Our new cat!

I know some of you have been following her story a bit over on corellian_sugar's LJ, but to give a very abbreviated background, Corellian_Sugar found her abandoned in an apartment with no fresh food or water (and likely there hadn't been in quite awhile). She took the cat home, but realized she wasn't going to be able to be around enough to integrate the newcomer with her current cat. I talked it over with rackham and we were both fairly excited about the idea of taking her in... so, yesterday we drove down to a restaurant near Chehalis, Washington to meet Corellian_Sugar halfway (she's in Portland, we're just outside Kirkland... what better place to meet than at a British restaurant off the side of the freeway in the middle of nowhere!) and bring our new baby home!

She's an absolutely gorgeous cat, incredibly affectionate and very sweet. We've named her Zoë -- after the character from "Firefly." Okay, so they don't seem to be much alike in personality, but the name really does fit her... the funny thing is that Rackham and I had both pretty much narrowed it down to that name after meeting her (with slight dithering on possibly going with Friday), and before we headed home, Corellian_Sugar asked us which names we were thinking of... well, we handed her the list (yeah, we had about 15 names on there -- most of them from Whedonverse shows, with a few thrown in from Star Wars, Heinlein novels, and George R.R. Martin books for good measure) and she said "Oh! You've got Zoë on here! That's what I'd been thinking of naming her!" So, it appears to be destiny.

We took her to our vet yesterday afternoon... and everyone in the office kept commenting on how pretty she is (because she is!). The vet told us that she's probably around four or five years old, judging by bone structure and teeth (which will need to be cleaned once she's settled in and more comfortable around us). She tested negative for FIV and Feline Leukemia, and it looks like she may have had fleas at one time, though they couldn't actually find any on her now. We're treating her for them, just in case, and watching to make sure she doesn't have worms. And she got the first of her vaccinations (since we have no clue how long it's been since she was last vaccinated). Oh, and she's been broken already, so that's one less thing to worry about (you know, where you take a perfectly functioning cat and, with a little operation, break her so she can't have kittens).

The vets were very impressed that we'd gone to the trouble of setting up a nice area for her to be isolated in at home... and that we'd been taking care to wash our hands between handling her and Polly, our other cat. The hardest part is going to be keeping Zoë isolated out in the garage for the next three weeks. We want to make absolutely sure that she's healthy, and the vet recommended keeping her completely separate if we have the means, until she gets her second vaccination. So, she gets to live in the garage (which is actually quite nice -- the previous homeowners put down parquet flooring, we've added some area rugs, and our old comfy chair is out there awaiting a future reupholstering project), and we've got things set up so we can spend a lot of time out there with her.

She's an absolute lapcat, which is quite a change from our last two cats... Cymry could never sit still on a lap for that long, unless she was sick, and Polly has never learned to relax on a lap, no matter how much she wants to sit there. But Zoë seems to love curling up in a lap and sleeping (even better, she'll curl up in Rackham's lap, which is not something either of our other two cats would ever do unless I was gone).

I'm just so happy that Corellian_Sugar found her when she did, and that we were at a point where we were able to take her in!

( And now, for some pictures! Behind the cut, because they're big. )