Thoughts on cats

First,

Sometimes we think of our cats we left behind in Phoenix and miss them. Here are Wilbur and Baby Cat lounging on the wall of our old patio.

Baby Cat was a stray who kind of adopted us along with her mother, Mama Cat, but we had to relocate Mama Cat because Wilbur did not like her and would not play nice. We had adopted Wilbur from the Humane Society and she was a good cat. Baby Cat wanted nothing but to cuddle with Wilbur, and Wilbur tolerated this. And so we had two fur kids.
We never really considered bringing them with us to New Zealand though. Bringing Baby Cat seemed silly because she was just someone who we let hang around. It would have been like bringing the neighbor kid.

Leaving Wilbur behind was a little tougher I thought. She had been 'officially' adopted into our family and we would be pretty horrible people not to include her in our plans. But the cost was prohibitive - we got an estimate of $5,000 for the whole process, including vet fees, travel, storage. Aside from the money though, we worried that an overseas journey would give Wilbur post-traumatic stress disorder. She was not a particularly easy-going cat, and I didn't think she'd cope well. The last thing we wanted was to spend all that time and money to immigrate her and then spend the next 10 years caring for a schizophrenic cat. To be fair, we've never heard of any cats suffering from immigration-related mental disorders, but it could have happened.

So we left them behind, which caused us no small amount of stress. Despite searching far & wide, we could not find homes for them. We ended up surrendering them to the Humane Society. It was terrible and sad. I still feel awful whenever I think about it.

Second,

About a month ago I took a taxi home from the airport after a work trip. As the taxi driver pulled into the driveway, I saw a cat laying in the middle. She did not look up or run away as the cab approached. When I got out and went to inspect, I found the cat was dead. This was perplexing.

About that moment, the next door neighbors came out of their house. We hadn't met them yet. Here's a tip for our readers: When meeting the new neighbors for the first time, a good opening line is not: "Do you guys have a cat? Is it this dead one?"

It turned out it was their cat, and it turned out the little girl had been rather attached. A pretty horrible scene followed. Out of respect for the dead and little girls who mourn them, I won't go into details.

Those neighbors have still not really warmed up to us.

Third,

We read a great article about giving birth by a woman called Tricia Anderson. She compares labouring cats to labouring women. It's called Out of the laboratory: back into the darkened room? Here's an excerpt:

Everyone knows that cats need to give birth undisturbed in a dark, secluded place - perhaps preparing a softly lined box in the darkest corner of the furthest room underneath the bed. And everyone who knows about cats understands that you must never disturb a cat in labour or a newly delivered cat and her litter of kittens. Otherwise the cat's labour will stop or she may reject her kittens. Everyone knows this.

But just imagine that one day, quite a long time ago, a group of well-meaning scientists decided that they wanted to study how cats give birth. So they asked anyone who had a cat, that when she went into labour to bring them to their laboratory - a brightly-lit, noisy, modern scientific laboratory where scientists could study them, by attaching lots of monitors and probes, surrounding them by strange technicians constantly coming in and out with clipboards.... In the laboratory, the labouring cats could hear the sound of other cats in distress, and there were no private dark corners for them to retreat to, but only rows of brightly-lit cages under constant scrutiny of the scientists.

And the scientists studied the labouring cats in their brightly-lit cages for many years, and saw that their labours were erratic, how they slowed down and even stopped, and how heart-breakingly distressed the cats were. Their mews and their cries were terrible. They saw how many of the the kittens were deprived of oxygen and were born shocked and needing resuscitation. And, after many years the scientists concluded: 'well, it seems that cats do not labour very well'.

Then, because the scientists were caring people and wanted to help the poor cats, they invented lots of clever machines to improve the cats' labours, to monitor the oxygen levels in the kittens; they invented pain-killing drugs and tranquillisers to ease the poor cats' distress, and drugs to make labour become regular and stop it slowing down. They even developed clever emergency operations to save the distressed kittens' lives.

The scientists wrote scientific papers which told everyone about the difficulties they had observed and how cats do not give birth very well, and all about the clever feline birth technology they had invented. The newspapers and television spread the word, and soon everyone started bringing their cats to the laboratory in labour, because of all their clever feline technology and of how many kittens' lives they had saved. Looking round at all the complicated technology, people were heard to say: "This must be the safest place in the world for cats to give birth in".

Years passed, and the workload at the scientists' laboratories grew busier and busier. They had to take on new staff and train them in their feline labour techniques, and slowly the original scientists grew old and retired. But sadly the new up-and-coming technicians didn't know about the original experiment; they didn't even know it was an experiment. They had never seen cats giving birth in softly-lined boxes in the furthest, darkest corner of the furthest room - why, what a dangerous idea! They were absolutely convinced that cats do not give birth very well without a lot of technical assistance - why, think of all the years of scientific evidence they had collected - and would go home at night feeling very pleased with themselves for all their clever and good work in saving cats' and kittens' lives.

She goes on to argue that birth is safer at home, and that we need to get out of the "laboratory" and into the "darkened room". You can read the rest of the article here. It really struck a chord with us and affirmed our decision to give birth at home. (Our due date is in 4 weeks and 3 days, by the way. But who's counting?)

Ready for winter

One thing that a lot of immigrants from America and the U.K. struggle with here is the lack of heating/warmth in houses. For reasons that are still not clear to us 10 months after arriving, Kiwis don't put a lot of stock into warming their houses. This seems to be changing, and newer houses will at least have insulation and sometimes double glazed (2-pane) windows. That's great for keeping warmth in, but doesn't really get the house warm in the first place. It's still really common for a house to have no form of heating at all. If that's the case, you have to buy plug-in radiators or install your own heating system. Lots of houses have wood-burning stoves to heat them, but this will only heat the room with the stove in it (usually the living room), and the rest of the house will either be cold or will have plug-in heaters. Central heating seems to be nonexistent in houses.

When we moved into our house in February, the only form of heating it had was a night store heating unit.

It's basically a radiator. We understand it's filled with bricks and weighs about 2 ton. It draws energy at night (when power is cheaper) to heat the bricks, and then slowly releases the heat all day. We've never actually turned the thing on though, and really have no idea how well it works. The quirky thing is that it's located in the dining room - so we could have a nice toasty dinner, and then retire to the living room to freeze. No thanks.

We knew we would need a more comprehensive heating strategy this winter. The answer: heat pumps.

Heat pumps are kind of like window air conditioning units, except they attach to the wall rather than hang from a window, and they blow both hot and cold air. They are the "modern" heating option in New Zealand.

We got in touch with a heat pump installation guy who Gareth knows through his work. He came to the house with his glossy brochures and sold us not one but TWO heat pumps: one for our living room and one for our hallway/bedrooms. We went for one of the more powerful Fujitsu models for our lounge (9 kW), and a smaller one in the hallway.

The heat pump is mounted to the wall on a bracket, and the hoses run to the outside where there's another unit with a fan in it.

We were told this would be a one-day job, but in the end it took 2. There was also some involvement by Action Alarm, after heat pump installer guy accidentally blew a fuse that knocked out our alarm system, requiring a visit from another repairman. But in the end, we got there. And now we bask in the warmth of our giant heat pump.

Autumn is here, and winter is just around the corner. We are ready, winter. Bring it.