stereotypical single woman

This is a subject I’ve been doing a lot of research on lately. I’m familiar with the process of moving cats from one home to another. I know to make my bed with unwashed bedding, set up their litter box, and use a Feliway diffuser all before my cats set foot in their new home. And I think I’ve done rather well, all have adjusted very quickly whenever we’ve moved, with minimum of demon cats displays and no behavioral problems (yet.)

What I’m most concerned about is actually traveling with them. The longest distance we’ve moved has been 5 miles. Next week they’re going to have to travel 163 miles, or roughly 2 1/2 hours across the state. And sure, Marty and Harvey have been little troupers when it comes to traveling, but they’ve never had to spend that long in the car before. And Foster, well, let’s just say I haven’t ruled out kitty tranquilizers, even though I’m going to try avoiding them if at all possible. So I’ve been doing my research, and just about everything I’ve found has been common sense stuff - keep them in the carrier, don’t leave them unattended in the car, wear earplugs, give them food and water if traveling for over 3 hours, etc… But then on WikiHow I found this little gem of a tidbit:

• Make sure your cat is wearing the collar and ID tags at all times! You never know if your cat will somehow weasel its way away. A rather drastic, but potentially very effective, method would be to shave the hair off your cat’s stomach and use a marker to write your phone number there. It’s typically best left to be used on cats who are adamant that they don’t want a collar on.

Shave my cat’s stomach? Ummm…yes, it would be effective, and kinda funny. Actually, it would be really funny, especially on Marty. Especially if I wrote something like “for a good time call…” on it. But it would also be very painful, not for the cat, but for me. I really don’t want to start school looking like I lost a knife fight, it wouldn’t do much for my street cred in Detroit. I think we’ll be sticking with the collars - I just bought a sparkly flowered one for Marty.