Mostly Nap Time

Karen Jo:  I didn't come up with a theme for today, so I just took some photos and I'll let the kitties tell you about them.  I really messed part of this post up, so I'm fixing it.

Bambino:  I was eating out of the food bowl nearest the door when Mom plopped down on the floor and pointed that strange black thing at me.  My breakfast was in the other bowl, but I wanted to check out what Tabitha had.  MOL!  That's Tabitha coming out of the safe room.  She went in to see if Cricket and Chevelle left anything.  As if!

Chevelle:  I 'm just hanging out in the living room beside Mom's big rocking chair.

Gandalf:

I am so very happy that Mom moved all those stupid papers off the table.  This is the best nap spot ever!

Clancy:  I love this nappy spot.  Glorious sun puddle!

Tabitha:  I was taking a nice nap, too, until Mom plopped down on the floor and pointed the black box at me.  I was all stretched out in the sun puddle on the mat.  Oh, I know that the black box is just the camera, but I haven't seen it in so long that it scares me.

Bambino: I get two pictures today because Mom thought that I was Cricket.  MOL!  You'd think that she would recognize me by now.  I am finishing off Gandalf's breakfast.

Karen Jo:  I thought that you didn't like the quality cat food.

Bambino:  This stuff is pretty tasty.

Julius:  Mom could have gotten a picture of me, if she had been fast enough.  Since Clancy was fast asleep, I was in the hall heading for the kitchen to get some food.  Mom startled me and I turned around to look at her.  She was so surprised that she forgot about the camera and I ran past her and dove under the bed.

Karen Jo:  I really wish that you would stop being so afraid of me.  It's been four years now and you still run away from me.

Julius:  When Clancy came, he scared me so badly that I got scared of you all over again.  Things are getting a bit better now, though.

Where We Eat

Thank all of you for your kind words on Maddie's Farewell post.  I put away a set of food bowls this morning, so I thought that I would talk about that.  I am going to take photos of the kitties when I can.  The kitties who allow their pictures to be taken will have them published.  On to the kitties!

Rocio:  I love to hang out in the laundry basket.  Mom is too lazy to put her undies away, so I always have a nice nest here.  I usually don't eat wet food, but when I do, I chose one of the bowls in the kitchen.

Karen Jo:  Gandalf, you remind me of Herman when you lie in the sun like that.

Gandalf:  Cool.  I love lying in the sun up here on the table, especially since Mom cleared off all the papers.  I have my own bowl, but I don't always eat from it.  I tend to munch around.  Maddie always used to beat me to my bowl.  Clancy and I get premium food and Maddie liked it, too.  Some days, I prefer the Fancy Feast and let some other cat eat mine.

Karen Jo:  That's most days now.  The food in your bowl usually does get eaten.

Clancy:  This is my dry food bowl.  Mom put out 8 wet and 8 dry food bowls for us.  The dry food bowl isn't on the placemat any more because if I don't like, or I'm finished with, the wet food, I flip the mat over the bowl and the dry food used to go flying.

Karen Jo:  You used to make quite the mess.

Cricket:  This is Chevelle's placemat that I'm standing in front of.  Mine is in the background.  I finish Chevelle's food for her most days.  Chevelle and I get Fussie Cat wet food because when I came Mom was told that was all I would eat.  We really like it.  I'm too thin, so I get a whole can all to myself for breakfast and dinner.  The other cats only get half a can.

Chevelle:  For some reason, I like to hang around litter boxes.  I am often lying next to a litter box when I'm not playing.  I eat in the safe room with Chevelle.  Mom started giving me Fussie Cat, too, because I ate out of Chevelle's bowl as soon as I got here.  It's good, but sometimes I go around and check out what the other kitties are eating.  I like to eat out of Clancy's bowl.

Clancy:  She's the only cat who can get away with that, unless I have buried it.

Tabitha:  I love sun puddles.  I had my head down and my eyes closed until I heard Mom sneaking up on me.  I always eat in the computer room.  There are two bowls in there and I always get one of them.  Sometimes Bambino eats with me and sometimes Gandalf does.

Bambino:  There are still two food bowls where Herman's original buffet was.  Maddie always ate there.  I alternate between eating there and in the computer room with Tabitha.  I was hiding at picture taking time.

Julius:  Since I am scared of Clancy, I come out to eat while he is napping mid-morning and in the middle of the night.  I used to frequent the bowl that Mom put away.  I roam around and eat out of any bowl that still has food in it.  We all eat the dry food.  We have a variety to choose from: Blue Indoor Health is our favorite, but we also have Go at the moment (Mom changes flavors whenever we run out) and there is Solid Gold in the safe room, as it is formulated for both kittens and adult cats.                                                  

Farewell, Maddie

This is absolutely NOT what I wanted to write about today.

This is the first photo I ever took of Maddie.  She's in the computer room, having just moved in a while earlier.  She didn't want the door closed for very long at all.  She soon made buddies with Horus and she played with him until Sea Shell came.

This is the last photo I took of Maddie.  She is sitting on the kitchen table.  She was a sweetheart.  She liked to sit on my lap and be petted while I was on the computer.  FIP came exactly like a thief in the night and stole her away from me.  At 8 last night, she was at dinner and nibbled at her food.  At midnight treat time, she didn't want her treats, which was unheard of.  Then I noticed her abdominal muscles working hard, just like Cissy's did the day before she died.  There is an all night emergency vet 36 miles away, but I don't have a car and my friend was in bed asleep, so I had to wait for morning.  By the time I could get her in to her regular vet, it was too late.  Her chest cavity was almost completely filled with fluid and she was suffocating.  The vet gave her a 1-2% chance of surviving an attempt to drain the fluid, so we put her to sleep.  During the wait between the sedative and the fatal injection, I held her in my lap.  I think that she liked that.  Now she is at the Rainbow Bridge.  Sea Shell must have run to greet her.  Now they are romping together on the grass with weather like spring, having an absolute ball together.

I keep thinking that I don't know how much more of this I can take, but then I look at all their sweet faces and know that I have to keep right on taking them in.  I find the strength by remembering that without me, they might not have a life at all.  They do all so much enjoy being here with me and each other that I absolutely cannot say, "Enough, no more!"  So, I will keep right on taking them in and taking care of them and losing them.  I must be doing something right because right now I have three five-year-olds who got the disease as kittens.  The expected lifespan with the disease is four years maximum.

Familiar Faces

Karen Jo:  Today we will hear from the kitties who were here when I stopped blogging so long ago.  Maddie had barely introduced herself when the bad stuff started happening, so I will let her do a lot of the talking.  The pictures of Rocio, Bambino, Julius and Tabitha are old ones, but you haven't seen the one of Maddie before.  I need to get in some practice taking photos again.

Rocio: See how worn this scratcher is, especially the chair part?  I jumped up on the chair and went right through it.  Luckily Mom bought us a new one.  Not much has changed for me, other than the changes brought about by Clancy coming in and making himself Alpha.  He was really mean to me at first, cornering me and making me scream, mostly.  I gave in to him right away.  Now that he has calmed down, I have gone back to napping in the laundry basket and on Mom's bed.  I don't hang out in the living room much any more.  That's Clancy's hangout now.

Bambino:  The changes around here really turned my life upside down.  Oja was getting to be a real pain to the rest of us, so I wasn't that sorry to see her go, but we all missed her.  The first really big change for me came a year later when Spyro and Horus left.  Spyro was my best bud since I moved in here as a kitten, over four years earlier.  When Spyro became Alpha, he made me his lieutenant and I helped him enforce the no bullying rule.  You should have seen Spyro fight being put into the PTU by the two strangers who came to take him and Horus away!  I hear he's happy in a new forever home now.  I really hoped that I would be allowed to go with him, but I didn't quite manage to beat this stupid FeLV.  Gandalf, Rocio and I were discussing who was going to be new Alpha when Evil Clancy moved in.  None of us stood a chance against him.  He's bigger than Spyro and MEAN!  I hate him.

Karen Jo:  He has calmed down a lot now and his bullying has almost stopped completely.

Bambino:  I don't care.  He's mean and a bully and he took my rightful place as Alpha.  I am going to hiss and growl at him whenever I see him.

Karen Jo:  I'm really sorry that things turned out this way for you, but he's here and he's going to stay.  You have let him turn you into a grumpy old mancat.  You even hissed at the new kitten when she came up to you to make friends.  You had never hissed at a new cat before in your life.

Bambino:  I have become suspicious of new cats since Clancy.  You keep bringing them in, though.

Karen Jo:  You know perfectly well why new cats keep arriving.  I wish that you would settle down and accept the new situation.  It's been months and months now.

Bambino:  Maybe someday.

Julius:  Mom is going to be really lucky to get any new pictures of me.  Clancy really scares me and I have gone back to hiding 99% of the time.  He still chases me if he finds me out in the open.

Karen Jo:  Clancy has changed since he first got here, Julius.  Now he wants to play with you.

Julius:  I don't trust him.  I am going to stay in hiding.

Tabitha:  Not much has changed for me.  I have always been a bit of a loner cat and I never cared who was Alpha: Oja, Spyro, Clancy, it's all the same to me.  I like Mom the best and just kind of tolerate the other cats.  Clancy never bullied me.  Other cats all seem to sense that I have no interest at all in being Alpha, so they leave me alone.  Clancy and I are as much friends now as I ever make.  Right now we are lying next to each other on the table by the big window enjoying a sun puddle.

Maddie:  I first moved in here as a 5-month-old kitten.  I decided to make Horus my best friend and we played and played together, though he didn't want to play as much as I did.  Then a wonderful thing happened a month later.  Sea Shell moved into the computer room and I moved in with her after a couple of days.  She was only a month younger than I was and wanted to play just as much as I did.  The photo is of the two of us playing pawsie and getting ready to wrestle.  Six months later Sea Shell moved back into the computer room exclusively and growled at me when I tried to play with her.  I didn't understand at all.

Karen Jo:  Sea Shell had a FeLV flare-up and she was feeling sick and didn't want to play any more.

Maddie:  It broke my heart.  I stopped trying to play with her, but I visited her every day.  After about a month, she started to get better.  She was moving around more and we would rub up against each other, but she still wouldn't play.  I tried playing with Horus, but my heart wasn't in it and he wanted to play even less than before.  After two months, I got my hopes up really high.  She was running around again and playing patty-paws, but then she disappeared one morning and never came back.

Karen Jo: That part broke both our hearts.  We had gotten her through the flare-up, but cancer of the blood vessels moved in and took her away to the Rainbow Bridge.

Maddie:  After Sea Shell left, I stopped playing.  Oh, I would occasionally bat a ball around for a little while, but mostly I didn't play at all.  I started kind of hanging around with Tabitha, but that was it.  In early October a new kitty came and Mom tried to get me to make friends with her, but I wasn't interested.  Then two weeks later another wonderful thing happened.  Chevelle the kitten moved in.  I couldn't have cared less until she came out of her room to stay.  She wants to play with every cat and I couldn't resist.  Now I am playing again.

Karen Jo:  I noticed something interesting about cats in mourning over losing a friend that they were very close to.  When Austin went to the Bridge, Rocio was devastated.  Bambino moved in shortly thereafter, but Rocio totally ignored him.  A while later Julius moved in and Rocio practically adopted him.  When Maddie lost Sea Shell, Cricket didn't spark her interest at all, but Chevelle made good friends with her right away.  In both cases, it was the second cat to move in that got them interested in making a new friend.  It didn't work with Bambino.  His personality has completely changed, but I think that has more to do with Clancy than anything else, other than losing Spyro.  I'm not sure what to do from here on, but I'll think of something.

New Arrivals -- Part 2

Karen Jo:  I took Cricket's picture yesterday as a "just in case" picture and I took Chevelle's picture a few days ago with my phone, just because I thought that they looked cute.  I fully intended to take better pictures of them this morning, but life intervened.  I will take better pictures of them both in the future.  Now on to the new kitties.

Cricket: I'm all fuzzy.

Karen Jo:  You wouldn't hold still.  This is the best I could manage at the time.

Cricket:  Oh, well.  I'm Cricket.  I'm 3 years old but I only weigh 6 pounds.  The only thing that I remember about the before time is that I had a kitty buddy that I was taken away from and I ended up here in early October.  I am in the safe room here, where I still spend a lot of time.  When I first got here Mom was told that I was lonesome for kitty company, so Mom put Maddie in the safe room with me.  That didn't quite work out.  Maddie ran out as soon as Mom opened the door again and wouldn't come back in.  I stayed in the safe room for a week, with little trips of a few minutes each, to explore.  Then I came out for good, but this is still my favorite room.  When I had been out for a week, Chevelle came to live here.

Chevelle: I don't remember anything about the before time, either.  I came to live here in mid-October when I was 4 months old.  Mom's plan was to put me in the safe room by myself for a day, then introduce me to Cricket.  That didn't work out as planned either.  There is a high-sided cat bed on the couch in the safe room that Cricket likes to sleep in.  All the other kitties were very interested in me and I was interested in them and some of them followed us into the safe room while I was still in the PTU.  Mom had dumped her coat and purse beside the door before she closed it.  Then she evicted the other kitties one by one and got me some food, which was all ready to be put in my bowl in the safe room.  Then she picked up her coat and purse to go put them away and leave me on my own for a while when she saw Cricket.  Cricket had been napping in the cat bed on the couch and Mom never noticed her.  Mom decided to go put her coat and purse away and come back to evict Cricket.  Hahaha!  By the time Mom got back, Cricket and I were curled up together on the couch, cozy as could be.  She put some food in Cricket's bowl, which was still in the safe room, as Mom intended for us to be together and left us alone together.  Cricket was great company, but she got bored in the safe room and went out for a while each evening, but always came back at or before Mom's bedtime.  After about 5 days of this, I followed Cricket out and wow! what a different world!  I got overwhelmed and ran back into the safe room.  Mom closed the door on me.  I let out the "kitten in distress" meow as loud as I could and Mom opened the door again.  I stood in the doorway for a while, just looking around, then went out to introduce myself around.  One of the first cats I introduced myself to was Clancy.  He's nice.

Karen Jo:  I was amazed at Clancy's reaction to tiny Chevelle.  They sniffed each other all over, then Chevelle rubbed up against Clancy and he accepted it.  He is extremely gentle with her and they even play together.  It's hilarious to see tiny four pound Chevelle chasing huge Clancy down the hall

Chevelle:  At bedtime, Cricket went back into the safe room and I followed her.  Mom shut the door again.  MEOW!  Mom opened the door again and it has been open ever since.

Karen Jo:  You get the Brave Kitten award for being the very first kitten ever to want the door open forever on your first trip out of the safe room.

Chevelle:  I have lots of fun now.  Almost all of the other kitties like me and I cuddle with Cricket and play with Clancy, Gandalf and Maddie.  The photo is of Gandalf and me cuddling.

Rocio, Bambino, Julius, Tabitha and Maddie:  What about US!  We want a turn.

Karen Jo:  It's your turn next time.

New Arrivals -- Part 1

Karen Jo:  I have a confession to make.  One of the reasons that I didn't want to blog about what happened to Oja is that I felt horribly guilty and ashamed about what happened to her.  The other reason is that this is what greets me whenever I start to upload pictures from my camera.  This is Oja in her prime, Alpha cat and mighty boss of the house.  Now that I have told you all about it, I feel much better.  Now let's get on to the new cats.  There are four of them, but they came in pairs, sort of.  I got 2 cats fairly close together, then a long time passed and I got another 2 close together, so I am going to introduce them 2 at a time.

Gandalf:  Hi, I'm Gandalf.  I arrived without a name, so Mom gave me one.  I was found wandering around the rail yard in Santa Fe and was obviously a pet, so I was taken straight to the shelter and efforts were made to find my parents, but no one came forward.  Since I was so friendly and adoptable, they tested me and found that I am FeLV+.  The shelter contacted Felines and Friends and they contacted Mom and I came here.  I arrived late last February,  just before Spyro and Horus left.  When they went away, that left a power vacuum.

Karen Jo:  Spyro immediately took over as Alpha when Oja disappeared.  He knew that she wasn't coming back before I did.  Horus was next in line, but he was gone, too.

Gandalf:  Oh, the photos.  The top one is my arrival photo in the safe room.  I stayed in there one night and then joined the rest of the kitties.  The bottom one is how I look today.  Anyway, somecat had to take over as Alpha.  I was the tallest and longest, so I thought that I should be Alpha.  Rocio had been here the longest, so he thought that he should.  Bambino was Spyro's lieutenant, so he thought that he should.  Anyway, the three of us were fairly amicably try to sort things out when Clancy showed up and changed everything.  I split.

Karen Jo:  Gandalf got out the door.  I had gotten careless with no escape cats in the house.  I saw his tail disappear around the corner of the house and went to get him, but he had completely disappeared.  I hunted and hunted for him and did all the usual things but there was no sign of him for three whole weeks.  Then one day, I was approaching the screen door and saw a familiar tail go by.  I rushed out and Gandalf was in the back yard, but he ran and jumped over the fence and I lost him again.  I put up another lost cat notice on the town news about town website and got an immediate reply that one of my neighbors had put up a found cat notice saying that he had been hanging around her house, eating dog food for a week.  I got him back the next evening.  He wouldn't let the neighbor lady near him the first day. I have no idea where he was the first two weeks, but he came home too skinny.

Gandalf:  By the time I got back, Clancy had established himself as the new Alpha, so I made buddies with him.  I was the first cat to make friends with him.  Things started to settle down a bit after that.  Things are pretty calm now and I haven't gone near an open door since I got home again.

Clancy: I'm Clancy.  I'm a rough, tough street cat with an attitude.  I was caught in a Trap, Neuter and Release program when I was one year old.  I was trapped, neutered, had my ear tipped and tested.  When I came out FeLV+ I was put on death row because of my attitude, but a nice foster lady rescued me.  She fostered all kinds of cats, so I was put in a small bedroom by myself.  I could hear and smell all the rest of the cats having the run of the house and it made me mad.  Finally my attitude got so bad that she said that she couldn't take care of me anymore and she contacted F&F, who contacted Mom and I came here.

Karen Jo:  Clancy was most likely born a street cat and had to fight for scraps until he was caught.  Then he spent two years in a small bedroom by himself, so he never got socialized with other cats.  He was a real handful when he arrived, as he wasn't overly fond of people, either.

Clancy:  When I arrived, the first thing Karen Jo did was put me in another small bedroom and shut the door on me.  I loudly announced my displeasure with that arrangement, so she let me out.  Wow, a whole big house to roam around in and 6 other cats.  I didn't know what to do with them, so I hissed and growled at all of them.  Then one of them disappeared.  I quickly sized up the situation.  There was no Alpha cat here.  I am a big, tough mancat, so I took over.

Karen Jo:  Clancy weighs in at 16 pounds and the vet assures me that he is not overweight.  That means that he's even longer and taller than Herman was.  He is also very strong.

Clancy:  All the other cats quickly learned who was the new boss, even though none of them liked me.

Karen Jo:  You were too rough with them.  Their last two Alphas ruled by the occasional smack on the head.  You rule by fear.

Clancy:  So?  Anyway, the gray and white cat came back and he made friends with me, but even he screamed.

Karen Jo:  You were still too rough.  Yes, Gandalf wanted to play with you, but you chased him like you wanted to tear him apart and you used your claws when he tried to kitty wrestle with you.

Clancy:  I have learned a lot in the meantime.  Now most of the other kitties either like me or tolerate me.  Bambino still hates me, though.

Karen Jo:  Bambino had convinced Gandalf and had almost persuaded Rocio that he should be the new Alpha when you showed up.

Clancy:  How did he manage that?  He's just a little squirt.

Karen Jo:  The same way that Oja and Spyro did.  By displaying leadership qualities and a willingness to keep the other kitties in line with the occasional smack on the head.

Clancy:  I like my way better.  I am much more gentle now.  Gandalf and I play together with no screaming.  The new kitten loves me.

Karen Jo:  She will get her chance to talk next time.

Departures

Karen Jo:  It's been nearly two years since I last blogged.  Lots has happened and I will try to explain what happened as best I can.  A couple of weeks after Bentley went to the Rainbow Bridge, Oja just plain disappeared.  Above is the first picture that I ever took of her and below is the last.  She had been acting strangely since before Bentley got sick.  She wasn't friendly toward the other cats any more, she stopped sleeping on the bed with me and she got so aggressive toward Missy that Spyro and Bambino smacked her to make her stop.  That's when Missy moved in with Jonny.  Then she was gone.  I couldn't believe that fat cat Oja could have gotten out of the house unnoticed, so I spent five days tearing the house apart trying to find her.  Yes, I did look outside for her the first day that she was gone, but she had never, ever left the yard and there was no sign of her.  I put up a lost cat notice and got several mistaken sightings.  Finally I had to accept that she was gone.  My theory is that her changed behavior was the result of an flare-up of her FeLV and being the Alpha, she didn't want anyone, including me, to know about it, so she found a way to sneak out, somehow.  Then she ran off to find a place to die.  She was never found.  This was quite a blow.  Oja was part of the happy threesome that I had for quite a while: Herman, Spyro and Oja.  When Herman left, Oja took his place on the bed, so I wouldn't be so lonely and she loved the attention.  She adored getting attention from me from the very beginning.  I still miss her a lot.

A couple of months after Oja left, Jonny left, too.  He was getting bolder and letting me see him more.  He loved having Missy in his room and I sometimes saw the two of them cuddled up together on the couch when I peeked in.  I used to leave his door open while I got his and Missy's food, because sometimes Bambino or Spyro wanted to drop in for a little visit.  One night I came down the hall with Missy's food bowl and Jonny was actually out in the hall, looking around.  He dashed right back in again when he saw me, but I thought that it was tremendous progress.  Unfortunately, when I opened the door the next morning for breakfast, Missy came tearing out like her tail was on fire.  Jonny was dead, next to his food bowl.  It looked like he was waiting to be fed, until I got close up and found that he had run off to the Bridge.

I can't seem to get between the two pictures above.  The top one is Sea Shell.  She never got blogged about at all.  I only had her a few months.  She came to live here March 2016 at 5 months old.  That made her one month younger than Maddie and Maddie loved it.  Because Missy and Jonny were in the safe room, I put Sea Shell in the computer room and let the other cats visit, as Sea Shell didn't object.  Maddie found her right away and decided to move in.  The two of them became fast friends almost instantly.  In a week, they were romping all over the house together.  They had a wonderful time for six months, then Sea Shell got sick.  It was a FeLV flare-up.  There is a new drug that came out just in time for me to try it on Brody and Cissy, but it didn't help them.  I decided to try it on Sea Shell and it seemed to be working.  Sea Shell was getting stronger and gaining back some of the weight she had lost and was even showing interest in Maddie again.  Then she just crashed.  I rushed her into the vet and discovered that her spleen was very inflamed and she had some weird growths on her foreleg.  The vet kept her and removed her spleen and the growths and sent them off for analysis.  Sea Shell didn't get any better and we helped her to the Bridge.  She was 13 months old.  The analysis showed that she had developed cancer of the blood vessels.

The picture immediately above is Missy Mysterious.  With Oja and Jonny both gone, Missy moved out of the safe room and mostly hung out in my room and the computer room.  About a month after Sea Shell went to the Bridge, I went into the kitchen to get breakfast for the kitties and found her on the floor, crying pitifully.  I immediately called the vet and was told that there were no openings, but I could bring her in and leave her and a vet would look at her when one of them got a chance, so off we went.  She was so weak that I didn't even put her in a PTU, just carried her in wrapped in a warm towel.  The receptionist took one look at her and whisked her off to the back room, where the surgeon who operated on Sea Shell examined her.  They called me back there.  Something really bad had happened really quickly and she needed to be helped to the Bridge, because whatever had happened was causing her pain.

Now for some departures of a different kind.  I don't remember if I ever said this before, but if a FeLV+ cat lives for over four years without a flare-up, there is a chance that they have beaten the disease and are completely healthy again.  Here are a couple of success stories.  Spyro, above, Horus and Bambino had all gone their four years with no problems, so they were all retested.  All three of them tested negative on the first round.  Then we wait at least three months and try again.  Spyro and Horus tested negative on the second round and Bambino tested positive.  Spyro and Horus got whisked off back to Feline and Friends of Santa Fe to be adopted as normal cats.  They both found forever homes.  Spyro got a home with a cat buddy, which made him very happy.  Bambino is still here with me.

Horus, above, got adopted as an only cat, which is what he had always wanted.  They are both very happy in their new homes.  This happened about a year ago.

Losing so many cats in what has seemed such a short period of time really floored me.  All of the happy threesome that I had for so long are gone now, though I am delighted that Spyro is well and happy now in a new home.  So that's why I haven't been blogging.  I didn't feel like reporting on death after death, then I just got out of the habit.

There are always arrivals as well as departures.  I will tell you about them next time.