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.

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.

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.