Weirdly Quiet

Kitten Watch 2024 has been successfully concluded! The tuxedos went back to the shelter this afternoon and all four were big enough for surgery tomorrow.

The house has not been truly foster-kitten-free for many months — at some point during the summer, the shelter ran out of foster homes, so I was doubling and tripling up, so even when I took one litter back to the shelter for surgery, I still had more kittens in reserve. Bottle feeding ten kittens is exhausting. All of my fosters this year survived (thank you luck, metronidazole, and subcutaneous fluids!), so I'm calling the year a kitten raising success.

Anyhow, I celebrated by going to the craft store. I'd intended to just buy one thing, but then I saw they had cardstock on sale. Glitter cardstock! Foil cardstock! I have no idea what I'm going to do with it, but now I own it.

Stats

This morning I looked at the stats for this blog for the first time in years. My all-time most-viewed post is this one: The Only Middle Grade Fiction I'll Ever Write

Frankly, it deserves to be. It's hilarious. That book, written in 7th grade, was the first encouragement I'd had for a while in English class. Middle grade English was not my subject. Yes, I read a lot. Yes, I had a great vocabulary. But diagramming sentences was introduced in an earlier year by a teacher who was a human chalk board scrape — to this day, my brain swerves away. My handwriting (graded!) was never going to be better than legible. Most of our grades were based on homework and I was terrible at organization, so I was failing or close to failing in English for years.

Then I got an A on the book and a handwritten note saying it was really good. Now I'm a full-time author. Amazing how that works, isn't it?

Another Kitten Picture

This is Gianni Purrsace's graduation picture. I feel like I could have taken a better picture, but he decided he would rather jump off the bed and explore under it. So this is what we have. Hopefully it's enough to get people to go to the shelter so he can win them over in person. He is an excellent velcro kitten who has no understanding of personal space, so I doubt it will take long for him to find a forever home.