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.

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.