Exes and kittens in Going public

There was mooOoooRe ex-bf drama. He sent me a long message about how he talked to his friends (like I suggested, to get some outside perspective), and came to some realizations around how it’s unhealthy to always try to keep the peace at the expense of dealing with issues / people’s bad behavior. And for the first time, it sounded like he actually GOT IT. But his overall sentiment was ‘I miss you and look I’m different now, so we can get back together, right?’ Yeah… no. A literal two days of thinking doesn’t put you on that path with me. Any respectable person would have at least waited a few months to make their case.

The way he was going about it just ended up making me feel super pressured and uncomfortable. He said something like “think of how good it was before, and how much better it could be if we got back together”. And that just really rubbed me the wrong way. It’s like.. do you not trust that I’ve thought about this extensively? He clearly doesn’t have the respect for me to accept that, whatever my reasons, I have them, and I’m allowed to have them. I could be breaking up with him for the most petty dumbass reason, and that’s my right. It’s pathetic to have him try to talk me out of this, as if I don’t know what I want for myself. I started to feel like I was just an object for him to win back, and I think that’s a really dangerous line of thinking. I told him I was feeling pressured and that I was blocking him. It was too hard to keep reading his shit and getting spun up every time.

Since then, I’ve felt good about my decision. It still sucks to be going through a breakup and single right now, but at least the stress is gone. One of my friends is having an exciting beginning to a relationship (they met on an app and have had a couple socially distant dates (walks in the park), and it’s been a bit hard to hear about. So I know I’m still feeling some sort of way about the breakup, but it’s more about the overall loss, and not about him specifically.

Last time I had written about how I messaged my doctor about my throat. He responded quickly, and sent in some antibiotics. I’m pretty sure he uses speech-to-text software to do all his writing (apparently most doctors do), and the messages come out in that weird unsettling software-generated way where there’s no discernible ‘tone’ to the writing. I took the meds all week, and things were going great, until last night. Very suddenly I felt a stinging pain in my throat when I swallowed, and then I went to go look at it and quite a lot of fluid drained out :( to get graphic, I can push on an area right below my ear and see it drain into my throat. Sorry, that’s fucking gross, I know. Today there’s no drainage (yet?) but it still hurts. What. the. fuck. It’s been over a year of this off and on. Can I just move on with my live?

I GOT FOSTER KITTENS!!! Two of them - Stuart and Frannie!

I signed up to foster maybe a month ago, but so did everyone else, so there wasn’t a real need. But now that it’s kitten season, there’s been a big influx. My area is the most adopting (vs buying) state in the country, and our kitten season is shorter due to the colder weather, and that means our shelters can take in animals from other states. These babies came in a big transport from California. The shelter posted a video on their facebook of the intake, and my heart broke for them. It was just a van filled with cat cages of kittens <5 weeks old, driving hours and hours on the bumpy highway, through the mountains. Just driving the 15 minutes from the shelter to my house those babies were scared, I’m so sad that they had to endure such a long trip.

I only found out one day before they got here that I was getting them, so I was woefully unprepared. When I brought them home I got them set up in my bathroom to do a first feeding. I then went to the pet store an got supplies - a playpen to contain them, bedding, food, etc. The shelter gave me supplies, but they weren’t great. They gave me a ton of adult cat food (???). Also the playpen was necessary because I can’t keep them in my bathroom long-term (I only have one), they’re too little to roam freely, and they needed to be separated from Cosmo for at least a couple weeks (disease-prevention).

It was hard to find an appropriate playpen. The fosters I follow on instagram use these plastic panels to create a pen, but those aren’t sold in stores, and the shipping on them was > week. I ended up getting some metal playpen panels from Petco.

I originally blocked off a corner of my bedroom and figured they should stay there, so I could close Cosmo out of the room. Unfortunately one of the kittens quickly figured out they could climb the wall, and they escaped into the room. I could have let them have the run of the room, but they would keep running under the bed and I need to have more easy access to them. I also couldn’t figure out a way to block off underneath my bed.

I decided to then move them to my den (a room next to my front door). There’s no door on it, so I placed the pen in a straight line to block off the area. I covered the top of the pen walls in aluminum foil so the kittens couldn’t get to the top to jump over. It looks pretty janky but it works perfectly.

So - the kittens are little tabby babies. They’re 5 weeks old, and I’d say they’re just a little bit feral. They have food aggression and do a lot of baby growling when eating. It’s so funny to watch the little peanuts act like rabid animals, growling at their sibling as they go to town on the pile of food that’s as big as their entire body.

So far they aren’t violent toward me - they hiss and growl but haven’t bitten me, even when I have to pick them up to give them meds. They have no problem with me sitting with them when playing, but they spring away when I move or they think I’m going to touch them. I watched a youtube video about these issues and we’re working on it! Basically it just involves me touching them when they’re eating so they know to associate the two :)

Sadly they do still have fleas. They got a bath at the shelter (that’s the only treatment as this age), but I saw a flea on the girl last night. So I have to get some Dawn dish soap and give them another bath, so that’s not gonna help our relationship.

Cosmo is really disinterested in them, which is surprising to me. I called him over once when I was in the pen with the kittens, and they immediately zoomed to the pen walls to see him and were SO into him, but he did a “sniff sniff.. meh” and walked away.