Blog – Page 4 – Mandarin’s Retreat

It’s Saturday

It’s a touch after 1200 and I’m tired. It’s been a busy week with two trips to the vet and more than a few hours spent working on financial reports for the El Paso Foundation grant. This is my first time submitting for a grant which requires our financial history and I’m not sure what goes where. I’m also wondering how in the hell can I project Vet costs over the rest of the year. Averages will bite your behind when it comes to vet bills. Last year we spent over three times our monthly average in one month when panleukopenia entered the Retreat with one on the kittens. Any way, doing this stuff for the first time always has a bit of a learning curve, though this one is a bit steep.

Back to this Saturday. Saturdays are fill the litter boxes with litter day. Normally cleaning the boxes and adding small amounts of litter takes only 40 minutes or so. On Saturday’s it’s at least an hour and a half. This is the day the pails holding clean litter by the litter boxes are refilled from the stock in the garage. Lugging 40 pound boxes around creates a lot of sweat. And, in today’s heat, sweating was underway big time. Such is the life of a Cat Wrangler.

In our our modest grant request, we are seeking to replace all our litter boxes with very high sided plastic boxes which keep the litter overflow to a minimum. Some of our cats love to dig in earnest, sending litter flying all over the place. We learned of the high sided litter boxes from another rescue. We conducted a proof of concept experiment with our isolation kennel in the office. Our problem was trying to work with flying litter — the isolation kennel rests on the desk behind our principle work area. The litter box sitting about 30 inches off the floor gave the interned cat a great platform for sending litter down our necks and on to our work spaces. The high sided litter box worked like a charm and we want to get more.

Another item in our grant request is to purchase three high quality cat trees. High quality cat trees are expensive. High quality also means durability when the tree is made of solid wood instead of particle board. The company we found in North Carolina makes this type of high quality tree. These trees also have the capability to replace damaged parts without buying a new tree. Another plus is that they are gorgeous. The trees are furniture within our home, so looking nice makes a nicer environment for us. Cats get durability and we get sturdy and good looking.

One other thing we hope to purchase with the grant is grant management software. Trying to find a grant that fits the Retreat is tougher than filling out the grant forms. The software pulls from an updated grant database and helps us make better requests. This is a very non-sexy request but a much needed addition to the Retreat’s tool box.

The final item in our grant request may possibly be the most important. We’re requesting seed money for a fund to treat sick and injured feral cats that our TNR partners trap. This fund would allow us to treat the kitties, nurse them back to health and release them back into their clowder or colony. We also want to used this fund to helps needy oldsters care for their sick kitties. Our vet often lets us know if someone needs help, but most of the time we have no capability to help. This fund would be a start. Again this is just seed money for starting the fund; the Retreat and its gracious partners would have to support this fund with more money in the future. I would expect to see a separate donation/project fund widget in the future to help grow this little fund.

In closing today, we need to name the new kitten. He’s been too long without a name. I’m inclined to name him, Geralt after Geralt, the Witcher of books, games and TV fame. Our kitten is gray, feisty and doesn’t speak much unless hungry. The name seems a good fit but it’ll have to be approved by Mrs H. What say you?

1st Year Anniversary

23 July is the first anniversary of our approval as a 501c(3) organization and the “official” date of the founding of Mandarin’s Retreat. If you’ve read through the material on the website, you would know that as a cat rescue, we’ve been caring for cats for much longer. Mrs H and I got our first cats together in Bogotá, Colombia over 20 years ago. We’ve come a long way since we obtained Silvestra and Weasel.

What we’re planning on doing for this anniversary is to start another modest funding campaign while continuing to work on several grant opportunities. One challenge for the upcoming year is interest on the company credit card. We’ve had an interest free year on the credit card we use for food and vet bills and we have a 4 figure balance. We would like to zero out that balance and have a little money left over for campaigning for regular patrons who support keeping cats healthy and housed. We’re call the new campaign “Keeping Promises” which is a spin off of the joke candidate campaign poster I created for the Presidential debates. That poster is shown below:

Watch for more news on this campaign and please consider becoming a regular donor.

Best Friends

I’ve been working through some trial software to identify grant opportunities for the Retreat and found the Rachael Ray Foundation works specifically to save domestic animals. It looked like a nice fit for us so I started to investigate further. One of the requirements for grant application submission is to be a member of Best Friends. Best Friends is a network of shelters and rescues and again it’s a nice fit for the Retreat. One other requirement is also to join the Shelter Pet Data Association (SPDA). The SPDA maintains statistics on each shelter’s activity and therefore requires you to upload monthly your numbers of your animals by category — intakes, transfers in and out, deaths, etc.

The Retreat uses a simple data base program, To Your Rescue which creates a record for each cat we have on hand. We enter medical data and key milestones and its report generator provides the information the SPDA needed with no effort. I’m expecting that by participating in these two organizations, Mandarin’s Retreat will gain some needed credibility as a responsible rescue and open up opportunities to share information, ask questions or yell for help with similar organizations. I don’t like re-inventing the wheel and I’m willing to ask for help. Knowing where or who to ask is the key, of course.

Anyway, should you want to check out these two organizations here are the links: Best Friends https://bestfriends.org/ and SPDA https://shelterpetdata.org/

In other happenings at the shelter, we have released all the named kittens to perpetual Kitten Day Care in the Retreats offices. You forget just how much chaos seven young kittens can produce. I’m currently looking for the battery cover of my computer mouse. The cover was removed and the mouse remained on my desk. How the kittens accomplished that is currently unknown. Here is a picture on the kittens plus two sister cats eating supper last night.

National Foster A Pet Month

#MyFirstFoster @petloveco @mrhwcats

While these guys are definitely NOT our first fosters, they follow in the footsteps of Winston, Pumpkin, Cody and many others,

Incidentals

Last week was busy and I didn’t spend much time on social media. Having eight kittens chasing their tails and falling off of counter tops at Kitten Day Care (KDC) in the office kept us on our toes. In addition, we’ve been dealing with two fairly sick cats: Cody and Carmello. Cody is not quite one and Carmellito is anywhere from 16 to 20 years old.

We got the big ginger dude in a pretty sorry shape. His constant diarrhea, matted fur and lethargic attitude had indicated a need for a vet visit a while ago, but his vet trip did not happen until he arrived at the Retreat. Two days at our friendly clinic with a bunch of meds and pain killers plus a gentle washing brought him back from the vet in somewhat better shape. The initial diagnosis was possible cancer and definite kidney problems; but now we’re not so sure. The meds, good food and a large kennel have worked wonders. His kidney food arrived, which he begrudgingly eats and his meds has reduced the size of his kidney. We’re not sure what’s going on but he’ll have a follow-up next week to see what’s what. The original plan was for Mr C to stabilize and survive the weekend. He’s done a lot more than just that, so we’re optimistic.

Cody, on the other hand, is a different story. He has only one working eye and has survived panleukopenia. As many of those who raise panleuk kitties know, survival is merely the beginning. The awful virus can leave deep claw marks inside of a kitten’s body and Cody did not escape his illness unscathed. As it turns out, Cody ended up with a pancreatic enzyme insufficiency. It took us a while to get the diagnosis, because his other gut symptoms somewhat covered everything up. We have his enzyme supplements coming in tomorrow and we’re hopeful he’ll continue to kick ass and take names.

Now to the incidentals. Most folks when they think of cats and cat rescues probably think of costs as food, litter, and vet bills. They would be right as these three items are the majority of our monthly costs. However, the deliveries this week painted a wider canvass of expenses. We received 1,000 t-shirt type plastic bags, a new kennel (to expand Carmello’s space), two surgical collars, one new kitty tower (for KDC), one kennel scratching post, blue nitrate gloves, 2,000 syringes and a micro-chip reader.

“Why do we need so many plastic bags”, you ask? We use about five plastic bags a day to handle the 60 pounds of cat poop that goes to the trash. While we buy groceries and reuse the bags when we can, we do not generally have 150 used grocery bags lying around and we have to buy them. Nitrate gloves and syringes are an easy guess for taking care of sick kitties but each expense goes into the budget.

Fortunately our @Walmart and our @Amazon business accounts let us purchase tax free. That helps. @Chewy offers us discounts from time to time. Ours friends in social media offer us ideas and suggestions for savings and time savers. It’s hard work running a cat rescue and while it’s a labor of love, expenses are a constant concern. If you would like to help, please hit our donate button on the landing page.