i think i've been part of YT long enough now to introduce my two kitties
the first two pictures are of sootsy. he has an interesting rescue story.. my brother in law used to work as a maintenance man at an apartment complex. while he was working he heard a loud mewing coming from one of the drains in the ground, and upon taking a peek with a flashlight discovered a little black kitten down there.. the only thing we can figure is a stray cat around the area had a litter of kittens, and one of them fell down the drain. (unless the previous owner of the kitten threw him down the drain.. something that saddens me to think about, but it's a possibility). he managed to loop some rope around the kitten and pull him up, and afterwards he rushed the kitten to me.. i still haven't really figured out why, maybe because he knew i would save him. his fur was slick with black oil and he was covered with fleas. someone has also put bologna down the drain.. probably to feed him, but all it did was attract a hoard of ants that bit him unmerciful. i did my best to wash the oil and fleas off of him with dawn dish soap, and also offered food and water but he wasn't interested. i went to bed that night praying that he would survive the night.. and when he did, i rushed him to the vet first thing in the morning. his vet said that he was covered with enough fleas that if they had gone untreated, he would have died from blood loss. he also had ringworm and intestinal worms. several nasty sulfur baths and hundreds of dollars in vet bill later, and i finally had a healthy kitten. of course i couldn't give him up for adoption after all we'd been though.. so he came into my home to stay. i named him sootsy after the superstition that black cats are bad luck. i said that, after surviving his ordeal, there was no way he was an unlucky black cat.. he was simply covered in soot. i also wanted a name that would work for both genders, because for the first couple month of his life, he was nothing but a little ball of fur, so we didn't know what sex he was.. even the vet couldn't tell! it wasn't until he was older that his boy bits became more obvious.
the next pictures are of bitty.. her story is much less sad and dramatic. my mom's friend had a litter of barn kittens, and we had been wanting another cat for a while.. so of course, we couldn't resist picking her up. sootsy is very big as far as cats go (vet thinks he may be part maine coon due to size and features, but can't be sure), so when we first brought bitty home, she could stand right underneath him without even crouching down. we would all croon "aww, look at that itty bitty kitty", and that's where her name came from.. it just sort of stuck. she also answers to "little bit", "tiny kitty", and more recently, "be nice to that puppy".
whew.. i didn't intend for this post to be such an earful!
thanks for reading