Recently in cat(etc)blogging Category

Looks like I picked the wrong month to quit sniffing glue: Three and a half weeks after my cat Sam died, I had to euthanize my parakeets Celery and Snowbird. Last Wednesday night I came home to find both of them in egg-laying distress. Celery had suffered a prolapsed oviduct, for which little can realistically be done, and Snowbird was eggbound, meaning an egg was stuck in her body that she couldn’t lay. Both problems are common to parakeets, apparently, and typically result from an overproduction of eggs, which overstresses their tiny bodies... and there’s not much that can be done about that, either.

I took this video last month. That’s Loreena McKennitt in the background, whom they’d never heard before, and loved:

It’s just me and Cassie the cat now. I’ve been ready for her to go for at least a year now, and ironically, she’s the only animal left with me. I’m still expecting her to go at any moment -- she’s very old and very frail -- but who knows? She may hang on for another five years.

I've been badly neglecting this blog lately, and I'm sorry that this has to be the first update in months, but here it is: My cat Sam died this morning. It wasn't entirely unexpected -- he was very old and very fat -- but still, it seemed sudden and shocking.

It seems likely that he had a heart attack, or something as traumatic (a stroke?), and I cannot, unfortunately, say that he did not suffer. It was terrible -- I have never heard an animal make the kinds of noises he was making, and I hope I never do again. But he did not suffer long: his passing was quick.

And now it's just me and Cassie again. Okay, and the parakeets, but they're not exactly critters you can cuddle with.

No more cats for me. It's too painful.

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Snowbird loves him some tasty greens, but Celery is eat-shy in front of the camera:

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Poor Sam is not doing so well these days.

I noticed blood in his urine the other day, so I took him to the vet, where they found a likely urinary tract infection and some sort of thyroid situation, so he’s now on antibiotics and a thyroid med. The vet will call tomorrow with the results of a second blood analysis, and then we may have a better idea of what we’re dealing with. There definitely seem to be some kidney problems.

When I Googled his thyroid med, Methimaz, I found another cat on the same med who looks amazingly like Sam: Fritzie. Weird.

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My brother Ray’s toy poodle Rosie, with a slice of pizza that’s almost as big as she is:

And another:

Funny how the birds go and off various foods. For a while, they gobbled up the sweet red peppers I put in their cage; then they wanted nothing to do with them, so I stopped offering them. I tried again months later, and suddenly they’re gobbling again. I love how the feathers around their beaks get stained pepper-red when they’ve been munching all day.

News! Celery, my female, is laying eggs. There were two a couple weeks ago, and then nothing, and now another tonight. I’m pretty sure the birds are not mating -- the word is that parakeets won’t mate if they don’t have a nice snug nest to nurture the eggs in, and these two don’t have that -- so I’m pretty sure the eggs are infertile. Celery seems spectacularly unconcerned with the eggs. The first two were broken by the time I discovered them in the bottom of the cage -- I suspect that Celery pecked at the first one and broke it, but that the second one fell a distance and broke that way. But this third one is intact. I’m gonna leave it on the floor of the cage for a while and see what, if anything, they do with it.

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Cassie checks out Sam in his carrier, on his way to the groomer. Perhaps she’s wondering whether she’s about to be an only cat again.

Cassie did seem rather perplexed when I came home without Sam -- he stayed at the groomer’s for most of the day. And here he is in all his newly shorn glory:

So, six months after I adopted a catastrophe of cacti from my friend Brian, the final culling has been completed and the survivors are lookin’ mighty hearty:

These aren’t all that’s left out of the 45 or so plants that I took in, but only about a third of them made it -- they were in bad shape to start with, and I knew that many of them would die.

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