Plum These Days

I took Plum with me to the vet this weekend to pick up his clomicalm, and to get his nails clipped.  Plum used to always be very easy about me clipping his nails. He’d lounge back and hand me a paw and let me clip away.  And then after I did all four paws, he’d want to do a gentle reciprocal clipping of my own nails with his teeth.  But lately he has been having none of it, and gets all agitated when I try to give him a mani-pedi.  He has no teeth, so can’t really hurt when he bites, although he certainly does try to clamp down hard.  I just don’t like the drama of it, nor do I like only managing to do one nail at a time, so it seems worthwhile to pay the $16 every now and then and have the vet techs do it themselves.

The other day I saw Plum sitting on the end table in our living room and thought it was picture-worthy.  For here is casual Plum in years past, pre-Owen:

And here he is now: 

Poor Plum Dumbledore!  Let us all take a moment and mourn his lost dignity.

No Grooming for Plum

Towards the beginning of October, I finally made and kept a grooming appointment for Plum.  He was very clumpy again, and although I had made resolutions to brush him every other day in September – and actually stuck to that schedule – I still thought that one of the reasons why he became so clumpy in the first place is that he was just overall rather dirty and needed a bath.  And I certainly was not going to attempt to bathe him myself – I would leave that task for professionals.

But easier said than done!  The problem is that there aren’t cat groomers near me that I know of.  There’s one about 45 minutes away but Plum gets very carsick (or used to, at any rate) and I figured that if I got him cleaned that far away, then he would probably sully himself on the way home – for that is how these things work.  One of our vets recommended a nearby grooming and boarding place, and so I made an appointment there with the one guy who “does cats.”  And this guy, Miguel, was very nice, except that he warned me when I dropped Plum off that the bath might not happen, since he had no restraints for cats, and was only able to bathe those who wanted to be bathed.  Which struck me as a little optimistic of him – do any cats “want” to be bathed?  I certainly couldn’t think of any.  At any rate, I wished him luck and went on my way, and then felt sure that Plum had okayed the bathing, since I didn’t get a call from Miguel until 3:00.  But no, he had tried three times to bathe Sir Plum, and each time Plum had said, Surely you jest? And so there was no bathing of the purple cat.

He did give him a good brushing and a “deshedding something or other”, and did not charge me very much, so there’s that.  But I have had to give up my notion of a sparkling clean and sweet-smelling lilac British shorthair in my house, and Plum continues to clean only where he sees fit – his privates, his paws, and his face.

Plum Goes Dental

We are getting ready for Plum’s turn to go under the knife and get his horrendous teeth and gums cleaned up.  We did this for Posy two years ago, and have been putting off doing it for Plum for financial reasons.  But the vet shamed me the other day by calling Plum’s alleged pain “extreme,” and whereas I do still have issues with pet dentistry, I chose Plum to be my pet, he didn’t choose me, and I don’t want any pet in our household to be suffering.  (For the record, we haven’t noticed any suffering—he eats as vigorously and happily as he always has, and indeed has gained an (unneeded) pound in the past year).

The vet thought that some of his other behavioral issues though—spraying and bullying Posy—might stop when his mouth is no longer hurting, and that would be nice if we didn’t have to drug him daily.  We shall see!  Surgery is scheduled for next week and hopefully all we be well.  Except for a tendency to be over-alpha, he is really a nice, affectionate, busybody beastie.

Plum, Janos-Faced

It is hard to get a good picture of Plum, because he really prefers to spend most of his days lying on a hassock in a dark-ish corner of our living room, or lying like roadkill right in the middle of where one walks from the dining room to the kitchen.  But this weekend he was up and about and I got a few good shots of him with eyes open!

Sean likes to take him out on the deck for a bit of fresh air.  Plum seems to like this very much too—he will talk the entire time he is out there, and if you hold him up to a nearby tree, he will nibble a leaf or a twig.

He is still on clomicalm for his spraying issues.  He is just on a quarter of a pill, instead of the prescribed half, but it seems to work for him.  While on the meds, he doesn’t seem too out of it, yet it takes the edge off his more annoying behaviors.  On Saturday I ran out of pill pockets so skipped a dose, and he then tormented Posy all Sunday.  Plus Sean thought he might have been spraying upstairs, although we haven’t found any proof other than odors.  So on Sunday evening he went back on the meds, after Sean personally bought him two bags of pill pockets so we wouldn’t run out in the near future.

I still don’t get why he bothers Posy, since she never bothers him back, and doesn’t try to stand up to his authority.  Perhaps he is just a bully?  Or perhaps his neutering wasn’t quite completely successful?

A good thing about Plum is that he is still great with Owen.  Owen is quite gentle with the pets on the whole, but whereas Posy will run away, and Dorothy will sigh and mope, Plum will stand his ground and even on occasion seek Owen out.  He will rub against him, and talk to him, and not be bothered by Owen’s pats.  So there’s that!

I was feeling pleased with myself yesterday because I was able to cut 17 of Plum’s 18 nails.  The last one is too close to his footpad and he didn’t like me touching it.  We shall try again tonight though.  He also has a few clumps that need to be cut off.  The indignities of old(ish) age!

Plum thinking I am alpha cat, hear me roar.

 

A Cloud of Lilac Fur

One of the things that has been a struggle while working full-time and taking care of a baby is trying to do daily pet care such as brushing and nail clipping and the like.  I mean to do it, but I run out of time in the evenings.  My cat, Plum, is a British Shorthair and as such has more hair per square inch than any other cat.  His hair is THICK.  I haven't been good about giving him his daily (or weekly if I'm being honest) brushings and thus he walked around like Pigpen, giving off puffs of hair if you looked at him funny.

This past weekend I finally sat down and brushed Plum's lilac fur.  And brushed and brushed and brushed.  Twenty minutes later and the fur was still filling up the brush.  Here he is halfway through the process, with about two-thirds of the fur that I actually collected during the brushing.  As Sean pointed out, if you squint at the picture, it looks like both Plum and Posy are lying there:

Animals, Wild, Otherwise, & Just Plain Strange

We have a yard rabbit whom we call…drum roll…Peter.  I know.  Rabbits probably hate that.  But Peter he is, and the other night as I was reading in bed, I was pretty sure I heard the very HORRIBLE sounds (and I mean HORRIBLE) of Peter fighting for his life.  We’ve had eastern screech owls around our house before, and I figured one of them was eating Peter for breakfast, although it sounded like Peter was fighting as hard as he could to not be on the menu.  Dorothy heard it and came running; Posy heard it and jumped up from her sleep, and I texted Sean who was downstairs and thus perhaps able to stop the carnage.  He turned on our new backyard light, but whatever slaughter occurring was in the neighbor’s yard, and by then he could just hear a strange clicking noise.

Anyway, the whole thing was very traumatic to hear, and I even thought a bit about moving back to the city, where the only carnage is mano a mano, but lo and behold two days after the Horrific Event, we looked out the window and saw:

Well, you can’t see it, really, but that brown dot in the yard is Peter, happily munching on dandelion leaves.  Huh.  I decided to research the matter, and being a modern gal, I did what one does, which was to youtube “animals screaming in the night” and then play the videos until I found a match.  It turns out that raccoons will make sounds like a rabbit being horribly dispatched by a hungry owl.  I’m not sure why they make these sounds.  We did once see a big granddaddy grizzled raccoon walking on the other side of our fence one foggy morning, so perhaps he was having a bad night?

At any rate, Peter is safe for now, although it is beginning to be a pain making sure that he isn’t out there before we let Dorothy out into the yard.  She did chase Peter once, but then Sean called her off and she came back to the house.

On another note, Plum has not been having any spraying issues, but that is no doubt because I have been keeping him drugged on clomicalm.  (Or some such name that ends in -calm.)  It’s like I operate a methadone clinic:  while I wash the dishes each night Plum lines up behind me to get his hand-out wrapped in a pill pocket and then happily scarfs it down.  He thus spends a lot of time sleeping.  Here he is on the chair in the sunporch, before and after he decided to rearrange the cushions.

And on to strange:  we had a gift bag sitting on the stairs for a day or so, waiting for someone to take it upstairs and put it with the other such bags and wrapping paper, etc., and last night when Sean went upstairs past the bag he noticed this:

Posy is not one to let a nice fancy bag go to waste!

Plum: A Follow Up

Since my post a few weeks ago regarding the problems we had been having with Plum--namely his compulsion to "water" all the vertical surfaces in our house -- things have been relatively, well, dry.  We've forbidden both cats to go in the basement, we put up two new litter boxes elsewhere, and we plugged in a Feliway pheromone releaser that is supposed to calm cats and lower their stress levels.

The vet proscribed prozac for Plum, but he couldn't keep the prozac down.  We then tried another med -- something with "calm" in the title -- and that seems to work, except it makes him really groggy so I'm only giving it to him every three or four days.

Last weekend Plum had --I don't want to call them "accidents", as they are done quite on purpose, it seems to me -- two, shall we say, moments of nefarious purpose whereupon he sprayed the pantry door and left a puddle on the kitchen floor.  Irksome, yes.  But we noticed that the Feliway dispenser was empty!  So perhaps the Feliway really is working, if he only began to spray again once it had run out?  I am hopeful, at any rate.

Plum thinking, don't be so sure.

It's my party, and I'll spray if I want to....

Update:  of course about five minutes after I wrote the above entry, Plum went wilding through the house and sprayed in about four different spots, including my bed upon which I was sitting at the time.  The humans were all quite glum about it, but we have decided to just keep trying to get him through his period of stress.  Wish us luck.

Banana Peel Plum

The title of this blog sounds like a postmodern still life, but it is instead Plum’s latest tactic to either spice things up a bit or get us back for bringing a crying infant into our household.  For what Plum has taken to doing is this:

Lolling about on the carpeted stairs, the color of which is perilously close to the color of his lilac fur, making him just about camouflaged and thus deadly.  I now make it a point to scope the stairwell before walking up or down with my twenty pound offspring, whose head I can’t see over when walking down or up. 

Find a new place on which to get your Z’s, Plum!

Plum Feeling Bookish

When we moved this summer, I was in the midst of a bad case of pregnancy edema, so spent all of my non-work hours with my feet up.  This meant that Sean had to do most of the packing and most of the unpacking, including all of my books.  When I moved from New Hampshire to Philadelphia via New Jersey nine years ago, I donated almost half of my book collection:  but I still have a lot of books.  Books please me.

We wanted to try to get the house at least basically arranged before Owen arrived, so when we unpacked, Sean put my books on the shelves as they came out of the box.  This was fine for a temporary solution, but my OCD wouldn't let this situation stand for long!  Why there were "w" books communing with "F's" and "A's"!  Fiction was mixed with nonfiction!  Authors' oeuvres were scattered across two floors!  It simply would not do.

I waited until I had my strength back and could stand on my feet and bend at the waist, and I set to alphabetizing and rearranging one weekend in September.  I didn't have much room in my Philly apartment, so settled there for a general alphabetizing of the books with no separation of genre, and lots of horizontal stacks.  Since we have room in this house--plus several built-in bookshelves!--I was able to do some OCD arranging!

And Plum helped!  Here he is filing himself under "L"...for Lothario?

For any reader with book OCD who needs to know, I separated my books into autobiography and memoir, Sean's art books, poetry, fiction, and nonfiction.  And I experimented by making the shelf on our second floor landing into a shelf of series!  With some Trollope on top!

Contented sigh!

The Enemy of My Enemy Is My Friend

Plum and Dorothy have found themselves united lately against a certain chubby interloper new to our house.  They will often play a rousing game of chase from first floor to attic and back--a game initiated by Plum, and not just ended by a paw swat by Plum--and the other day I caught them commiserating on the couch.  Here they are, Plum cleaning a haunch and Dorothy a paw:

When hark!  Both are interrupted in their cleaning by the squawk of a Tiny Terrorist, Mr. Owen:

Oh no!  It sounds like the beginning of evening fussy time!

Drat and bother!

Settling down for the long haul:

Cats Where They Want To Be, Doing What They Want To Do

In a previous post, I was so bold as to proclaim that we had a no pets in the baby equipment rule.  I should have kept my big mouth shut.  Since publishing that post, every time I turn around I spy a cat doing what s/he ought not.  I first came across Posy nestled in the very bugaboo that necessitated the rule in the first place.  Then, when she was removed unceremoniously from said bugaboo, Posy marched over to Owen's catapult seat and made herself at home:

And while she was doing this, Plum was over on the coffee table sucking on one of Owen's pacifiers:

The next day I went to change Owen and found guess who basking in a sunbeam on Owen's changing table:

And when I couldn't find the Baby Bjorn and went looking for it?  Yes, you guessed it, I found it under Posy's warm body on the table.

Between the cats on the baby equipment, and Dorothy trying to claim and destroy all of Owen's toys, it is a madhouse here.  Perhaps I should just throw in the towel and add more chaos:  a pair of ferrets perhaps?  A wee pig or miniature goat?  Gerbils?

Fodder for Past Posts

With the arrival of Owen in the house, my ability to get things done has fallen by the wayside.  If I have a chance to take a shower, I consider it an accomplishment.  In the past month or so I've had pictures that I planned to use for blog posts, but those posts were never written.

For example, my parents were here twice helping out, and each time they brought their Tibetan Terrier, Nellie.  For some reason, the only picture I managed to take of Nellie while she was here is this one:

It's not the most ladylike of positions, and if I were a good sister, I probably wouldn't post it.  Sorry, Nellie!  I'm sure you were doing other things while you were here besides lying with limbs akimbo on my living room floor!

And at one point towards the end of our unpacking after the move, I had piled a few boxes on top of Dorothy's dog kennel.  Plum decided to make a home in one, like a little furry purple hobo:

There is nothing a cat likes more than a new place to sleep!