September 26, 2005

My First Pet Adoption !!

Saturday we volunteered again at the Goliath and Bebe's cat adoption day at Petco. There was lots of stress when we arrived as the head person had not yet arrived and there were around 10 visitors looking. The foster parents were dropping off their cats so I introduced myself to several I had not yet met. One was rather nasty, asking what experience I had in screening potential adopters. She said "Where is Lisa? I don't know you and I do know Lisa is good at this." I did not have a clue where the adoption forms were and was pretty much in a panic myself since I was new at this. I resisted the temptation to choke this woman and calmly replied that Lisa had been over the procedure with me in detail. My expression must have shown what I was thinking about her because she started apologizing and saying she didn't mean to hurt my feelings. I bit my tongue and told her that I was a teacher so it was difficult to hurt my feelings. Of course that wasn't true. I felt horrible being new and being challenged like that. Anyway, we reached an understanding of sorts and parted more or less amicably. To my credit I did try to push her cats for adoption instead of ignoring them but none of hers were adopted that day. Lisa arrived around that time and things settled down. I went over the paperwork procedure with her and took on my first interview. It went very well and I soon adopted out a cute little black and white kitten named Pandora. I did not have much time to celebrate since there was a steady stream of people coming through looking at the cats. Eight hours went by and I didn't get to sit down once. We had one person who was deemed unsatisfactory to be an adopter by his screener. The screener did not know how to tell him this in an acceptable way so I volunteered to take over and let him know. He became very defensive and nasty though I did try to be polite about it. That was the second rough incident in an hour for me and I was exhausted at this point. The next crisis was that the husband of one of our foster parents came in carrying a foster cat. He dumped the cat in front of us and informed us that his young daughter was mistreating the cat at home so the woman was quitting the foster volunteering. I felt so bad for this beautiful white cat named Russell. Fortunately we adopted him out near the end of the day to a nice couple. The next crisis came a few minutes later when a family came in and the husband shoved a duffle bag in my face. He said it contained three kittens from a female in their subdivision thay had been feeding. Of course they hadn't bothered to have her spayed so she had these guys. He informed me that if we didn't take the cats they would simply dump them off at the local shelter. We all knew that the shelter would probably euthanize them. I was speechless so I turned him over to Lisa who proceeded to dress him down verbally about his callousness and stupidity. After this she did present them the opportunity to have the cats neutered cheaply and then foster them while bringing them in on weekends so we could try to adopt them out. They said they would think about it and left. I imagine they went straight to the local shelter with the poor cats. We simply were full at the time and could not accept any dumps like that. Let's see... the next crisis came a couple of hours later when we discovered that a litter of new cats a foster parent had dropped off were completely infested with fleas. I cleaned out the cage while others bathed and treated the cats. There were so many fleas that the
bath water was red. What a tiring day! By the time I left we had adopted out 5 cats and shown cats to over 100 people.

Back to school Monday and the kids had a test on evolution and taxonomy. It was a quiet day overall. The rosacea is pretty quiet today and the heart hasn't been acting up much. I'm just bone tired from the weekend and I took a 2 hour nap this afternoon after school.

On a completely different note, some of my MIDI music is going to be used in a graduate level sociology linguistics course at the University of Louisville. I think that's a first for me. I haven't made a dime off of my compositions but they sure have gotten a lot of play on various websites and in schools. I really haven't worked on composing much this year since taking up the guitar. I guess I need to update the webpage and work on some new material soon.

Posted by Ken Albin on September 26, 2005 06:46 PM

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