I WOULD PAY TEN TIMES AS MUCH FOR CHOCOLATE IF IT MEANT REDUCING THE AMOUNT OF SLAVES IN THE WORLD? HOW IS THIS ANY KIND OF PROBLEM.
good news, you can! the company’s called Tony’s Chocolonely and their entire purpose is to make slave-free chocolate and reform the chocolate industry.
Whole Foods carries it. If you don’t want to support an Amazon-owned company, World Market carries it. You can also buy it directly from the company.
It’s the best chocolate I’ve ever had and it’s 100% slave free. Tony’s Chocolonely works really hard to push for transparency within the chocolate industry and actually has and is following an action plan to eliminate slavery within cocoa production. They’re good people who make good chocolate.
So, when my maternal grandmother died, we had to find loving, permanent homes for all five of her cats because otherwise she would have risen from the grave to kill the entire family. We took in Chloe because Chloe was my grandmother’s favorite, and she made my mom promise to look after her. Now my mother treats Chloe like her third child, and the cat is basically plastered to her 24/7 when she isn’t hiding from some imagined enemy like the dustbuster or my dad’s footsteps.
Anyway, we wound up giving the rest of the cats to this couple that runs a joint called Kitty Korner. They try to find loving homes for all the cats they take in, but will care for the unadoptables (read: assholes) for the rest of their lives. That’s great, because one of the cats we gave to these poor women was Tobey. I have no idea why my grandmother ever adopted Tobey. He was a huge schmuck. The most handsome orange tomcat you ever saw, and he loved to crawl in your lap. But if you ever tried to touch him, he would switch immediately into Kill Mode and you could say goodbye to your hand. Needless to say, having him in your lap was awkward. It was like holding a bomb.
Kitty Korner sends us detailed letters every year to give us updates on how Tobey’s doing. Basically, they are status reports on how much of a douche Tobey is and continues to be. These women are saints. I guess they really like cats, because these letters are like a full page of single-spaced text. But more or less, they amount to:
2003: Tobey has a real colorful personality! But, uh, we don’t think he’s suited for adoption yet
2004: Nope, still not suited for adoption
2005: I think this is pretty much a lost cause
2006: WTF
2007: Tobey is trying to kill us and every other cat in the house
2008: Tobey is still trying to kill us and every other cat in the house
2009: Tobey is a vicious dictator and can only find pleasure in the subjugation of other organisms
BUT!!!! The past few years, Tobey has apparently been making steady improvement. And in our most recent letter, we have been informed that he is no longer doing things like venturing upstairs expressly to beat the living shit out of the other cats at Kitty Korner. He will also let you pet him, and when he’s had enough he’ll give a warning nip instead of removing your limb. In fact, Tobey, at a ripe old age of 14, is ready for a new home! With an experienced cat owner, comes the necessary caveat, and like… no kids. At all. Ever. Or other cats, probably. But at least he’s no longer a psychopath.
WE GOT ANOTHER LETTER FROM KITTY KORNER AND WE THOUGHT TOBEY HAD FINALLY KICKED THE BUCKET BUT IN FACT HE HAS FOUND A NEW HOME, AT AGE 16, WITH AN ELDERLY MAN WHO RECENTLY LOST HIS OWN CAT.
I MAY CRY.
2/1/2016: old man Tobey still loving his forever home :’)
Amazing
The adoption story to end all adoption stories. Hey, does Kitty Korner have a Kickstarter anywhere?
The outpouring of love for this post is amazing! I’m going to cry at the office.
They do not have a Kickstarter, however, as a no-kill foster home run exclusively through volunteer work, they always welcome donations and you also have the ability to sponsor a cat. You’ll get detailed photos and status reports on your kitty, and should he or she get a happy ending like Tobey, you’ll be the first to know!
My grandmother was a card-carrying crazy cat lady until the day she died, and she was a big supporter of Kitty Corner. The women who run it are as devoted to rescue animals as she was her entire life. Wherever she is now, she’d be humbled to know just how many people were touched by Tobey’s comeback story.
I didn’t know cheetahs meow I’ve always thought they roar my whole life has been a lie
Ok but the other one is purring so hard
If I ever don’t reblog this assume I’m dead
Fun fact: technically, because of its inability to roar and its ability to purr, the cheetah is not a ‘big cat’ (or Great Cat) - they are still classified as Lesser Cats.
Also you haven’t heard anything until you hear them cheep.
being a cashier is so stressful i’ll be like “hi! how are you :^)” and the customer will hand me a screwdriver and say “my granddaughter had a miscarriage this morning” and I’m like …………………..i’m so sorry that’s $2.33
Deadass I once told a customer “Have a nice day!” and he responded that he couldn’t because it was the anniversary of his wife’s murder
I often refer to my bottle-raised lamb as my adopted daughter, because it’s mostly true, it temporarily keeps nosy strangers from knowing I’m an eeeevil childfree woman, and it’s hilarious when people find out. And by that time they’re usually too disturbed by the “her-daughter-is-a-sheep” thing to get on my case about the “woman-with-no-husband-or-kids-oh-the-horror” thing.
Most of my friends are aware that I do this, and will back me up in conversations without batting an eye when I reference my daughter. And the best part is that they literally never drop the story. They just 100% all the time accept that I have a two-year-old adopted daughter. The fact that she happens to be a sheep is an unimportant detail, not worth mentioning until an anecdote gets too weird to plausibly be about a human toddler.
Which actually takes much longer than you’d think, since human toddlers apparently have absolutely zero sense. “She bites if you stop paying attention to her” is believable, “she tries to eat rocks out of the landscaping” is believable, “she stuck her head through a fence and couldn’t get out” is believable. “She jumped a five foot fence and came screaming back into the house through the dog door when I left her outside in the pasture” does get some strange looks, though usually not for the right reason.
Occasionally the joke gets turned around on me, though. I posted a picture on my not-tumblr blog of her wearing my glasses, and every comment was “Oh my gosh she looks just like you!!!” “I would never have known she was adopted If you hadn’t told me!!” “Are you sure that’s not an old picture of you?!”
Anyways the way Tumblr treats the Perks Of Being A Wallflower like it’s cringe and bad just because of the hipster craze over it in 2012 and ignoring the fact that it’s one of the few books/movies that shows the ugly side of teen mental illness and discusses sexual trauma in young boys (something only portrayed in shows like SVU) is in fact, bullshit, and I’ll never forgive y'all for taking the line “we accept the love we think we deserve” (a reference to toxic abusive relationships) and turning it into cringe culture. This is a book about a struggling depressed kid who I saw myself in as a teen, and yeah he and his friends could be annoying and pretentious but are you going to say you weren’t as a kid?
In High School Musical 2 Sharpay very clearly states that they have “…Iced tea imported from England, life guards imported from Spain, towels imported from Turkey, and turkey imported from Maine.” In order to import an item, it must come from another country. The series is set in Albequerque, New Mexico, and as New Mexico and Maine are both part of the United States Of America, they cannot have their turkey imported from Maine. As most of the characters are white, and all speak English, this clearly indicates that High School Musical takes place in an alternate universe where a second Civil War has split the nation and New Mexico is no longer part of the Union, based on the fact that we never see the characters celebrate the Fourth of July. In this essay I will
