seen me naked, or close to it, but they've never seen me knitting.

I used to suspect that the main reason why I was invited to one friend's house was that chasing the ball of yarn from which I was knitting was the one thing that seemed to interest that family's obese Manx cat in exercise. Not that that cat was any more interested in recovering its figure, nor that its humans were more interested in that, than Garfield and his man in the comic strips. If the damage it did to my yarn ever did stir up the cat's metabolism, someone probably overfed it to compensate. 

Then there was the original Samantha-cat I knew, who was seventeen years old and a champion sleeper. I once spent a day recovering from flu, watching that long-ago Samantha, a rather pretty calico but starting to show her age. She slept without moving for four hours, woke, yawned, turned over, and slept another five hours on the other side. Then some of her humans came in. Samantha stood up, sniffed at them, ate a few bits of kibble, used the litter box, and then, as if exhausted by the effort of being on her feet for five minutes, curled up and slept for another four hours. But if I knitted, Samantha would claw and chew at my yarn enough that her primary human complained that I'd tired her out. I would have thought that only a sloth or a hibernating bear could sleep more than Samantha did, but apparently, after the effort of damaging yarn for half an hour, she accomplished that feat.

One day when Magic was about a year old I took out my knitting in front of her. That was the first of a very few times Magic didn't do something I'd asked her to do. She understood so much, and seemed to enjoy showing how much she could understand and obey. She seemed to understand that I wanted her not to grab at the yarn...but she couldn't. She seemed to be saying, "I'll stop, if you want me to stop--but I can't ignore that yarn. That''s something a cat can't do." I can not-pounce-on-the-yarn for this moment but, the next time I see the ball of yarn twitch...I can't help it. If something taps your knee, you can stop yourself kicking the person if you think about it, but you can't stop your foot twitching." 

Rather than humiliate Magic about her cat reflexes, I put away my knitting and just didn't knit in front of her again. Or in front of other scats, either. I learned: Magic loved me. Some cats are capable of self-sacrificing love; a few bestow that love on humans. Magic was one of the few. She might, over time, have been trained not to chase yarn. But it was much easier to train myself to keep my knitting away from her. 

So, when Serena was an office kitten...when she was a tiny kitten who slept in a box, I could knit in the office. During her "wonder weeks" of scampering around the office, I didn't. I kept the yarn in a different room. I never had to try to discourage Serena from grabbing, chewing up, or unwinding balls of yarn. 

Knitting with a kitten chasing the other end of the yarn around the room is cute, but knitting in a different room from the kitten produces more satisfactory results.
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