Chris & Joy's Critterweb » Simon

The filthy carpet has left the building

Chris — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 18:39:04 +0000

Yeah, we said we were going to leave the carpet that was over the plywood till we figured out what our plans were but that was also the nastiest part…

…as you can see.

A lot of moisture issues in front of the fireplace. We aren’t sure if it is all due to Lindsy sleeping there, or if there’s been a leakage issue (other than leaking dog).

Finally the cooties have been purged, and the area repeatedly treated. Of course, now we have a plywood living room… for now.

Happy 9th birthday, Simon!

Chris — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 22:32:27 +0000

Today was Simon’s birthday, or at least it’s the day we celebrate it. Since Simon was a rescue that we adopted while living in Tucson, AZ, we kind of had to estimate by the age he was when we got him. We can’t believe he is actually NINE!

There was vanilla ice cream, and cheetos, two of Simon’s favorite things…

… though there was also no shortage of volunteers offering to help him finish the ice cream.

It being the first birthday party Paddy has attended, he had some etiquette issues involving others’ ice cream and had to have a leash.

Cricket was proud of her party outfit, which she got from Wag!…

Winter chose to show up fashionably late and missed the ice cream.

Olive isn’t much for crowds and watched from a distance.

Calvin didn’t have time to pick out an outfit so he made his own.

After the ice cream, everyone headed out to the park to play soccer.

Simon got to play first, it being HIS birthday…

…but Calvin couldn’t resist jumping in…

… and like many good parties (and sporting events) it kind of ended in a drunken brawl.

Black cat camouflage

Chris — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 14:26:05 +0000

We took the bird netting off one of the two blueberry bushes, since it was done producing for the year, and Simon thought it made the perfect cat bed.

I should mention also that Simon is nine years old today… he’ll get to celebrate later with a party collar and some of his favorite treats.

Brotherly love

Chris — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 21:00:27 +0000

Simon loves his little brother… sometimes.

Sunny Saturday

Chris — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 15:20:37 +0000

Well, it’s raining again today but yesterday was pretty nice… if a bit chilly. We had a vet appointment in the morning to get Paddy’s DHLPP booster and then bundled up a bit to sit out in the sun with the critters. Calvin is now allowed out with supervision (at least until we get the tree scrunchies installed on the cherry tree) and Winter didn’t get photographed much because she was off stalking birds. Olive didn’t make it into the photo gallery at all, because I figured we already have a bazillion pictures of her sitting watching for moles… but then again,we did take yet another picture of Simon upside down. Honest, the cat is not paraplegic, he does walk sometimes. Paddy is on a leash only because we are being very slow and careful about introducing him to being outside with the cats (blame that, again, on Arthur) but he is doing really good. Lindsy is having a harder and harder time getting around and it shows in these pictures, sadly.

Anyway, here are a few highlights and the full album can be found in the gallery. There’s even a few rare pics of the critterweb humans.

Simon appreciating the chilly day from the comfort of a lap.

The mini roses all survived the winter and are getting leaves already.

Cricket also subscribes to the ’sunbathing is better on a lap’ ideal.

Last year’s parsley, still going strong.

Unbeknown to her, the huntress (Winter is on far right of pic) is also the hunted.

A photo op goes awry.

Lindsy, Chris, Simon, and Paddy

When I was taking this, I wondered if Joy was having a creepy sensation of being spied on?

Calvin had a great time outside.

There are 21 more pictures in the full album.

And the Critterweb Inn is now officially full

Chris — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 00:08:58 +0000

Since the rest of the week is going to be pretty grueling, schedule-wise, I’ll go ahead and introduce the newest member of the family that I have been hinting about for days now:

This is Paddy. We adopted him from the shelter a week ago and things are going well so far. He is about five or six months old and is going to be a pretty big boy. Yeah, we were going to wait until Lindsy passed, but he had the personality traits we were looking for and he needed a home. He’s not had any accidents in the house, is doing fine with the cats, initially pestered Lindsy something fierce but has eased off on that, and he even managed to charm his grammy.

We have been kind of keeping quiet about his presence since what I’ll call the Arthur Nightmare (and prior disasters) while we made sure things were going to work out, but we got outed within five minutes of Joy’s mom coming over this weeked. Paddy made a noise in his crate… “What was that?” “Uhhhh…nothing?” “Are you guys hiding a new granddog from me?” And so the cat, or rather large red dog, was out of the bag. He’s still learning not to jump on new people but conducted himself very well with her.

Forty six pounds or not, he is a puppy, so there’s lots of work ahead.The big difference between him and his predecessor is that there really is two way communication going on, and he wants to do right. Arthur was like having some sort of alien in the house, he really was the most frustrating dog I’ve ever dealt with. Paddy can be a bit stubborn, typical for his age, but he’s also gentle and responsive.

Cricket showing her evil side

Having a bigger dog around the house will make us feel a bit safer (Lindsy was great when she was young but can’t hear the door now) and will be good to have on hikes. We picked him for his personality rather than looks, but also think he’s absolutely beautiful.

Calvin and Paddy, the day we brought him home to cat-test him

Simon and Paddy

Paddy just came over and signed this post himself–> H][=p[=[]

Fifteen

Chris — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 00:02:40 +0000

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.

The one month mark, and a name change

Chris — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 00:26:57 +0000

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?

Happy Halloween everyone!

Chris — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 03:23:19 +0000

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!

Simon’s sinus invader has a name

Chris — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 00:12:38 +0000

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.