Well, it’s been awhile, but remember how I had to leave Kalakoa, the kitten I adopted, at the shelter because she had a feline respiratory illness? Well, it was almost time for her to come home the last time I visited her.

Here she is in the hospital.

The poor little thing was not happy being there. A kitten does not like being confined like that! But her eyes had been all goopy, and she wasn’t eating well, so I still had to leave her there. That was hard on me, too.

But finally I got to bring her home! They hadn’t been able to spay her till she was all better, so they called me to let me know her spay date and to come pick her up at the end of that day.

So back I went to Vancouver, kitty carrier in hand. I was so excited! I got all her paperwork after they microchipped her and put her new collar and ID tag on it. She was surprisingly alert, though I could tell she was still a bit sleepy.

I was told not to let her jump and to keep her as quiet as possible. What a joke that was!

Here is the first photo I took of her after she came home. I decided to keep her in the laundry room for a week while her sutures healed. I didn’t want to take any chances that Keola or Noelani would start fighting with her and rip them out.

You can see in this photo how they shaved part of her tail at the shelter. Probably because of the effects of having the respiratory illness.

“Don’t let her jump!” they said. But she jumped anyway, all the way up to the counter.

What a beautiful kitty she was!! And she acted as though she knew it, too. She’d grown quite a bit since I’d first adopted her. Here she is, showing tortietude. I found out that her coloring is called Torbie, which is a cross between a tortoiseshell and a tabby. But she also had the attitude of a calico.

The turquoise on her belly is actually a tattoo that they put there to let vets in the future know she’s been spayed.

And this is how I knew it was meant to be that she’d be mine: the exact spot on her hind leg that ʻUkulele had.

Kalakoa would jump down onto the floor, and since I didn’t want to confine her to a carrier for a week, I just had to hope that the sutures would be okay.

Here she is, washing her paw.

She was such a sweet baby, but with lots of kitten in her, it was hard to get photos of her because she really didn’t want to hold still for long periods of time. I snapped this one right before she jumped down again!

Two seconds after I took this photo, she was on the move again.

Then she jumped down into the laundry sink.

Then into the laundry basket!

Ho da attitude, yeah? I wondered what she would do when she met Keola and Noelani!