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.

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.

Formerly Feral Friday

Karen Jo:  I was gone for most of the day, helping a lonely old man find a new dog, so the only picture I managed to take was of Julius, so he rules the blog today.

Julius:  It's a mystery as to whether I was really a wild kitty or an escapee, so formerly feral fits me, as I was classified as feral.  See, I was cold and hungry outside when I saw this box with food inside, so I went in to eat and couldn't get out again.  Some people came and took me to a place that was warm, but smelled funny.  They poked and prodded me and upset me, then I went to sleep and when I woke up, I thought something was missing, but I wasn't sure what.  I did find myself in a warm but small place with food and water and I liked it.  Then one day the people came and put me in a box and took me back outside in the cold.  There I was, back where I started, and I didn't want to be there.  I absolutely refused to leave the box when they opened the door and sure enough, they took me back to the warm place.

Karen Jo:  Smart kitty!

Julius:  I got poked and prodded and stabbed, then put back in my warm little room with people who came and got me out and played with me and petted me and I was happy.  Then a lady came with one of those boxes and took me away.  I was not happy.  Then another lady came and put me into another box and took me out in the cold and we went bumping along for ages.

Karen Jo:  Seven minutes -- the time it took me to walk home from the meeting place where I met the worker from the shelter and picked him up.

Julius:  We went inside a warm place and there were kitties all around me when the lady put my box down.  They seemed like nice kitties, both of them, and I sniffed them back when they sniffed me.  Then the lady picked me up again and I found myself in this room with yet another kitty checking me out.  Then the lady opened the door to my box and I came out.  The three other kitties all crowded around me and spooked me, so I ran under a thing on wheels to hide and I hissed at the gray kitty who tried to follow me.

Karen Jo:  That was a mistake on my part.  I should have shooed Spyro, Bambino and Rocio out of the safe room before I opened the PTU door.  Things were going so well that I thought the kitties might all get along from the start, but I was wrong.

Julius:  Now I have a room all to myself, lots bigger than the first room I found myself in, and it doesn't smell funny and nobody is poking or prodding or stabbing me or stealing my stuff.  I have discovered that they took the tip of my ear off.

Karen Jo:  Julius was caught as part of the TNR program, so he had his ear tipped before they tried to release him.

Julius:  I'm warm and I have lots of food and water and litter and toys and room to explore and I'm happy again.  I don't trust this strange lady, though.  I purr at her when she comes to visit me, but I won't get very close to her.  I did sniff her hand late this afternoon, but I won't let her touch me.  No way am I letting any lady get close enough to me to put me in another box.  I have had enough of boxes.  I am a bit curious about the other kitties.  I can hear them through the door and one on them likes to play pawsies with me under the door.  Sometimes the gray one gets into my room, but the lady shoos him out again.  A bigger gray and white one got in once, but he just wanted to eat my food and the lady carried him out right away.

Karen Jo:  I think Bambino is the one playing pawsies with Julius.  He spends time outside the safe room door.  Julius spends time beside the door on his side, sniffing and listening.  He even made biscuits on the bottom of the door, purring like mad when I visited him late this afternoon.  I think he wants to meet the other kitties, but perhaps the sheer number and size of them scares him a bit.  I think that he will come around, once he figures out that he is here to stay and stops being afraid of me.

New Arrival

Oja : I can NOT believe what Mom has done to me.  Yesterday afternoon she left the house with an empty PTU.  That's NEVER a good sign.  Sure enough she came back with yet another stinky boycat in it.  I'm standing by the bathroom door, just up the hall a bit from the safe room where he is thankfully behind a closed door.

Spyro:  He's not so bad.  I greeted him when he arrived and sniffed him over.  He's just a little guy.

Oja:  The little ones are the worst.  They run all over at top speed and think they can pounce anycat.

Spyro:  I'm checking out his papers.  They say he's a five to six month old orange tabby with white.  Besides, Oja, you like to play as much as the rest of us.  I saw you chasing Bambino down the hall this morning.

Bambino:  I'm so excited that I can't stand still for a moment.  I wanna play with him sooo bad.  I bet he's gonna to be a lot of fun.  I snuck in his room for a minute today, but he wouldn't come out and play.

Rocio:  This is going to be so cool.  He's an orange and white tabby like me, but he has a lot more orange on him that I do.  I sniffed him over when he arrived, too, and didn't hiss at him at all.

Horus:  New arrival, hmff.  I don't care enough to give up my nice sun puddle.  I'll check him out when he's out of the safe room.

Karen Jo:  I got an email a couple of days ago about a five to six month old male kitten caught in the Santa Fe TNR program.  He was neutered and taken back to where he was caught, but this smart kitten refused to leave his cage.  They took him back to the shelter, where he was very friendly toward the staff, who decided to put him up for adoption because he wasn't really feral.  That's when they found out that he was FeLV+.  The shelter contacted the Humane Society, who contacted Felines and Friends, who contacted me.  A shelter employee who lives in Los Alamos brought him up to a meeting place for me yesterday and now there are six kitties in residence.  His name is Julius and he is mostly orange tabby with just touches of white here and there.  He has very interesting markings on his sides.  He is shy and hasn't let me touch him yet, although he purrs loudly when I go in to visit him now.  I haven't been able to get a picture of him yet, as he hid all afternoon and night yesterday and most of the day today.  He did come out and move around the room late this afternoon, but I didn't have the camera with me, as the light was fading.  It is going to take him some time to adjust, because this is the first time he has been in a home and everything is new and scary.  I think he will eventually fit in just fine.  He didn't hiss at all when the other cats came up to his carrier to check him out.  He was sniffing them right back.  He did hiss at Bambino when Bambino got into his room and got too close, but it was just a little hiss.  I guess I'm a fully fledged crazy cat lady now.

I want to thank everyone for their expressions of sympathy about my depression.  The medicine has taken hold now and I'm back to my old self for the first time in a long time.  I haven't been blogging because I was very busy before Christmas and came back from my visit with a cold that sapped every bit of my energy for a good week.  I'm all well and feeling great now.  We all hope that everyone had a great Christmas and a wonderful New Year.