We’re BAAAAAACK!
As we’ve noted before, we’ve been having some staff issues and we do apologize. Our Purrsonal Assistant has been a bit of a trial but we believe we finally have her under control. Dealing with this woman has been like herding cats!

First it was family moving to her town, Christmas and a family wedding. Then it was a horrible flu (the coughing really disturbed our sleep for two weeks!) and then it was finishing her first book in her cozy mystery series. We sat her down and told her she had FOF, fear of finishing, and she needed to get the last chapter done! Since this is a series that has both Al and I in it, we have a vested interest (Lily may be written in later).

So there you have it. As we seek to overcome this last time drain on our Purrsonal Assistant’s time we are looking forward to offering you, our beloved furiends more content and on a regular basis. Oliver did have some advice for her (he’s such a caring guy)

And we all felt a certain kind of way about our purrsonel issues.

So there you go, paws crossed that the issues with our PA are resolved!

 Cat Reunites with Its Owners in Montana After It Was Displaced by the Maui Wildfires

Oh my whiskers, I’m a sucker for stories about kitties reunited with their families. The Maui Humane Society in Hawaii reunited a cat with her owners after she was lost during the wildfires last year.  A post on the shelter’s Facebook page announced that the cat, named Mahina, was found after surviving 100 days in the burn zone.

Mahina’s humans were relocated after the fire.They filed a missing pet report about Mahina right away. Eventually they moved to Montana and they lost hope of ever finding their feline again.

Mahina was found by the Maui Humane Society’s Fire Task Force in February. After checking for a microchip (the family had updated the information when they moved). The family was thrilled to hear Mahina had been found.

It was no small feat getting her to Montana from Hawaii. Thanks to the efforts of the Maui Humane Society who covered the cost of Mahina’s health certificate and travel to her family via Hawaiian and Alaska airlines, with a transporter helping to get her from Seattle to Montana.

Mahina is now home and doing very well. She is an inside kitty (she’s not fond of the Montana snow) and very happy to be inside.

Cat lost for four years turns up over 150 miles from Northern Ireland home

It was four years after their cat had disappeared and the Smyth family had given up hope when they got the call, “We have your Blueberry”.

Blueberry disappeared in November of 2019 from his home in Bangor, County Down, on Northern Ireland’s coast and turned up in County Galway in western Ireland.

He was noticed outside the SuperValu supermarket, looking ill. A man took him to the local veterinary practice to have him looked over. The vet diagnosed him with the cat flu and knew the cat had been owned by someone because he was very affectionate at the clinic.

Blueberry had a microchip but there was no information on him. The vets then tried Europetnet, which covers 26 European countries, and found a match in the UK. They discovered his name was Blueberry, that he was 10 years old, and that he had started his odyssey four years earlier and more than 150 miles away.

Blueberry’s family couldn’t wait to bring him home and he is happily enjoying being with his people again.

Humans, allow me to say again that keeping your feline ‘s microchip info current is critical. Neither Blueberry or the cat in the previous story would be back in their homes if their humans hadn’t kept the microchip information current.

Cat pics will pay your fines at Worcester’s libraries

Meowza, here’s a creative, feline friendly idea! Patrons at this library can clear their damaged or lost library fines by visiting the library with an image of a cat. They ‘re calling the program “March Meowness.”

 “Even if you don’t have a cat in your life, you can still draw one,” said library Executive Director Jason Homer. The library created the program in an effort to bring people back to the library system’s seven locations, regardless of whether they have fees under their account.

The library has done fee-forgiveness programs in the past, but Homer said the staff wanted to try a new, more creative approach.

In addition to fee forgiveness, the library’s March calendar is littered with other cat-themed programming. There’s a cat eye makeup tutorial (for humans, not cats), a lecture from a certified cat behaviorist, an event to de-stress with cats from the Worcester Animal Rescue League and more.

“We librarians love our cats,” Homer said. “We’re really leaning in on the fact that, all in all, librarians are cat people, so we thought, let’s lean in on the joke, let’s be part of the joke, and let’s have fun together.”

Peoria library has a pop up cat café

Who knew libraries were such lovers of cats? Patrons at the Peoria Public Library North Branch held a pop up cat café and the response was great, the lines to get in wrapped all around the building.

The pop-up cat café was sponsored by the Peoria Humane Society to bring awareness to all the cats up for adoption at PCAPS.

 “They do a lot of story times, and they have an active group of people that come out here all the time. So it was just an easy way for us to bring some cats, get some attention and focus on reading and literacy and just really focus on finding homes for homeless cats.”

Kudos to this forward thinking, feline friendly library!