I have all these awesome photos of Chita Rivera the Obscenely Cute Kitten on my camera and the cord for it is... somewhere in the house... and so I haven't posted anything here in ages because I keep being like no no, I'll get the photos off the camera and then I'll post.
No, I'll post now, and then I'll post again later when I get the photos, and you'll see by the length of time between how long it's been since I last posted, and understand how friggin' slow I am at this crap.

I will update that my BFF Ursula flew in from London on Tues. night and left yesterday morning, and so while she was here to be of assistance, I took Chita to the vet for her first appointment. We went in on Friday morning, and while Chita had been utterly fearless in the car three weeks ago when we got her, she yowled most of the way there this time. (We went to the new vet on Kenmore Ave, so it only took two minutes to get there...)
Inside, there were two waiting rooms, and one had a large agitated giant poodle in it making a racket, and the other had a quiet sweet-looking small yellow lab, so we went in with the yellow lab. Chita insisted on getting down to explore, including going right over to the poor dog, whose owner had her under pretty good control. Greta was her name, and she sniffed Chita eagerly but was well-behaved and did not try to get closer-- we had to pick Chita up because she was trying to jump over to be nose-to-nose with the dog, and it just didn't seem fair to the poor dog.
Once Greta went in for her check-up, we let Chita loose and she roamed around the whole place. She asked to be let out into the hallway. She ate a kitty treat. She played with the mousie we brought her from home. Then she discovered the high counter with the receptionist on the far side, and wanted badly to be allowed to go into the receptionist's space, but we didn't let her because we are awful people. (The receptionist cooed over how cute she was, of course.)

When we went into the exam room, that dang giant poodle was in the hallway flipping out. So Chita arrived for her examination with her tail puffed out. The vet tech was impressed-- she looked like a squirrel. But she soon settled down and insisted on exploring the exam room, and stuck her head straight into the container they had of dog biscuits.

She weighed 2 and a half pounds, and the vet tech in consultation with the vet decided she was precisely twelve weeks old. Which means my sister Fiona wins-- from the photos <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/dragonlady7/733998650/">I posted on Flickr two weeks ago</a>, she estimated that Chita was 10 weeks old.

The vet tech said she was probably the cutest kitten ever, and left, to be replaced by the vet, a big soft-spoken bear of a man who picked Chita up and cradled her like an infant to listen to her heart and lungs for a good two or three minutes. At first Chita was content to lie there, paws in the air, but after a while she got bored and started playing with the tube of the stethoscope.

The vet pronounced her absolutely perfectly healthy except for a minor case of roundworms.

What gets me is that unlike many stray kittens, she was so obviously raised well. When we got her, she had obviously been well-socialized, and had never been malnourished or abused. She already was good with people and other cats, and even the worms and fleas were only mild-- I've seen so much worse, actually in every kitten we've ever had. So someone raised her lovingly to the perfect age for a kitten to be weaned and adopted, and then dumped her by the side of a road! It seems so backwards. Of course it's better than the usual, when they're left to die far too young to survive on their own, but still.

So she's perfect-- she even tests negative for feline Lukemia, which was an expensive test (it was like $30) but I just thought that it was best to be absolutely sure. You can give a cat a pretty good life for a while with various of those terminal cat diseases, if it's an indoor solo cat, but you have to know about it.

So we took our absolutely perfect kitten home, and didn't let Ursula put her into her suitcase and take her home. But I've promised to regularly post photos of her.
Starting now with the webcam ones already on the computer. ;)



Kisses!

a while ago


Taken just now over my shoulder.