Happy Halloween!
All the kittens are out having their spay/neuter today, but we did a little photoshoot with some costumes yesterday. The kittens will all return this evening.
Ivy is still at PetSmart in McHenry, IL, hoping to be adopted.
Ivy's Adoption Event, and Upcoming Schedule!
This should be pretty brief; I just want to make sure everyone knows what's going on!
First, a quick note to our Patreons, if you missed the news, we had to reschedule the Patreon exclusive livestream to 2:30pm Central, Saturday the 29th.
Tomorrow, October 29th, Ivy will go to the PetSmart in McHenry, IL at 11:00. There will be people from Animal Outreach Society there hosting an adoption event from 11am-2pm. After that, they would like Ivy to stay at PetSmart until she is adopted. However, it seems likely that if she is not adopted by Sunday evening, we will bring her back to the Academy and just have her at PetSmart for the weekends. Maybe. We have to work out the details with AOS and PetSmart.
November 2nd, all six kittens will go to the vet all day for their "Graduation ceremony" (spay/neuter, microchipping, vaccinations, etc). They will return to the Academy in the evening.
Animal Outreach Society has a lead on five new kittens, which are currently living with their mother in a barn. They expect these kittens to be weaned and brought to the Kitten Academy on or before November 9th. The mother is feral and will be spayed and returned to the barn. The kittens are (naturally) somewhat feral, but reported to be interested in and friendly with humans.
November 12th, all six of the current Kitten Academy kittens will be brought to PetSmart in McHenry, IL, from 11am-2pm, for their own adoption event.
If you want to adopt Ivy or any of her kittens, now is an excellent time to contact Animal Outreach Society in McHenry, IL, with your application!
Ivy's been a wonderful cat, both to her kittens, and to us. She was a kind mother to her three kittens, and still enjoys visiting with them. She loves to play, especially with catnip toys, and she also loves vigorous belly rubs. She likes to sing to her humans with a hearty "MAOOB" while carrying her toys around the house. And she loves relaxing in a lap while her humans work at the computer. She's the first Kitten Academy momcat to have her own Twitter account, where she uses her trademark disapproving glare to entertain her followers. She gets along with other cats and dogs acceptably well.
Here's some of our photos of Ivy over the last few months. We'll certainly miss having her around! She'll make an excellent companion to whomever adopts her.
A Little News, a Lot of Photos!
Sorry we haven't done an update in almost two weeks. We've been pretty busy between integrating the new kittens, working on getting things in place with the new cat run, and all the bits of daily life.
No news is basically good news, though - everyone has been healthy and happy! Though Ivy's been a little unwell in the last 12 hours; we're keeping an eye on her and if she's not feeling great again by tomorrow, we'll bring her to a vet.
Animal Outreach Society has scheduled the spay/neuter for all the kittens for November 2nd. So they'll be out pretty much all day then. And they are up for adoption with their first showing at PetSmart in McHenry (presumably - we'll update as we get closer to the date) on November 12th.
First, some photos of the Kitten Academy staff cats in the new cat run. We'll post more about it when it's completely finished, including a bit of a tour.
And then... all the kitten photos!
New Arrivals!
First off, thanks to all of you who went through the archival videos in our last blogpost and helped decide what was worth keeping. We'll be using your suggestions as soon as we have time to go through and edit them!
Now on to the real news - most of you know that Animal Outreach Society sent us three additional kittens to help fill out the class roster until graduation. They are exactly the same size as Ivy's kids, and so should all graduate together (in a month or so).
They were bottle-raised by their first foster parents, then were taken over by a second foster for a while. Now they are coming to Kitten Academy to complete their education before adoption.
The new kittens will be living in the Kitten Academy Annex for the first few days, until we're all comfy with each other and sure they are healthy. Then, probably on Wednesday, they will be brought into the main Kitten Academy room with Ivy's League.
Sorry about the quality of the Live Stream camera that's in the Annex. We have a replacement coming on Monday - until then, we just have to make do. [Edit: the camera didn't make it, we pulled one from the main room instead for now.]
Our naming chart for Ivy's kids is pretty far out of date, too, so we're including recent photos of them here with the new kids.
Dusty - Female - Purple Collar
Cloudy - Male - Black Collar with Pawprint Design
Stormy - Male - Green Collar with Pink Design
Cornell - Female - No Collar
Harvard - Male - Red Collar
Yale - Female - No Collar
As usual, here's the bonus photos from this first new kitten photoshoot!
We Get By, With a Little Help From Our Friends!
Now for something completely different...
My God! It's full of videos!
YouTube allows us to create archival dumps of the Live Stream, if we do it within the four-hour window they provide. Over time, we've accumulated a few of these that we've intended to go back and trim down to just the interesting parts, and then publish them.
The trouble is, for a lot of them, we're not sure why we saved them. For a couple, we're not even sure that we saved them! It's possible they are dumps YouTube created, because the stream went down, or just because YouTube wanted to.
This is where we'd like to enlist your help! Below are links to all the videos in question. If you care to - no pressure - please view them (or skim them - some of them are VERY long!), then comment on them, on YouTube, with your opinion of whether we should publish them, and if there is anything of particular interest that happens during the videos, exactly what time in the video that thing occurs.
We'll use this information to either publish the videos wholesale, or delete the videos, or cut out clips from the videos and publish those. Some of these are already labeled with what I think the video is about - but don't take my word for it, and also, be sure to say whether you think we should publish it, if I'm right. And where to trim it, if you think that's the thing to do.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WW_M67o1ofg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaEM-pzbPQk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEP-Rx8PJec
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jKcgeAI6Og
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCifMvgpbCs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3e5j9nsS-c
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=metXi-TlT3k
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AL1mbi-E0jU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6mATFma9kI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCJ92k3lhLE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzTzWWJhbCY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=weZZpeCkuH8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDBNdYklFpk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4HCtO1HEnE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8NKETNSahw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skCF83XRsIw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VR4MPi1C2wg
Thank you for your help!
Giant Photodump!
Not much news here - Ivy is getting along very well outside of the kitten room lately, and while she's not best friends with any of the Faculty, they do well enough.
We're still waiting for possible new kittens to turn up via Animal Outreach Society.
In the meantime, we've taken quite a large number of photos in the last few days. These are a selection of those photos, but not an especially discerning selection, so there may be some varying quality. Some of these you may have seen already on our Twitter!
