Technically dogs aren’t allowed on the boardwalk from April 1 to October 31, but it’s definitely past tourist season even though there’s technically a couple of weeks left. Nobody seems to mind the dogs around. A gay male couple just went by the one direction, walking a tiny Yorkie. They passed a giant St. Bernard wearing (I swear I am not making this up) a hot pink harness and leash. I think I actually heard the guy say “don’t laugh” as I started to chuckle. Anyway, the St. Bernard passed and the Yorkie sniffed at it, and the gay guys walking her said “down girl, don’t hurt that big dog!”

Deaf Cats.
Mr. Harrison Weir, president of the National Cat Club, England, says in his book “Our Cat,” that a white cat of the long or the short-haired breed is likely to be deaf. Should it have blue eyes, the fancy color, it is almost certain to be deaf. Mr Weir, at a cat show, purchased a white cat - a beauty, loving and gentle, for the low price of two guineas. When he got it home, the cat proved to be “stone deaf.”
Then the trouble began. if shut out of the dining room, its cry for admission could be heard all over the house, for it being deaf did not know the noise it made, though its owner often wished it could hear its own cry. When it called out as it sat on his lap, it called with ten-cat power, and its commanding voice caused it to be named the “Colonel.”
One day a friend saw the “beauty,” and admired it so much as to accept it for a gift, even after being told that it was “stone deaf.” A few days after Mr. Weir received a letter from the friend offering to return the loud-voiced cat.
“Give it to any one you please, but don’t return it to us,” was the reply.
The “Colonel” was given to a deaf old lady, and both were very happy.
The Silent Worker, vol. 4, no. 35, October 29, 1891.

I just have to share this, because I am so totally thrilled about it. Ladies and gentlemen, today I am twice as close to being on Cute Overload as I will ever get.

If you saw my quicklinks in the past day or two, you may have noticed the scuba diving cat video that I personally captioned, including two minor errors that I don’t feel an urge to fix. It took me about 45 minutes to caption the one-minute video, because I kept having to start at the beginning to make sure everything was still in sync. Now, I know there are multiple editions of the scuba kitty video on Google Video. But only one of them is captioned, and the two posts from CO both include the captions. (It’s also up on CuteCast.)

No, it’s not me in the video. No, I don’t know the cat. But you know what? That is as damn close to being on Cute Overload as I will ever get, and I’m totally stoked. So there.

I love taking pictures. I’m not into digital photography…I only like to take pictures of my cats. I have 450 pictures of my cats on YouTube, and as my cats age, I need to take lots more pictures of them. I keep my little camera on my nightstand so I can grab it the moment one of them does something cute. I used my 1MP camera to take almost 200 pictures and almost 10 videos of Toadstool before she died, but they are just not as satisfying as real pictures that I can print out and put in a frame next to the urn. It’s too late for me to have great shots of Toadie and Empress Wu, but if I had a 6MP HP camera I could really get fancy with my other four cats!

For other people, the preferred photographic subject is their kids. I don’t have any kids, so I take pictures of my cats. Over and over and over…deleting the blurry ones as soon as I take them and putting all of the rest on the web. Have I mentioned I love my cats? Have I mentioned how fabulous it would be to have ginormous 6MP pictures of my cats? Have I mentioned that HP, which sponsored this post, is a very reliable company that has been around since 1939? Have I mentioned that I don’t even know what pretexting is, and that HP’s corporate operations have very little to do with whether they make good products?

I am clearly deserving of a 6MP HP camera, because to a crazy cat lady like me there is nothing more important in life than pictures of your babies. Meow! (This post was sponsored by HP.)

I had way too much candy yesterday. I kept a lot of it fat-free, but it was still a lot of sugar! Of course there’s still candy all over the place at work, but yesterday was candy day and now I’m going to try going cold turkey again.

Also, nothing makes you feel like a bad cat mommy worse than hearing your always-silent, mostly-deaf kitty start to cry. Amanita never makes a peep, ever - the most we can usually get is a tiny squeak under extreme conditions. But today she had to go in for tooth and ear cleaning and I put her into A’s car. As I was buckling in the carrier, she started crying louder than I’ve ever heard. And of course this is after we had to take all food away last night and she was looking so sad and hungry this morning…yes, we are bad cat mommies indeed!

Ant update: They are mostly all gone. A left the mailbox open when she came home, and by the time I came home more than an hour later, there were only a few left around from what I could see (I didn’t look very closely). The mail - which was indeed stuffed in there by the mail carrier - is still sitting on the front porch waiting for all the ants to leave, but hopefully we won’t have to do that again tomorrow.

A kitty came into our screened-in back porch today. It looked like Agaricus but wasn’t him - a little less orangey, and much skinnier. It’s almost certainly the cat a neighbor called us for a month ago - she knew we were the neighborhood’s crazy cat ladies, and wondered if we knew who owned it; she said she felt bad that it seemed so thin. When it was on our back porch, we got a bowl of cat food and it ate hungrily. I quickly got the spare break-away collar we had lying around, and taped a note around it saying “do you own me? please call…” so that if the kitty does have a home, we’ll hopefully hear about it. If a month goes by and we still haven’t heard anything, then we’ll probably take it in for alteration, a checkup, and possibly hand it over to a no-kill group.

You might not want to read this if you’re eating.

This morning I went to put a couple of Netflix DVDs in my mailbox on my way to work. I was horrified to open the mailbox and find thousands of tiny ants swarming around. My first thought was the package of cookies raisinbottom sent, which arrived Friday - but then I realized that was a sealed cookie package inside a sealed bubble-wrap mailer, with no leaks in any of them. The ants were having a great time with something, so I’m wondering if someone put something in our mailbox that attracted the ants.

It was seriously gross, too - they just about blanketed the entire front of the mailbox, all over. It was raining, and I tried brushing a few away with my coat sleeve - bad move, because I ended up with a sleeve full of ants. I shook most of those off and figured I’d have to deal with it later, because I was already running late for work. But how do I deal with this? I think a really strong hose blast might just wash them all out, but our hose isn’t long enough to reach to the mailbox - maybe we can borrow from the neighbors. That’s really my only idea for dealing with them, short of buying a totally new mailbox.

With 38.1% of the vote, the winner is Violet Silk Brocade! I’ve sent in my measurements and fabric choice and all that and if I’m lucky I’ll get the corset by the time we go on vacation; if not by then, maybe by the Mr. DC Eagle contest.

Poor Amanita had to go to the vet today. She has been having problems hearing, and she hadn’t had a health checkup in forever - she’s probably about 12 years old now. So off to the vet she went, and the poor baby puked on the way there and peed herself on the way back. She got a rabies shot and a leukemia test, and was pronounced in reasonably good health. The hearing problems - she was quite deaf for a while, but she responds to loud sounds now - are due to gunk in her ears, so they cleaned that out, and there’s more in there they weren’t able to get to. She also has a cracked tooth that will have to be removed at some point, and they’ll clean her ears more deeply when she’s under anesthesia for that. The vet wasn’t particularly concerned about her stiffness, it’s just part of getting old; he said losing some weight would help but not to worry about it too much.

Well, that’s an experience I don’t care to repeat. Specifically, dragging a very scared and confused Maine Coon out from under a deck that hasn’t ever heard the word “clean” in its life.

Somehow, the cat got out. Read the rest of this entry »

Toadstool is gone. It was a long time in coming; she almost died in January and then again in May. We were living on borrowed time for a long time, and her quality of life had gone sharply downhill. In the end, we decided to stop giving her water; she was drinking it willingly but it wasn’t bringing her back and so it was only prolonging the inevitable. Last night, when we were trying to go to sleep, she was crying quite loudly from the sink (she liked it there) every 20 minutes, but we couldn’t do anything for her. So we gave her a couple of Ativan and she was peaceful through this morning. She was so peaceful that when I woke up at 5:00am and peered at her in the dark (she was in a basket on our bed at this point) I thought she was already gone. A came home to check on her around noon today, and she was almost gone. She stayed with her through the end, giving her morphine to ease her passing. She died at about 3:30pm and A arranged her in a basket (picture here) so I could see her when I got home.

She had a good long life - 16½ years. You can read her final missive at hello_grumpy. It’s quite fitting, really…that’s just what she would say.