Jackie and Jack (Don't Talk Back!)

It's been a full night and fuller day since the second jab went in.  I decided to record my mid-morning reaction status in verse, based on the brand I received:

 ♫I am the very model of a Moderna recipient
It all went well but side effects have now become incipient
The chills are here, the headache's mild, the symptom's mostly lethargy
But temperature is fine and no reaction to an allergy
The workers at the pharmacy were kind and quite professional
They processed all my forms and then we entered the confessional
The stab was brief, the bandage stuck, I even got a sticker
And then drove home for 90 minutes,  glad I got no sicker
So thanks to Joe and Anthony for making it convenient-
I am the very model of a Moderna recipient! ♫

I lasted at work until an outside appointment at noon, then returned briefly to finalize the filing process for that client and get a few other things out. By 2 or so, the chills were still there, I seemed a little warm, so I headed out for some attempted nappage. A couple of hours later, I had a workout scheduled, but a relatively short one and the temp, by then, was back under 98.6F where is almost always has been during this.  I got through it, a Wegmans and Kohls run, and we finally got to the end of Serpico tonight, which we've been working on for several evenings.

We've also been getting ready for a new four-legged arrival:



Meet Jack. We will, on Sunday afternoon, but we've been approved to take him home with us.  I'll give you two posts about him, and others we encountered recently since deciding to reopen the home to a third young cat after the unfortunate passing of Boz and the much more fortunate demise of Evil Cat.  I linked to this New Yorker piece from earlier this week about the joys of trying to wend one's way through rescue organizations, and added these comments:

Yes, now that Evil Cat is reduced to yowling at squirrels from inside her ashy box, we've been looking for a third cat again. We may have found one, but it hasn't been easy.  Rescue sites are inconsistent, big on "don't call us we'll call you," and Eleanor has seen "adoption fees" as high as 800 bucks for an in-demand breed.

I once applied to a dog rescue that was not far off from the New Yorker spoof. "VE vill contact you vith the dog of OUR choice once your security clearance has been approved. YOU vill meet the dog ven and vere ve tell you to, und you vill either take it home after paying our exhorbitant adoption fee or VE vill banhammer you from ever applying again. Und you vill LIKE it!"

We didn't get that dog.  This, meanwhile, was Eleanor's post about the process from yesterday morning, right after I got on the road to Rochester for a few work things but mainly the second shot:

Ray has posted about this, but I have something to say too.  I took Boz's death hard, and although I may be ascribing feelings to Bronzini that he doesn't have, I believe he'd enjoy having someone his own age to pal around with.  So I've been looking.

I finally thought I'd found someone, a brother and sister who are clearly bonded.  They'd been on the Petfinders website for at least a few weeks.

As soon as I expressed an interest, they were labeled UNAVAILABLE.  The owner of the agency reached out to me to see what I was looking for.  She sent me several pictures, none of which clicked.  She was most fond of, as she explained to me, a group of triplets, all black and white.  Yikes.  It was a stretch to think of two, but three young cats, added to our household?  Um, no.  Plus, our two present cats are all-black.  Our dog is black with a few other touches of color.  The Evil Cat we just put down was a tuxedo.  I didn't want another black and white cat!  By the way, anyone who's younger, perhaps you'll understand when I say as an older person whose eyesight isn't what it used to be, a dark-colored cat is easier to trip over.

I've kept in touch with Kathy, a volunteer who helped us adopt Bronzini and Boz.  I've asked her to keep a lookout for an orange boy. 

I started looking at cats living farther away from Buffalo.  As Ray noted, the range of adoption fees is nuts.  People are free to say animals are exotic, even when the pictures don't seem to support this, and charge as much as $800 a pair.  Other animals clearly have something cool in their heritage, but it's not indicated in their bios.

Then there's the caveats.  There's diabetes, FIV, and other things to take into account.  There are cats that don't get along with other cats, cats who don't like dogs, children, loud noises, cats who want to be the only cat in the house, you name it.

There's human boundaries to deal with.  The Canadian/American border is closed, but a significant portion of who shows up on a search based in Buffalo is, you guessed it, from Canada.  Sigh.

The bios range all over the place, too. Some are creative, some are bare bones.  I don't know if the animal was a stray or was surrendered when its owner died or was no longer able to take care of it.  When I started to think about what I'd been told about one cat - that she's about 6 years old - I wondered, how did they know?  Has she been hanging around someone's horse farm in central New York, and they just decided to care about her well-being now?

One cat we're seriously considering was adopted last summer, and returned to the rescue group a couple of weeks ago because he bit someone.  They're pretty sure it was provoked.  We're all about forgiveness, so we expressed our interest (he's the right age and color). Whoops! Suddenly he was unavailable, but the human involved said he's not dog-friendly anyway.  Then last night, she said he's available again - the other application fell through - but there's the dog thing.  Except maybe not, because she admitted that they really don't know - if he's even been around a dog!  So they're looking into that issue for us.

Can we talk about the policies/procedures of the rescue/sheltering organizations?  Some seem to operate on what I call the sales technique of throw-it-against-the-wall-see-if-it-sticks.  They're so eager to place animals that they're not overly concerned if it's a good fit for the human.  See the aforementioned trio of black and white kids.

Then there's the rescue group that has a website - great - but whoever wrote the code was a little sloppy.  So, after I submitted an application, I got an email saying I was pegged as a reference for the individual submitting that application.  Yeah, me.  We got it straightened out, and three friends kindly responded, but...?

Then a woman from that group asked if she could call and interview me.  Which she did.  It was kind of aggravating, to feel like I had to stick close to my phone - I have a lot going on around here, and I'm not in the habit of gluing myself to it - but I get that these people put a lot of time and energy into what they do.  The interview went well, and at the end, she said we were excellent candidates.  But there's four other applications for the same cat, she has to interview all of them, and we'll hear on Friday most likely.  I suspected, and Ray said he thinks too, that they're trying to make sure that the animals they've got don't end up in a lab somewhere.

So here we are.  Waiting for results in the interviewing process on a little guy rescued from Tennessee.  Waiting to hear back from the central New York people about their take on the dog issue.  If neither of those works out, there's the maybe-6-year-old, but how do we know - still a few questions on her.

Then there's a cat who sounds cute.  She's right here in good old Buffalo.  Except there's not a lot of info on the website about her.  And she's living in a cat café.  So, if I want to see her, I have to pay eight dollars to spend an hour with her in the café.  I told Ray I imagine it's like dating a stripper.  Everybody else is there for the show, while you want something longterm.  Oh, and there's a cat cam, operating when the café is closed, so I've spent way too much time trying to see her.  Almost creepy.  Certainly funny.

That was where things stood when I started to head for home all Moderna'd up last night. Around the halfway point, I got a text that the "little guy rescued from Tennessee" had been approved for us. That would be the Jack you see above. Almost the same age as Bronzini, very affectionate, good around other cats and even dogs.  He's fostering at a Rochester home. I almost flipped an illegal U-turn to head back to the city on the spot to try to claim him, but between not having a carrier in the car and the side effects already starting to set in, we put it off until Sunday.  The adoption fee is much more reasonable and will go toward their efforts to get kittehs out of high-kill shelters.  He's fixed, all shot up and chipped.  The little guy here will probably snit for a few days but we think he will eventually be smitten; Zoey the older cat tolerates him and even plays occasionally, so what's one more? And the dog will be scared to death of him like she is all the kitzels she runs across. Wuss.

"Jack" is primarily short for Sparrow, with a hint of Daniels thrown in since he's from Tennessee. But of course the Captain Jack we'll be hearkening back to is Harkness, who I've actually met in real life, not far from a Maryland town called Cockeysville:



Shore Leave 2015. And yes, that's a cup from Dickey's barbecue gathered en route.  Always try to make the convention guests feel welcome, yo.

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Off to sleep now, to see how long these symptoms last.