It was a very long week but much less stressful than it would have been a few weeks ago. My job has now been officially divided into two different positions and half of my duties, the customer service side of things has been passed on to Jenney, CS Supervisor extraordinaire. I'll be able to focus on the Animal Care side of things. Yay!

The toughest part of the week was that we lost another little foster kitten who we had nicknamed Button. I brought her home last week because she'd stopped eating while fighting upper respiratory infection and was no longer a good candidate for our regular foster program. Losing them doesn't get any easier and this one was particularly hard because she was eating on her own (like a little piggy!) and seemed to be getting better. She started doing a kind of half sneeze/half cough Saturday night but ate normally and seemed fine otherwise. In the morning, she was a little listless and was wheezing, so I brought her into work with me. She died before we could do anything for her. I think it might have been pneumonia. I thought we were safe because she was eating on her own again and had a good body weight for her size but it just shows how fragile cats can be because they are so small. The other three who were being kept separate because they're from another litter are doing great. Except for the shaved spot, you can't even tell where the abscess was on the tabby female, Pickford. They'll be going back to shelter on Monday for surgery on Tuesday. We've renamed Chaplin to Huck. Chaplin was a fine name but didn't really fit him. We're still working on renaming the two girls, Pickford and Marion.

Alan smelled natural gas at the end of our driveway when he was bringing in the trash can a couple days ago. You never want to waste anyone's time but with gas it's worth a phone call. Xcel Energy, our gas and electric company, sent someone out that night to look for a leak. They were there until late at night going back and forth up the two streets (we're on a corner) and it looks like they were checking furnaces and gas lines for some of our neighbors, too. All of them are early to bed so I think they had to be woken up. The next day, they were back again in late morning and when I got home that night, they'd rigged up some generators and gas tanks and those horses with the blinking lights on the edge of our lawn around the corner from the driveway. We never heard what happened but it looks like it's on our lot. Eek.