Whiskers

Our remaining cat, Skimble, is a monster feline. When I took him to the vet the other day, she agreed that he needed to lose some weight, but said that given his frame, she'd expect him to be 14 or 15 pounds regardless (he's more like 17 or 18 pounds). So, although he's sort of oozy, he's pretty magnificent. He's got great markings and terrific orange stripes. And he's got fantastic whiskers. I set about trying to capture them in the sunshine the other day.Doesn't he look regal? Well, he looks sort of noble at least until he rolls over on his back and then he's just kinda cute...and oozy.He's not the brightest cat we've ever had, but he's awfully sweet.

Remembering Oliver

We lost our cat, Oliver, to cancer early Saturday morning. I don't usually make a big point of blogging about our pets. And you'd be pretty annoyed if I blogged about every guppy or goldfish we'd killed. But the cats are different. Both of our cats had been members of our family since Smunch was just six months old. So, they're his contemporaries, in a way. As much as the kids have taken over my life, it still hard to believe how difficult it is to lose a pet.

When we got them as kittens, Oliver was the little one. He was quickly nicknamed "Smalliver". He was such an adorable little kitty.He had a neat little patterned nose...part tabby, just like his coat. And on one of his first nights with us, he declared his love for Scott by crawling up on his shoulder and falling asleep.To some extent, he was Scott's cat from that moment on. But as Smunch got older, he also became Smunch's cat. I guess sometime more recently, he became Mam's cat too.He had a magnificently expressive, long tail that always waved around to greet us. And he was the cat who was always on my office chair or in my face while I tried to work. His claws have pulled loops out of the thighs of many pairs of pants. He talked a lot, but was very sweet. He also liked to run from window to window when he spotted another cat roaming the backyard. And although he was always an indoor cat, he took every possible opportunity to slip out an open door, sometimes not turning up again until morning.

We'd sometimes find him in unlikely places...on top of the armoire, on top of the kitchen cabinets, upside-down and stuck down behind the furnace. He was a great jumper...most of the time.

And he was the only cat I've ever known who was obsessed with access to the sock drawer. He managed to figure out how to open at least two of them, as the claw marks on Scott's dresser drawer will attest. He would open the drawers while we weren't around, so that there were often clean socks strewn about the house. At his most lovable, he would saunter into the family room in the evening, while we sat on the sofa, and deposit a sock at our feet. He was so proud to be able to deliver us his kill for the evening. And it was so, so funny.

He loved to hang out on the back of the sofa in the evening (or any other time, really) when we watched TV, too.Back in April, he was vomiting a lot and we took him to the vet. They ran some tests that looked like he might have lymphoma. But we changed his diet and his follow-up bloodwork, just two months ago, looked normal...or so they said. And although he lost some weight (which was a good thing, I thought), he seemed fine.

When Oliver stopped eating on Wednesday night, I didn't think much of it, but by Thursday night he still wasn't eating and he was getting lethargic. I took him to the vet first thing on Friday. Smunch was really nervous about it and asked a million questions as we walked to school.

Oliver was at the vet all day being poked and prodded, running up an astronomical bill. Each call from the vet sounded more dire...his white blood cells were through the roof, his bilirubin was high, it looked like he also had leukemia. But the vet was also very positive about the treatment options for lymphoma. I was secretly skeptical. We were looking at months of chemotherapy to extend his life for...months.

Scott was out of town. I asked plenty of questions, but under the pressure of losing our cat, I approved everything the vet suggested. When I picked Smunch up at school, the first words out of his mouth were, "How's the kitty?" I told him the truth...that Oliver was very sick and we'd need to make some really difficult decisions about him. And that he was going to die. It was awful.

The vet gave Oliver steroids, a first dose of chemo and some anti-nausea medication before I picked him up around 6 p.m. I brought him home. He stumbled out of the carrier and laid down on the floor. He still refused to eat. He drank a little water and laid back down on the kitchen floor.

By the time Scott arrived home around 9:30, he was sleeping in the laundry basket in our closet. And he looked bad. The night was miserable, Oliver was more lethargic, he cried in pain every half hour or so. I sobbed while he suffered. And by the time I realized he'd been quiet for a couple of hours, I already knew he had died in the night. At least he didn't have to suffer anymore.

I'm grateful that we were spared difficult decisions about chemotherapy and euthanasia, but it was such a hard, hard night and a harder day, watching my sweet little boy absorb the news that his favorite cat was gone. He was so sad and it made it so much more difficult.

So, now we are a one cat family. Although Skimble sniffed at Oliver's lifeless body before it was taken back to the vet, he appeared to search for him for the rest of the day...looking as though he expected to be pounced on every time he turned a corner. Since then, however, I think maybe he's realized that this means he's the only cat to bestow attention upon and that he's getting a LOT of it from his sad family members. I'm pretty sure he's going to embrace this new role with gusto.Rest in peace, Oliver. You were well loved and will be dearly missed.

Farewell to the Holidays

The saddest day of the holidays is doubtlessly the day we pack all our holiday decorations up and say goodbye until next year. The house is clean, but it's no longer festive. Here's Mam saying a fond farewell to our cheerful little snowman.And here is Skimble, our wizard of a cat, enjoying watching Daddy put the tree lights away...or enjoying flickering blinky things on the wall, at least.Bleh. Taking down the decorations means getting back into the school routine. I wasn't ready. The holidays were really fun this year...at least as soon as Christmas arrived and there were new toys an a lot less wound-up anticipation. School means fixing lunches every night, getting out of bed in the morning and not showering as often as I'd really like to. But a couple days and a wee bit less sanity later and I'd changed my mind. I couldn't wait to have the house to myself for a few seconds.

Fortunately, putting the Christmas decorations away also means there's no decorative use for a gingerbread house. It may taste like cardboard, but to the kids, at least, it makes the end of their vacation that much more bearable.

Florida Epilogue

So, we're back. Now the cold Smunch picked up in Florida has arrived home with us. With all of us. It's August and we're all sniffly and coughing. Then again, it's August and it's been rainy all day. Perhaps it's all sort of fitting. Better to be a little under the weather at a time like this than in 90 degree heat with 90 percent humidity.

Our trip from St. Petersburg to Tampa International was eventless. Well...I shouldn't say that. There was a small event in there.First one we'd stopped at since we'd been in Florida..and ostensibly, we only stopped to pick up a paper with a story about the game from the night before. But Daddy thought the coffee at the hotel was vile, so...

And here's the beautiful town of St. Pete on our way out. It really is quite lovely. See all the busy people milling around? Yeah. Me neither. Lovely, but terminally strange as cities go.We made it to the airport with time to spare and although we were told that we'd be late arriving in Dallas, we were early and had to sit on the tarmac for 30 minutes while another plane left from our intended gate. Then we found out our connecting flight was also delayed. We had plenty of time for a decent airport lunch. Turns out, we nearly had time for dinner too. Our flight was delayed two and a half hours and we'd gotten in two hours before it was supposed to leave, so we spent almost 5 hours at Dallas-Ft. Worth International Airport. Did you know they have Starbucks there? (I digress).

The kids were bored, but all things considered, the waiting wasn't all that bad. Daddy declared DFW a "very nice shopping mall".

We arrived home mid-evening, to all of our relief. Our luggage made it and we called my parents, who were sitting in the cell phone lot, to say we were ready for pickup. They'd driven the mommymobile to be sure everything fit. Only one problem. The battery of said mommymobile had died while they were sitting there. We sat on the curb with our mountain of luggage while they got it jump started.

Smunch had turned into a pint-sized smoking crater by that point, incapable of speaking in a normal voice or putting two words together. Hungry. Tired. Grouchy. Just like me, but hopefully, I hid it better.Mam, in her regular Mammish way, was fine. Cute. Friendly. Happy to be home.We'd planned to go out to dinner, but it's Saturday night in Silicon Valley and Chili's has a half hour wait, another nearby favorite closed at 8...it's now 8:05 (or 11:05 in Tampa). We opted to call ahead for pizza at our favorite place. I love them. When I placed the order, they already knew who it was for. Good to be home.

Our cats had missed us so much that they wouldn't leave us alone. And they needed to let us know what they thought about how well our housesitter had cleaned out their litter box. Litter box. Open suitcase full of clothes. Hmmm... Those slightly damp, disgusting clothes clearly don't smell nearly bad enough. They fixed that.

Welcome back to our real life.

Potato Wars

When I picked Mam up at preschool on the afternoon of St. Patrick's Day, I was proudly presented with...a potato. I'm still not quite sure why she got a potato. None of the other kids left with a potato, but they were learning about Ireland and I guess Mam was the lucky winner of the potato. Nothing special. Just a plain ol' Russett potato. And, as children are wont to do, she absolutely treasured her prize for a day or so.

By the afternoon of the 18th, it had largely been forgotten, however.

Enter gigantic, fat house cat. Our beautiful, overly large pet cat, Skimble, kind of resembles a potato himself. Mind you, he makes an awfully large, 18 pound potato, but his general blobular nature is very potato-like. He's big. He's lazy. He's kinda roly-poly. Like a great, big spud.

And, on Wednesday afternoon, these two sort of irregularly shaped creatures met each other on the kitchen floor. Don't let this fool you...I don't think the potato was fooled by Skimble's faked nonchalance. Perhaps it thought its camouflage against our remarkably lovely tile floor spare its notice by the large blobby beast next to it.

Nope.After a few test bats at the potato, Skimble quickly recognized a kindred spirit and clearly there was LOVE.