The Royal Engagement

This is official. Cinderella is losing her glass shoes so Prince Charming is looking for another bride. If any of you own a glass stiletto, 4 inches high, about size 3, you are eligible to be the next princess. You may now share the news.

Just kidding. I am not crazy yet. Though honestly the past two weeks can get me there.

But before I got to the crazy part, let us announce the winner of last event.
Here is the nominee again:

and here is the entry:

1. Domino
2. Checkers
3. Milkshake
4. Shadow
5. Bluey
6. Ebony
7. Whitey
8. D'Artagnan
9. Portos
10. Artos
11. Aramis

The random draw said:

Kitten #1 is a female, and she got "Whitney" (the computer keep saying "error" because whitey is not grammatically correct *sigh*)
Kitten #2 is a male and he got "Domino"
Kitten #3 is a male and he got "Ebony"
Kitten #4 is also male and he got "Portos"

So we got 4 winners.

The prize:

is available in pink, red, khaki (light brown), orange and blue.
Can each of the winner email me at whiskerssyndicate[at]gmail[dot]com with their preferred colour and shipping address? One versatile fish hunting cat is coming your way.


The way Kim told me about her wonderful friend "Sparky Terror" really inspire me, so I cheated a little bit and remove that name from the competition to be given especially to a very special cat. She is around 4 months old. Her story is a horror story, but the way she deals with it was so wonderful I think the name Sparky Terror will be perfect for her.

I am saving her full story for another day, but if you really want a peek, here she is:

That said, Kim also got one of the versatile, fish hunting cat. So claim your colour now, Kim!

Now the crazy part.

Monsoon is coming, and it seems like the conference of extreme weather had begun. Storm, typhoon, earthquake, landslide, flood, all over the world; and here in Bandung, seasons went upside down.

Starting with April, monsoon was suppose to bring warm weather and smiling sun above our county. It will be dry season all over Indonesia until October, when another monsoon come to bring the rain.

But unlike any dry season it's very wet now in Bandung, with occasional shower and daily torrential rain. It's not raining cats and dog, only water, but flood is everywhere. Perhaps like Melbourne, Bandung can change weather from hundreds of Farenheit to only fifty, or lower, and jumped back up the next morning. Like London, Bandung is covered with mist even until midday, and some of the days the sun didn't even bother to show. Our laundry that supposed to dry within half an hour in normal weather, now need the whole day to dry.

At the other side, diseases paraded the entire city. Kitty season had begun a few months ago and everywhere around Bandung you will see baby kitten to toddler cats and their parents sneezing and got runny, crusty eyes or sitting in the middle of the street seeking a dry sun while gasping for air. Without treatment, those kitten will catch pneumonia in a few days and go through their agonizing death within 48 hours.

Yes, it's Domino, feverish

Pukun and his crusty nose.

A street kitten that I picked up, and have to let go the same evening

This one too, didn't go out of the clinic alive

For the rest of the month until the sun is more stable, I will see plenty of dried out, grisly looking little carcases in dumpsters, along the river, in the sewer, and landfill. They spread germs to the other street cats, and the circle of evil started over.

If I wish I have a hundred pairs of hand like Goddess Kuan Yin, it will be an understatement, because I will still need a few more brain to actually handle sick kittens in the Whiskers' Syndicate alone. One gets better, the other went down, and so on.


At time like this, the bills grow taller very fast, while the income seems to stay where they are.

Then the temptation to go back to work that still lurk in the dark start coming out. If I have my day job I can always rely on the other bank account that is automatically filled every month.

That temptation clashed with the sense of devastation too familiar every time the season is changing. I would have to pick up a lot of disease ridden cat from the street much too often, and paid a lot of money for vet clinic stay over. But with less to tend for them, every day I will go home and find at least one kitten or senior die, alone, on the cold floor or in the cage of the vet office. What's the point?  Then I remembered that I always promise that next time it will be better, and I decided that this is the time I keep that promise, and with that beat the temptation of some jobseeker dot com.

I spend more time with the cats, I monitor them all the time. I pay attention to symptoms, because of that, I save more cats. Instead of seeing one cat die in my living room one every night, I see one that got better, one after the other. Some didn't make it, but instead of dying alone on a cold floor in an empty house, or the street, they die in my arm. I stayed with them, long enough to say goodbyes, so that when they had to go to Rainbow Bridge and meet Noah, or Peter, or God anyway, they can say that they've been loved. My vet said it even better. She quoted that famous song from the sinking Titanic.

Love can touch us one time
And last for a lifetime
And never let go till we're gone

Between the little remaining free time, when the mobsters are sleeping,  I spend time by myself by sewing new toys. Stitching had somehow become consoling meditation for me and it does help bring the enlightenment that if I want to get these cats' plight surfaced, I need to spread ourselves thinner.

For that matter, Care2 that has been my home for years is seemingly out of option. Though  I truly missed my friends there and the thick flavour of filial piety between our great circle of friends, I was cut out of the site for over a year, even when I try logging in at different time of the day, using different browser, different computer, or even opening a new account.

So I dragged myself into other social  media, and one of the other that I already have is Google +. The name said enough about who own it. It's a mix of facebook and twitter, though it came pretty late into the competition, so the majority verdict is that it's not going to stand up against the very many others, let alone facebook.

When it launched a sometimes back I gave it a try, but it was as empty as the desert so I left, like many other. I don't want to go to Facebook because I am still overwhelmed by the many gruesome picture and animal cruelty people posted in their pages day after day and it exacerbated my insomnia because I have to see that same amount of cruelty in my daily life already.

But when I go back there, it's totally different. Google+ had grown so well that it has literally hundreds of animal defender communities unlike any other, and just for fun, Google + is now the second social media sought out after facebook.

So I plunge in with less hesitation and join my old Care2 friends like +Kay HelpSaveAnimals Fisher who already there sounding the plea of the death row pets all over the world and +Michelle Sibinovic who campaign for the shelters around the world (and she endorses the Syndicate as well!). She invited me into another animal defender league and engage me to new friends like   +Adelheid Adelliam who relentlessly campaigning for Faroe Island's pilot whale and Taiji's dolphin.

Soon enough I find myself in the middle of animal welfare war that I had left in Care2. I spend as much time as I can allow creating awareness for Whiskers' Syndicate, and although it is still pretty empty, we are now in Google + as +The Whiskers' Syndicate. If you are there before us, please send some pluses our way.

While God had sent me a brigade of friends who helped me with the cats, and advices, and care in the cat sphere, this time he crosses my path with cool people like +Mayura De Silva a web specialist who seems to be able to conquer any code and use his expertise to help the Syndicate to finally get a facebook page here: The Whiskers' Syndicate Facebook. What I try to accomplish (and spectacularly failed) to do in 3 days, he done it in 53 minutes including a power outage from his home in Sri Lanka.

Did I mention that we now have a twitter account? @WhiskerSyndicat.

Talking about spreading ourselves thin! But honestly, if this can help making Bandung street animal's plight heard, then so be it.

So if you are in any of those platforms, come and visit us. We cannot promise a lot of content yet, because all of those were made recently, but while you are there, please drop by and give us a high five, and share the plight of Bandung animals. We are soaked wet here, but we have hope that the sun will rise for us tomorrow, so we hang in there just one more day.

When things go wrong, as they sometimes will,
When the road you're trudging seems all up hill,
When the funds are low, and the debts are high,
And you want to smile, but you have to sigh,
When care is pressing you down a bit,
Rest if you must, but don't you quit.

Life is queer with its twists and turns,
As everyone of us sometimes learns,
And many a failure turns about,
When you might have won had you stuck it out;
Don't give up though the pace seems slow,
You may succeed with another blow.

Success is failure turned inside out,
The silver tint of the clouds of doubt,
And you never can tell how close you are,
It may be near when it seems so far;
So stick to the fight when you're hardest hit,
It's when things seem worse,
that you must not quit.