Plans for the future

August 8, 2021

I have not written for awhile: things were very busy, but in a good way. We have made some nice break-throughs. Lots of touching and lifting and handling the kittens, with complete approval of Mitsy. Playing with Mitsy has now become a routine on most days. It depends on how busy the day has been, but she loves the feather stick.

Yesterday my rescue contact at Ninth Life Cat Rescue Ontario came to visit. It was really nice. She confirmed that we have extremely healthy and big kittens. Yay!

Sacrificing a room to the cat family

We plan transferring the family into our spare bedroom. We are currently preparing for that. It takes quite a bit of reshuffling. There are so many things to think about…. It is a big job. We decide to do this because the two crates are not the best place for playing and socialising. Since we live in a rental, we cannot remove the carpet. And to protect it, we order a piece of high quality carpet from End of the Roll, with a leak proof backing. It will go on top of the existing carpet as an extra layer of protection. Let’s hope the kittens know how to use the litterbox by the time we move them… I don’t want this to become a kitten pee-mess…

Adjustments to the windows…

Keeping the room cool

The other issue with the room is that it is stinking hot: it is in the sun all afternoon and some idiot architect of suburbia-cookie-cutter-homes thought it would be a smart idea to equip that room with huge windows. To let the sun in…. How ridiculous. You can tell that all of these houses have the same design and it is not adjusted to where the sun hits it. It is a nice room in winter, of course, but it is so much easier to heat a bedroom, than to keep it cool when the sunbeams are thundering down on it. Our house does not have the fancy window trimmings, just ordinary blinds. It’s not ideal but it is the only room we can use.

Keeping the room secure

It does not have sliding windows, but big units, half of which open to the outside. Which means we cannot leave it open (even without kittens) unless we are home, for security reasons. We have heat- and light-blocking curtains, but none of those can be used with kittens in the room. They could demolish all of them as they get bigger. So how do we get it to not become too hot AND secure for 7 cats? I board up 3/4 of the huge windows with foam board. I cannot use screws even if I wanted to, because these are plastic window units. Yuc. I miss European houses at this moment, with their brick and real wood structures! Although maybe the maintenance free windows are also becoming more common there…  I don’t like them. They force me to use double-sided tape. I found a really good brand, that will not damage the materials, but it is a lot of work now and even more work to take it all down after the kittens have gone.

The secret of Canadian summer…

In the basement the cats have had a steady 21 degrees. We put a fan on top of the AC vent in their new room: good move. With the fan, and the open vent, we check the temperature and it seems to stay on 25 Celsius in the room, but there are afternoon peaks that go well over 30 closer to the window. I am guessing that the cats will be more inclined to look through the window at night time, when it has cooled down. Funny story: an acquaintance from abroad asked me the other day where the hell I live, what with summer temperatures of well over 35 Celsius in summer… Ontario South summers are the best kept secret of Canada!

We cannot open the window unless we are there, for obvious reasons (escapes, falls from the roof etc.) and we also do not want the kittens to climb in the screens. The screen is on the inside of the window. I manage to block it as well as I can and now all I can do is pray for the best.. Worst case scenario means that we have to get a new screen if or when we move out. The kittens will not be able to escape, as long as we make sure the window is closed when we leave. It will become a bit stuffy, but there is not much I can do about that. On a lot of the hot summer days opening it will not be an option anyway, because the outside temperature is higher than the inside temperature. I think we will set up an old baby-security door in the door opening. because I am predicting that when we enter the room in the morning for food and cleanup, there will be a feline crowd waiting for us in the door opening and we do not want these guys, accidentally or on purpose, to get loose in the house!

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