This is a paid post I actually have a reason for taking. The product shown at left is ES Clear for Cat Cancer. I didn’t mention it, but the one-year anniversary of Empress Wu’s death was on January 12th. When she died, I thought the pain would never end…it went on so long. One year later, I find it is greatly diminished, but I still miss her terribly. When I was tagging old posts and I got to that point, I could barely read them to see what tags they needed.

Our little Wubie’s death was ultimately caused by lung cancer, which I don’t think is too common in cats. The immediate cause was pneumopericardium, which is air in the sac around her heart. She had breathed too fast since we got her, like she was forever trying to catch her breath; a few months before she died she was diagnosed with asthma. But it wasn’t asthma, it was lung cancer, and it took my kitty away. She was a month or two shy of seven years old, and she was the only cat in the house who always looked to me first as her mama, rather than my wife - I am usually the “backup” mama to the other cats.

ES Clear is a natural product specifically formulated for cats with cancer. I don’t know if it would have helped her or not. It seems like it’s not trying to cure the cancer, but rather give the cat a better quality of life. Wu was only really sick for a day or two, and she seemed much happier in the oxygen cage at the vet’s office, but I would have tried anything to make her more comfortable.

That’s all I can write, I’m afraid. Writing this entry was harder than I expected it would be.

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 was surprised to see an opportunity to come up for a paid post about a product for pet depression, stress and anxiety. I didn’t realize there was a market out there for this! The product is called Anivive, and it’s an all-natural supplement for animals. We have an anxious cat - Mischa licks himself till he bleeds in various spots, and the vet diagnosed it as anxiety, but we were never able to give him the Prozac. Anivive is a liquid that you put into your pet’s water bowl, which is much easier than trying to give them a pill. A single bottle is supposed to last a month, although given that we have four cats sharing the same water dish we’d probably end up needing a bottle per week. But still, if it keeps him from licking himself raw, and maybe makes him less aggressive toward the other cats, maybe it’s worth a try.

I just got through tagging the entries around Empress Wu’s death. Damn, that sucked. Much worse than tagging those around Toadstool’s death. I am going to need to go home and hug kitties big-time.

So I have tagged almost all of 2006 now. Tagging is not easy; as I mentioned it requires reading everything. It’s also been a bit of a pain because my site doesn’t like me opening so many windows on it at once; I keep getting timeouts trying to load edit pages. Only four more years to tag now.

Today is another woot-off, but I’ve had four meetings today and I missed the electronic sudoku game that would’ve been $10 shipped. Nothing else has been remotely tempting, really.

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.

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 »