• I don’t like strangers traipsing through my apartment. (I could have ended that four words earlier.)
• It’s a pain in the ass to keep my apartment clean like somebody might walk through at any time. I’m a bachelorette, so my messes tend to be pizza boxes and half-finished craft projects, but they’re still bachelor-level messes all the same.
• I’m afraid someone’s going to go into Rowling’s suite and see the poop on the carpet and freak out.

What do those things have in common? They’re all about me. None of them is about the cat. Here’s the only reason that’s worth a damn: I don’t want Rowling going to someplace that doesn’t understand what they’re getting in to. So I’ve built a page all about Rowling, in the hopes that she can go to the perfect forever home. Please share it with anybody you know who might have a lead on a special-needs-suitable locale she could call home.

Meet Rowling.

Friday morning went back to Benton’s House. Cleaned Niblet’s, which is always messy since they have some incontinents. Got to walk Black Jack, which was awesome. We were out for almost an hour and covered around a mile. He almost pulled me straight through a bush when he saw a lizard. Got to brush Buddy, which was sweet. Bob came over and sat in my lap while I did it, so that was even better. Lunch was tasty fettuccine, and then I went over to Quincy House (nee Kitty Motel) for a little mopping, some dishes, folding laundry, and just generally doing my best to out of the caregivers’ way. Got to make some new friends, including Hermes, Tiny Tim, and new, tiny Eliana, all of whom have paralyzed hindquarters and went crazy over a wand toy. And, amazingly, one of the caregivers remembered a photo that I’d sent them of three of the Pahrump kitties sunning. I don’t even remember sending it. It’s not just the animals, but also the amazing humans who do this every day that make volunteering at Best Friends so rewarding. Dinner at the new and quite good Canyon Bistro. I’d recommended it to other volunteers visiting. And that’s it for this year. Hopefully another visit spring of next year!

Snagged a rental car Tuesday morning and headed out to Kanab. Got in at 3:00 on the dot, just in time for the last tour of the day. So much has changed at Best Friends since I was here last in 2009. Notably, there’s a puppy complex now and a gorgeous, huge Cat HQ building. Dinner at the Rockin’ V with two other volunteers.

Got up bright and early Wednesday morning for a 7:30 orientation. Got a tour of Cat HQ (which has pocket doors down each side which slide open or closed to join rooms – brilliant) where many of the cats who aren’t cat-friendly live. Spent my first shift with my favorites at Benton’s. Got to take care of my Dillymonster and Miss Dot’s room, as well as peek in on Blackjack. Met Katy, a new lovebug who followed me around in the manner of Candy, only without the shoulder-riding. Lunch at Angel Village was great. I found myself picking at a piece of chicken before I remembered it was tofu. And the tiramisu was spectacular. Spent the afternoon shift at Kitty Mo. I was petting HRH Princess Thumper when they brought out her pop bottle to show some other volunteers, and I got to squeak, “I did that!” *grins* Helped out a bit on cleaning quickly before rain moved in and did some laundry folding. 9 loads. They average 9 loads a day at Kitty Mo in industrial machines. That’s more than I do in a month. I do not envy them.

I picked up the first book, The Hunger Games when it came out. It was good timing. I was doing a survey of contemporary dystopian fiction aimed at teens. I liked the first book in the same way you like a good action/adventure flick, and put it down without having to read the rest of the series. But one of my friends at work insisted that it got better and I had to give the second and third books a shot. And I did. And it’s a completely different trilogy looking back from the end of book three. If the first book is an action/adventure movie, the second and third books are very solidly in drama. I still find myself occasionally pondering some of the moral questions opened up in the final chapters. There aren’t any easy answers, and that makes the series worthwhile to me for adults as well as kids. If you haven’t read it yet and you think you might like it, the first two chapters of the first book are up on Scribd.

Now that we all know what I’m ranting about, Buttercup. Katniss tries to drown him when Prim brings him home because it’s one more mouth to feed. When she doesn’t succeed, they end up having a sort of respect for each other’s strengths. And, as I’m looking at swimming meme cat, I thought to myself, “You know. I bet the intersection of the Venn diagram of families with little girls who love The Hunger Games and families who have been thinking about adding a cat to their household is not null. In fact, I bet it’s pretty significant. And if we could get just one of these cats a forever home, that’d be worth me creating this.

So I set out to find me some adoptable Buttercups. The basic qualifications I used:
1) Gotta be a male. We know that much about Buttercup for sure.
2) Can’t be a kitten. Buttercup’s experienced the world. He survived on his own in The Seam, where he could have easily ended up in Greasy Sae’s stew.
3) Has to be buff. Well, buff or orange. We don’t know a lot from Katniss’s biased descriptions of him, but we do know he was distinctly NOT the yellow of a buttercup.
4) Ears must be unique. Some of the cats listed here have been eartipped (which generally means they were at one time part of a feral colony). Some of them have fought frostbite and won. Or maybe other cats. We’ll never know for most of them, the same way we don’t know how Buttercup lost half an ear. All we know is now they want to have em scritched by a loving owner. So let’s get to it.

Oh, and these guys are all District 12 and north and east of the Capitol. Don’t know how that happened. I searched the entire country. Came back with these guys.

A Baker’s Dozen of Adoptable Buttercups

My personal superlatives:
Best Eyes the Color of Rotting Squash: Ricki from Springfield, VA
Best Poofy-Cheeked Tom: Sylvester from Harrisburg, NC
Most Likely to Go Quietly In the Bag: Farley from Savoy, IL (look at that cowboy hat!)

Do you know of another perfect Buttercup candidate who’s waiting for a forever home? Nominate him! I’d love to have 13 cats featured at all times as long as… well, folks other than just me are visiting this page. So please post your own Buttercup nominees in the comments, and I’ll add them to the map as these get adopted. Or maybe I’ll just add them anyhow. You can never have too many Buttercups, right?

Oh, and may the odds be ever in your favor.

Started this month off going to (best friend Holly’s brother) Matt’s wedding in San Francisco. That included getting to visit DNA Lounge (bonus! not having to worry about whether or not I was hip enough to enter said lounge because now it has a pizza joint attached), hitting a really fun thrift shop (the pink, vinyl drag queen boots in the window drew us in), shopping at some gorgeous art and fabric supply stores Holly had picked out, and really good food including some well-timed post-public-transport-fiasco hot wings. I’d never been to one before, but weddings at wineries are the win. Between the Blue Angels practicing overhead and seeing a bunch of people I’ve only really seen together within one context, I felt like I was somewhere between 5 and 15 again. Which is probably good on occasion.

At the moment my apartment looks more like an episode of Hoarders than a bachelor(ette) pad. But there’s a light at the end of the tunnel of misplaced crap. But not yet. Now I’m off to finish some birthday presents and start on the Halloween costume.

Did my first Frankenpolish this weekend. Have been jonesing for a replacement for OPI’s Ecuadorable Coral, but I didn’t want to spend $28 to get a bottle of 9-year-old polish. I’ve been trying to order a substitute for it unsuccessfully for years now. Took one of the closer approximations and made it into Ecuadorable Fauxral: 7 parts China Glaze Aztec Orange + 4 parts OPI Chocolate Shakespeare. OPI Gift of Gold to taste. You’ll have to trust me that it’s really close. The cat says it’s time for pettins, not time for pictures of the fingers.

On Holly’s last visit she took a pair of my jeans back to Austria with her. And I got them back this week, all embroiderified (which was even better because I’d forgotten about them). They’re awesome. There’s more on them, but I’m not putting a picture of my butt on here.

In other news, Disney has totally taken to a bag from my college days that got unearthed during Mom’s emergency room visit. It must smell like Tennessee barbecue. When I look over, she’s burrowed down in it. And she won’t touch the narwhal I bought her. Cats.