Cats redux

     We could not find an owner of the little gray tabby that Dave rescued from certain death by winter.  Dave, who is NOT a cat fancier, has taken a fancy to the little fella, and seemed downright pleased when I announced I was keeping him (the cat, people, the cat…. Jeez!)  He has named him Hobbes.  (Does that make David Calvin???)
     I took Hobbes to the vet right after Christmas, where he was pronounced a keeper and given all of his shots, was de-wormed, and treated for ear mites.  Are cats BORN with ear mites?  Does anyone know?  Because every cat I have been owned by- and Hobbes makes #15- has had them.
     Hobbes fits right in.  He easily learned to use the cat-door and the litter box, he knows where the food is, and he knows how to torment the living hell out of Patches.  He chases her relentlessly, and she is too dumb to realize that she is three times his size and could defeat him just by sitting on him.  Squashed kitten.  He’d be a grease mark on her butt.  Butt no, she tears through the house, wailing, howling, hissing, with Hobbes hot on her heels, the both of them knocking things over and making a mess.  It’s good to have a kitten in the house.
     Hobbes seems genuinely fond of David.  He curls up at his side while he is working at his desk, or wraps himself around Dave’s shoulders and purrs in his ears.  David, for his part, seems equally enamored of Hobbes.  Maybe you just can’t help but bond with something you have rescued and is grateful for it.  
     Hobbes loves Mama and I as well, but for different reasons.  He seems to love the way I taste, and he seems to love the wonderful, loud and piercing noises Mama makes when he rakes her feet with his claws- which, by the way, he can kiss good-bye (as well as his kitty balls) on January 23.  All responsible pet owners should neuter their pets, so no lamenting his lost reproductive potential, please.  And for those of you who are philosophically opposed to de-clawing, I will only remind you that I recently buried a beloved cat friend who died at the age of 18.5 years- and lived to be that age because she was de-clawed and was an indoor cat.  May Hobbes (and Patches) both exceed that record.  Amen.
     Must go now, and retrieve my great toe.  Kitty teeth are brutal.

Cats I have known and loved

I have been owned by a succession of cats since 1987.
It began when someone gave my daughter, who was 15 at the time, a beautiful little kitten she named Chevy. I balked at letting her keep Chevy because I was (and am) massively allergic to cats. But what can you do when your little girl is in love with a ball of fur? We took Chevy to the vet and got her her shots, and made arrangements for neutering, etc., when she was old enough. Two weeks later, however, she began having seizures, so one day while the kids were in school, I took her to the vet. She had distemper. The shots had come too late for her. I could have taken her home and let my daughter watch her slowly die, or have her put gently to sleep. Since, to this day, my daughter is bitter over my killing her cat, you know the choice I made. But on the advice of a friend, I did not go home empty handed. I took a little black tabby home with me so Kelly could have something small and soft to cuddle while she mourned poor Chevy. The black tabby was Shadow.

People may choose to bring cats into their homes, but cats decide with whom they will bond. Shadow had ear mites and worms and needed dosing and care that I had to provide since Kelly was in school all day and she decided to bond with me. Now I had killed Kelly’s first cat and stolen the affections of the second. That’s why, about a year later, Samantha, a seal point Siamese, came into our lives. Samantha was completely Kelly’s creature.

Shadow mothered Samantha and they developed a close relationship. About a year later, Roxie, an orange tabby, joined the zoo, and Shadow mothered her as well. Gemini, Tugger, MacGyver, Bubba, Lillian, Vivian, Sinbad, Rusty, Rosabelle and Patches succeeded Roxie. Poor Shadow. Each new addition after Roxie was greeted with a combination of irritability and dismay. Shadow, though the oldest, was not the alpha female, and the younger cats bullied her unless I protected her.

We never had more that five cats at a time, and after living with five cats for a couple of years, we found good homes for Gemini and Tugger and declared a three-cat maximum from that point on. Roxie died young of kidney failure. Fool that I am, I paid for dialysis trying to save that sweet cat. She greeted me every time I came in the door. We had a buffet by the front door, and as I came through it, she would be on the buffet, waiting to love on me and help me shake off the stresses of the day. I still miss her.
We were down to two cats, Shadow and Samantha. Then Kelly rescued a kitty from a dumpster (Gemini, so named because she looked like Shadow’s twin). THEN Kelly was given a gorgeous gray kitten as a tip on a Domino’s run that I named Tugger and we were back up to four cats. Gemini and Tugger really bonded with each other- they were kind of like feline, female Fred and George Weasleys. I really enjoyed them, but Dave was adamant about the three-cat rule. A friend of mine in graduate school had just lost her 18-year old cat- she had had the cat since she was five- and she was heart-broken. I offered her one of my cats, either Gemini or Tugger, but told her it was a wrench to separate them because they were so close to each other. She took them both, God bless her.
It’s funny. Of the two, I favored Tugger. My friend favored Gemini. People react to cats like they react to people. Some personalities just jibe with your own. Gemini was sweet and affectionate and a bit of a follower. Tugger was crazy, and wild, and fearless, and silly and a natural born leader. The two of them made life very interesting. Both Shadow and Samantha cried for days when they left, just like mama cats who have been separated from their kittens. It made me feel terrible. I missed them, too. But we were back to being a two-cat family again.
Then my son showed up with a huge, glorious black male who was clearly part Maine Coon, and my son expected to keep him. We had never had a male cat before, so I was a little leery, but it worked out that he was a terrific cat. What a character! I told Jake he could keep the cat if I could name him MacGyver- I was really into MacGyver at the time. The cat was well named as he seemed to live for adventure. Shortly on the heels of his joining the ladies, Bubba turned up. Bubba was another absolutely beautiful male, and as sweet a cat as I have ever met, but I don’t remember how it is he came to live with us.
The four cats got along well, but when my second granddaughter Haley was born, we found she was highly allergic to cats. (Jake’s family and Dave and I were sharing a house at the time.) Okay, the cats had to go. Kelly took in Shadow and Samantha and I found a good home for MacGyver and Bubba and for a while my house was catless.
[I must state here that I was able to find homes for these cats because they were healthy, neutered, and de-clawed. To those of you who have problems with the idea of de-clawing cats, I’ll just say deal with it. No cat with claws will ever live in my home. I value my belongings. Beyond that, the average life span of outdoor cats with their claws is 5 years. The average age for indoor cats who have been de-clawed is twice that. If you could ask the cats, I’d bet they say it was a fair trade-off. ]
Jake and his family moved out on Normandy Lake and during the moving-in process, found that two little kittens had been abandoned in their house. They were an awfully cute pair that Jake named Lillian and Vivian, and I have pictures of them nestled in Jake’s shirt pocket. Since they couldn’t live with Jake, they lived with me until I could find homes for them. In the meantime, since Jake wasn’t living with me anymore, I retrieved Shadow and Samantha from Kelly.
Then Jake bought a boat, and found that an adorable male kitten had been part of the package deal. We named him Sinbad. I can’t remember who adopted Sinbad, but do remember being sad to see him go.
Dave, Shadow, Samantha and I moved into the house we live in now in 1997. Shortly thereafter, my adorable next-door neighbor showed up with an orange tabby orphan that I instantly fell in love with. I named him Rusty. He used to be in the garage waiting for me when I got home from work every day and talked to me- mostly “feed me”, “water me”, “change the litter”, and “scratch me” but he was really good company while I did all those things. By now, Shadow was 10 and Samantha was 9 and they were too old and too jaundiced to be much amused or enamored of an active young male but I was. I only had Rusty a year. He had a bad habit of rushing the door to get outside, and he must have sneaked past us, probably while we were bringing in groceries, because dinnertime came, and there was no sign of him. We searched the neighborhood, handed out leaflets, but we never found a trace of him. A year later, the same thing happened with Samantha. She was almost 11 when she slipped out the door, something she NEVER did until we moved to this house, but was now making a habit, to my chagrin . I was getting ready for bed when I realized I hadn’t seen her in awhile, and searched the house for her. I searched the yard, the lot next door- no luck. I called. I whistled. (I have trained each of my cats to come to a whistle, believe it or not). A terrible thunderstorm came up, so severe it drove me back into the house. I kept expecting to see her run up onto the porch to get out of the weather but it didn’t happen. I don’t know if she went off to die like some animals do, or if the severe weather killed her, but she was gone, and I mourned her for weeks.
About this time, my son’s marriage broke up. Kendall and Haley’s mother, in an attempt, I think, to ingratiate herself to the girls, gave them each a kitten. Of course they couldn’t keep them, so I got a tearful call from Kendall, asking if the cats could come here to live so that the girls could at least visit them from time to time. Who says “no” to heartbroken child? So Rosabelle and Patches came to live with me. That was five years ago. Shadow just rolled her eyes, glared at me, and went into my bedroom to grumble under the bed. More damn kittens. Jeez.
Rosabelle was Haley’s cat, and she reminded me very much of Roxie. Last year, while Dave and I were in San Diego, Jake and the kids came over to swim and apparently let her out without knowing it. Normally, that would not have been a problem. The yard is now fenced, none of the cats could get out of the yard, and I often let them out in yard with me. Jake was coming back the next day to mow the grass for us and would have put her back in the house. Except that the moron pool guy- who really deserves a blog of his own in the future- came in the interim and left the gate open when he left. Jake found Rosabelle the next day. She had been mauled by dogs and did not survive.
Which brings us now to Shadow and Patches. Patches is Kendall’s cat, and is really a pig with fur. She eats constantly and is fat, fat, fat, even though I monitor her food and have her on a weight control cat food. She eats her food and then eats Shadow’s. She’s a bit of a knucklehead, but I really love her.
And Shadow… my dear old lady cat, whom I have had since 1987, died this afternoon of kidney failure. She has been failing for the past couple of years, and this year the decline has seemed to accelerate. She had lost her appetite and so lost a lot of weight, she was losing her fur in clumps, she had arthritis in her hips, and she was going blind. She had a bad tooth, so I had been treating her with antibiotics and today she was to have the tooth extracted. In preparation for surgery, the vet did blood work and found she was in acute kidney failure. Needless to say, he did not attempt to extract the tooth. She died at 2:30 pm. I went to get her with an air-tight plastic bin that contained a soft baby blanket she loved and her favorite toy. Terry was very sensitive and laid my dear girl out so that she looked like a kitten sleeping. Dave and I buried her in the backyard and will plant flowers in the spring. She would have been 19 in April. Nineteen. I had had her for fully half my marriage.

The ironic thing is that two nights ago, when the temperature dipped below freezing, Dave told me to bring in a kitten that has been hanging around on the front porch for days. He’s not fond a kittens but had no desire to see one freeze to death. The kitty obviously belongs to someone as she is wearing a very expensive collar. She seems to think she lives here now and has been tormenting Patches for two days, which may actually be a good thing as it may run some of the fat off of her. But tomorrow, I am going to take Baby Kitty’s picture and make flyers to hand out in the neighborhood. Somebody thought enough of her to give her that fancy collar. Someone may love her and be missing her. I know how that feels.

Grocery Diva

I hate grocery shopping. Maybe if I did it every day instead of every week, I would hate it a little less, because I would have fewer bags to wrestle with. Nah. I hate the stores; they are too bright, too cold, and too damn boring. I hate check-out, I hate loading the car, unloading the car, putting away the groceries, breaking down bulk purchases into smaller portions, recycling plastic bags … need I go on?

So… out here in California, you can actually grocery shop ON-LINE! How cool is that? You make your list on line, choose the brand names you want (or don’t), permit substitutions (or not), pick a day and time and voila! Groceries come to your door like magic. You still have to put them away, but somehow it’s not so onerous when a nice man has done all the aisle surfing and heavy lifting for you. Kinda like a provender Christmas- “OOOH, what’s in THIS bag?”

I have only shopped online for groceries twice, and I am 1 for two. I didn’t screw up the first time I did it, when I didn’t know what I was doing, but made up for it big time yesterday, when, theoretically, I did know what I was doing.

The first time the groceries came, a very nice man named Luis gave me some very helpful hints on how to maximize my shopping experience and refused a tip. “Give it to your church,” he said, and I will when I get home. Five dollars from Luis. God bless him.

Yesterday, after using all of the helpful tips Luis gave me, I was awaiting the delivery of the last groceries we will need for this trip. A knock at the door, and there stands another nice young man with a crate of food. I sign for it, and hand him a 100 dollar bill to pay for it. He
looks startled. “Can’t you change a 100 bill?” I ask, slightly panicked because that’s all the money I have, and the groceries are $92. He shakes his head, so I figure, what the hell, it’s Christmas and tell him to keep the change. He is gob-smacked. Thanks me innumerable times. I wave him out with a smile and a “Merry Christmas”. I am feeling pretty darn pleased with myself, and a little humbled that an $8 dollar tip could mean that much to someone.

Until I remember that I prepaid the groceries with my credit card.

That child walked off with a $100 tip.

Well, what the hell, it’s Christmas.

Except now I have to tell Dave what I have done. I stress all day. I’m not stressing about the money, I am stressing about the sheer absent-mindedness of the act. My brain is absent way too frequently these days. I think I may have Alzheimer’s because I keep forge… Sometimes I really fear I may have Alzheimer’s, because…

Anyway, the man gets home, and I tell him about my day. You have got to love a man who reacts this way: “What a great day you gave that kid! Who gets a $100 tip? He will remember that his whole life. And in time for Christmas, too. How cool is that?” To which he added, “Don’t make this a habit.”

So, God bless the young man and may his Christmas be bright. And God bless my husband for his generous heart. And God help me, because I am obviously losing it.

I really fear I may have the beginnings of….. what was I saying?

Dinner with the Nige

Dave and I had dinner tonight with Nigel Bryant, native of Beaulieau (pronounced Be-oo-ly), England. The Nige works for CTS-UK so we get to see him from time to time while we are in San Diego; he comes over for corporate meetings. Nigel is married and has two kids, all of whom I met when I traveled to England with Dave in 2001 (?) Jackie, Rachel and Hannah are lovely people, and I had the pleasure of dinner in their home and a tour of the New Forest area around Beaulieu which is delightful. It was my only visit to the Bryant household, but Dave has been many times. Dave used to make several prolonged visits to England every year and has come to love England as a second home. Whenever he is there, Nigel invites him to dinner, and whenever Nigel is here, vice versa.

Usually, I cook for Nigel, and spoil him with an elaborate dessert. I love having him sit at my table, and listening to him and Dave discuss business, books, family, and history. They discuss cricket, soccer and wine, too, but those topics don’t interest me much. Nigel is always good company, though he sometimes turns his sharp wit on people we all know, and says the most outrageous things. He makes me laugh. Tonight, we took him out to dinner to a restaurant called The Butcher Shop. Sounds yummy, doesn’t it? Not quite as bad a name for a restaurant as the Camel’s Breath Inn but still unfortunate. As it turns out, it is a very good restaurant, very good ambience, food, and service, and, happily for Nigel, a decent wine cellar. They make a hell of a dessert there as well. I can recommend it highly, but make reservations before you go or the wait will be wearing.

We had a lovely meal and a lovely time, marred only somewhat by talk of retirement plans. It’s not that I don’t want these men to retire; they have both worked hard and long and deserve comfortable retirements; it’s just that whenever retirement does come, our dinners together will become a thing of the past. People always say they are going to keep in touch and get together from time to time, but it doesn’t often happen that way. When our friend Bill Hooper retired, he moved to Florida and disappeared from our lives forever; no attempts at contact by us have been reciprocated by him. Nigel will be retiring to England, which is considerably further away than Florida. He won’t be retiring soon, but it is on the horizon, and it makes me sad. I’ve grown very fond of Nigel.

It’s hard to fathom that we have come to that time of life when we are planning to retire. I say “we” because I have a mouse in my pocket; I am already sans employment if not retired, having resigned my associate professorship in April to become a gypsy. But, as Dave said to our son about two weeks ago, in four years we will be 60. That doesn’t seem possible. Dave’s been working for Cubic for 25 years, and that doesn’t seem possible either. I know we are older. I can see it looking at us. And I know we are slowing down, losing strength, beginning to creak and ache but our SPIRITS don’t seem any older. We both still have the same joie de vie that we have always had; we still have enthusiasms and hobbies, skills and pastimes; we still dance to rock ‘n roll, look forward to movies, eat popsicles after dinner until the box is empty and rub each other’s feet. We are youngsters trapped in fading bodies. And we are still in love. I think we are too young to retire. Maybe we should start our own business. Maybe a restaurant? I'm sure we could think of a really horrible name for one.

Happy birthday to my baby sister Susan, born on this day in 1950. You do the math. Love you, Sis.

A Christmas Mish Mash

First, a rant.
You know, I love to shop, and I do a lot of shopping by catalog and on-line.  Every year about this time, I start getting unsolicited catalogs in the mail.   Actually, the deluge usually begins around Halloween, and the first few hundred are actually kinda neat; fun to look at, fun to share, fun to see the innumerable things that are available for purchase, fun to laugh at the pretentious, inflated prices of most of them.  Until this year, no one else I knew seemed to get many catalogs, so it was easy to hand them off.  Even so, by Thanksgiving, I was usually more annoyed than amused at the sheer volume.  This year, however, annoyed does not begin to encompass my feelings.  How about HARASSED?  Or PISSED OFF?  Not only am I being swamped by catalogs, but so are my friends- most getting catalogs for the first time.  They are a bit bemused about it, but I am PISSED OFF!  WHY is it possible for Land’s End, for example, to spend next to nothing  inundating me with catalogs- the SAME catalog, multiple times- while it costs me 37¢ to mail a one-ounce letter?   I jokingly threatened to save all the catalogs that came between Thanksgiving and Christmas and then take a picture of the stack, but within less than two weeks, the stack was already knee-high.  I am sick of merchants, people!  I am sick of Christmas carols before Halloween, I am sick of lugging tons of catalogs out to the street to be recycled, and sick at the thought of how many hundreds of thousands must be ending up in landfills.  I want to amend the Constitution: the Christmas season does NOT begin until the day after Thanksgiving; no merchant can send out more than one catalog a season- and it has to COST THEM to do it.  

And now, for no apparent reason except these things just popped into my mind, Compare and Contrast… or something like it.

Living with one old lady and two cats rather than with two kids and a dog.
I have done both.  Believe it or not, there are some similarities, at least in comparing the old lady to two kids.  There is no comparison between dogs and cats, however, except that they both shed.  Cats have fur balls.  Dog lick their balls.  Enough said.  

• When my kids were living at home, they bickered all the time.  Mama bickers with the cats all the time.  Verbally, it makes the exchange one-sided… but not quieter.  


• Kelly bossed Jake (and vice versa), and Mama bosses Patches.  


• With two kids, there was always some debate about who made the mess (unless I saw it being made with my own eyes).  With Mama and the cats, it is always a given… given a particular mess, I know exactly who made it.  


• My kids didn’t pick up after themselves, and neither does Mama or the cats.


• My kids played with their imaginations, and verbalized their play.  Mama does the same thing, except that she is always pissed off at her imaginary friends and shouts at them a lot.


• Before the kids could drive, I ran Kate’s Taxi Service.  Now, I run Kate’s Taxi Service for Mama.


• I used to live in fear of losing my kids whenever we went shopping.  I have no fear of losing Mama when we shop.  I am inured to it now.  She disappears every time.

One Christmas, Two Locales:
Christmas in San Diego is slightly different than Christmas is Tennessee.  It’s not just the warmer weather; we have lots of green Christmases in Tennessee.  It’s the trees that get decorated.  There is something so wrong and yet so wonderful about lighted palm and eucalyptus trees.  They don’t really look Christmasy, unless it’s in a “Nightmare before Christmas” kind of way, but they are strikingly beautiful.  We got in last night and so were driven through San Diego in the dark and got to see San Diego in all its Christmas glory.  There were fireworks as well, as the Chargers won a game in Qualcomm stadium which is just down the road from our apartment.  We don’t usually get to see fireworks in winter in Tennessee.  There is not as much Christmas carol playing here as there is in Tennessee, and what there is did NOT start before Halloween.  

The apartment in CA and the house in TN
     The apartment is clean, uncluttered and totally lacking in cat hair.  It’s nice to give my clothing a two-week respite from feline shedding every month.  It is noisy here, mostly traffic and car alarms going off, though on the weekends the air is alive with the sound of inebriated twenty-somethings who haven’t yet learned how to drink without getting drunk.  At least they walk home, but they walk under my window, and they usually sing, swear, fight, or screech while they are doing it.  Males tend to fight, vomit and go to sleep.  Females tend to scream, cry, and beat on the sleeping males.  Not much of that going on in my house. My house in Tullahoma is filled with collectibles and furniture and is decorated to the nines for Christmas.  We have a 12 foot tree that is spectacular and decorations in all the main rooms and on the porch.  The apartment has a metal tabletop “tree” from IKEA and two metallic reindeer.  HOHOHO!  All we need is a lighted eucalyptus and we are ready for the holidays.