The New Barn Cat aka Happy Caturday

We had a cat when we moved to our place last year.  She was primarily an outdoor cat, but slept inside at night and kept my lap warm in the winter.  Sadly, we lost her to the food chain in April and have been kittie-less ever since.  Which has been ok, except;

• We live on a farm, so we have a hay barn.
• Having a hay barn, means we have mice.
• Being kittie-less for quite some time, means we have fat mice in the hay barn.

The alpaca dog would like to catch the mice, but he's just not quick or silent enough.

I've only seen a couple of mice this summer, but with the weather cooling off, I suspect we'll have a large migration of mice into the hay barn if we don't do something about it soon.  Having an excess of mice leads to an excess of mouse droppings which can lead to Hantavirus and the Plague.  Which means I have been thinking quite seriously about replacing our cat for a while.

So yesterday, when I was visiting a nearby alpaca farm I spied 5 or 6 young kittens in the brush.  I asked the owner if she was going to be keeping all of them.  She told me about the cats, how she got them and that she had a few older ones she definitely wanted to let go.

I told her I would be interested in one or two, but needed to speak with Hubba and pick up supplies.

I think she was very excited to get rid of a couple, because she emailed me late last night saying her granddaughters had caught two of them and they were waiting in her office for me to fetch them.  :-)

Hubba agreed to one cat with two stipulations: (1) it will not come in the house and (2) it will not have a name.

So, here is the newest addition to the Alpacamundo farm... The Barn Cat.

He's quick.  Quick like a cat.  So all the photos look like this one.  But I did finally get a decent one...

He's about 6 months old, is an accomplished mouser, likes alpacas, big dogs and people.  He has some seriously big feet, so I think he'll end up being a big boy.  For some reason, I really want to call him Bruce...

Updated: One of my favorite blogs has a Saturday feature called Happy Caturday, so I updated the title of this post... since it is indeed a Happy Caturday. :-)