logo! This one was created by the lovely and talented Bonnie, who somehow knew that I was considering putting out a call for a July-themed logo, and sent me one!
Thanks, Bonnie. You rock!
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Currently
reading:
Eleven on Top, by Janet Evanovich. I sure do love this series.
Finished the other night:
Inconceivable, by Ben Elton. I didn’t much care for it, because it was slowwwwww reading, and the author felt the need to include every excruciating detail of every instant of this couples’ life, and I ended up skipping about 80 pages in the middle, and didn’t miss a single thing. I wouldn’t recommend it, unless you’re dying and want to make the time last as long as possible.
(
Edited to add: I like how I bitch about the book going on and on about every excruciating detail, and then go on to write 63,000 words about taking the cats to the vet. POT. KETTLE. BLACK.)
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That Tom Cruise. What a fuckin’ loon, huh?
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Ever notice that on the rare day when your hair looks pretty good (for once) and you have to run errands, the INSTANT you step outside the house, it begins to rain cats and dogs, and doesn’t stop until you get back home, looking like a drowned rat?
Fucking mother nature.
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Stuff I need to buy for myself:
Over 25 percent of human genes are the same as those of a banana. Get over yourself t-shirt.
Too many idiots, not enough villages button.
Everything is funnier with the word fuck in it button. (That should be my motto)
I am the center of the universe sticker.
Does my fat ass make my ass look fat? sticker.
You mean shopping for more useless crap isn’t the meaning of life? sticker.
I do love the
Sticker Giant site.
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The kitten section.
So I took Mia, Flossie, and Peanut to be spayed and neutered yesterday. It was quite an experience, because I walked into the vet clinic, Mia saw a passing puppy, and lost her SHIT, hissing and growling and yowling. Apparently Mia is no big fan of dogs.
I had to take her out of the carrier to be weighed, and I won’t lie – I was pretty scared to do so, because Mia hissing and growling is something that scares the bejeebers out of me. A hissing, spitting, growling kitten? Cute. An 8-pound ball of pissed-off Momma? SCARY. But she came out of the carrier and growled a little, but let me pick her up and put her on the scale. She’s gained almost a pound since she was at the vet’s three weeks ago, but she’s still a skinny cat.
The biggest surprise to me was when I picked Peanut up to weigh him, and he hissed and growled at ME. The little fucker. So I weighed him – he’s 2 pounds, 9 ounces, which makes him the biggest porker of the bunch at the moment – and the front-desk lady weighed Flossie, who was hissing at HER, and then we put Mia in a cage in the “cat ward”, since she’d reacted so violently to the dog, and we put Flossie and Peanut in another cage, and then I had to leave pretty quickly, or their sad little meows would cause me to take them back out of the cage and run away with them.
I came home, I puttered around the house, and after I uploaded my entry for the day, I went upstairs to herd
Larry, Curly, and Moe Oy, Edgar, and Snoopy into the study so I could clean the cat room. Spot, Spanky, and Mister Boogers were already hanging out in the study, and they didn’t take the influx of little kittens with ANY kind of good humor at all. Spot squalled and ran like hell, and Spanky pretty much did the same thing. Mister Boogers sniffed the kittens and then hissed, then yowled, then hissed, and then raised his paw to hand out some Smacks o’ Doom, so I shooed him out of the room.
It took me about half an hour to completely vacuum and air out the room – still smells like a stable in there, but at least it’s a CLEAN stable – and then I went into the study to get the kittens. Who were having a grand old time sniffing around, and I turned around to shut the door, and Mister Boogers appeared out of nowhere and ran into the study. So I shut the door and sat down to watch the show.
For the most part Mister Boogers left the kittens alone, though Oy kept going over and sniffing at him, and he could hardly stand it, and he would growl and raise his paw to smack that kitten across the room, but then I would say “Mis. Ter. Boog. Ers.” in my Mad Momma voice, and he’d put his paw back down and walk away.
I never let him have any damn fun.
I eventually herded the
Stooges kittens back to their room and gave them a little love, then checked on them later to see how they were doing – sleeping, is how they were doing – and left the house after 4:00 to pick up Mia, Flossie, and Peanut.
When I got to the vet’s, the front-desk woman told me that the shelter owner was leaving the shelter at 5 and was coming to the vet’s, so I could hang out and wait, and we could do the vaccinations here. It was about 4:45 when she told me that, and I looked at the clock and considered, and figured I probably couldn’t get to the shelter before five – maybe I could, but not definitely – so I sat in the waiting room and waited. But first I went back to the cat ward to see Mia, Flossie, and Peanut, and Mia looked at me with her big, dark eyes, and she hissed at me in a desultory manner. Flossie and Peanut, on the other hand, wanted to come out of their damn cage and sniff all over the place, and I let them for a minute, and then put them back in and went back out to the waiting room, because I couldn’t stand to look at their sad, confused little faces.
Forty-five minutes later, Shelter Lady showed up with a cat to be spayed and another to be tested, and we went in the back of the clinic, and I took Peanut out of the cage and brought him out, and Shelter Lady gave him the shot, and he hissed and growled and swiped at me with his little paw, and would not be comforted. I put him in one of the carriers and grabbed Flossie. She clung to me and howled, then howled some more while she was getting her shot, then howled some more when I opened the carrier to put her in with Peanut, and he hissed and growled at me, then swiped at me with his little paw.
“Cut that out,” I said sternly to him. He wasn’t impressed, and growled and hissed some more while I put Flossie in with him and shut the carrier.
“Okay, let’s do Mom,” Shelter Lady said.
“Oh,” I said, surprised, “We need to do her, too?”
“Well, yeah,” Shelter Lady said. “We haven’t done her yet…”
Talk about feeling like a dumbass.
“We can probably just do her in the cage,” she said, and we opened the cage door, and Mia growled and hissed and yowled, and I grabbed her by the nape of the neck, and she fought back pretty hard.
So we spent the next few minutes with me trying to grab her, and Shelter Lady suggesting ways that I could grab her, and I’m SURE she thought I was the biggest fucking wimp on the face of the earth, as I stood there and said “Mia kinda scares me…” Because she does! She scares the shit out of me when she gives me the crazy eyes and growls with her mouth wide open. I can deal with the scratching, but the biting REALLY FUCKING HURTS, and I wasn’t up for being bitten. We ended up deciding that we’d wait on giving her her shot, and I put her in her carrier (an easy job that entailed holding the carrier up to the cage and pushing on Mia’s butt. Mia ran into that carrier like the hounds of hell were after her).
“Did they tell you that you need to keep the Mom and the babies separate?” Shelter Lady asked.
“Uh. No…” I said.
“Is that – are you going to be able to do that?”
“Yeah, we’ve got a room where we can put her…” I said.
“Okay, good.”
I put the carriers by the front door and said “So… are we next in line for the petstore?”, knowing that Fred would want to know, because he’s worried that he’ll have to take care of the kittens while I’m in Maine.
“No, not really… There are the kittens that are already there, and then someone else has five kittens, so it could be a little while. And the Mom and the kittens probably won’t be going to the store at the same time.”
So I left, and called Fred on the way home to ask him to set up the study for Mia with food and water and a litter box, and when I got home he took Mia into the study and I took Flossie and Peanut into the cat room, and he said that as soon as he opened Mia’s carrier, she came out, meowed at him, and rubbed up against him.
Flossie and Peanut were okay. Flossie was pretty sleepy for the rest of the day, but Peanut popped around like he had a firecracker in his butt, picking fights with the other boys, and chewing on my hair like it was a can of tuna.
I feel so, so, SO bad for Mia, though. Because she’s alone in that room, she’s no doubt hurting, and she has no idea what’s going on. She howls on and off, and when we go in there to keep her company, she runs over and howls and rubs on us and purrs. This morning, she could hear a kitten meowing in the room – which is next door to the room she’s in – and she got all excited and ran over to the wall and meowed.
I realized when I got home that I hadn’t asked whether she needed to be separated from the kittens for just a few days, or for good, so I emailed the Shelter Lady, who emailed me back to tell me that for good would be best, and she’d adjust in a few days.
Poor Mia. We’ve actually discussed letting her out into the house with our other cats during the day, but I’m afraid that if she went outside she’d run away, and I definitely don’t want that to happen. Maybe we’ll start letting her out for a little while in the evening – unless we introduce her to our cats and it doesn’t go well, I guess.
Can you tell that looking out the window is a favorite kitty pasttime around here? Mia likes to look out the window and growl at people as they walk by on the street.
Flossie snuggles with my foot.
“Like, oh my GAWD! No she DI-IN’T! No way!”
“Are you there, god? It’s me, Mia. Please make these rotten kittens stop trying to nurse, PLEASE.”
Oy is just the smilingest kitten.
We used this bowl to put on the kitchen scale to weigh them, and they liked hanging out in it so much that we just left it in the room, and every now and then someone will sit in it and fall asleep.
“Oh, about this tall. Very whiny. Kind of cute, likes belly rubs. Have you seen him?”
Snoopy and Egg shnuggle.
“Wazzuuuuuuup!”
Peanut, chewing on my hair. Apparently hair is a delicacy in Catsville.
Edgar and Oy, sleeping.
“Have you tried the hair this evening? It’s quite good. Fresh directly from the head, with just a soupcon of hair gel. Tasty!”
No toy is more fascinating than the Momma’s tail.
Sleepy Egg.
Flossie on my shoulder, sniffing my nose.
Oy and Mister Boogers check each other out. Neither seems all that impressed.
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Da Poo.]]>
Peanut, taking a moment mid-fight with Flossie, to lick his nose.
Egg decided he needed to be in the sleeve of my sweatshirt. He climbed in, hung out for a few minutes, then…
…turned around and came back out!
Miss Flossie shows off her fangs.
Oy gives someone the Manson lamps.
Egg prepares for the dismount.
“Egg! Egg! Hey, Egg! I’ve got some primo catnip, come get some! Don’t tell Oy, though. He’s a ‘nip hog.”
I love the way his toes are just sitting there, over his shoulder, for no apparent reason.
“Bahahah! Ha! Hee! Whoo, I think that catnip made me high…”
The yawn-and-stretch. Is there anything cuter than little pink cat toes? I think not!
“How YOU doin’? You wanna come up to my place, sniff some catnip, and check out my new cat toy?”]]>
She was a good and patient mother. Even when all five of the kittens were crawling over her, demanding to be fed, she just lay there and let them nurse as long as they wanted to. If they needed nudging in the right direction, she’d do that. She cleaned them, and fed them, and kept an eye on them to make sure they didn’t get themselves in trouble.
I don’t think I ever mentioned this, but she liked Fred. I mean, she liked me, but she REALLY liked Fred. In the evening when we’d go into the room where she and her kittens lived, she’d greet me, and then look expectantly at the door. If Fred didn’t come through the door pretty quickly, she’d start howling and wouldn’t let up until he came in. Then she’d rub on him, and purr, and flop down next to him. He’d pick her up like a baby, and she’d lay there and purr and look up at him with the Eyes of Love; I can guarantee you she wouldn’t have put up with that from anyone else!
She also had a playful side.
As her babies got older, she started to do less worrying and watching and grooming of them, and more playing with them. The first time she chased one of them down and held him down to nibble on his stomach, I don’t think he had any idea what was going on.
They thought her tail was the Funnest! Toy! Ever!, and she loved to tease them with it. She’d lay on top of the box in front of the window, and twitch it back and forth until they came running over to swat at it. Then she’d twitch it so it was out of their reach, and I swear that she laughed to herself as she watched them run back and forth trying to catch her tail.
She liked to sit and look out the window at the birds as they flew by. If someone walked by on the street below, she’d growl quietly at them, so they knew she was here to protect her kittens and if given the chance I’m sure she would have protected all of us, as well.
She wasn’t crazy about strangers, but I think she would have ended up being a really good cat for someone who didn’t have any other pets. She was a loving cat, and a good mother, and even though we knew we wouldn’t keep her, that she was going to be adopted by someone who could see how special she was, we loved her like one of our own.
Some of you have suggested that she held on until she knew that her kittens would be okay. Maybe that’s anthropomorphizing, but I’d like to think it’s true nonetheless. That she waited until she knew her babies would be okay without her, that we’d take good care of them, that we’d love them as much as she did.
The room where she spent her last few days feels strangely empty now. But last night when I walked by, I swear that out of the corner of my eye I saw the slightest hint of a tiny golden-eyed spitfire, sitting in front of the window, watching the birds fly by, and purring to beat the band.
Rest in peace, sweet girl.
