Anita's Notebook

CATS, CATS, CATS, AND MORE CATS. That was the strange title that caught Jennifer’s eye one day when she was perusing an online copy of an old newspaper.

‘Um, I think you might be interested in this for your blog Honey,‘ she said with a raised eyebrow and turned the screen so I could see.

Over the CATS, CATS, CATS title was a black and white picture of a woman who was frowning and looked like she was having the worst day of her life.

Her eyes were cast downwards towards a crazy tangle of cats -lots of them- twisting and climbing over each other to get to a batch of food put out on a table.

I can only imagine what it sounded like in that room at that exact moment, I’m guessing it sounded something like MWRAOWRRWRRMAAAOOOWRRRAWW.

Turns out the woman’s name is Wilma MacDonald and she wasn’t always so unhappy with her room full of cats. She had been a travel agent at one time but decided to give something new a try: running a hotel for cats.

She must have loved cats a lot to want to open a whole hotel for them. And really what’s there not to love about sitting around and watching cats for a living? Well except for litter box duty lmao but beyond that it’s a pretty layed back job.

So what went wrong then, how did Wilma MacDonald get to the point of frowning down on a chaos of cats?

Apparently things were going along fine until she started to notice that there were more cats around than were registered at the hotel. Turns out that people were chucking cats over the gate of the hotel and eventually they even started to leave cats in boxes at the front door as well.

Of course being a cat lover she couldn’t turn away the poor abandoned cats so they just kept piling up and so did the bills to take care of them. Her business not only stopped being profitable but the Hotel For Cats became an unsanitary place, prompting the Santa Monica city council to tell her to shut things down.

I think a lot of people had a giggle at Wilma MacDonald’s expense for starting a cat hotel and for how it turned out in the end, but I think it was good that she decided to go out on a limb and try something new. I gotta say that most people don’t seem to be that courageous.

But I think it’s also good that when things …didn’t quite work out… that she packed up shop and moved on to other ventures. Because once you have cats, cats, cats, and more cats there’s only so much time before you’re literally swimming in them. And from the looks of the picture that time wasn’t too far off at all.