Kitties in Manila

I’ve seen a ton of kitties here, they’re all wild but highly socialized toward humans. They’re also incredibly tiny and thin, I’m sure they don’t live easy lives. I haven't tried to pet any of them because although they don't run away from people, they're clearly not house cats.

As you might imagine, I’ve taken a lot of photos (I can’t resist cute cats) so here they are:

I saw these two at the Bonifacio High Street Mall area on January 11.

I'm pretty sure these are the same kitties plus another one; I saw them January 19.

This tiny kitty was eating something, what you don't see are the couple of workers sitting on a short landscaping wall taking their break. I'm pretty sure they were feeding the kitty.

This is a different cat, although she looks very similar to the previous one.

This is yet another cat, but this one's sitting on the landscaping light. It wasn't a cool night by any stretch of the imagination but cats do run hotter than we do. So I'm sure the warmth felt good.

And as I came back by on the same walk, that little kitty decided to curl up on the light.

Mother's Day

My sons gave me this blanket years decades ago for Mother’s Day. I call it the cat blanket because (duh) it's got cats on it, and also because these days, Wally has made it his own. If he’s not in a proper cat bed snoozing away, he’s curled up on this blanket.

And I thought perhaps this photo showed the cat blanket but alas it doesn’t. I’m pretty sure this was the same Mother’s Day I received the blanket; if so, it’s not in the picture. Sorry for the crummy quality—it’s a picture of a picture. Still, it's a fun picture with both kids in it.

Here’s another picture from the same day—again, not the best quality but you can see Tigger, who was a wonderful cat.

Everything I know about cats—for Julia

Disclaimer: I’m not a vet. Always listen to your vet over anything I say.

Cats are obligate carnivores. This means they can’t really digest grains or fruit and that their entire diet needs to be meat. This link takes you to an article on PetMD and here's a quote from the article:

The cat cannot sustain its life unless it consumes meat in some form.

Cats are also actually lactose-intolerant. While they will drink milk, they shouldn’t.

Vitamin D capsules are deadly for cats. At least one of mine loves those capsules so if you take vitamin D, don’t let your kitties near them (just in case).

Not all cats like cat nip. It’s sort of like cilantro—some people love the taste, others think it tastes like soap. All three of my current kitties love nip but I’ve had others just look at it and walk away.

In the wild, cats get most of their water from eating their prey (mice, birds etc.). So drinking water isn’t their first preference and cats tend to not drink enough. This is especially true for male cats, who can end up with kidney issues. I use a CatIt fountain, and it’s made a real difference in how much water they drink.




Cats are territorial but it’s different from the way dogs are. Dogs will have a spot they consider theirs and that spot doesn’t change. Cats will have areas and they’ll shift their spots. Some prefer to climb (Wally is our big climber right now) and others just want a soft, warm spot to curl up on.

You can (and should) trim your kitty’s nails. Start doing it now when they are kittens and it will be no big deal for them.

Cats are also crespucular, which means they are most active at twilight, morning and evening. That's why you may get demands to get up and play, or feed or generally interact with your kittens.

Cats scratch. Some scratch horizontally and some prefer to scratch vertically. We have this “lounger” that all three love, and there are lots of other scratching pad/post options out there.

Hope that helps!

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.

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.

Of cats and calendars

Years ago, my mother gave me a cat calendar for Christmas that was amazing. The pictures were of feral cats taken in Greece and I was entranced by the light and the composition of each month’s picture. To be honest, I’m not even sure when this started although it was before Kent and I started dating—I know this because I framed some of the photos from that first calendar and hung them in the apartment I lived in then.

I told her then that she could just give me the same thing everything for Christmas and I would be very happy. It’s hard to find cat calendars that aren’t stupidly cheesey or overly cutesy but this one was fantastic. And over the years, she’s done exactly that. I think there was one year where she couldn’t find a version, but mostly I’ve been able to hang a calendar of amazing feral cats in Greece on my wall every year.

This year she told me I wouldn’t be getting one, and I’ll admit I was bummed. But what I didn’t know is that while she was in Greece, she had been taking photos of the feral cats there. And she created a calendar for me with those photos, along with some from her sister (the aunt for whom I’m named), and a friend who traveled with my folks.

I love this calendar, not only because of the photos but because of what my mom did. She told me she thought of me the whole time she was there as she was taking those photos. I think this ranks right up there with the most thoughtful and loving gift my mom’s ever given me.

Snoozy kitty

But not one of ours. This is the one who stalks mice in our backyard (I'm a fan of that) and the same one that batted at our office window one day as if to say "Hey! Look at me!"

Right this second

One cat is snoring on the bed on the left side of my desk, one cat is curled up in the bed on the right side of my desk. And Wally is holding my hand.

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.

Animals are weird

We gave my mother-in-law’s dog a rubber duck nearly two years ago at Christmas. The duck is wearing a stocking cap and squeaks very loudly when squeezed or chewed on. Arfie (yes, the dog’s name is Arfie because when he barks, he says “arf” very clearly) loves that chicken, and takes it everywhere. But the reason I’m including this in my “animals are weird” post is because every Sunday when Kent calls his mother, Arfie runs off to get the chicken and brings it to my mother-in-law, making the bird squawk the whole way.

In a similar vein, Eddie is a talkative cat all the time, but he saves his loudest, most expressive meows for when I call my mother on Saturday mornings at 8 her time. He will walk down the hallway and come into the office, singing the song of his people the entire way. My mother can hear him very clearly—heck, I think the people down the street can hear him. He’ll do it other times too, of course, but never with as much feeling and meaning as he does when I am talking to my mom.

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.

It aint pretty

But it works. Here's our solution to the litter box issue I mentioned a while back. I'm happy to report that the litter is great; it controls odor really well and has far less dust than the Fresh Step did. That's good because the big litter bins are in our office:

No, it's not what we wanted to do but we don't really have a better spot for them. Since the stairs to our basement are located in the garage, we couldn't put the litter boxes down there. That's just as well since then I suspect we would forget to scoop daily. And the other downside is we can hear them doing their business, which is pretty disturbing when they're peeing.

My cat's Christmas

My mother-in-law is a confirmed dog person but still manages to get the best cat toys for our kitties at Christmas (which I know I've written about before). This year was no exception and Eddie in particular is having a ball with this present.





He's managed to get the toy out of the sucker gripper that kept it on the glass door, and has been carrying it around the house for the last 30 minutes. We'll need to make sure we put it away tonight or we'll never get any sleep.

Wherever I go

There they are. At least lately. They follow me to the bedroom when I am just going to read, they curl up with me on the couch (and leave me practically no room), and if I sit on the floor when we watch TV, well they swarm me then too. Crazy kitties.

They put out serious sleep vibes, I was
about to pass out here

You're one of my kind

One of the blogs I read is written by a collection of veterinarians who specialize in cats (yes, I do love kitties). There’ve been a lot of interesting articles on the blog but one in particular got me thinking about my own three cats.

The article discusses the nature of social groupings in cats and asks readers how many exist in their own home. Naturally enough, that got me to consider Wally, Eddie and Chloe.

Chloe has never been interested in other cats; in fact, for a long time she was downright hostile toward her own species. Little Sammie tried to kitty pile with her but she was having nothing to do with him. After he died and we got Wally and Eddie, they too tried to kitty pile with her. Age had not softened her solitary ways but the boys did not care. They still played with her and tried to snooze with her. The playing often got out of hand because she’d get angry with them and the kitty pile naps were a non-starter. Sometimes Wally could sleep near her after she was asleep but that was about as far as things got.

A long time ago!

The boys were a different story. They are litter mates and for the first few years, they slept in piles around the house, groomed each other and just generally behaved as though they were one cat in two bodies.

I’m not sure when things changed but certainly by the time we flooded the first time, they were no longer quite so cozy with each other. By then, we’d stuffed them in their carriers for a cross country move, and made them live for a couple of months in a teeny, tiny place that didn’t allow cats and certainly didn’t have any room for kitty romping. And then we flooded. All three were in the apartment with me when the water started coming in, and I’m sure they picked up on my own fear and uncertainty as I shoved them none too gently into their carriers. And of course who can forget the first night in the crack house hotel, followed by living for three weeks in the basement of a very generous friend and then moving again to a temporary apartment . . . yeah, that was a lot for the cats.

After reading that article, though, I realized we do have social groupings. It’s just that I’m at the center of these groupings. There’s Wally and me, Eddie and me, and Chloe and me. Wally and Chloe have a tiny bit of warmth to their relationship but I’m still in the middle of that. And I get in the middle of the Eddie/Chloe relationship because that’s still not a very friendly environment.

I didn’t put Kent in this diagram because I wasn’t sure how to depict his status. When he’s home during the day, Eddie sleeps on his lap almost all day long. That's hard to show in a diagram, wouldn't you agree? And I aligned the cats the way I did because Wally does mostly interact in a positive way with the other two. But they all swarm me.

Fat cats are fat

Eddie doesn't like the diet

At last month's vet check up, the vet mentioned that in addition to the kitties being awfully high strung and maybe next time we sedate them before bringing them in, they're all three on the chubby side and perhaps it's time to lose weight.

Well, the vet is right and I'm sure it's partly because we have no stairs for them to race up and down upon here at The Little Yellow House. Stairs made for a nice easy way to reduce kitty stress and manage kitty weight, but we live in a ranch home now.

Being the dutiful cat owners that we are, we researched good options for calorie restrictions, including a couple of Ikea cat feeder hacks (here and here). This is more difficult than it might seem, not because they whine (they've always whined for food daily anyway) but because of their individual eating patterns.

Wally and Chloe are both nibblers or grazers. They'll eat three or four pieces of kibble and then be done for an hour or so. If they were the only two cats we had, we could get by with a cat sitter every other day when we go out of town since they eat when they're hungry and stop when they're not.

But Eddie doesn't work that way. Eddie is a scarf 'n' barf kind of cat. He will eat and eat and eat, sometimes to the point of tossing his cookies er kibble immediately afterward. If we put out enough food for three days on the first day, it would be all gone at the end of the first day. Plus he'd probably barf.

So those feeding differences meant we needed to find a reduced calorie kibble and also feed less of it just a bit more frequently. Previously, I just kept the bowls topped off. Now I put 1/3 cup very high quality (also expensive) diet kibble in each of the two bowls in the morning and then again at night. Theoretically that should help them lose weight because it's fewer calories and less food.

But theory and reality aren't yet lined up with the Meoinkers. As of two weeks ago and 21 days into the calorie reduction, Wally and Chloe have maintained their weight while dramatically increasing their food whining. Eddie, on the other hand, has gained weight.

We'll have another kitty weigh in this weekend. I'll let you know what the scales say. Kitties may need to get FitBits (KitBits?) of their own and start logging 10k steps a day.

No room

This is how the cats think the bed should be every night: full of them with just a bit of room for me. Sorry, Kent, no room for you.

Yes, of course there's room for Kent. He just shoves them out of the way and they huff off for a bit before they come back and try their land grabbing ways again. 

This is why we can't have nice things

Really it's why I can't have nice things.

Cats have scent glands on the sides of their faces, the bases of their tails, on their legs -- really, where don't cats have scent glands? And they like to rub those scent glands on things that are important to them. Over and over and over again they like to rub.

Until you get something like this leg on my desk:

Notice where the black is all gone? That's from cats rubbing off the finish and rubbing on their scent. But the worst thing is they only do it to my desk, never to Kent's.

This is why I can't have nice things. They'll just rub em to death.

A slightly disgusting hack

We have a big, giant trash bin provided by our city. I mean, that bin is huge and while that's nice, it's also plastic which means it absorbs odor. Since we scoop the litter boxes daily, we've put seven bags of grossness into a big, giant plastic bin every single week since late January when we moved in. No big deal . . . until the weather started heating up a couple of weeks ago and I'm here to tell you it's a smelly situation now. The entire garage just reeks.

So last weekend I had an idea about how to solve the smell -- the poop pot.

We got a super cheap stock pot with a well-fitting lid and put down a layer of charcoal briquettes in the bottom of the pot. The daily bags of grossness go into the poop pot until Monday morning, when they get tossed into the big, giant plastic bin. Once the layer of briquettes no longer help with the odor, we'll toss them too. While the contents of the poop pot are still quite smelly, our garage no longer stinks to high, high heaven.

Did a bad, bad thing

OK not bad exactly, but silly and perhaps a little foolish.

I bought the cats a special pet bed. Actually it's a dog bed but don't tell them that. The reason it's silly and foolish is that cats sleep where they want to sleep. Forget your special bed, they like cardboard flat on the ground, a folded blanket, a piece of paper, any small, contained space -- well you get the picture.

But all three have cycled through this dog cat bed and seem to like it. I will say it's incredibly soft, and also machine washable which is a huge bonus in this house. That's partly how we control the fur, by washing and drying pretty much everything.

Don't be fooled by that open eye.
He's totally down for the count.