After moving to Cambridge just over a year ago, ive not made a huge amount of friends. One of the friends i made was a cat breeder whom i bought some books off on trademe.

I bought an ex breeding cat who had not been the best of breeders, i paid a decent amount of $150 for her which was fine. We loved her so much and decided that when our older cat died we would replace her with one of my friends kittens.

In the past year my friend decided she wanted to move her website to my server for hosting. Being a friend i gave her $5 a month hosting and went out of my way to go over to her house and set up her computer to work.

I even set her up a new website using a CMS and spent a good few hours on it, she however decided that she wanted to stick with her old frames version, centered, with lots of italics and MS Comic (which is fine, i can live with that).

When she messed something up on her website that made links in her frames work, she blamed it on my server. When i rebooted the server, for 5 seconds her webpage was down (literally, its a VPS) she complained and said she wanted a refund on hosting and to move it elsewhere and made a huge deal about it … she never did.

Finally my older kitty had to be put down, and i asked about a new kitten. She said she would give me a discount because i had done the same for her. When she had kittens she said ‘oh lets stick with the $500 i charge everyone else’. I can live with that. The kitten was ready right before  i knew i was going to be away for 2 weeks in wellington so I asked as a friend could she keep it an extra couple of weeks.  I thought it was not cool to take a new kitten then leave it by itself alone only with my other cat who didn’t know it for a couple of weeks. Since my friend had reneged on ‘mates rates’ on everything else, and often offered to look after my other cat when i had gone away (though id never taken her up on it), i figured it wouldnt be a huge thing.

Today i went to her house to see the kitten. She tells me its ready tomorrow, and suddenly decided that i should pay her $2.50 per day to look after it for the next couple of weeks.  Since I wasn’t going to pick it up for a couple more weeks, I had only paid $300 of the $500. I need to either come up with $200 by tomorrow, or $2.50 per day for the next 2.5 weeks or until i can pay for it.

I’ve decided that there’s no way I’m paying $17.50 a week for a kitten to be looked after, even catteries are cheaper than that. However I am going away to Wellington for a couple of weeks, and i’m on the bones of my butt trying to pay for extras relating to that. So yeah, bit of a bombshell, and im really not happy about it all. I very much doubt at this stage ill get any money back if i decide not to go through with taking the kitten and getting another elsewhere.

I guess we will just have to extend loans or something and have my oldest son look after it whilst im away.

ps. I do not want advice or opinion much here, im just letting of steam and pissed. Friendship will be pretty much terminated in this case.