Cat in a box

I will write a few catch up posts later this week since it's been a hot minute since I blogged. In the meantime, I got some new booties yesterday and Eddie, who can never resist a box, decided the box was all his. I especially like the third photo where you can see him sort of spilling over the edges.

It's a challenge

To change sheets in my house. Eddie cannot resist the sound of sheets being put on a bed. He ignores the sounds of making a bed in the mornings, so there must be a difference in the noise. I can't tell with my human ears, but he can.

It's similar to the way all three cats ignore non-tuna cans being opened. Open a can of pumpkin, or artichoke hearts? They snooze. Open a can of tuna and all of a sudden, you're surrounded by cats crying piteously for a bit of that yummy tuna.

Anyway, here are some action shots from this morning's sheet changing adventure.

Playing around with a new app

Well it's new to me, anyway.

Original photos are on the left, the Prisma versions on the right. Link takes you to the Google Play store, it's also available on iTunes but you'll have to find that stinky link on your own.

Just talk to me

We're changing veterinarians and here's why.

It’s not that the cost for two of the kitties exceeded the estimate for all three by 30% (and meant that one cat—Chloe—didn’t get sedated, have an IV started, have any x-rays or have her teeth cleaned).

It’s not even that Chloe’s procedure wasn’t done. I get it that you don’t know how complicated a procedure will truly be until you’re actually in there doing it. I do appreciate that Wally and Eddie took longer than anticipated.

And it’s (sort of but not fully) not that four teeth were removed (two from each cat), instead of the one we knew about. Again ,I get that things can end up being in worse shape than preliminary exams indicated.

It’s about the utter lack of communication.

I expect to hear if something’s more complicated, going to take longer and going to cost a lot more money as it’s happening. Not at the end of the day when it’s a done deal, and not when I’m told the bill.

I expect that once it’s obvious that all three cats won’t have their procedures done that the one who’s not getting sedation would get at least water and preferably some food too.

She never does this.
She drank for a full three minutes.

We followed directions and picked up the food and water at 9 PM Wednesday night. That means that Chloe, who is 17, was without food or water for over 18 hours. It shouldn’t take a phone call from me asking if she’s had water for veterinary health care providers to think, gosh, she might need water.

And it’s about the lack of partnership. Eddie had one blood test come back in July with a slightly unusual value. We weren’t interested in tracking it down, but Thursday when we picked up the cats, the vet told us she’d run that test. No touching base with us, no “hey remember that one blood value, I’d like to run another test,” nothing.

I want any health care provider (whether for animals or humans) to work with me, tell me what’s going on, what to expect, any alternatives and then let me make an educated decision. It’s clear from our two experiences with this vet that we won’t get a collaborative partnership.

That’s fine. I’m voting with my wallet and my feet (paws?) and looking through the recommendations I got from my friends.

Feeling tense?

Just look at these two snoozing away last night. Really, I could have said today and it would be nearly as accurate. The only difference is that Wally is asleep on our bed instead of in one of the cat beds on our desks.

In this case, Chloe was off camera on the other side of my desk (which is just to the left of Eddie in the green and brown bed) and also asleep.

This morning's snores are making it hard for me to get going.

Changing the sheets

Is a contact sport in my house.

Eddie cannot resist the sound of sheets getting flung out over the bed. He’ll come running, leap on the bed and start attacking the sheets every which way. He’s a big, long and strong cat, he weighs close to 20 pounds so shifting him off the sheets takes some work.

But he loves tackling the sheets so I can’t get too cranky with him.

Oops, they noticed

As part of our “keep kitties well hydrated” process, we split a can of cat food three ways each night and add in about the same amount of canned pumpkin. That way, they all get more moisture and Eddie—our boy who’s had some issues with his behind—also gets fiber. The cats love the pumpkin and we’ve often joked that we could probably just give them pumpkin and they wouldn’t even notice the absence of their normal Gravy Lovers food.

We’d have been wrong.

Last night, Kent groped around in the box of canned food under the sink only to come up empty. He thought there was another, unopened box under the sink but nope—we were completely out. So we figured what the heck, now we’ll find out if they even miss the Gravy Lovers and gave them plain ol’ pumpkin.

They noticed. In fact, they all almost immediately switched bowls probably to see if someone else had the good stuff. And then they all huffed off and left their bowls looking like this:

Kent ran out and got some food. Eddie was very excited, Wally and Chloe couldn't be bothered and had to be carried out but once there, devoured their dinner.

Unintended consequences

We bought a second cat bed to go with the cushion on the file cabinet between our desks, and the cat bed that takes up about a third of the real estate on my desk. We hoped that this second bed would provide a third safe, comfy spot for kitties to claim. Right now it’s on the window seat in the office and ultimately it will go on one of the shelves in the built in portion of the window seat.

Eddie claimed it right away, which pleased us—at least until Wally began hissing like crazy at Eddie and only at Eddie. We are perplexed and can only think that the new bed has an odor Wally finds offensive. We think if that’s the case, the odor has transferred to Eddie and now Eddie smells the same. The hissing and growling has been going on since Saturday and it’s taking a toll on poor Eddie. I’m sure it’s not easy for Chloe or really for Wally either, and it’s definitely hard for us.

In other cat news, while all of this hissing drama was going on, the cat that sometimes hangs out on our air conditioner condenser popped up there Saturday night and banged on the office window! Eddie happened to near that spot as was hissing Wally and wow did they get all riled up. I have no idea what the other cat was doing, but yesterday when taking this picture of Eddie in the new bed, I realized that other cat had hit the window hard enough to leave a smeary little paw print.

Our house today

It's cold here in the Midwest and even though the snow was a bust yesterday, it's been looking and feeling  as though it might snow all weekend long. Here's what our cats do when it's cold and gloomy:

Admit it, you're sleepy now.

Cat in a window

Again.

We are all loving the weather right now. Yes, winter's coming but for now the windows are open and it's lovely.

It's their favorite time of year

Any time we can open windows or doors, the kitties love it. This is from earlier in the week:

They take turns

Mostly they take turns nicely. Sometimes there will be hissing and crying. Today was a hissing/crying kind of day.

P.S. Wally was there first.

The grey kitties

Chloe and Eddie both nap on our bed during the day. Chloe usually curls up on the pink blanket a friend made for us as a housewarming gift, but not always. Sometimes she curls up on one of the two folded beach towels at the foot of the bed. Yes, we have two folded beach towels on our bed . . . doesn't everyone? No really, we have them there to help keep the cat fur off the duvet cover. Of course that just means the fur is on the towels, and they have to be washed but somehow it seems like a good idea.

Anyway.

The day I took this picture, Eddie had managed to get very close to Chloe for his own nap. She wasn't completely unaware and what you can't see here is how her tail was whipping back and forth. Eddie finally just put his heavy paw on her tail and made her stop.

Water cat

Crazy cat loves water.

Water cat part trois

Eddie has long been fascinated with running water, at least water running from a faucet. I have no idea what he’d do with a stream since he’s strictly an indoor cat. But he does love water coming from a faucet.

I wrote about his obsession here and here (both with videos), where I had to practically fight with him to get the sink to myself when brushing my teeth. That ritual has evolved in the Little Yellow House.

Nowadays, he jumps on the bathroom counter when I get the floss out and chirps or meows at me to hurry it up. Once I turn on the faucet (to a tiny trickle) and wet my toothbrush, the sink is all his for as long as it takes me to walk to the kitchen, dispose of my floss and finish brushing my teeth. Sometimes I come back to him just looking at the water. Other times he’s actively biting at the trickle or sticking his head under it. Usually he ends up giving a great big shake and getting water all over the counter and the mirror.

This morning when I came back, he wasn’t doing any of these things and I realized there was a spider on the side of the sink. I rinsed the not so eensy teensy spider down the water spout drain, and poor Eddie didn’t get his water play time today. No worries, he's an optimistic cat and knows tomorrow is another day.

That was exhausting

Here's the end result of all of yesterday's hissing:

Yup, he wore himself out. He napped the rest of the day, which isn't his typical pattern.

Wild child

I haven’t posted much about the kitties recently, and realized it’s because the boys have settled down for the most part and don’t tend to do so many crazy things. Oh they’re still quite playful and have their little idiosyncrasies but neither one is out and out wild any more. That’s a relief, especially at night. Nowadays we’re more likely to be woken up by one of the boys crying in our ears rather than breaking things in another room. Even Wally has mellowed.

These days I have two cushions on my desk—there’s a cut down brown cushion left over from an old Poyang chair from Ikea on the left side that Eddie claims, and an actual pet bed (dog, to be specific but don’t tell the cats) on the right side (that’s mostly all Wally’s). I didn’t want to give up that much real estate to the cats but found that if they didn’t have a cushion, they tended to sprawl and then push things off my desk with their paws. That gets dangerous when what’s pushed is a full cup of coffee which then spills on electronics nearby like cell phones, keyboards or tablets.

Chloe remains firmly ensconced either on the second Poyang cushion (which is on top of the two drawer file cabinet between our desks) or on the pink knitted blanket our friend made for us. She still gets huffy if I don’t make the bed quickly enough in the mornings; she will wait and cry or grump until I get the blanket folded and into its proper spot so she can knead it and then curl up to sleep most of the day. She’s 14 or 15 years old now, so she sleeps a lot.

Eddie still loves, loves, loves his pumpkin with his canned food. He’s slimmed down a bit but let’s face it—that cat is always going to be a big boy.

And Wally is still the complicated, slightly high strung, easily bored cat he always was. This picture is pretty unusual. Normally you don’t see him that relaxed unless he’s on the pet (dog) bed on my desk.

Big boy needs a big box

Our boy kitties are quite long; a non-cat loving friend pointed this obvious fact out to me a few years ago. She was impressed with their incredibly long tails and then commented on their long spines. I hadn’t really put it together but then I got curious, measured them and then looked up average cat tail lengths online. Sure enough, Wally and Eddie are long kitties.

Over the course of the last seven years, we’ve had a variety of litter boxes to accommodate them. We finally ended up with about the biggest actual litter boxes you could get, with high sides but no tops. As I wrote about a couple of weeks ago, we’ve been experimenting with changing the litter, and between that and poor Eddie’s bum, he was not a happy cat and had recently started pooping in the dining room.

After consulting Google yet again, I suggested we get a plastic storage bin and try that as a litter box in the dining room on top of one of the poop spots. It seems that cats really hate to feel crowded while doing their business, and they don’t much care for being cooped up in small spaces while doing it either. Since Eddie is so very long, even the biggest proper litter box is too short. Fair enough, I dislike latrines and Port-A-Potties for the same reasons. Well, all the cats started using that box—Kent does the scooping and there was pretty much nothing to scoop in the other two boxes.

The kicker was on Sunday when we returned from a quick overnight trip. Eddie got our attention and then kept eye contact with us while he pooped on the dining room rug. Yikes.

So now we have two giant bins in the dining room and all cats are using them. These bins are too big to go in the sideboard we have in the office, which housed the previous litter boxes. But they are plenty large enough for very long cats to do their business without feeling crowded or having their bums hanging over the edge of the box. Unless, of course, it’s deliberate.

We’re also trying yet another litter. So far, so good in terms of no smell and far less dust. And also so far, so good in terms of the cats actually using the boxes.

The only downside is where to put these boxes permanently. I don't really want them in the dining room or the guest room and they are too big for the office. 

More pumpkin

It's not a new picture, but it's typical Eddie

Poor Eddie. He's really got a sensitive bum. As we suspected, his anal glands had started packing up again. The good news is he lost a bit of weight (0.4 pounds, which is more than it sounds when you start out at 18 pounds). And the other good news is we caught it sooner and now I know I did feel the glands.

He's to double his pumpkin intake and come back in three months. The vet wasn't all that sure that the fiber would help but it won't hurt and it does help increase the amount of water he's getting.

Of cats and litter

We'd had a litter that we liked, well sort of. It's this one, only unscented. What we liked about it is that it clumped solid with no odor. But there’s also a big negative too: it’s super dusty. And when I say dusty, I mean the dust goes everywhere. That’s not good for our lungs, the kitties’ lungs nor our computers (which are in the same room as the litter boxes.

So I scouted around online and read up on the various litters out there to see if we could find a better alternative. The World’s Best Cat Litter had a lot of positive reviews, although a few did say the odor control wasn’t the best – but it didn’t have dust. We were cautiously optimistic and got some.

The switch-over seemed to be going well, with all cats acting normal and not upset. But then – and at the same time as when I started this consulting job a few weeks ago – someone started pooping in the dining room on the rug.

We knew that cats don’t actually just start going outside their boxes for no reason so we figured it was due to one of the following:

• He (based on the size of the chocolate Lincoln logs, it was almost certainly one of the boy kitties) was upset that I wasn't around all day anymore
• He didn’t like the litter
• Or he had something else going on

We tried a couple of things. First, we got a much bigger container to use as a litter box because both boy kitties are very long and we’d read about how much cats hate to feel confined in their boxes. But he still pooped outside the box. Then we noticed that Eddie was crying more and I could feel tiny hard lumps again on either side of his butt, the same as when he had the anal gland issue a few months ago.

So tomorrow he goes to the vet’s to be checked. In the meantime, we changed out the litter in the big box and put in the dusty stuff again. And you know what? All three of them are using that box exclusively. Clearly The World’s Best isn’t our best option. We’ll be trying Precious Cat Ultra Premium next. Fingers/paws crossed and all that.