Leg Teeth

Yesterday evening, around 6 p.m., I came back to the office to get in a little podcast editing and noticed D.J. Kitty sitting up beneath my desk. Something about his manner seemed off, though. Maybe he was leaning against the desk for support, but I didn't consciously see that. I just got the general impression that something was not right.

"Hey, cat. What are you doing under there?"

He didn't answer, but I wondered if maybe he was constipated and was waiting for a second go-round in the litterbox.

After a minute, though, he began to move, and did so awkwardly. He backed out from under the desk, and then backed over some boxes and papers nearby. He seemed to be trying to stay off of his back right leg and held it up whenever he could. Yep. Something was wrong.

I enlisted the wife's help and together we managed to hold him down on the dining room table long enough to inspect his leg. It was swollen at the knee joint, probably twice the size of his uninjured leg, but there didn't seem to be any huge wounds. Whatever was wrong clearly caused him pain, because he started squalling and hissing at us to the point that we were afraid he might bite or claw. We wrapped him up in a towel and proceeded with the inspection, with nearly the same results.

Emmett, hearing the squalling, hopped up on the table beside him and looked very concerned. As D.J. cried, Emmett also began to cry in very sympathetic tones. I would never have guessed he was that empathetic, but it was kind of cool to see.

The cat had been sleeping on the bed for most of the day, so we didn't think it was a snake bite--at least not from anything terribly venomous Maybe a cat fight wound.

It was too late after hours to take him to the vet, but our vet has an answering service and soon enough we were talking with our vet. After telling him the symptoms, he suggested it sounded like a cat fight, as cats are notorious for swollen, puss-filled wounds. He suggested giving him a kitty antibiotic, which we happened to still have some left from one of the other pets. As nothing seemed to be an emergency, though, we decided to just keep an eye on D.J. and haul him to the vet in the morning rather than engage the kitty E.R.

It's been a long while since I had to deal with any vet-worthy kitty wounds from fighting, probably because I've mostly had female cats for the past 20 years. As a kid, though, I had a male cat named Bay who used to get laughed at by our vet because most of the fighting wounds he received were on his butt and tail. "Yeah, you could tell which way he was running," the vet would say. As he aged and gained some nun-chuck skills, though, the wounds began to appear on his head and shoulders, so we knew Bay was giving as good as he got.

D.J. seemed to be okay with just holing up in his foam kitty house, so we left him in the spare bedroom overnight. The antibiotic must have worked some, too, because in the morning he leaped off of the bed to try and get out of the bedroom for breakfast. Alas, he didn't get any, cause the vet wanted him on empty in case sedation was needed.

The vet was able to find a puncture wound on D.J.'s leg. He said they'd do some blood work and have a closer look at the wound, then clean it out and make sure nothing vital was torn.

An hour later, we got a return call. The blood work was fine and they found the source of the infection right away: it was the tip end of a feline canine tooth. Evidently D.J. had been in a scrap and ran away so fast that it broke off the tooth of the attacking kitty. Yeah, that's my brave little fighter.

He's now back in our care, extra kitty tooth extracted, still high as a drunken kite.

Another kitty MIA

No sooner do I introduce the "new" kitties on the blog than one of them vanishes. Emmett Kitty has been missing for over 24 hours. I know, I know, that's a mere fraction of the time some cats disappear and then return, especially male cats. When I was a kid, we had a cat named Bay who would disappear for three months at a stretch and then turn up out of the blue. However, Emmett is fixed and has never done this before, so we have to chalk it up as either a first time walkabout or bad news.

At first we thought it had been a couple of days since we'd seen the cat, as the wife said she didn't remember seeing him at all yesterday. However, I remembered that I did see him yesterday morning, just before breakfast, when I saw Emmett sharpening all four sets of claws on one of our chairs at the same time. Normally any non-sharpening post sharpening pisses us off, but I remember thinking that I'd have to tell the wife about the four pawed claw because Emmett was certainly taking the art of clawing the ever-loving-shit out of the furniture to a new level.

We were then out for most of the day. When we returned, D.J. Kitty was around, but Emmett didn't turn up for dinner.

Making matters worse is that we were hit by some pretty nasty storms last night, the kind no cat would want to be out in. The wife got up in the night and must have let D.J. out while letting the dogs out to potty, because he was mewing to get in at 6 a.m. I could have sworn I heard two different cat voices then, because I even commented to the wife, "Oh, don't you hear the choir of kitties mewing to get in?" But we left them out there, mostly because we recently found a clothes basket full of clean laundry that had been pissed upon. If there really were two, only one turned up for breakfast.

So we're not sure what his status is or if he's even been away for a full 24 hours. I may very well be prematurely calling him missing. But he feels missing.

If you're of a praying mind, please say one for my missing kitty. (And one for Avie, too.)

If you're not of a praying mind... well, pray anyway. God hears the prayers of unbelievers, too.

Thanks.

New Cast Introductions (and Goodbyes) Part 3

D.J. Kitty, ostensibly the runt, has turned out to be the more intelligent of the two kittens. He’s definitely the more demanding one when it comes to his food supply and is given to meowing loudly from just out of reach at 4 a.m. when he decides it’s time for breakfast. He is also known for clawing the shit out of you if you don’t prepare his morning bowl of canned food as quickly as he desires. (This has led to many a morning when he only receives dry food and is lucky it isn’t thrown at him.) When not clawing us, his other favorite tactic is to locate the most fragile and/or valuable thing one of us (*cough*cough*cough*THEWIFE*COUGH*) has unwisely left on the table where we feed them, say a cell phone or stethoscope, and knocking it off to the hard floor below. We’ve therefore had to adjust our habits of where we put things upon coming home. When D.J.’s not being an absolute bitch, though, he’s a very loving cat. And he adores Moose, to the point that we sometimes catch them napping together.

Emmett, on the other hand, is the Matthew McConaughey of cats, meaning he looks very pretty and very stoned most of the time. He’s not terribly intelligent, but probably only has a dusting of the “re re,” so he’s not a total lost cause in the brains department. He’s much more prone to just quietly taking life as it comes. And while he's definitely interested in food—in fact, we had to switch to weight control cat food cause he was becoming quite the fatty for a while there— he's not so interested that he’d cause anyone physical harm to get hold of some, or even meow. In fact, I can't recall the last time I heard him meow.

It took us a while to bond with the cats, probably because they drove us nuts most of the time. With the brief exception of Milo Soulpatch, we've only had female cats and the ones we've had weren't known for just tearing the hell out of our house like these two ass clowns. Though they've settled down a bit now, there were a couple months there when they just flew through the house knocking shit over at all hours of the day and night. There was some mutual training that had to be done in this. They trained us to notice that whenever they were tearing through the house, knocking shit over or clawing at the flatscreen, it was there way of getting our attention because they WANTED to go out. And we had to train them that when they knock a bedside lamp onto our head in the middle of the night, we are apt to try and strangle them, or at least hurl a pillow at them. (And by "we" I mean me, as the wife never seems to be on the receiving end of their antics.) D.J. now limits his sleep interruptions to meowing in the night in the hope of being let out or being fed. (The little shit does not suffer for lack of food, by the way, he’s just a complete bitch.)

We recently returned from another family trip to Florida. We rented the same house from last year and met up with most of the same crew of the wife’s family from last year as well as a niece and nephew who weren’t able to come before. This year, we included my sister and my parents, since the house was plenty big enough for all of us. We took our dogs with us on the journey, but left the cats behind at the “kitty spa,” which is what we call vet-boarding. A great time was had by all.

We returned on a Sunday, so we knew we would have to wait until the following morning before we could pick the kitties up from the vet. It was kind of sobering to return home knowing the new cats were safe and sound at the “spa” and that we would still have Avie in our lives now if we’d only decided to board her last year.

As the wife and I settled into bed on the night of our return, we were startled by the sound of a cat meowing from outside. It sounded as though it was very near our bedroom window. Both of us had the exact same thought at the same time and rushed to the back door, silently hoping that our cat had chosen an ironic or at least very synchronous time to return. What a tremendous story that would be that Avie returned to us nearly a year to the day from her disappearance. We both called her name repeatedly, but she didn’t appear and we never saw the cat that made the sound. Probably just one of the neighborhood cats.

We still wonder about Avie and her whereabouts. And whenever we’re in Ruby's neighborhood, we always keep our eyes peeled just in case we see her. We like to think that she was adopted by a nice old lady and that at any given moment Avie is napping peacefully on her lap. It breaks our heart whenever we see any sort of stray cat, for fear that Avie is among their number now.

Today I stopped by the animal shelter to have a look around, for old times sake. No Avie to be found. Not even a cat that looked remotely like her. The shelter has long since taken down her wanted poster, though to their credit they left it up for many months longer than any of the other posters, probably due to my near daily presence.

I guess maybe it's time we officially said goodbye to her and stopped hoping for her return. I doubt either of us could manage to do it, though.

New Cast Introductions (and Goodbyes) Part 2

We next called our vet, who told us that the kittens would possibly be all right provided we keep them confined in a room such as a bathroom, one with tile or linoleum floors that are frequently bleached. At their young age, they had some degree of mother's immunity still but would need the full compliment of vaccinations to be fully protected. So we rushed home and stuffed them back into their bathroom prison.

After some discussion, we decided to keep the kittens with us. After all, if Ruby was going to keep them in her bathroom for several weeks, they may as well be in ours. And we could at least take them out a few times a day for exercise and exploration outside, not to mention immediately get them their next set of shots.

We took Emma and D.J. to the vet that afternoon, where we were informed that Emma was actually a boy. Yep, big ol unmistakable set of cat junk on that guy. Also, the kittens weren’t siblings at all. In fact, “Emma” was at least a couple of weeks older than D.J., a fact that was mistakenly reported otherwise on the official forms from the animal shelter—you know, the same forms that said he was a girl. The vet also stressed that they could not guarantee any vaccinations given to the cats by the animal shelter, because much of the shelter's vaccine stock was donated or expired from the get go. They were also mainly staffed with volunteers and kids from juvie, so who knew what sort of accuracy their records had in the first place? (And if "Emma's" stated sex was any example, not much.) Still, the vet said that our plan to keep the cats sequestered in the can was probably the best given the circumstances. Pan leukopenia took two weeks to set in after exposure, so we would just have to be alert to changes in two weeks time and play it by ear from there.

We decided to rename Emma "Emmett," after one of my favorite characters from the film Silverado, played by Scott Glen. We also toyed with the idea of renaming D.J. "Jake," after Emmett's brother Jake, played by Kevin Costner.

On the way home, we phoned Ruby to let her know about the gender switch for Emma. We told her of our plan to rename him Emmett. We immediately called Ruby to let her know of our renaming scheme. We'd no sooner told her about Emmett's new name when she cheerfully piped up, “Oh, Emmett, like from Twilight?”

"Uh, no," we said. Ruby, you see, is a Stephanie Meyer fan. As card-carrying non-fans ourselves, we weren't even aware there was an Emmett in Twilight, but we didn't much like the association. We then told her about D.J.'s proposed new name.

“Oh, Jake like from Twilight?” Ruby said.

“No! Not Jake like from Twilight!” we screamed.

Instantly we knew that renaming D.J. to Jake was a bad idea, because everyone below the age of 30 would forever assume we meant to name the cats after Twilight characters and we just couldn’t handle that. He would have to stay D.J.--damn sparkling vampires.

Keeping the cats in the bathroom soon proved problematic. D.J. was a master escape artist, who would wait by the crack of the door whenever we approached and would be out in a flash. We took to just putting a hand at the bottom of the door to catch him each time. Emmett, on the other hand, was pretty mellow, though he wasn’t above fighting with D.J. when they got too stir crazy. We took them out twice a day, but they were getting bigger and more active by the minute, it seemed, and wanted out of the bathroom in a bad way. And to show this, they took to destroying as much of the bathroom as they could get their kitty claws into, including clawing down the shower curtain, shredding the toilet paper and generally spreading as much litter to the four winds as possible, when they weren’t busy stinking up the joint with impressively powerful kitten poops. At least they were pooping, though. The lack of pooping and peeing and appetite was a sure fire sign of medical trouble, but we saw none of that from them. They were feisty and hungry at all times and pissed and shit enough for six cats.

We made it to nearly the mid-way point of their immunization cycle before turning them loose. By then, three weeks had passed with no problems. We decided to take our chances and hope the vaccinations they’d already had would be enough. After all, Milo Soulpatch had come into our care from the brink of starvation and had other ailments beyond the pan leukopenia. We don’t even know that he acquired it in our care, just that he came down with it two weeks after he arrived. These kitties did fine, though. Soon they had made frenemies with the dogs—content to sweetly nuzzle them and even sleep spooned up against them when not actively being chased.

New Cast Introductions (and Goodbyes) Part 1

One of the most tragic aspects of the disappearance of our cat Avie, just over one year ago, is that so much effort was put into getting her into our house in the first place. From her original rescue from the negligent assholes who had her, to the weeks she spent in the care of my mother-in-law in North Carolina as she underwent the necessary vaccinations in order to even set foot in our potentially panleukopenia-infected house, a lot of calories were burned getting her here. For nearly two years she was part of our family and we loved her dearly despite, and sometimes because of, her occasional quirks.

When we went to Florida last year, we left her in the care of some friends across town, Ruby and Turk. This was Avie's first time to be cat-sat, and I'd intended to buy her a collar with a name tag. After all, our friends had three boys and there was no guaranteeing that any of them would be as diligent in policing open doors at their house as we might be. Unfortunately, I forgot to, remembering my intention only after we'd dropped Avie off. Ruby said she'd put her cat's collar on Avie, just so there was some contact info to be had should she escape, but she forgot to as well. Phone text reports of Avie's status sounded good. But when Ruby came home on the Friday night of our vacation, she found her back door wide open and no cat to be seen.

We spent a fruitless month searching for her, and another two months after that of almost daily visits to the local animal shelter to check if she'd been turned in. Despite seeing plenty of nice looking cats there, we decided it was probably best to just stick with dogs for a while and not try and find a replacement kitty. It had been so much work to get Avie into the house in the first place, and we couldn't bring a stray in without weeks of vaccinations first. We'd been warned that the panleukopenia spores can live in the house for years and we couldn't risk having another kitten die as horribly as the kitten before Avie, Milo Soulpatch had.

A couple of months passed and during them Ruby and Turk's marriage fell apart. This had nothing to do with Avie, but was something we'd been sensing might be on the horizon for a while, but had hoped would not. Not long after they separated, Ruby announced that she'd picked up a couple of kittens from the pound--a brother and sister. I don't know if the kittens were intended to be a distraction for her kids from the problems around them, or what, but it seemed maybe not the wisest idea from my perspective. Then, a couple weeks later, Ruby announced that the kittens were not working out. It seemed that despite their litter box training, the kittens had sniffed out a place in an inaccessible corner, way behind her sofa, where a previous neighborhood cat had once taken a crap. And it was in this spot that the kittens insisted on crapping exclusively. Nothing could persuade them to stop, including relocating their litter box atop it. Ruby asked if we would like to take them off her hands, at least for a little while, until they matured enough to cut it out, if not longer. I did not want them and said so to the wife, but I also knew Ruby was under enough stress as it was and I thought it would be better to take them rather than have the kittens returned to the pound. However, I insisted that we couldn't take them until their vaccinations were complete. Ruby said they had and within a couple of days brought them over to the house.

The bigger of the two was a female with almost lilac point Siamese coloration but with no real Siamese features. Her name was Emma. The smaller male was a gray tabby named Deja Vu, because he looked a lot like a cat they'd had before. We liked the name Emma for a cat, but decided that Deja Vu would be shortened to D.J. Kitty. We played with them a bit, let the kids say goodbye to them and then we put them in the hall bathroom overnight, because introducing them to the dogs would be a gradual process.

The following morning, we put the dogs outside and let the kittens have the run of the place. We then went to breakfast. It was over a plate of Egg Beaters and turkey sausage that some math issues that had been tickling in the back of my mind floated to the front.

"How long has Ruby had the cats?" I asked the wife.

"Two weeks. Maybe three."

My heart sank. I realized the kittens could not have had their full set of three vaccinations against panleukopenia. They'd probably had one set at the pound, but it takes 21 days between each set. They might have had two, but I didn't think it was very likely. A quick call to Ruby revealed the truth. We practically screamed at her over the phone in the middle of Bob Evans. "Ruby! We can't take these cats! They have to have ALL of their shots before we can have them." Ruby swore she thought they'd had the full amount, but hadn't done the math herself. She felt horrible and said we could drop them off at her place again and she'd just keep them in her bathroom for the remaining time. This didn't really help our anxiety, though, as we'd left them with full run of our house, including all the rooms Milo Soulpatch had been in before he died.

(TO BE CONTINUED...)

I'll have a Bloody Mary with a twist of skunk

I thought when I stopped working in a library the amount of stank attacks in my life would decrease. And they have. But when one hits you out of the blue it can still be shocking and send you into Bear Piss Man flashbacks.

This past weekend, I was enjoying some Saturday evening TV with the glow of a beer still about me when our dogs began barking oddly at the back door. Through the glass of the door, I could see one of our cats, D.J. Kitty, sitting on the deck railing.

(By the way, I've rudely failed to introduce D.J. Kitty, as well as his buddy Emmett Kitty--the non-human babies I recently referred to us having--despite the fact that they've been in our lives since last summer. It's a Tale from the Lost Months I've been meaning to get to.)

Then the dogs paused in their barking to sniff at the bottom of the door. Immediately, they began whining loudly to get out. I had no clue what was going on, but I got up and opened the door and they nearly turned an ankle trying to get off the back deck and run into the night. Only after they were gone did I take a good breath and picked up the strong odor of skunk.

"Ohhhh shit," I said. I could just imagine those dogs, who love to chase after little critters like squirrels and cats, running headlong into a skunk and finding themselves with a face full of spray. It would be horrible and I would have to spend the rest of the knight scrubbing them. Moose is smaller, but his fur is very thick. And Sadie, while thinner of fur has more of it, and fluffy.

The dogs had already run around the corner of the house and were presumably in the driveway. Frantically I began shouting for them to come back while also clapping my hands as loudly as I could. The clapping part is their signal that Pa Means Business and Shits Are Gonna Break Bad if They Don't Head Back This Very Second. True to their training, they listened and came running back.

"Get in the house!"

Moose ran right in, but Sadie paused at the edge of the yard.

"GET IN THE HOUSE!!!" I shouted. She whined and cast a glance toward the back corner our home's exterior, as though weighing how much trouble she would be willing to incur by running that way to check for skunks.

"GET! IN! THE! EFFING! HOUSE!!!!!" I screamed. Only I didn't scream "Effing." My neighbors must adore me. Reluctantly, Sadie went in the house and I slammed the door after us, crisis averted.

Standing at my firmly shut back door, it was astounding to me how strong the skunk funk already was inside the house. The door had been open for less than 30 seconds, but it smelled an awful lot like skunk. It was so strong, in fact, that I wondered just how close to the house the skunk had been for it to smell so powerful. I could at least count my blessings, though, that the skunk hadn't managed to spray one of the dogs or the...

...cats.

oh shit.

I looked over at D.J. Kitty, who was munching food from his bowl atop a table in the kitchen. With fear and trepidation did I move over to the table. Double that and you'll have my feelings about the prospect of leaning over to carefully sniff the cat.

I recently recorded a podcast about the time I was working at my old job in the "liberry" and had to check in a book soaked in horse urine. Upon first sniffing that book, I realized to my horror that what I'd thought was merely mud was actually the bladder-based waste-product of a living creature. This is much the same gut reaction that hit me as I sniffed the cat. He didn't smell exactly like skunk spray, but the cat was definitely covered in some sort of powerful, revolting, animal by-product concentrate. Again, it not exactly skunky, but in the ballpark. I couldn't think of what else it could be and the skunk in the area was too much of a coincidence for it not to be skunk funk. My best guess was that the skunk odor we're all familiar with is actually a combination of skunk-funk-concentrate and air.

D.J. hopped down from the table and our dogs took an immediate interest in sniffing him. I knew my nose wasn't off. He was doused in something awful.

Somehow I had the presence of mind to go and shut the bedroom door. It would be hellish to have to sleep in a room that smelled of skunk and I knew my wife, with her acute sense of smell, would not be able to handle it. I then stripped off my shirt and went to catch the cat, who I hauled to the hall bathroom tub.

An episode of Mythbusters backed up the home remedy of a bath in tomato juice to cut skunk spray, but I didn't have any at hand. So, instead, I soaked the cat in vet-shampoo and scrubbed him for ten minutes. After rinsing him off, I found he was definitely still stinky, but maybe a bit less so. He was also wet and cranky.

I texted the wife to warn her about the skunk. When she came home, she immediately wrinkled her nose upon walking into the house. I don't think she was very happy about it, but it wasn't as if I had let the cat in KNOWING he was coated in skunk spray, so she couldn't really complain.

"He smells a little better now," I offered.

The wife suggested we put the cat back outside regardless. He was way too rank to stay in the already stinky house.

"I know it's probably a long shot," she began, "but did you happen to close the bedroom door?"

"Yes, I did," I said, proud of my forethought. She was equally delighted.

The bedroom had indeed remained blissfully free of skunk smell and we kept it closed off and the dogs locked inside of it throughout the night. Eventually, the dogs had to make stinky of their own and whined to go out at 5 in the morning. Upon entering the hallway with them, I was hit with the still potent smell of skunk. Waking up on my return to bed, the wife suggested we turn off the heat and open some windows in the rest of the house. Sure, it was a bit chilly outside, but we'd be pretty snug in the closed off bedroom. And by morning, the house nearly smelled normal. The cat, however, did not.

From the store, I purchased two of the biggest cans of tomato juice they had and took them home, prepared to give D.J. a proper tomato bath. One of the many troubles with giving a cat a tomato juice bath is that despite it being the standard suggestion for skunk spray remedy, no one ever tells you exactly how to accomplish it. Do I fill the bathtub with tomato juice? Do I pour it on his head? Do I need a wire bristle brush? Does he have to soak in it for half an hour? Should I heat it first? I didn't know. I decided to go with a soak/pour combo to cover bases and I decided to do this in the kitchen sink. I'm not sure why I thought it would be easier than the bathtub, but it was a mistake all around.

Before seizing the cat, I mixed two different kinds of shampoo with half a giant can of tomato juice and stirred it up. (Mythbusters also said soap was good.) Then I put the stopper in the sink drain, put the cat in the sink, rinsed him with the sink's spray hose and then held him with one hand while pouring the mixture over his back and head with the other. I began massaging it over him, trying to get the cat good and coated, but the soap mixed in was making him slippery. Thinking that he wasn't coated enough, I then tried to pour the rest of the can of tomato juice over him, but I couldn't get a good grip on the sides of the can with only one hand and had to awkwardly pull the can over by gripping its top edge, before tipping it over using my forearm and chest, and then pouring it onto the cat.

D.J. Kitty was not having a good time of it, but he didn't squall too much and didn't claw me. (Clawing me is what he saves for when I'm actively trying to feed him in the morning.) What he did do, though, was one of those patented Kitty-Full-Body-Shakes, sending blobs of soapy tomato goo flying in all directions. Quickly I realized my error of doing this in the kitchen. I also realized that the puny spray pressure of our sink hose would not be enough to cut the tomato mixture in any sort of ideal time period. Those thoughts, combined with the fact that D.J. suddenly decided he'd had enough and had begun clawing at the edges of the sink to escape, which became a two-hand job to prevent, made me certain that we needed to finish this bath in the bathtub. I didn't have a spare hand to grab for a towel, so I just pulled D.J. to my chest, , his claws away from my body, and ran with him to the hall bathroom, blobs of tomato falling to the carpet in a trail behind us.

The bathroom rinsing seemed far less traumatic for him, if no less messy. By the time we were done, it looked like a cat had exploded in there, from the cat-slung smears of tomato-soaked cat hair sticking to the sides of the tub. And while the tomato juice bath had cut the stench quite a bit, it had not taken it all, particularly around his face. I could have done another soak on him, but it wasn't so bad that he really needed it. Let him keep a stank head for a few days. Might teach him a valuable lesson about which animals he's supposed to be hassling.

As for finally introducing the kitties themselves, I guess it's about time to do that...