O Mighty Huntress!

One of us has a lot to sing about!

Last Sunday, I was playing up in my bedroom with Owen, when Miss Posy Fern strutted into the room...holding a mouse!  Ugh!  Owen and I quickly made our escape and called for Sean (one funny thing is that now when Owen sees a bug in the house he'll call, "Sean!" instead of Daddy).  Sean got Posy to drop her trophy and it turned out that she had both caught and killed a poor wee mousie, despite the fact that Posy only has one fang and a couple of other teeth the size of a pinhead.  Not to mention the fact that with all her heavy breathing, she is hardly stealthy!  But catch a mouse she did and she was very, very proud.

Meanwhile, Mr. Missed Opportunity was snoozing in the sunporch while all the carnage was occurring.  Embarrassing!

I let Posy catch this one to boost her confidence:

Posy's Pedicure

An obsessive cleaner, Posy enjoys any help with grooming I might want to give her…but that doesn’t mean she is going to help me help her, so to speak.  She loves a brushing, for example, but she likes to strut around with her tail held high while receiving the brushing, forcing me to chase after her as I brush.

She also doesn’t mind getting a “pedicure,” and will even purr during the procedure, but will still be at her squirmiest and will keep retracting her lethal talons.  So what we do now is poor Sean gets the unenviable job of holding her, while she tries her best to slice him, and while I try my best to at least get all of the talons clipped on one foot.  And then I tend to get all triumphant and rest on my laurels instead of attempting the rest of the feet shortly thereafter.

The other day, however, I realized Posy’s nails had gotten so long that she was making little clicking noises when she walked.  She already makes enough noises when she moves – from her tendency to narrate what she is doing, and her constant sneezing and snuffling and the forcing of air through microscopic nostrils – so the last thing she needed was more bells and whistles adding to her travels through the house.  Therefore, I asked Sean to hold her at his peril while I clipped some talons, and we did her whole front right foot, including the thumb!  And then the next day we did her two back feet!  So now we only have the front left to go, and then Posy is back to being a stealthy ninja, or at least as stealthy as a smushed-face cat can be.  Pretty Posy!

It's Posy Again, Bitches!

I’m sure you are all wondering what Posy is up to these days.  And if Posy could talk, she would say something about how that is for her to know and for you not to find out.  And add to that a bitches.  Here she is being an ice cream nudge.  Seriously, it is impossible to enjoy ice cream in our house without Posy climbing the eater like a tree to get to the treat:

And here is Posy enjoying looking out the window from a temporarily well-positioned shelf:

I noticed the other day that Posy had a lot of scabs on her neck.  At first I thought it might be from Plum, who will occasionally bully poor Posy.  But he generally leaves her alone, and new scabs were appearing daily.  I googled “indoor cat has scabs on neck” and got pages and pages of hits.  Apparently this is a thing?  But not something to worry much about, as long as the scabs don’t get infected.  They can be a passing allergy or an allergic reaction from over-grooming, which Posy definitely does.  I’m keeping a calm eye on the situation, and giving her lots of neck scritches, which she loves.

(Updated to add:  I remembered after I wrote the above entry that we had gotten a bag of kitten kibble by mistake and had decided to mix it in with their regular kibble.  It occurred to me that she was probably having a reaction to the kitten food, so she is back to eating just the normal food -- for now, at least.  Their normal dry kibble, Nutro Max, is no longer being carried at the pet stores nearby, so I'm going to have to find another kind that they both like.  Nutro has another line, which is perhaps replacing the old, but it seems rather overly healthy for my two finicky cats, since all the flavors are brown rice and something...).

It's Posy, Bitches!

I thought it might be time to check in with Miss Posy Fern, mainly because although she is a very hard cat to photograph, I finally got a good picture of her the other day:

She has pretty, very light-blue eyes, but she tends to squint or close them when a camera is pointed in her direction.  Or I'll manage to get her to keep her eyes open, but there will be something like a toilet in the background.  Oh dear:

But anyway, Posy is doing well.  I took her to the vet for a check-up in December, and the vet was very pleased to see that after her teeth surgery last March, Posy had gained over a pound.  She had been underweight before -- probably because her bad teeth kept her from eating as much as she should -- but is now a healthy plumpie.

We keep the attic door closed mostly, but Posy loves to run up there when the door opens.  It's a very sunny attic, and at the moment it is cluttered in a way that Posy loves, with all sorts of comfy hiding spots, like the one below:

Posy is a good "found object" bed maker, and there is nothing she likes better than when we do not hang up our clothes right away.  Apparently a dirty laundry bed is a luxury.  Who knew.

No doubt she is also trying to blend in in the above picture, and not be spotted by the toddler.

Bathroom Buddy is the New Kitchen Witch

I know most of you are probably thinking that the last thing you want is a bathroom buddy invading your privacy and destroying your calm, and that there is most certainly such a thing as too much togetherness.  But not so fast!  For I am here to attest that my bathroom buddy, Posy, is quite a good one. 

The bathroom to our master bedroom has been claimed by Posy as her domain.  It has a litterbox in it, a water dish, and a bathmat, which she thinks is a cat bed.  Plum will visit it, but he won’t stay long, so it is really the one place in which she doesn’t have to worry about getting bothered by her purple brother.  It also has a ceiling heater and a shower, the steam from which helps clear Posy’s mangled tiny sinuses.  So whenever I use that bathroom, Posy is there, and I have become quite used to her furry little presence. 

When I get ready in the morning, she almost always appears in or on the sink and talks to me a bit: a wee girlfriend helping with my makeup.  I will warn you that if you use “her” bathroom, and sit on the toilet, she will probably  jump up and try to curl in a circle on your lap—and I get that that is not everyone’s cup of tea, what with talons near the privates and whatnot.  But look at this little powder room gargoyle!  Is she not sociable?  Don’t you wish you had one?

Posy thinking, why wouldn't anyone want me as a buddy?

Think carefully before you answer that, bitches!

Posy and "Posy"

I got a few books for Owen the other day, for when he graduates from board books.  One of them is a book named "Posy" by Linda Newbery and Catherine Rayner, and stars a cat named Posy who looks very similar to my own Posy.

I decided to try to get a few photos of the two:

She wasn't very impressed.  But the moment I picked the book up and put it on the endtable, she decided to use it as a perch:

Perhaps she thought it was a monogrammed bed of the non-plush variety?

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!

She Bites

Posy is in the proverbial dog house this morning.  She needs to sit in a corner and think a bit about her recent behaviors, which include biting and late-night caterwauling.  She was cleaning herself on my lap last night and I was petting her, and all of a sudden she sunk her teeth into my palm while staring at me steadily with her light-blue, increasingly serial-killer gaze.  It made me so glad the vet didn’t remove all of her teeth, ahem.  She was literally biting the hand that fed her.

Then she screamed outside my door last night at around 2 a.m. (Sean swears she is screaming MOM?!  MOM?!).  I finally let her in, because I figured she’d make less noise outside then in.  And she did settle right down until 5 when she got up to cough up a fur ball, complete with thorough histrionics.

The vet had said we would notice a difference in behavior after her mouth was cleaned up, and she does seem more playful.  If only that playfulness didn’t come with a side dish of brat on a bed of brat with a brat coulis, etc.

I also think the Feliway pheromone dispensers, which calm Plum, have a kind of adverse affect on the already calm Posy, making her all spazzy.  She’s been doing a lot of running around, and it is always a sight to see, since you can tell she is running as fast as she can go—and thinks she is exhibiting g-forces—yet to our eye it looks like she is running in slow motion.  Girlfriend will not be winning any sprints anytime soon.

Posy thinking, Bitches!  I'm so fast you didn't

even see me run away and come back!

 

Posy Under the Knife

After four or so years of hemming and hawing, Ms. Posy Fern had dental surgery on Friday.  I’ve long been conflicted about pet dentistry.  My pug, Tulip, did not have the best of teeth, and I did have her teeth cleaned about four or five times in the second half of her life.  Anesthesia is always an extra risk with pets who are brachycephalic—i.e. smushed face animals – though, and over the years pet dentistry seems to have “evolved” from a set-price procedure to a major financial investment.  Leaving aside the fact that we can’t afford it, I have some ethical issues over paying more for my pets’ dentistry than I can afford for my own.

So even though vets have been telling me for the past four years that both my cats had terrible teeth and gum issues, I’d been stalling doing anything about it.  Recently, our new vet – whom I like very much and is a no-nonsense kind of doctor – told us that Posy’s mouth issues were so bad that she was definitely in a lot of pain.  Left untreated, we’d be compromising her quality of life, as well as paving the way for eventual blood poisoning.  She told us both cats needed the procedure, but Posy much more so than Plum.  We finally signed Posy up for surgery and Sean brought her in on Friday, empty-bellied, and somewhat subdued to be taken on this unusual father/daughter adventure.

Once she was under anesthesia and x-rays had been taken, the vet called me to tell me what she planned to do and to get my permission.  Basically, Posy had her “cheek teeth” removed (most were in various states of resorption, a common problem for brachycephalic pets), and then major gum repair done in the places where she had stalagmites but no stalactites, so to speak:  teeth going up or teeth going down with no mirror image above, thus leading to gum carnage with every bite the poor gal made.

The good news is that everything went very well, and the other good news is that it ended up being significantly less expensive than the initial quote.  Posy came home loopy on pain meds, and spent her first thirty-six hours in our guest room suite, where she could be sure to not be bothered by Plum or Dorothy.  Of course, being Posy and being feisty, she spent her second night yowling behind the closed door demanding her freedom.  She purred from the moment she got home though, and ate immediately too—both good signs.  She has yet to clean herself, so I know that she is feeling some mouth pain still, but hopefully she’ll re-start her cleaning OCD in the next day or so.

I was pretty sure she was feeling much better in the wee small hours of the night last night, when I was awakened by Posy playing a mean game of paw hockey with a balled-up candy wrapper all over my bedroom floor.  Thanks, Posy!

Here is Posy Saturday morning, still enjoying the hallucinatory effects of her pain meds:

This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius!....

Hello Posy

It's been a long time since I've written about Posy, and I'm not sure if she thinks that is a good thing or a bad thing.  On the one hand, I'm sure she is all -- get your own cat, bitches.  But on the other hand, I'm sure she is wondering where her documentarist has gone.  So here we go:

Posy is an easy cat, mostly.  She cleans herself constantly:

She always, ALWAYS wants to snooze in my lap:

My one complaint is that she tends to get the caterwauls and the zoomies right around the time Owen is napping, and she usually likes to do both under the carriage in which he is trying to sleep.  You can imagine that that often does not go well.  Sean and I will both start hissing at her to get out of that room now and not to mention shut up!  Usually to no avail.  I then have to tiptoe in and extricate her from the carriage wheels and then give her a good brushing in the other room to get her sleepy.

Posy doesn't like the cold weather, and I'm sure she is looking forward to when she can go up and bake in a sunspot in our hot attic.

And here she is right now, trying to figure out how she can fit on my lap along with the laptop.  Let's see if she can fit...askdhgotskfndosietn390snvoss0wngdkt-clkt.

A Riot of Plastic

As mentioned before, Owen is not a big believer in sitting when he could instead be carried by one of his slaves parents.  He has a bumbo seat, but as of late his thunder thighs have prevented him from fitting comfortably into it.  He still can fit in his catapult seat, but he tends to tolerate it for five minutes tops:

Don't let this smiling face fool you--

he is about to demand to be extracted:

Yes, that's right, You! Take. Me. Out!

So one recent Sunday I was dispatched to that particular hellhole known as Babies "R" Us to buy Owen a new contraption in which we could, on occasion, dump him, thus giving our weary arms a rest from his nearly twenty pounds of tightly packed chub.  I went to buy what some call an exersaucer, and others, an office.

I found the aisle with said saucers, and browsed amongst the explosions of plastic, trying to choose the lesser of the gaudy evils.  Since I couldn't make up my mind, I texted the three choices to Sean.  Behind the first door we had the modest frog office:

Behind the second, the aquarium office:

And behind the third, the jungle office:

Ever fond of a sea shanty, Sean texted back his vote for the sea-themed saucer, and I left the store a little later with a large box of blue plastic.

Sean set it up, and Owen now spends a wee bit of time each day in his office at his desk, until he gets angry that he can't reach all the gadgets, and is forced to start yelling at his secretary:

Owen is very busy.  Go away.

Of course, another member of my household is also interested in the exersaucer....

Cat Trap

When we have an empty box in the house, Sean is fond of placing it somewhere, saying "Cat Trap!" and seeing how long it takes to catch a cat.  Usually not long.

Here is Posy in the empty babywipes box, about two minutes after it was placed on the table:

I won't even go into just how long she will remain sitting in the box--but it is somewhere in the neighborhood of A Very Long Time.

And who are we to question why?