It's official: I am married to the crazy cat lady
We currently have fifteen cats in the house. Only three of them are ours.
When Sarah was contracting at Google, she started an informal, but company-endorsed trap/neuter/release program, because the basement of buildings 40-43 had a bit of a stray/feral cat infestation.
Since she left Google, she's continued doing trappings on an on and off basis.
She got a call a couple of days ago about a litter of kittens behind one of the other buildings, so she headed off last night with one of her crazy cat lady friends, and they proceeded to catch one of the kittens. She brought that home, and I went back with her, and the mother, which seems fairly feral, had been caught in a trap. The rest of the kittens seemed to have managed to secrete themselves away inside a generator behind the building.
This morning, with some help from various facilities types, she managed to extract the other four kittens from the generator. So that put the mother plus five kittens in the spare room (in a large cage).
At more or less the same time, Sarah got news of a litter of six kittens that need rescuing from down Gilroy way (some woman in a trailer park didn't seem to realise that boy cat + girl cat = kittens), so after grabbing the other four kittens this morning, she headed off to Gilroy to grab them.
So the current plan is to get the mother cat of what we'll call the Google litter desexed on Tuesday and then release her back where she came from. Her five kittens are young enough (~8 weeks) that they can be socialised and won't be feral. The six Gilroy kittens are from non-feral parents, and are about 11 weeks old. All of the kittens are old enough to be desexed as well, but Sarah can't get them into Palo Alto Animal Services for desexing for a couple of weeks, so I suspect we're stuck with them in the interim, unless Sarah can find foster homes for them. To cap it off, we're going to Sacramento for the weekend, so we have to get one of our friends in the complex to take care of them all.
The sad thing is the Gilroy Six seem to be in worse condition than the Google Five. They've got pretty poor coats, and seem to have some diarrhoea. Hopefully with a better diet they'll pick up. They're all very cute. The first one of the Google Five that Sarah caught last night is particularly cute. I expect Sarah will get some photos of them all up soon.
If anyone is in the Bay Area is interested in a kitten, we've got them by the near-dozen.