BerthaBlog

Our Christmas was relatively quiet. Which was nice, after taking a friend to the ER on Christmas Eve. (Short version: bad reaction to antibiotics given for strep earlier in the week left her severely dehydrated. She’s okay now.)

We had the parental units all come over for turkey dinner. The kids made out like bandits, as usual. Everyone seemed happy with what they got. My spouse was not surprised by his gift, as I’d had to involve him in the ordering of it—I got him a custom-tailored silk bathrobe from a tailor in China. I couldn’t figure out any way to secretly measure him for it.

He got me a Roomba.

I love Roomba. Hell, I love anything that does housework for me. And Roomba does it better than I do, because (unlike me) it doesn’t just swipe over the rug once and call it done. No, this little gizmo trundles back and forth until its batteries run low, and then it returns to its docking station. If it finds a particularly dirty spot, it stops its random pattern and does spirals in one place for a bit. And it has a little whisking brush on the side to get along the walls, something I do maybe twice a year when I’m feeling motivated.

We had a lot of fun Christmas day watching the Roomba. What can I say, we’re easily entertained. I pressed the “clean” button and Roomba sang its little boot-up song, sallied forth, and immediately began to strangle on the fringe of the Christmas tree skirt.

We performed a Heimlich maneuver, removed the skirt from the tree, and turned Roomba loose again. At once it set about humping the base of the tree; clearly its attempt to eat the skirt was not just a cleaning mishap. Eventually it left the tree, making “call me” gestures as it went, and got down to actually cleaning the carpet.

I’ve read some hilarious accounts of cats and Roombas, but Phurball is apparently not going to be providing any. He is utterly disdainful of the Roomba. When we first turned it loose he sat with his back to it, refusing to acknowledge its presence. Being a machine, Roomba did not realize it had been snubbed, and cheerfully continued to vacuum the carpet.

“Wheee!” said Roomba, nudging Phurball’s tail aside as it went. Phurball deigned to give it a scornful glance.

Roomba bonked into a wall, turned around, and headed directly for the cat.

If Phurball had eyebrows, one would have been raised as Roomba approached. When Roomba was a few inches away he finally rose and strode with great dignity to the couch, where he sat in lofty immunity.

Roomba returned to humping the tree.

Phurball’s dignity has been under attack on all sides these days. Now that our temporary cat has been spayed, she no longer goes after him whenever he approaches. Now, she wants him to play with her. Unfortunately he’s a grumpy old man and doesn’t want to play with her. One morning as he sat patiently at my feet awaiting his breakfast, he glanced around to see That Damn Kid preparing to pounce on his tail. Never have I heard such outrage expressed in a sibilance.

We’re still looking for a home for her. We’re reluctant to take her to the SPCA, because neither of us want her to spend time in a cage. Since she’s just starting to relax and trust people a little, we think an institutional environment would be a major setback for her. Ideally we’ll find an adoptive family and she can just go straight into their house.

So that’s about all that’s going on here, these days. Next year I’m hoping to add to the family with a Scooba. Of course, it’ll be a bit longer than usual until next Christmas, since 2006 has been postponed.

Just heard from the vet. Little cat is out of surgery and recovering comfortably (they said it took a fair amount of anaesthesia to put her under—not surprising considering how frightened she was).

Turns out she wasn’t pregnant. Her little bulging belly and swaybacked walk really had us fooled. She did have roundworms. She tested negative for Feline HIV and leukemia. She was also in heat.

I’ll be picking her up around four-thirty this afternoon. I don’t know how glad she’ll be to see me, but I’m sure she’ll be glad to get back to the house where things are familiar. Have to remember to talk to the vet about her mantel perch, and whether jumping up there is going to cause her problems.

Yay! I didn’t kill her kittens!

I’ve got an appointment with a nearby vet to take the little cat in tomorrow morning to have her spayed. Her pregnancy is still in the early stages, and while I hate to abort her kittens it’s going to be very hard on her to have them at her age. Not to mention how much easier it will be to find her a home if it’s just her. They’ll also give her a rabies/distemper shot and check her for feline leukemia.

I have no idea how I’m going to get her into the cat carrier. This is a canny little cat; there will be no tricking her into it—I’m going to have to simply nab her by the scruff and lower her in. It’s been over twenty years since I’ve picked up a cat who didn’t want to be picked up, so it’s anyone’s guess whether I remember how.

And just when she’s starting to trust me a little, too. *sigh*

She’s feeling a bit less jumpy, although yesterday she suffered a setback when I vacuumed around her litter pan. She didn’t mind when I vacuumed the carpet, but when I brought the noisy horrible thing over into her little sanctuary she had no “safe” place to retreat to. She ran into the basement and hid for hours, until I got worried about her and rousted her out.

I’ve been e-mailing the local shelters. My first choice, Safe Haven for Cats, is completely full and their waiting list is so long that they’re not currently accepting new names for it. I’ve been contacting other no-kill shelters in the area, although naturally they tend to be full because, well, they keep ‘em until they’re adopted. I’d like to avoid taking her to the SPCA; I know they do their best to avoid euthanizing the critters, but someone has to take all the animals that the no-kill shelters turn away, and resources are finite. Chances are the cat would be adopted, as she’s young and personable, but I don’t want to take the chance if I don’t have to.

Yesterday I also ran across a page describing the reasons you should never offer a pet as “free to good home.” After that I was rather depressed and didn’t want to contact anyone else about taking her. Man, people can suck sometimes.

On the multi-cat front, this morning when Phurball passed a couple of feet away from the new cat, she didn’t put her ears back or hiss at him. She continues to lurk around in the den; she doesn’t like to come into the living room. Her aversion seems to start at the line between the hardwood floor and the carpeting. I don’t know if she’s just decided the hardwood area is “safe,” or if she’s had bad experiences in the past that she associates with carpeted floors. I wish she’d quit flinching when we go to pet her, it makes me feel like an ogre.

We’ve put up flyers, we’ve notified the SPCA and the animal control agency, we’ve put an ad in the local newspaper. I can’t help but think that anyone who was seriously trying to find this cat would have called us by now. I’m beginning to think it’s the age-old story of the unwed teen mother: she got herself knocked up, and her family kicked her out to fend for herself.

Last night my husband said, “If you want to keep it a secret that she might be pregnant, you shouldn’t post it to your blog.”

At this point Phurball is pretty much trying to go about his daily business and ignore her presence. This isn’t always easy, as whenever they happen to pass within six feet of each other she begins to growl and hiss at him. I suspect he is the first cat she has ever seen who wasn’t a member of her immediate family. This morning Phurball headed into the kitchen for a drink, and was pulled up short by this annoying little upstart growling at him. He looked more exhasperated than anything else.

I said, “Quit it,” and gave her a small squirt from the Bad Kitty bottle. She jumped and trotted back over to the fireplace. I think if cats were capable of rolling their eyes, Phurball would have done so as he continued to his water dish.

This morning as I was sitting on the couch, giving Phurball his morning pet, I noticed the “new cat” creeping about in the kitchen.

Phurball noticed as well, and got up to see what she was up to. At first she put her back up, then changed her mind and crouched down with a plaintive mew. Phurball glowered at her for a moment, added a hiss to make the point, then turned his back on her and went off down the hall.

I sat down on the floor nearby, and as soon as the Big Mean Cat was out of sight she came over for some petting. I think I petted her for ten minutes before she’d had enough and went to explore a little more. At one point I looked up to see Phurball’s wide-eyed face at the corner, staring at me with an expression of, “How… could you?” After the little cat had had enough petting and gone back to exploring, I went to find him sulking on the couch. I sat down and petted and fussed over him for a while, eliciting a grudging purr.

Now she’s retreated to the mantel again, but I think this is progress.

Yesterday morning when I took out the trash, a small gray tabby came dashing desparately for the door, meowing frantically.

This is pretty normal when the weather is cold. Phurball will insist on going outside, then discover he can’t warm up even if he sits in the sun, and as soon as I open the door again he’s running for the house, meowing all the way to make sure I know he’s coming. So I’m accustomed to seeing a cold, frantic cat pelting across the driveway.

Except it wasn’t Phurball.

She realized I wasn’t hers about the same time I realized she wasn’t mine, came to a screeching halt, then stood there mewing. Phurball himself sauntered up to see what all the commotion was about, spotted her in front of the van (now hissing at him), and changed course with the “I’ll-take-care-of-this” stride of every old man who has ever yelled at those damn kids who keep walking across his lawn. I scooped him up and put him inside to forestall an argument, then sat down by the van and talked to our visitor until she approached and let me pet her.

She was a young cat, less than a year old from the look of her, and very upset and frightened. She would jump back if I moved too quickly, but purred thunderously while I stroked her. Clearly she was someone’s pet; my guess was she had gotten out of her house and then become lost and disoriented. I set out some food and water for her, which she immediately gobbled up. Her weight was good so I didn’t think she’d been lost for long, but she might have missed a meal or two.

I went out to run some errands, and when I got back she was still there, still meowing in distress. I petted her a little more and went inside.

Later I went to pick up my son from school, and when we got back she was there again, still meowing. At this point it looked like she really was unable to find her own way home, and with the temperature getting below freezing at night I didn’t want to leave her outside while we tried to find her people. I attempted to pick her up so I could bring her in, but this alarmed her and she struggled free. Ten minutes later, I was able to coax her to come into the house on her own.

She spent a while searching the house, calling, obviously looking for her people. Eventually she retreated to the mantel, where I put some small dishes with food and water for her and then left her alone to calm down a bit. She stayed up there all night.

This morning she was still there, though she was calm enough that she let both the boys pet her a little bit. Even my husband talked to her and gave her a reassuring scritch.

Phurball is not impressed. I let him out of the basement for a while this morning, while I was there to supervise events, and gave him some gooshy food and petting to make sure he knew he wasn’t being replaced. Oddly, he didn’t hiss or growl at the other cat. In fact, he made a point of not looking at her at all, although he cruised malignantly around the fireplace with his tail twitching.

Last night I put flyers up around the neighborhood with her picture on it, and filled in the “found pet” form on the local SPCA web site. Today I’ll put an ad in the paper. Hopefully we can find her people quickly; she really wants to go home.

Rummaging through my hard drive yesterday (I never did find the file I was looking for), I discovered an old usenet thread I had saved where the group regulars were all talking about their cats. Since I know everyone loves hearing about how great my cat is, here’s what I had posted, back in mid-2000:

Never ask a cat owner to talk about their cats–it’s like asking a grandparent if they have any pictures of the grandkids. :)

Phurball is a generic domestic shorthair, with dark gray tabby markings. I am biased but I think he is a very handsome fellow. We used to live in a neighborhood that had another gray tabby–my husband couldn’t tell them apart, but it was quite clear to me which was which. The OTHER cat was not nearly so handsome; he was lanky and had an angular face. Phurball is sleek and well-proportioned and has a lovely round face. His eyes are green and he looks like he’s wearing eyeliner.

Phurball came to live with me before I was even married. A friend of mine was standing out in his front yard when a car drove by, and the occupants flung a cat out of the window. (For a long time I tried to tell myself the cat had jumped out, not wanting to believe anyone would be so deliberately cruel, but when I mentioned this theory to my friend he disilluded me.) He retrieved the cat, who remarkably was unhurt, but my friend already had two dogs and four or five cats and his wife put her foot down at any more. He knew I was cat-less at the time and asked if I wanted the cat. Well, to me a house (or at the time an apartment) isn’t home without a cat, so I adopted Phurball.

Who turned out to be a wonderful cat. Whoever chucked him out that car window really missed out. He is friendly and affectionate; he loves nothing better than to be petted and loved. He will ignore food in favor of affection. He’s surprisingly chatty for a non-Siamese cat; perhaps because I talk to him all the time and it’s just natural to talk back, or perhaps it’s just his nature. He quickly forgave me the unpleasant trip to the vet for his “operation,” and amiably agreed to go along with the few rules that I set for household pets (mostly no walking on cooking or eating surfaces).

If I’m eating something Phurball thinks he would like, he won’t beg or pester, but will sit politely by my chair and wait patiently. If I am reading or talking and don’t seem to be noticing him, he will reach through the rails of the chair’s back and give me a gentle poke to get my attention. Sometimes he will do that even if he doesn’t want any food, but would just like a caress and some conversation.

He is the most forbearing animal it has ever been my privilege to live with. As our family increased to one and then two children, Phurball never made the slightest move to scratch or bite the kids, even when they were infants and still learning to be gentle with him. If little hands got too rough he would merely remove himself from reach. I think he also trusted me to prevent the small ones from getting out of hand, as I trusted him to excercise patience with them.

He also enjoys playing mind games with the adults. Sometimes he will wait until he has our attention, then abruptly stare with great fixation at thin air. After we spend several minutes looking to see what he’s staring at, we will glance back at him to find him smirking at us. Occasionally he will sit in one place and meow until I come to see what’s wrong, and then just beam at me as if pleased I responded. His favorite perch is an old couch which is set on end; its upper end is about seven feet high and he likes to sleep in this elevated perch. Once when we had some friends over we were all standing next to this perch talking. Phurball bounded up a foot or two to cling to the side of the couch, looked over at us to make sure he had our attention, then strolled leisurely up the vertical surface to his perch and sat there looking insufferably pleased with himself as our friends expressed their awe.

And in one last anecdote…I once bought him a catnip mouse and put it into my purse to give him when I got home. By the time I got home I’d forgotten about it. Later that night I saw Phurball up on the kitchen table (you may recall that he doesn’t GO on the table, he knows it’s against house rules) sniffing with great interest at my purse. It wasn’t until he actually took the zipper tab in his teeth and started working the purse open that I remembered that catnip mouse inside. I have never seen a cat that could unzip a purse until then. Perhaps I’ve just never seen a cat who WANTED to unzip a purse.