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By Chris, on March 2, 2010, at 7:02 pm
Lindsy turned fifteen this past month. The picture above is of her eating the last of the Pfeffernusse Christmas cookies from Trader Joe’s – we bought her a doggie cupcake from a local petshop but it was hard as a rock. She loves Pfeffernusse so that was probably a better ‘birthday cake’ for her.
She’s not doing real great these days. There have been several incidents where she couldn’t stand up, and she’s losing control of her bladder sometimes as well. She spends most of her time in a confused fog and it’s really sad to see that. She’s covered in huge lipomas and papillomas that keep getting infected and bleeding. Her appetite isn’t what it used to be, and we have World War Three with her over her ProIn pill (for the incontinence) every day. But she does still eat, and enjoys her bedtime cookie… I think we may be coming up on a hard decision soon, but we aren’t there just yet.
It just occurred to me that since we usually count our rescued animals’ birthdays from the date we adopted them, that Cricket had a birthday in January. Which one, is anyone’s guess. When we adopted her five years ago, our vet said she was at least ten — so I guess that makes her fifteen, as well. She’s doing pretty good, she got past that last bad spell and though her eyes are filming over now, overall she’s pretty spry, bad heart and all.
Simon will be nine this year… Olive will turn thirteen… how did everyone get so old?
Lindsy at a park in Garland, TX six years ago.
By Chris, on January 31, 2010, at 7:26 pm
Well, actually it’s more like the ‘five and a half week mark’ at this point, since I have been meaning to post this for a while now. I had a pretty long week last week, driving over 1500 miles total, and getting home close to seven PM a few nights, and then the bad weather closed the shelter and made it impossible for anyone other than us to get to it this weekend, so we took care of all the animals both days. I also spent part of this afternoon making a futile attempt to clear a path through the ice and snow in the driveway for my van to get out in the morning (not looking good for that happening, at least not before noon) and am now sitting on the couch feeling every one of my forty one years right now. But at least I finally have a moment to give a report on how things have gone with Dandelyon this past month or so.
As I mentioned in the first post, we were a little hesitant to be optimistic about a new addition to the family, with as bad as things went with Arthur… and adding a cat was particularly dicey, given the aggression issues we’ve had with Olive, and between Olive and Winter. We’d hoped the right one would kind of balance things out, but it could just as easily have been a total disaster.
I’m happy to say that things have gone better than we could ever have hoped. By the end of the first week, we had him intermingled with the rest of the gang. The only problem we did have was him giving his upper respiratory infection to Winter, but that may have helped the transition in a way, funny as that sounds; she was feeling too bad those first few days to worry about being hostile to the ‘intruder’ in the house.
 Now, over a month later, Winter treats him like a little brother – sometimes she finds him amusing and she actually plays with him, other times he’s too much for her and she gets angry. He does pay attention when she gets mad and backs off. Simon also gets along well with him — we were worried he was being too rough with Simon but Simon seems to initiate the wresting at least as often as Dandelyon does. They sleep together and Simon even grooms him sometimes. Olive… well, Olive is Olive. She is OK most of the time but we have had some issues with her jumping on him when she’s having one of her off days. Still, overall things have gone well.
 Cricket was initially kind of snarky with him (in her defense, he does treat her as a chew toy) but she’s gotten over that and he’s showing a bit more restraint with the flying tackles. Lindsy snapped at him a few times, but she hates all of the cats and we didn’t really expect she’d be any different with a new one.The unfortunate thing is we now have two cats that love dogs, and no dog that likes cats, but we’re still hoping to find the right dog to add to the family some day — though ideally not until after Lindsy’s passed on.
 One thing I do need to explain is that Dandelyon is now his middle name, and we’ve been calling him “Calvin.” It just suits him more, most of the time. His full name is “Calvin Dandelyon Weasley.” Yes, not only have we confused things by spelling one name weird, but now we’ve given him a name from “Calvin and Hobbes” but not named him after the cat in the cartoon. At least the Weasley part is pretty straightforward, if you’re familiar with the Harry Potter books. His personality is very Calvinish, he’s funny, inventive, mischievous, and cheerful, but can put on a good pout when he gets tired. And he has yellow hair that sticks up all over the place.
He has been so much fun to have around, he really is like a little ray of sunshine. We really love him. He makes us laugh constantly with his antics, and he’s blossoming into a beautiful cat. The five AM wake up in the form of a five pound kitten suddenly pouncing on your face we could maybe do without, but I’m sure he’ll outgrow that.
How could anyone resist a face like this?
By Chris, on December 12, 2009, at 1:02 pm
Never mind that it is barely above freezing out there, Olive is determined to sit outside and pretend that she’s not freezing her ass off.
By Chris, on November 5, 2009, at 8:14 am
A few posts back I think I mentioned that we were finally getting ready to buy a new camera. I’ve been mooning over several mega-zoom models for over two years now; I’d spend many hours on the camera review sites, decide on a model, at which point the model would become obsolete and unavailable. Since it was such a major purchase that we were hesitant about to begin with, at that point we’d just back off entirely for a while. But our poor little Canon G2 has gotten rather quirky about focusing lately, and we decided it was time to finally commit.
The animals almost nixed the whole plan with that entire weekend we spent at the vet’s, consuming about twice what we’d intended to pay for the camera in one sweep. What we ended up doing instead is selling some gold jewelery we’d been intending to sell at some point anyway, and put the money towards the camera. I’d had this stuff, which was near-24 carat gold and came from Thailand, for a long time but had no attachment to it, neither of us wear gold, and it wasn’t valuable enough to hang onto as an investment or anything. It was enough to mostly pay for the camera, though. Ironically the camera also apparently came from Thailand, according to the sticker on the bottom. 
 We poured over the review sites one last time, being really hesitant to mail order a camera since the one we’d been looking at isn’t available locally. Somewhere in the course of this, Joy wound up clicking on sample pics for digital SLRs and we realized how much sharper and more accurate they were. She’s actually the one who looked up and suggested the Nikon D3000 that we ended up getting, which we were able to buy locally. I think she’s been working at that computer shop too long and the ‘geek’ has rubbed off on her. We paid more than we were going to for the other camera, and I didn’t get my ginormous zooming capability (for now) but it’s a far superior camera that will be able to do anything we want it to and more. A zoom lens will have to wait a while, but since it’s a DSLR it will support all sorts of different lenses… maybe even a macro lens to really get up close and personal with my spider friends?
It’s taken a bit of getting used to to once again look through the eyepiece and not have the live view on the LCD (this model doesn’t have that, nor does it shoot video but we never used that feature anyway) but it’s a lot like my old Nikon N4004 in most aspects and very intuitive to use. I am including a few photos below that we’ve taken so far, and the Halloween pics were done with the new camera. No more washed out indoor pics of Olive with her eyes blinded shut.
If I have any criticism at all, it’s the noseprints that you can’t help but leave on the LCD when taking pics, and that seems to be pretty universal for digital cameras. I also find the pictures a bit oversaturated, but Joy thinks they look good so that might be just a personal preference issue.
Fall in Marion, NC. The burning bush hedge in this picture really was that brilliantly red but the grass seems a wee bit bright to me. I brought the camera along for the day when I went to Newland for a service call but unfortunately it was really dark and overcast all day.
Mini rose close-up (all three roses are still blooming their hearts out, don’t they know summer is over?)
‘Wildcat’ in the bushes.
Olive on mole patrol.
Cricket on the couch. The house was pretty dark, this was taken in the evening with low light and flash. It did really good with her eyes.
The color really came out really pretty here. Her eyes are closed from the sunlight, not the camera.
Note: the weird line on the right side of the portrait oriented images is something our upload program is doing to them, nothing with the camera. Its been going on a while and I keep meaning to research that and fix it but never get around to it.
By Chris, on October 31, 2009, at 8:23 pm
Ah, it’s that time of year again, the time the animals dread… well, actually, Simon and Cricket enjoy it and the others accept it in a resigned sort of way since there are tasty treats involved. Two things to note before I start here:
1. I am actually posting these pics on Nov 1 but am backdating to when we took them. I didn’t have time to put them up last night because we were watching scary movies and eating pizza.
2. The pics unfortunately make our gross living room rug look even worse than it is; it was filthy when we bought the house, we even had it steam-cleaned once, but it’s so bad that the years of dirt just sort of settles then seeps back up. Six months of unrelenting rain and seven of us coming in and out of the yard constantly doesn’t exactly help. This year’s income tax is earmarked for hardwood floors.
Anyway, those disclaimers aside, I now present the holiday costume pet torture 2009 edition:
Meet Count Catula – we made Simon’s costume ourselves this year, Joy did all of the actual sewing by hand since I quicky discovered that flannel is not sewing machine friendly.
Simon loves dressing up, and particularly seems to like capes. If you click on either of his pics, there are a couple more in the gallery we uploaded. He paraded all over the house. Taking pictures at night of a black cat in a black cape was a bit of a challenge though.
Initially, Winter’s flapper costume produced spontaneous paralysis and caused her to fall over dead…
She did, however, eventually recover the use of her limbs long enough to pose for us.
Olive has a bad leg so we let her off easy and she got to wear Cricket’s costume briefly. She was most unimpressed.
Lindsy, also being old and creaky nowadays, wore a Halloween party collar in lieu of an actual costume.
Cricket wore her costume to the vet’s for her recheck and X-rays, which we thought was pretty funny. She had a blast showing off.
Well, that’s it for another year… hope everyone had a happy and safe Halloween!
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