Disturbing the Peace

Karen Jo:  First a word of explanation and apology.  I can blog on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays IF I haul myself out of bed early enough.  I have been sleeping too late lately, but hopefully I have a handle on it again and will be blogging more regularly.  Now on to the cats.

Karen Jo: Things got nice and quiet for a while after Bambino got adopted.  Then some cats started disturbing the peace.  Yes, I'm looking at you, Gandalf.

Gandalf: Me?  I'm just up here nice and quiet.  I was looking out the window at the snow when you disturbed me.

Karen Jo:  Yes, you.  You decided that scaring Cricket was a fun thing to do, making her scream for help.

Gandalf:  It is fun.  She scares so easily.  I can scare the crap out of her with a short chase.

Karen Jo: And then I have to clean it up.  I want you to stop it.

Clancy:  Hahaha!  Gandalf got in trouble for being a bully!

Karen Jo:  Don't look so smug.  You're in trouble, too.  You like to scare Rocio.

Clancy:  Rocio is a wuss.  I can even chase him into the broom closet and make him scream.

Karen Jo:  Rocio is not a wuss.  Are you forgetting that he beat up Gandalf?  The only reason that he doesn't fight with you is that he has accepted you as the Top Cat.  Keep pushing him and you might get a surprise one day.

Cricket:  And in other news, my eye is completely healed.  I love to curl up in Mom's lap and take a nap.  She keeps me safe from Gandalf.  Though, to be fair, he hasn't been chasing and scaring me as much this week.  I hope that he does stop it altogether.

Chevelle: I have been growing.  I'm bigger than Cricket now.

Cricket:  No, you're not!

Chevelle:  Yes, I am!  Mom says so.

Karen Jo:  Yes, Cricket.  Chevelle is now just a tiny bit taller than you are.

Chevelle:  I made a new buddy.  Mom was surprised.

Tabitha:  I'm the new buddy.  Mom was surprised because I have never had a special cat friend before.  It started out when Chevelle started playing with my tail.  I would let her do it for a while, then walk away.  Then one day she pounced me and I didn't hiss at her, like I used to.  I actually started kitty wrestling with her.  I outweigh her by a ton, so I'm careful not to get on top of her.

Chevelle:  We play pawsies side by side and grab each other and I even kick her, but she doesn't mind.  It's fun.  Cricket doesn't want to play with me and Maddie died and Gandalf and Clancy just want to play chase, so I started playing with Tabitha.  It's fun.

Healing.

Cricket:  My eye is almost completely healed, with no yucky medicine.

Karen Jo:  You might have healed faster if you had let me put the medicine in your eye.  My arm is also healed, where you scratched me while I was trying to get you into the PTU.  I do wish you would stop running away from the camera.

 Tabitha:  You didn't post a picture of me last time.

Karen Jo:  You wouldn't hold still.  Here you are this time.

Tabitha:  I sometimes eat a little of the premium food, but mostly I like Fancy Feast.

Karen Jo:  I'm glad to see that.  It's good for you.

Chevelle:  I'm just hanging around in the computer room.  Mom really needs to clean up the house.

Karen Jo:  Yes, I do.

Rocio, Gandalf and Clancy:  What about us?

Karen Jo: Rocio, you were under the couch or the bed with Julius.  Gandalf and Clancy, neither of you would hold still long enough for me to snap a picture.

Vet Visit and Food

Cricket:  Stupid Mom had the camera on the wrong setting, so most of the photos are fuzzy.  Mom scared the heck out of me last Friday.  I say her put Bambino in a PTU and take him outside and he never came back.  I thought that she had turned evil and was getting rid of us kitties.  When she got out a PTU and came for me, I ran and hid and fought back like fury.

Karen Jo:  I just wanted to take you to the vet to see what was wrong with your eye.

Cricket:  I didn't know that.  I fought with everything I had, but Mom finally caught me and scruffed me and dumped me in the PTU.

Karen Jo:  I hated to scruff you, but you got me good and it was the only way to handle you.  The vet found blood on your fur and I had to tell her that it was mine.

Cricket:  I was terrified.  I even peed in the PTU.  When we got to the vet, I wouldn't come out.  They had to reach in and grab me.  Then one of them held me still and the other one messed around with my eye for the longest time.

Karen Jo: It turned out that you had something tiny in your eye, caught between your inner eyelid and your eyeball.  It took three tries to get it out.  Then the nice vet lady showed me how to put medicine in your eye.

Cricket:  Ha!  As if I would let you mess with my eye after all that.

Karen Jo:  Luckily your eye is getting better without the medicine.  It looks almost normal again this morning.

Julius:  I'm laughing my little butt off.  The other cats told me about Mom's plot to catch me and put me in a PTU.  The very next night, I started coming out of hiding and showing Mom that my eye was  back to normal again.  I got whatever was in my eye out all by myself.

Clancy:  Mom went to Pet Pangaea and bought us our monthly supply of premium cat food.  We had all been eating Fancy Feast for a couple of weeks.  Here are some photos of our reactions.

Clancy:  Gandalf and I got Instinct Salmon.  I not only buried it, I flipped it over.  Mom saw me to it and rescued it before it all fell out on the carpet.  She was nice enough to rebury it.

Cricket:  Mom gave Chevelle and me Fussie Cat Tuna and Prawns.  I buried it.  You can just see my tail behind the grey box.

Chevelle:  I waited for the Fancy Feast to come out and ate it.

Gandalf:  I decided to ignore the whole thing and play House Panther in the living room.

Rocio: I couldn't be bothered to get out of my comfy spot in the laundry basket.

Karen Jo:  What am I going to do with you kitties?

All the kitties:  Feed us and love us and take good care of us.

Sun Puddles

Rocio: I'm the only one, besides Julius, who didn't find a sun puddle today.  I practically live in the kitchen now.  I won't hold my head still for Mom.  See those ripped up paper towels?  I did that.  I love ripping up paper towels and TP, though I don't touch the TP on the roller.  I find it where Mom tries to hide it behind the laundry hamper and rip it up back there.  Paper towels on their roller in the kitchen are fair game, though.

Gandalf and Tabitha: We both found the big sun puddle on the table.

Tabitha:  I've been here longer, so I claimed the big pillow.

Gandalf:  I don't care.  I usually prefer just to lie on the soft throw on the table, anyway.

Clancy: This glorious sun puddle belongs to me.  I love being up here in the sun.  It feels so good on my fur.

Cricket: I have my own sun puddle in the safe room.  I was up in the window, but the couch is more comfy.

Chevelle: This sun puddle on the living room floor is great for me.  It's just my size.

The Big Fight

Karen Jo: Another old photo of Bambino from when he was happy here.  I do miss Bambino, but not as much as I thought I would.  I guess I have been in mourning for the happy Bambino since Clancy came and I'm mostly used to it by now.  I miss him every time I feed the cats and don't see his face.  I miss him every time I give out treats and wonder where he is.  I miss the way he  used to jump up on the bed and walk up to my face and tickle my cheeks with his whiskers in the middle of the night when he wanted a petting session.

I also want to explain what is likely to be my blogging schedule.  I can only blog when I get up early enough to get some stuff done, so I have time to blog.  I have trouble getting up early in the morning in the winter, so that's why I have been missing for a month.  I will only be able to blog on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and the occasional Saturday.  I have lots to do on the other days.  Events I describe here may or may not have just happened.  I won't bring up stuff from the way past, but from the last few days or a week ago.  Today's post is an example.  The events described between Rocio and Gandalf happened about a week ago.  Now on with the kitties.

Karen Jo: Gandalf, I found a pile of your fur on the kitchen floor.  What happened?

Gandalf: Um, well, I sort of got into a fight in the middle of the night.

Karen Jo: Rocio, do you know how Gandalf's fur got on the kitchen floor?

Rocio:  Darn tootin'! I beat up Gandalf.

Karen Jo:  Why?

Rocio: Just because he's best friends with Clancy, Gandalf has been giving himself airs and thinks he can lord it over the rest of us cats.  I'm not going to put up with it.  Though I'm not keen on it, I acknowledge Clancy as Top Cat because he PROVED that he's the toughest, baddest cat in the house.  However, I'm not going to take any crap from Gandalf.

Gandalf:  Hey, Clancy made me his lieutenant and I was in the running for Top Cat before he came.

Rocio:  There were three of us in the running for Top Cat: you, me and Bambino.  You were the first one eliminated.  Then when Clancy started taking over, you ran away for three weeks, leaving just me and Bambino to sort it out with him.  When you came back, you immediately started sucking up to him.

Gandalf:  I wasn't sucking up.  I came back, took in the situation and decided that the best way forward was to make friends with Clancy, something the rest of you hadn't bothered to do.

Rocio:  You weren't around to see how mean he was to me while he was taking over.  We aren't buds, but I tolerate him now.  He really has mellowed out now.

Karen Jo:  Is everything all right between the two of you now?

Rocio:  Sure.  Gandalf leaves me alone now.

Gandalf: Everything's fine.  I thought that Rocio would be a push-over because he's such a lazy lard-bucket.  I was wrong.

Rocio:  Ha!  I may be fat, but there's a lot of muscle underneath.  I can jump almost as high as  you can with the extra weight.

Julius:  Guess what?  Mom actually got a photo of me.  Now that things aren't so tense around here, I'm hanging out in the open more now.  This is as close as I will let Mom get while she's looking at me.  She started to take another step and I tensed up, so she backed off.  This cat tree is new to us since Mom stopped blogging before.  I like it. I can sit or lie up here and no cat can sneak up on me.

Bambino's Big Day

Karen Jo: This is a Cinco de Mayo photo of Bambino from years ago.  You can see the most recent pictures in my last blog entry.  The really great news is that Bambino got adopted!  A family wanted to adopt a FeLV+ cat to keep their FeLV+ cat company.  I recommended Bambino.  They looked around at some other cats and chose Bambino.  Yay!  It's a perfect family for Bambino.  There is another cat for him to be buddies with, a dog, which Bambino doesn't mind and children, whom Bambino is fond of.  It gets him away from Clancy.  He wasn't too happy about leaving, but I think that he's happy now.  This happened last Saturday.  I waited until now to tell you about it, because I was afraid that he would be returned for being the grumpy cat that he was here.  It looks like that as soon as he got away from Clancy, he went back to his original personality of a happy, very loving cat.

Rocio:  I hid from Mom and her camera.  She had to bend way over to take my picture.  That's why I'm all fuzzy.  I miss Bambino, but not too much. My buddy has always been Julius.

Tabitha: I miss having Bambino around.  We were meal buddies, eating in bowls side by side.  On the other hand, I get a better chance of grabbing the big pillow in the sun puddle now.

Gandalf: I hardly got to know Bambino before he turned all grumpy and growly.  Things are better here now that he's gone. Mom says that it's Groundhog Day and all these wonderful sun puddles mean 6 more weeks of winter.  I don't care.  Bring on the sun puddles.

Cricket:  I won't hold still for Mom and the camera.  That's why I'm fuzzy.  Bambino was a great guy.  He used to hang out with me in the safe room.  He was never grumpy in there.  I miss him.  I keep squinting my left eye.  Mom's going to call the vet on Monday.

Chevelle:  What I remember most about Bambino was that he wouldn't play with me.  I tried to join him once to cuddle on top of the cat tree in the computer room and he growled at me.  I don't miss him at all.

Clancy: Bambino?  ::snort:: I'm glad that the little creep is gone.  He hissed and growled and yowled at me all the time.  Mom says it's because his best friend was Alpha before me, but he got adopted and Bambino wanted to be Alpha.  Ha!  I came here and found a leaderless bunch of cats and took over.  Too bad that hurt Bambino's feelings.  It's so much nicer now that he's gone.

Karen Jo:  The tension that was so prevalent in the atmosphere here is gone.  All the cats are more relaxed now.  Clancy is acting like a calm, normal Alpha now.  He is having more fun.

Clancy:  I do have a playful side.  Here I am kitty-wrestling with Chevelle.

Chevelle:  It's fun.  I squeak a little bit when I wrestle with Clancy, but I enjoy it.

Julius:  This is an old picture of Bambino and me.  I am still hiding most of the time, but I have been coming out more and hanging around in the living room.  I really miss Bambino.  After Clancy came and scared me so much, Bambino used to come and hang out with me under the bed.  Mom thinks that there is something wrong with my left eye, too.  She doesn't know what to do about it.  I have never been to the vet, because I won't let her come near me.

Karen Jo:  Do any of you have any suggestions for getting a very shy cat to the vet?  I managed it with Jonny because he was in a small room.  Julius is mostly hanging out in the living room now.  I can close doors between the living room and the rest of the house, but it's a huge room full of hiding places.

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.