My cat can count to three.

My little cat, Sophie, gets a treat every night. It's three pieces of hard cat food. Ever since she had her kidney problems many years ago, she has to have wet food to keep her really hydrated. She ultimately gave in and decided that wet food was real enough food, but she hasn't forgotten that dry food is oh so much yummier, at least from her perspective.

So every night I scatter three pieces of dry food near her food bowl. (They are technically dental treats, but she doesn't really have enough teeth for this to be relevant any more.) She goes crazy with joy when I bring out these treats. I scatter them because otherwise she'd inhale them so quickly she would forget that I even gave them to her. This way, she has to take a few steps before eating the next one.

One day, I saw her eat one, then another, and then she couldn't find the third. But she knew it was there. She determinedly looked around until she found it. Yay! My cat can count to three!

(I learned from Watership Down that animals, or maybe it's just rabbits, count "one, two, many." But Sophie can count to three!)

Then I stopped and looked again. Sophie had indeed counted to three, finding three treats. But she was still looking around, determinedly. And I realized: My cat can count to four!

I will hunt down every piece of those treats.

Why I look for non-toxic plants

Sophie tells the new Sanseveria trifasciata who is in charge in this house.

Geeking out on plants

When we last left our hero, she had decided to go to a nursery to buy a snake plant.

The nursery I found online, and then ran out the door to get to in time, is Cactus Jungle.  How perfect!  I spent a long time there examining the gazillion plants they have that they claim I couldn't kill.  Some really pretty things.

And now I am a plant geek.  Well, just succulents.  I bought a gorgeous jade plant, which at $40 cost twice as much as the most expensive plant I've ever bought.  Then I started impulse buying, suddenly desiring more beautiful greenery in my life.

Echeveria setosa, Aeonium gomerense, and (in back) Crassula ovata.
They are even happier today than they are in this picture.

It wasn't just a shopping spree.  This place takes plants so seriously that they call the plants by their Latin names, so now I get to learn and recite these beautiful words.  I know it's a jade plant, and that's its nickname.  It's actually a Crassula ovata.  For outside my door, I bought a small Echeveria setosa and an Aeonium gomerense. (Note that Aeonium has all the vowels, awesome.)

As I picked out which Echeveria and Crassula I wanted, I asked the woman working there, "Is this a good one?" and she would say, "That's a beautiful specimen."  So not only do I have great plants, I have beautiful specimens.

Realizing I could use an office plant, I ran back in at the last minute and said, "I need a plant that can sit on a cold office windowsill that gets very indirect sunlight."  She handed me a teeny tiny pot with one of the weirdest plants I've ever seen, a string of pearls plant (another "beautiful specimen).  I actually don't know the Latin name.  It looks like the inside of a peapod, a string of peas, but it's very hardy.  You can't pull the peas/pearls off.  Like the other plants I bought, it doesn't need any attention.

Ironically, now that I've bought plants that need no attention, the geeking out comes, not only with my rolling their names around in my mouth, but with my daily checking and inspection of them to make sure they are happy.  I carefully monitor and remove dead leaves and celebrate the arrival of new ones.  I didn't want the Echeveria and Aeonium to be too cold, so I brought them in to bake in the warmth of my western window.  Yesterday, I discovered some bites taken out of the Echeveria, which luckily is not poisonous to cats, so now that poor plant is exiled to outside again until it heals.

Today I noticed that the Crassula ovata has some black spots under the leaves.  The old me would (1) not have noticed, and, if I did, (2) ignored it until the plant died.  The new succulent geek-me googled this and found that my plant may have a virus.  Since Cactus Jungle says I can bring in plants that may be ill for a consultation, that's my plan for tomorrow.

I will likely leave there with another plant, and a new Latin name, to add to my menagerie.

Happy Julia Child's 100th birthday

Also known as: There is nothing as special as giving

Tonight I gave a friend of mine a little book.  She grew up with Julia Child as a family friend and has fond memories of being at her house.  She also loves cats.  The book is called "Julia's Cats."  When I saw it, I knew it was for her.

There was no special occasion, and I was impatient to give it to her, so when I discovered today was was Julia Child's 100th birthday and found myself giving my friend a ride home, I took advantage of the moment.  I grabbed it from my back seat and handed it to her.  Nothing ceremonious. I had kind of wished I'd made it a more special moment, but instead it was kind of spontaneous.  

It was still a special moment.  She caressed the picture of Julia on the back of the book, a picture that looked like how she remembered her.  From a time when both of my friend's parents were still alive, a long time ago. 

It didn't matter that I didn't wrap it or present it in a formal way or at a significant occasion.  She was moved, deeply touched, and it was heartwarming for me to give her that kind of gift. 

As she got out of the car, she thanked me again, and we wished each other "Happy Julia Child's birthday."  Something new to celebrate together.

Which makes Sophie crazier: Madonna or the window?

My cat, Sophie, spent yesterday afternoon and evening near the top of the stairs where the first floor ceiling crosses the stairs so she could "hide." She stared out the window (mostly the one near the kitchen) intently. She would not come downstairs. She was definitely hallucinating something. When I tried to pet her, she scooted up a stair and poked her head under the ceiling so she could keep an eye on her hallucination.

I tried to figure out what had sparked this. When had it begun? I think it was while I was putting together my Ikea furniture. Was it the drill? But I'd used it the day before. I'd put Madonna on my iPod stereo to lighten up the Ikea construction process. Could dislike of Madonna's music have driven Sophie upstairs? This was seriously my theory for a while.

My latest theory is that she was having a reaction to my opening the window. I was warm, so I had briefly opened the casement window near the kitchen and stood in it. Until I have screens put in, I have to keep the windows shut because I can't prevent Sophie from jumping or falling out of one (and I can't count on her judgment). Sophie has already demonstrated confusion when I open a window. I briefly opened the one behind the sofa one day, and after I closed it she jumped on the back of the sofa to examine the situation. You could almost see smoke coming out of her ears as her tiny brain tried to interpret the acoustic event she'd experienced in that vicinity.

Friday night I briefly opened a different window. After I shut it she once again came over and looked out, trying to figure out what happened.

So my theory is that opening a window yesterday freaked her out. I'm counting on her little brain to forget this happened.

Fly wrangling

I got home to find a lot of flies in my apartment. I'm not a bug squisher, so I wanted to eliminate the flies without handling them. Hoping they would kill themselves in my halogen torchiere was a bit too passive, and my cat had tired of chasing them around. So, of course, I went online.

I found a great discussion of home remedies for houseflies. I decided it was too late for the water-and-a-penny solution, so I went for the milk-vinegar-and-corn-oil solution. They warn that it shouldn't coagulate, and mine did. And the flies ignored it.

Then two thoughts occurred to me:

1. Take off the (faulty) window screens and let them fly free, and
2. Use that information you might have learned if you paid attention to that article about how flies anticipate being swatted. 

The result is my own, personal, patent pending new home remedy for houseflies:

1. Make sure there are no flies in your bedroom.
2. Put the cat in the bedroom and shut the door. (This is to make sure the cat doesn't follow a fly out of a window and to try to preserve any last bits of respect your cat may have for you.)
3. Open all your windows wide.
4. Pick a window with a fly on it and pop the screen out, being careful not to allow the screens to fall three stories to the ground.
5. If the fly(ies) decide not to fly out the window, use swatting knowledge to guide them there.
6. Repeat until you or the flies surrender.
7. Replace the screens, which will inevitably be on the western side of the room, enabling you to be blinded as you try to fit them into the frame.

So I spent about a half hour running around my apartment waving my arms trying to guide flies out windows. It's actually rather satisfying: they look so right and graceful and innocent zooming in an s-curve off into the open air. And you can think, "Ah, one less fly!" For me, at least.
Food for all those spiders I capture and put on the fire escape.

Krazy Kat

I know it's been forever since my last post.  The free-roaming part of my brain has been consumed with taking care of my cat, Sophie.  Roaming to possibilities, to concerns, calling vets, wondering what my cat is thinking, and now to the Adventure of the Food.  Really, my creativity has been put to good use.

Sophie developed what we now know was a calcium oxalate stone in her ureter, as we found out when the test results came back from the lab in Minnesota on Wednesday.  Last month, she had five days of fluid therapy in the hospital (bank translation: vacation to Hawaii, staying at the Four Seasons), trying to get her into UC Davis (translation: penthouse), followed by surgery (not at Davis but at the wonderful BAVS) when the stone didn't come out on its own (translation: flying first class).
Vets are awesome people, and she ultimately came through with flying colors.

By my count, she's used at least three lives.  (1) Because Hopalong and I agree she wouldn't have made it on the street, or even just as an outdoor cat, (2) because if the stone hadn't been addressed she would have died, and (3) because she's a head case and seems to have forgotten how important eating is and would not have made it if I hadn't followed her into Crazyland.

That's what brings us to today.

Calcium oxalate stones are "highly recurring" (with no definition of that), which means that Sophie could end up consuming another trip to Hawaii.  Many more trips, in fact.  Oxalates can't be prevented by all those prepared, canned cat urinary tract health diets -- that would be struvites, much easier to control.  No, my Sophie, predictably, produced the more difficult of the two kinds of stones.  The only way to even possibly prevent an oxalate stone is to somehow convince your cat to drink more water.  Dilute the urine, that's our only hope.

On the way home from the appointment when I learned all this, I stopped at the store and bought her a kitty fountain (translation: cab ride to the airport).

Sophie's a dry food cat who is under orders never to have dry food again. But she doesn't perceive wet food -- a major source of water -- as food. She licks the sauce a bit and walks away.

I've learned that cats can have food aversions. They (apparently easily) develop associations with food which makes them stop eating it. Sophie's aversing started with stone pain/hospitalization/surgery, and she came home thinking food was bad. She's on mirtazapine, an appetite stimulant (separately: the Pill Adventure), which is supposed to get her through this, but she's figured out how to resist its effect, resist me, resist her hunger pangs. In the face of all this expensive and smelly wet food! At the same time she's perfectly frisky and playful, acting as if being super cute and loving is all that matters. I end up seeming like the only crazy one here.

I document what I feed her and what she eats.  This way, I won't end up panicking that she hasn't eaten in five days when she might have actually eaten recently.  But it turns out her food aversion extends to bowls and locations, so I have to keep switching things up.  The log from the past two days goes:

Chicken/gravy

Ducken

Chicken/gravy

Wellness turkey (in BR w/water in orange bowl)

Wellness turkey (in BR near window on plate)

Moved ducken to table

Chicken/grave on table in cruet

Wellness turkey in corner

Chicken/gravy in BR

SO on table while I eat and work on computer

SO with 5 pieces of dry

fresh chicken

Ducken

fresh chicken

She didn't eat most of this, which means it's all in the garbage.  She will eat the fresh chicken, but only if it's cut into little cubes -- she can't seem to understand it's the same food if it's in shreds.  The vet said I could serve her diluted chicken broth, and that's helping ... so now she has me cooking and cutting chicken, making plain, unseasoned broth, and serving it in a variety of bowls in varying locations.  I have five options in the living room (including two on tables), two in the bedroom, and one in the kitchen.

The new Pilates: use your cat

Cats are good for the abs.  Anyone who has done core strengthening knows that it involves focused movement: holding your core still while moving a leg or lifting your head or torso or something.  When I was rehabbing from something hockey related (SI joint), I had to crouch on my hands and knees with a three-foot PVC pole balanced across my shoulders and then lift my arms and legs one (and then two) at a time without the pole falling.  I never succeeded.

But with a cat....  My cat, Sophie, is curled up next to me, leaning against me.  She's not a jello-cat: if I move, she moves.  And I needed a Kleenex, which was a foot beyond my regular arm reach.  The challenge: grab a Kleenex without disturbing the cat.  Move the upper body and torso a foot closer to the Kleenex box without moving the hips or legs.

She did stir, but I managed to do it.