Mebbe to protect your grumpy reputation? Come on, confess. You're keeping one!

Imagine if we were all gross -- and limber -- enough to give ourselves tongue baths all over like catz. Wouldn't we be more allergic and stinky to each other? Does the very thought gross you out? Still love them little saliva-encrusted furballz?

I just remind the folks involved with the unaccounted for fourth kitty that there are laws. Natural laws.

Law 1. If your child owns an animal, you own an animal.

Law 2. Even if they live in another state and are in college. Especially then, actually.

Law 3. This explains the tarantula that Poor Spidernervous Verbie had in his office for a couple of years.

Law 4. This also sometimes, mysteriously, applies to stepchildren and pets that live with THEIR parents that you've never met except that one time.

It's important to understand the laws.

Estiveo, did Trouble at least offer to trade the parrot toy for a pencil or two?

Ha sez you! Have you ever tried to bathe a cat that has dropped a whole pot of cold cooking oil on itself? Huh? Huh? Bathing a cat is one thing, bathing a cat covered in cooking oil is another thing entirely.

Sorry, but cats don't give you a big slobbery "kiss" after licking their nether parts.

So glad a I had a Doxie who couldn't reach those nether parts!

I think that is why gawd invented car washes.

Gots nothing to do with kisses, Sequoia, even if cats did love any human enough to plant a kiss on 'em. Gots to do with having all that cat-saliva and whatever it picks up off fur/cat parts spread all over their fur which then dries out and detaches into the air we all breath.

Oh, but catz will lick you down some if they really like you think they can get something out of you.

Or if they think they have already gotten something out of you. After a belly scritching during which he almost falls asleep, Cisco goes into fervent lick mode. They have us trained well.

No. I'm not keeping one. I draw the line at pets that literally as well as figuratively walk all over me.

I have a very miserable cat in my shower stall at the moment.

Sooner is one of my outdoor cats. He's a black Persian-looking guy who took up here about 6 years ago, when he was maybe about 2 years old. He looked very much like a cat who had died of FUS a couple of years earlier. That cat's name had been "the cat of uncertain shape to be named later" and we called him Later. Thus, Sooner.

Sooner is not an inside cat -- he was intact when he arrived, and already had the habit of spraying his territory, so he's the outside Alpha Cat. At only 9.4 pounds, he's the smallest of the outside cats but rules them all with fur and cattitude. He's Mr Grumpy, too, doesn't want to be petted but wants to supervise everyone and everything. He only talks at me through the door. He'll stand on the other side hollering "Hey lady! Hey lady!" until I come out, and then he stalks off. Wherever I go in the yard, he's close by, pretending like he just happened to have business there. If I pet him, I have to pull my hand away quickly because he'll attack it. Instead, he attacks my feet.

I really like the little guy -- maybe because he has such a perverse attitude. The Dick Cheney of cats.

Over the last several weeks, I'd noticed he was drooling a lot, and also had his tongue out a lot -- much more than normal. So Wednesday we went to the vet, and he obviously hasn't been flossing because his teeth were badly decayed and he had severe gingivitis. Upshot is that he had 11 teeth pulled, and I'm making him catfood/chicken broth slurry for food and dosing him with Clavamox and morphine. Poor baby.

I have the "cats' bathroom" off my kitchen with a large glassed-in shower stall that I normally use for storage. I cleaned it out and turned it into a temporary hospital room with a bed, litter box and dinner tray. My inside cats are somewhat freaked about our visitor, and keep coming to tell me "the outside black cat is in the shower! Aren't you going to DO something?"

I asked the vet if he'll be a wet food kitty from now on, and he said maybe not -- that he has seen a lot of cats that just go right back to the dry food once they heal. I'm suppose to keep him inside until we finish the antibiotics, and that may be the most miserable part of it for him.

Have any of you all had experience with a toothless kitty? It's apparently not that uncommon.

My oldest cat always had bad teeth. He has his 2 fangs and that's it. He has never had a problem eating dry cat food or any other kind of food.

The difference between a cat and a dog.

A dog thinks, "he feeds me, he takes care of me, he puts a roof over my head. He must be God!"

A cat thinks, "he feeds me, brushes me, puts a roof over my head, takes care of me. I must be God!"

My patient seems to be making it through this ok. We're sitting on the couch right now watching Animal Planet's "Too Cute." He's been fascinated, but the evening morphine is starting to kick in, so it's almost time to go back into the hospital room.

He actually purred! He's never done that. Then he tried to bite me, but thought the better of it about half-way through.

Trouble has her "rounds" to make every day. She checks out the end table in the living room several times a day because pencils are often lying around to be stolen. In the afternoon, if I've left my bedroom door open, she gets up on my desk and knocks anything shiny to the floor. If my bedroom door is closed, she'll go to the bathroom and knock my toothpaste or shaving cream off of the counter.

Later on, if I'm in the fambly room reading or watching TV, she'll go from floor to chair to kitchen table to kitchen counter so that I'll get up and walk over telling her to get down, which she does and waits for pets and to be told what a good girl she is. This behavior usually repeats one more time in the next 10 minutes. I am well trained.

About this time she also makes regular passes by the fambly room to check the end table where my mom sometimes leaves her glasses...which would be promptly stolen, batted around for a bit then dropped in the water dish. This cat can hear a pair of eyeglasses being folded shut from the next room.

At any time during the day, if she hears someone use the ice dispenser, she runs to the fambly room to look for a coaster to knock to the floor.

I has a very busy kitteh with a schedule to keep. Between naps, of course.

This is my little old lady kitty, Violet:


(aka: Miz Vi, Your Vi-ness, Vidy-Vi, Vidala)

I adopted her when she was just a kitten, and now she's approaching 17. When she was diagnosed with kidney failure, the vet gave her a year - that was in November 2010 and she's still kickin'. Her appetite and energy are good, and, six days a week, she patiently suffers through getting jabbed in the scruff of the neck and loaded up with ringer's lactate. And when she's done, she immediately goes over to her food dish to wait for her treats. She's always used the scratching posts and litterbox like a good kitteh, purrs at the drop of a hat, loves to snuggle and has a coat as soft as bunny fur.

She'd be the perfect cat, except...

...she snores.


(It's not the best video since I took it with my phone, but about 14 seconds in, she really gets going.)

She's still worth it, though.

I'm diagnosing sleep apnea. Get her a CPAP!

(Not really a vet, not really dxing, not really to be taken seriously)

I have sleep apnea and my CPAP saved my life. From time to time, though, of an evening, a certain kitteh has been known to walk across my CPAP machine and, in so doing, hit the power button.

Such a pleasant way to awake; smothered by the kitteh.

FWIW, Trouble snores. Often while her fuzzy little head is resting on my shoulder near to mah ear. She's also been known to sit on my chest and lick my CPAP mask for a while. This usually involves purring. And kitteh spit.

Me too, 'cept for the cat stuff. Haven't had one for a long time. They poops in the wife's garden and she doesn't like that. 'Course now the rest of the neighborhood cats still do it, which still drives her nuts. She cultivates all her garden so well it is the most inviting toilet in the neighborhood.

Our "garden" is such a (pocket) coastal rainforest that the cats only visit via the back-fence hiway. (I finally got the bird feeders high enough to discourage goldfinch predation)

Anyway, I saw in a local animal column in our paper that you can largely discourage kittehs from using your yard as a litter box by planting 4-5 catnip plants together in a part of the garden. Seems the kittehs will enjoy the nip, then go back to their own yards (or someone elses) to do their bidness.

That sounds counter-intuitive to me. Like "Hey, we can partay here AND they got the bestest everywhere-catbox in the neighborhood!"

So my toothless wonder is now out of his makeshift hospital room and back lounging on the driveway. He seems to be somewhat more mellow -- he greeted one of the outside cats when he first went out with much mutual butt-sniffing, and hasn't thwacked or hissed at any of them.

On the other hand, Louielamour, the inside-outside black cat, is immensely jealous of Sooner. He hissed at him last night (and then at me) when he found Sooner on the couch watching TV. When Sooner went outside this morning, Louie came running up and then circled him, hissing all the time.

Sooner ignored him, as Louie had always done to Sooner, which just made Louie madder. But I'm not concerned -- Louie is a lover, not a fighter, and just has the habit of hissing at anything he doesn't like. His biggest mad is that he was always special and better than the outside cats because he got to come inside whenever he wanted and they didn't. Sooner has had attention and privileges that Louie thought were exclusively his, and he is currently bent.

We've still got about 3 days in the antibiotic course, so Sooner will be coming back inside for that (and some more TV, perhaps -- he's fascinated by it), and he also has to eat separately because he's exclusively on soft food. But I think my little guy is going to be fine, and in the meantime, has actually learned to purr and love the slicker.

Happy he's coming through. All those extractions must have been an ordeal.

Mommy, why do you torture me?



Images from Crufts.

That has to be in a dog show. The things they put those poor animals through just to get high stud fees.