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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 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!
By Chris, on October 26, 2009, at 5:12 pm
We got the culture results; Simon’s nose is infected with pasteurella, which is a bacteria that is commonly found in cat’s mouths and is usually more of a concern to someone bitten by a cat than to the cat themselves. The bacteria wasn’t susceptible to the Baytril he’s been on, or to anything but penicillins and cephalosporins. Simon can’t take the former (Clavamox causes him to set a distance record for projectile vomiting) so he is now on Simplicef, a drug from the latter category. It has given him diarrhea but we’re hoping we can control it long enough to finish the full course. Poor guy still has something that looks like cream of tomato soup pouring from his left nostril.
If we understand what the vet said and what we’ve read, then this is something secondary to whatever initially affected his nose. It tends to be something that sets in when the immune system is compromised. He’s had issues with his nose for so long, we’re really hoping he’ll finally get better.
By Chris, on October 18, 2009, at 2:28 pm
…spend all day at the vet’s, that is.
So remember my mentioning Winter coming in the house Friday acting a bit off? This morning, we looked at her and realized that something didn’t look quite right about her head:
Asymmetrical would be one word to describe it. “Oh shit, you’ve got to be kidding me!” would also be a good descriptive phrase. At first, we thought we’d watch it a while, but as morning drifted into early afternoon, it continued to grow. Since no one will be here all day tomorrow (I have a service call in Fayetteville, five hours away, and Joy doesn’t get home till nearly 7 PM) we decided our only choice was to have it seen today.
As we were getting ready to head out, Simon staggered through the kitchen into the living room, sneezed (literally) twenty or thirty times as he did so, spraying blood through half the house. Then he let out the most pitiful tortured yowl, as if he was saying “owwww… that hurt.” We looked at each other, at the trail of blood spatter, and then Joy went back for a second crate.
We just got home about a half hour ago after spending most of our Sunday, and over four hundred dollars (on top of the similar amount yesterday) at the clinic. I asked if they were going to name a wing after us. Winter, it seems, must have had an altercation with Olive that day; she has an abscess on her head and an ear infection. We opted to try and get the abscess to rupture on its own with hot packs rather than putting her under, but it still may end up being the course we take. We had finally gotten her chronic diarrhea under control this past year, and hopefully the antibiotics won’t be a setback to that. On the plus side, if I can find a source for a small pet sized Star Trek uniform, she could be a Klingon for Halloween this year instead of a flapper as planned.
Simon has a nasty infection in his nose that may have involved the bone. Since this has been an ongoing issue for a very, very long time we went ahead and had skull X-rays and a culture done today. The X-ray didn’t show any sign of a polyp, tumor, or fungal invasion (with him being from Arizona originally, we did worry a bit about valley fever) but did show what appeared to be bone involvement to his infection. The culture results will take several days, but the vet also did a smear of the gook in his nose and the main culprit appears to be some sort of ‘almost filament like’ rod bacteria. We hope we can finally get this cleared up for him, poor guy.
Don’t get me wrong, we LOVE our vet clinic – the doctors and staff are great and it’s a wonderful place, but we have seen enough of them for a good long while.
Suddenly, Mr. Squirrel feels a creepy sensation go up his spine, a sense of being stared at, and the strange sudden recollection of that time he and his friends rented “Pumpkinhead” as teenagers.
“Hey Fred! Albert! Get over here. Ya gotta see this thing. Over there in that window – what the hell is wrong with its head?”
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