Donate
Mixed and mingled

Mixed and mingled

First and foremost: tra-la. It’s May.

And, truth be told, “tra-la” is just about the most complex reasoning we’re capable of right now.

What’s going on here? Why does Sally look so happy and nonmurderous? All will be revealed…

I’m not entirely sure where to begin this post, so let’s start here: everything you know is wrong.

The Weight Management Suite is no longer managing weights.
Adoption Rooms #1 , #2 and #3 are no longer rooms for adoption.
Britney Spears is only seven years away from eligibility for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Wherever you expect any given cat to be, you are incorrect.
Walls have fallen.
Cats have mixed and mingled.
Offices have been born out of nothing.
The Community Room is feeling very communal.

Confused?
Welcome to the party.

In the most audacious, outrageous, ambitious shake-up since Shaq decided to shill for Icy-Hot, Tabby’s Place has tossed cats and humans to the four corners of the wind this spring. After over a decade of sharing close quarters in the Community Room, it was becoming unsustainable for Sanctuary Operations Manager Danielle, Volunteer Coordinator Karina, and Blog Doofus Angela to get any work done. We’d stop up one ear to futilely fumble through our phone calls, while volunteers and cats carried on all around us. We’d do our best to be busy and businesslike in the midst of bedlam.

A room fit for a community.

We were all going madder than ever before…and, considering where we started, this was a severe state of affairs.

Then there were the cats. The Community Room, originally designed as a room for the community, had become the Kiwanis Club for cranky, challenging, quirky and extra-ultra-old cats. Sure, there was still a little room for communal things (meetings, classes, dance parties)…but between the sort-of offices and the sort-of cat corners vying for dominance, it was more a Chaos Cell than anything else.

And what about those Adoption Rooms? The names had long since been anachronisms. For about the first fifteen minutes of Tabby’s Place history, these three small rooms had been catless and all cozied up with couches, designed for adopters to spend one-on-one time interviewing potential adoptees (and vice versa).

But a funny thing happens when you pluck a friendly cat from her suite and stick her in an “Adoption Room.”

Angelo is man enough for the extreme little-girliness of the Adoption Room formally known as #1. Good thing, since he’s rooming with Angela and Bucca.

She gets squirrelly, or shy, or subterranean (those cozy couches are perfect for hiding beneath).
She becomes…unadoptable.

So in short order, the Adoption Rooms became Semiprivate Suites For Cats Who Dislike/Fear/Consider Themselves Vastly Superior To Other Cats. If you were a cat who could handle five roommates better than seventeen, an Adoption Room could handle you.

Finally, that brings us back to the Weight Management Suite, the Suite formerly known as C. In all of Tabby’s Place, this was our one true scheduled-feeding room. This forced us to make it home to the obese, the diabetic, and the otherwise gastronomically-special. All together now. This forced a strange, crowded, starving situation of anxious, attitude-y cats clamoring for clam dip at all hours.

It was all, frankly, a bit of a mess.

So buckle up, kittens; over the next weeks, we’ll be touring the brave new map of Tabby’s Place. It’s brilliant, it’s beautiful, and it’s driving us all blissfully bats as we get used to who’s where and why.

Don’t tell me you don’t have a box or ten like this when you move.

1 thought on “Mixed and mingled

  1. This is a seriously lol funny story (rotflmao) at 5am – got to be the best way to start a day! Thank you Angela. (Except for the icy chill when we read about Britney Spears.)

Leave a Reply