Yesterday when Steven got home from work he immediately starting fixing the heater in the cat house. It was in the teens/low 20s and windy yesterday, and we noticed the heater was acting funny Friday night. He tried the “unplug and plug it back in” trick Friday night, but on Saturday morning when the temperature never went back up, he realized something must have broken during the day Friday (I’m so glad we thought to check it!).

Snow Jr (black cat) is living in the cat house right now, but this super friendly striped cat, who Steven calls Tywin, and I call Davos, comes around quite often too. I thought it was so cute he was “helping” Steven fix the heater (see photo below). (The heater fan stopped working, so Steven took another fan out of one of the backup heaters we have, and it’s working again.)

Later, while we were eating dinner, Steven told me how Snow Jr ran away while he worked on the cat house, but Tywin/Davos came running across the frozen pond to come see what he was doing. I thought that was adorable. And also looked at the pond and saw it was partially unfrozen and wondered how he knew where to go to avoid getting wet.

Sigh.

So we’re finishing up that portion of dinner (salads, while our leftover pizza heats up) and a cat I’ve NEVER seen before walks by the windows and looks HORRIBLE. I say to Steven “did you see that new cat? He looks so skinny and rough!” I got ready to give him some food, then realized – it was Tywin/Davos! He looked horrible and unrecognizable because he was SOAKING wet!

He must have fallen into the pond!

Steven didn’t even see him at first, because Tywin/Davos showed up with a black cat friend that we’ve never seen before, and Steven thought I was talking about that cat!

Thankfully, Tywin/Davos is super friendly and wants to come into the house all the time already, so I was able to wrap him up in a towel and bring him in to warm up.

The poor guy already had ice forming on his fur!!! It was NOT a good day to take a swim in the pond!

While I was warming him up, Steven put food out for the black cat friend who came with him – he’s on the right in the photo below, and Snow Jr is on the left.

I used a few towels to dry off Tywin/Davos, put him over the heater vent, and brought in a small heater to get him all nice and dry. He was shivering and shaking at first, but he stopped when he started to dry (and a couple of cat food tube treats helped too!).

It took him about 45 mins to warm up! But I made sure he was nice and dry before he went back outside. And crossed my fingers he would stay away from the pond.


When he showed up this morning, he was dry. Phew!