Goodbye and thanks for EVERYTHING Serena!

Yes, I am sad to report that Serena, head rehabber and queen of the seals at Wolf Hollow, has left after giving over 7 years of her life to helping ALL the animals of Wolf Hollow.

I wanted to take this time to say, publicly, how thankful I am that I got to volunteer with her every week. She was always encouraging me to try new things and never once throttled me, even though, seeing as how I was an OVERLY enthusiastic volunteer initially, I am sure she wanted to. She made volunteering at Wolf Hollow a fun and educational experience and I can't thank her enough for that.

All the best in your future endeavors, Serena. We'll miss you!

Meet the Newest Love in My Life!

Yes, I know this is mainly a Wolf Hollow blog, but I just am WAY too excited about this new being that will be creating utter and wonderful havoc in my home in about 5 weeks.

Meet Riley! He is not even one day old in this picture!

Here he is at 1 week old.

I lost my wonderful cat, Edward Albert, almost exactly a year ago and I have wanted to get another male kitten, more specifically an orange or orange/white male kitten. All of the orange or orange/white cats we have had in my family have been the most amazing of pets and I have been on the prowl for a kitten for a couple of months now. As it turns out, my coworker has a friend who bred her cat and she promised me a kitten if she had an orange/white male one. After the first three kittens were born my coworker got a call saying there were no orange ones and she thought there was only going to be one more kitten born. I went home resigned to the fact that it just wasn't meant to be. But later that night I bumped into the woman whose cat it was. She hugged me and said the VERY LAST of the five kittens born was orange and white and was mine if I wanted him. And want him I did!

Here Riley is at 2 weeks, with eyes partly open and ears still closed.

You can't really tell from these pictures, but he is a BIT bigger than his siblings. In fact, I hear that he is the best eater of the bunch, so much so that he will push the other kittens out of the way to get to Mom. Now, our family has come up with some VERY creative names for our beloved orange and orange/white male cats. The first cat I ever counted as my own had a LOT of extra toes, and was therefore named Jon Thom Le Feet. The kitten that we got the first Christmas I lived here in Washington ended up with the auspicious name of Ashley Darlington "Killer" Farnsworth the Third. So, keeping in mind this extended nomenclature tradition, my sister Shannon has dubbed that Riley's middle name, due to his penchant for eating, shall be Templeton, after the rat in Charlotte's Web. In fact, I think she called him Riley Templeton, the little piggy rat kitten.

Here is Riley, this week, at 3 weeks of age, eyes and ears finally open!

I will have to drag out some pictures, but, IF memory serves me correctly, he has VERY similar markings to my first cat, Jon Thom Le Feet...almost eerily so.

And last, but certainly not least, here is one of my favorite pics of Riley and me, with him just hanging out on my knee during my most recent visit.

So, there's my exciting news! I will be back to posting Wolf Hollow posts tomorrow, as we had some interesting creatures in last week. Til next time...