The little foster kitties I’ve been posting about are still with us. They haven’t eaten enough cheezburgers apparently. They have to gain a few more pounds before they can get spayed/neutered and go up for adoption. They are hanging with us until then. Here’s a rare shot of them looking sleepy. (Usually they are a blur of hyperactivity.) Squee!

Thanks @Chris for capturing this adorable picture

First off, I’m sorry for the Sheen-baiting in the title. I’m a little ashamed to say that I’ve become utterly fascinated with Charlie’s unraveling.

Secondly, I really wish I was better at making cat videos, but 1.), I don’t have endless hours to follow my cats and foster kittens around filming them sleeping, hoping they do something awesome during the 30 total minutes they’re awake each day, and  2.), even if I did, I’d get bored very quickly.

With that out of the way, here are some snippets of cute from the foster kitties:

Yes, that’s my high-talking voice. Sorry, we can’t all sound like Mark Lanegan (sadly). Also, I apologize for the BLATANT TWSS at 0:35. And before you get on my case about naming something so cute and small after the douchey whale from Pinocchio, crank up the volume and give a listen to this terrifying growl:

Have a fuzzy weekend, you guys!

Wednesday morning I picked up our first litter of foster kittens in 2011. They’re insanely adorable and fuzzy, love attention, and barely hold still long enough to snap photos before returning to their natural state as black & brown blurs.

There are five total; three boys and two girls, all of whom came with prior names that were dreadfully uninspired. I’ve made it our task over the next eight days to find new names for each of them. Thus far I’ve only been successful naming one of the girls, Jackie (since the other four all have white paws, she’s Shoeless Josephine Jacqueline. Yay baseball!)

Finally, and this has nothing to do with kittens, there’s some new art to be worn, and a few in the pipeline; check it out:

I have 2 new foster kitties this week. Meet Charlie and Valentino. They’re amazingly fluffy and sweet. Valentino is the fluffier and braver of the two. He’ll probably get adopted so fast his paws won’t even touch the kennel floor. Admire the cute below:

In other news, I heard two totally WTF’tastic things today that I couldn’t wait for Wednesday to share.

1. WTF Album Drop
Remember Jimmy McMillan? He was running for NY state governor from the “rent is too damn high” party. (If you missed this side show during the electoral season, you can see what I’m talking about here.) Today Jimmy dropped an album, titled “The Rent is Too Damn High”, of course. He seems to be going for a sexy Marvin Gaye thing, but it comes off more like Weird Al trying to do sexy Marvin Gaye. If Weird Al were a black guy with some kind of handlebar/mutton chop facial hair situation. Best song: My Place. Jimmy croons “Let’s get it on. We can do it in the hall, In the kitchen. We can do it while I’m talking on the phone. We can do it while I’m moppin’ the floor.”

See for yourself:

2. “Winter Boyfriends”
I heard about this on the radio. Apparently ladies get “winter boyfriends” like one would winter boots or a winter coat. I didn’t know we could be kept seasonally. Fascinating. Any ladies care to comment? Do you get “winter boyfriends”?

P.S. In case you think I’m a crazy cat hoarder with 20 pets, rest assured, I’m not. My wife is too much of a neat freak to ever tolerate that kind of thing. We have 2 cats of our own. We foster for the SPCA, but only a few kitties at a time. So when I’m sharing new foster kitty pics, it means the foster kitties I blogged about in previous posts have all gone back to the SPCA and gone up for adoption.

Remember last Friday when I brought home these sweet foster kittens? I am happy to report that their colds are clearing up nicely, they’ve gained a little weight and they’re running around my house playing and sounding like a herd of elephants. Here are some new photos of the little guys, enjoy:

I picked up these three cute foster kittens yesterday, just in time for them to strut their stuff for Fuzzy Friday.

Wondering how I’m so lucky as to hang out with these 3 cuties for the next week and a half? I volunteer as a foster parent for my local SPCA. Fosters take in animals from shelters for a variety of reasons. Sometimes the animals are too young to be adopted. Sometimes the animal needs to be socialized with humans so it will adapt well once it’s adopted. Sometimes the animal is under the weather and needs some medicine and TLC (plus it’s best to keep them away from the other shelter critters so everyone doesn’t get sick). Sometimes the shelters get too crowded and they reach out to fosters so they have some place to put some of their animals until more get adopted. If you’d like to get involved, contact the local animal rescues in your area and see if they have a fostering program.

A few other ways to help the critters:

1. Next time you’re considering a pet, try to adopt a rescue animal. Shelters are a great way to meet a new pet. If you want a specific breed or age, check out PetFinder.com. They deal with shelters and breed specific rescues across the US and Canada. You can search for nearly any kind of pet on this website and they’ll help you find an animal that meets your preferences and needs rescuing. If you have friends or family looking for a new pet, let them know about these options too.

2. Volunteer at an animal rescue. Even if you can’t foster a pet, you can still donate your time to an animal charity. They need dog walkers, kitty cuddlers, fund raisers, data entry help, graphic designers, administrative help, event coordinators, just about everything you can imagine.

3. Donate your cash. Most animal rescue organizations have made donating money pretty easy. You can donate online, set up a recurring monthly donation, include an animal rescue in your will.

4. Visit the Animal Rescue Site daily. Your clicks help them raise funds for the animals.

You could also buy your next tee here at Ex-Boyfriend. We donate a portion of our revenue to animal rescues. We also do special events throughout the year where we donate even more. Last spring we donated 100% of our key chain sales revenue and raised over $1300 in about a month!

As I’ve mentioned on this blog before, my wife and I love fostering animals for the Maryland SPCA here in Baltimore. The drag of it is, there are so many foster “parents” on the books with the MDSPCA that you only get a call about once every 4-6 months asking if you’re available. And just as our luck would have it, the last call we got was just days before we left for our tortuous fight with the Icelandic ash cloud back in May, which made it impossible to devote the two weeks the kittens needed before they were ready for adoption. I was pretty bummed, because, y’know, I love kittens, and it was very likely I wouldn’t get another call until this Fall.

Thankfully, I got another one on Wednesday, and promptly prepared our master bathroom for our fuzzy visitors. Five kittens, four boys, one girl, all named after Trueblood characters. Let the cuteness commence!

Bill

Eric

Eric & Bill

Lafayette

Sam

Sookie

My bathroom is now full of kittens. There are 5 of them: Bill, Sookie, Sam, Lafayette and Eric. I’m fostering them for the MD SPCA. I’ll take more/better pictures later and share them on Friday but in the meantime, here’s a preview of the cute:

So, as I’ve blogged before, my wife and I are pretty active volunteers at the local SPCA. Our love of companion animals is well-documented throughout the site, from our tee designs to our philanthropic endeavors, but it also carries over into the three dimensional world.

About a month ago, we got a call from the volunteer coordinator over at the SPCA asking if we’d be able to foster a pair of puppies for a couple of weeks until they were old enough to be spayed and neutered before going up for adoption. Despite a split second of reticence brought on by memories of our first attempt at fostering a dog, I said “YES!” Cuteness trumps good sense 99.9% of the time.

So I drove up the next day on my lunch break to pick up Grace (fawn) and her brother Harlowe (black).

Enjoy the cuteness while it lasts!

About six hours later, I was seriously regretting my decision.

While these two are unassailably adorable, all of that goes out the window when they’re, y’know, awake. It’s ridiculous how much energy and poop is contained in those tiny bodies. I feel like the Ms. and I spent two weeks just following these two around with paper towels and sanitary wipes. The good news is, these two were both adopted on their first day of eligibility. As much of a headache as they were, I wanted nothing more than for them to end up in a loving home as soon as possible. As great as the staff and facilities at the Maryland SPCA are, a 2′³ kennel is a 2′³ kennel, and the best thing for these guys is a lot of space where they can run around, if only to tire them out so they revert to their cute and unconscious state. It’s kind of funny how they’d run and wrestle and scamper non-stop for 20 minutes, and then just more or less keel over onto their blanket and pass out. ON or OFF, there is no dimmer switch!

For whatever reason, being an SPCA foster parent tends to be something of a feast-or-famine proposition. Once we’d been approved as foster parents last January, it was a whole two months before we got a call asking us to care for an animal. After that 10-day stint, it was another two and a half months before our next call. Then, we get the call for Grace & Harlowe in mid-October, and the day we returned them two weeks later, we were sent home with 18-month old Jezebel and her six kittens!

Nom nom nom!

Nom nom nom!

Originally (and imaginatively) named Momcat and 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6, we slowly over the last two weeks got to know every member of the family on an intimate (very intimate—you should have seen the state of that litter box every 6-12 hours; yikes!) level. Being the jailbait strumpet single mom of six, Momcat became Jezebel.

Her brood is made up of two boys, Chunk and Thor, and four girls: Pixie, Rosebud, Clementine, and Valentina.

Sleepy Valentina

Rosebud!

EPIC CUTENESS.

Unlike Grace & Harlowe, these guys were a little more manageable when awake; small size and quiet voices are like that.

While we love every last one of these guys, I can say that I hope we get a little time off now. I miss living in a two bathroom household!

Sorry for the lack of updates, but I’ve been on vacation. Actually, I was away getting married to my long-time girlfriend. That is the reason for the lack of new art and updates here and on Facebook. Getting ready for your wedding can keep you busy, no matter how small you try to make it. Anyway, the exciting news is that we’re home now and we are fostering three adorable and mischievous kittens! This post is going to be very heavy on the pictures and videos because I had too many favorites to just pick one.

I also have a mischievous kitten story for you guys. The littlest of the kittens is a tiny calico girl named Laura. She weighs about 1.5 lbs (and that’s a generous estimate.) Saturday morning I went to check on our kittens and Laura was nowhere to be found. I totally freaked out. The kittens have been living in our upstairs bathroom, frolicking in our large empty bathtub and skittering about under the toilet. There aren’t many places for them to disappear, but this tiny Houdini had certainly managed to make herself scarce. I wondered if maybe she’d snuck out when I opened the door.

I woke up my wife and we called all our friends, enlisting them to tear apart our house for the better part of Independence Day. We worried our adult cats had gotten their paws on the missing kitten and eaten her. We worried the missing kitten had scurried into a vent somehow and was lurking inside our walls. We pulled appliances out from their corners, we left treats out hoping to entice her back. It seemed hopeless, and I dreaded fessing up to the SPCA that we’d lost one of their charges.

Around dinner time I went to check on the remaining kittens, and what did I see out of the corner of my eye? The missing kitten! I only caught a glimpse of the little fiend, but I definitely saw her. She’d been in the bathroom with her brothers all day. She disappeared as fast as she appeared, but I noticed that she had run behind our pedestal sink. I checked behind the sink and discovered there was a small cut-out in the porcelain where the pipes go in. I reached inside and felt something soft and fuzzy. The hideout was so small that only Laura could fit in there, and I was barely able to get my hand inside to pull her out. Luckily, I was able to get her by the scruff of her neck and pull her out. I duct taped the entrance to her hideout and returned her to her brothers. Hopefully that was the last of her disappearing tricks, but whoever adopts this kitten is definitely in for some trouble.

Anyway, trouble or not, the kittens are too adorable for words, so here are some pix and videos. Enjoy!