Collars, Thanksgiving

Some things I neglected to write about in yesterday's megapost:

I. Fight the Power

Mango made an escape from the house just before I left for The Hague. He leapt from a box to an awning window about five feet off the ground, latched his claws into the window screen, pulled it out of frame, and then scrambled out the window. After hunting for him in the house, I found him casually sauntering up the stairs to the porch.

The orangies do have microchips. But this made us think more about them getting out, and we'd definitely like them to be identified by anyone who picks them up, so that they don't think they have a friendly new orange kitty that they can take home. So we ordered them collars from the same place that we got Lucy and Callisto collars just before we moved. Nice leather colors with quick-release collars to ensure they don't strangle themselves. And their name and my phone number printed on a metal plaque on the collar. (I vaguely recall talking about getting Callisto a tag saying, "I DO NOT BELONG OUT. CALL MY PEOPLE." or something similar. Did we get that with the collar? I don't remember.)

Anyway, the collars arrived a day or two after my return from the Netherlands.

And they've been absolute failures.

Mango learned to get his collar off almost immediately. We're not sure exactly what he does: get his paw under it, get his teeth under it, something. But he's just sitting there with the collar, and there's sudden movement, and then the collar is sitting next to him, popped open. For a while, I tried to put it back on every time he took it off, but it keeps getting lost when he takes it off during the night. At this point I haven't seen it in a week.

Elmer also learned to get his collar off, and then he chewed on the clasp so that he broke it. So it didn't close reliably any more.

Mango's is still around the house somewhere; Elmer's has been thrown out. Sigh.

All Lucy did was scratch at her color for a few weeks, so it looks ... well, I think it looks very rugged and Kimberly things it looks like crap. But at least she still has her ID. The orangies may need to instead depend on their microchips.

II. When The Lights Go Down in the City

We have our tickets for our holiday vacation: we'll be going back to the Bay Area for Thanksgiving this year.

We had such a great time at Christmas last year that I at least was tempted to repeat that, but we decided to switch it up, and instead spend a Thanksgiving meal in San Martin (and then visit friends in the Bay Area afterward). So, that's in less than a month already! But I'm looking forward to it.

That also means that we'll get to spend Christmas with our own tree and our own lights in our home, which is nice. And Kimberly points out that'll give us more opportunity to prevent the orangies from destroying the tree.

(They're still such rambunctious, destructive kittens, even though they passed their first birthday the day I left for the Netherlands!)

With any luck, our week in the Bay Area won't be as cold and wet as it was last year either.