Why One Cat Is Fat. And The Other... Is Not

You know that we have cats, right? We've had Meow and Roar since Mister Man was three. He was the one who named them, actually, back when he wanted a lion instead of a cat. Meow and Roar were older kittens at the time. They were strays, maybe 10 months old, and Meow was the smaller of the two kittens.

Oh how times have changed.

Roar - the all orange one - is now the smaller cat, by a lot. The cats are brothers, so who knew they'd become such different cats as they grew. The other day, my husband called me over to show me that he'd figured out the issue.



Things I've Learned

1. Meow likes to eat.
2. Roar is sort of dainty.
3. Meow is a pig.
4. Meow needs to learn manners.
5. Meow is a rude pig.
6. Roar always expects that there will be a little more.
7. Meow has an insatiable appetite and won't let anyone or anything get in his way.
8. If you want to poison my cats, Meow will happily scarf down anything and everything. You might have to sweeten the pot for Roar.
9. Meow is a huge, rude pig.
10. There's a good reason Meow is fatter.

Wordy Wednesday - Garden Update

How does your garden grow? And to think I originally entitled this Wordless Wednesday! Ha!

I am so sad that my green beans and French beans aren't coming up at all. That said, my kohlrabi went wild (and was the first up) - they're the ones in the middle. I think I'm going to try to thin them and replant in another egg container. Any thoughts as to how to help them survive?

I also planted tomatoes two weeks after the other ones - both Roma and Beefsteak. They came up quickly and successfully; I put only 2 seeds per cube.

I neglected to read the instructions for carrots: plant them directly to the ground so their roots grow straight. Oops. Crooked carrots will still taste good, though, right?

My "herb" mixture is coming up well. It's all sorts of chives and basil an such.

Only one of my peas sprouted. I'm debating growing another one. It was so cool to watch it pop up. For awhile it looked like Seymour from Little Shop of Horrors. I was actually concerned that I had done something wrong when the peapod part (at the bottom) started popping out from the soil; I thought I'd planted it too shallowly. Unfortunately, I also noticed that one of my cats ate the first leaves to pop up. I think I need to find a way to protect them from not just the outdoor vegetation theives but the indoor ones, too!

With the weather still wet and chilly here, I haven't put them outside yet (thanks to those who explained what hardening means). Once we get into the 60s in the day, I'll start putting them out during the day.

My next step is to thoroughly weed the patch that will be the garden. It was somewhat clean, but all the rain we've gotten has sprouted everything you could possibly imagine there. At least the soil is soft, right?

What else should I be doing?

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And You Thought All Girl Scouts Were Good....

I told you a couple weeks ago how I got my very first pet, Caesar. She was so special to me and was the best cat a little girl could ever ask for. She wasn't my only pet though -- considering I have two cats right now, I suppose that's obvious.

Anyway, like most girls, I was fascinated by horses. When I lived in Belgium, there was a barn just down the road from us, and a friend of mine Kiersten Grashofer -- I can't believe I remember that name! -- owned a horse named Melody that I got to see every once in awhile. Unfortunately, my French wasn't good enough to take lessons at first, and by the time it was good enough and a new session was starting, we were moving back to the States.

I immediately started riding after we moved and loved it more than I could have imagined, much to my mom's chagrin -- and that of her pocketbook! That was third grade, and I kept riding until I was pregnant with Little Miss. I'd still be doing it if I could find the time and justify the expense.

The summer after fourth grade, I had the opportunity to choose what camp I wanted to go to. Whoo! What a responsibility for an nine year old. Ok, so it wasn't so hard. My mom handed me the catalogue of Girl Scout camps, and I found the one that was horseback riding.

Oh, what a joy those two weeks were. I had so much fun riding and grooming and just hanging out around the horses. The other girls did, too, although they were less interested in the horses than I was.

Their favorite game was Stick 'Em.

Like every barn -- or almost every barn -- they had barn cats. It helps to keep the mouse population down, which reduces disease et al. And when you have barn cats, there are constant litters of kittens since barn cats are rarely spayed and less often neutered. And they tend to not live that long, so the new kittens keep the population stable, sadly. (I just realized I made a pun!)
This barn had six kittens. They were only a few weeks old, and oh! were they cuddly and soft and cute. Many of the Girl Scouts liked to pick up the kittens and toss them at haybales to see if they'd stick. Yep, that was their favorite game.

I was appalled. When I found what they were doing, I cried. And for whatever reason, the counselors did nothing about it. After awhile, my resolve grew.

When my mom arrived to pick me up at the end of the two weeks, I told her that I was taking two kittens home and was going to save them from this life of misery. My mom isn't exactly an animal person, and we already had a dog and a cat at home.

I begged. I pleaded. I told her of the torture these cats were going through, of how the girls laughed at the poor mewing kittens flying through the air before thrusting out their claws in a panic on the haybales to keep from falling four to six feet to the ground.

My mom finally relented and allowed me to take one kitten home. It was really hard to choose only one to save, but one finally called out to me. Luckily, one of the counselors knew how to tell boy from girl -- my mom had obviously learned from our last encounter.

The poor little kitten was gently placed into our car, and we began the drive home. She hid underneath the seat the whole way, mewing softly but never moving.

By the time we arrived home, I had found a name for her. I named her Copper Top because she never stopped. And yes, this was in the days prior to the Energizer Bunny or that may have been her name. Considering her blaze orange coloring, many people assumed I named her Copper because she was copper. Sadly, no.

We took her to the vet to be spayed and get her shots. That's when we discovered she had fleas. Lots and lots of fleas. Oops. Sorry, Mom. I swear I didn't know. Fortunately, we quickly rid ourselves of the fleas, and life was happy.

While Caesar didn't love Copper, they tolerated each other pretty well, and all was good. After Caesar died, you could tell that she missed having someone around. My mom wasn't about to gete another pet though, and I lived in a college dorm, so she was stuck.

When I finally moved to an apartment off campus, I brought Copper with me. I lived alone, so she was a great companion and was so happy to have me around all the time again.

Even at the age of eleven when I brought her to Chicago, she was still head shy. Eleven years of a gentle and loving home with me and my family, and the poor cat still flinched anytime someone approached her too quickly from the front with a hand out. She never got over being picked up and thrown at haybales over and over again.

I sometimes think about the other five kittens that I couldn't take with me. I wonder how many of them stayed at the barn. I wonder if the Stick 'Em game persisted with other groups of Girl Scouts. I wonder if any of them ever had a family to love them....

Knowing that I was at least able to save one kitten who had a long and happy eighteen years with me before she passed away one afternoon has to be enough. At the age of nine, I didn't have the power to do more. The injustice and wrongness of it still burns in me though.

A Glimpse From The Past

I've always grown up with pets. My parents had cats before I was born. Of course, the fact that I was born nine years after they got married and they got the cats shortly after they got married meant that those two cats really wanted nothing to do with me.

And really. My parents named them Charmin and Percy. I think Percy was because he was such a regal cat (who sadly got bladder cancer and died a very sad death when I was four). Charmin? Two guesses why my parents named her that. I have to admit that I didn't get the point of the name until I ummm had graduated college. Then it dawned on me. Yes, she had run away (or so we're told) when I was seven. It took another fifteen or more years before I figured it out. Sometimes, I'm a bit slow.

I, however, wanted a cat of my own. And what Mommy wants, Mommy gets -- apparently. When I was two, my parents took me to a pet store. Of course, we'd never go to a pet store now that we know how they work and all about the wonderful world of shelters. In any case, they had six cats in a giant glass cage. I was told I could choose any one of them. I picked one out, and the man handed it to me. Perfect.

Except it was a boy. My mom made me put him back and choose another. Oddly, we went through the same routine with four of the other five cats. Finally, the only one left was the one sitting in the water bowl. I sighed and chose that tri-colored torti. Fortunately, she was a girl. I remember walking out of that store with the cat riding on my head. Like I said, we didn't know much back then.

I named the cat Caesar because someone else I knew had a cat named Caesar, and I thought all cats were named Caesar. Hey, I was two; don't question me. She was a great cat. I remember sitting on the floor of my house one day crying for who knows what reason. No one could comfort me, and I know my dad was getting worried about me. Caesar crawled into my lap and laid down. I immediately stopped crying and just pet her for awhile.

She was truly mine. Every night she would sleep with me. She wasn't just on my bed, but she was my pillow. I fell asleep listening to her purr into my ear. I woke up the same way. Cats are supposed to be nocturnal, I know, but I swear that cat never left my room while I was sleeping.

She would come when I called. As soon as she heard my voice, her feet would pitter patter as fast as they could to my side, and then she'd follow me around. Plus, she was protective of me. We had a tomato swing (remember those?) in my basement, and one day I was twirling around on it singing the "I'm shrinking, melting, shriveling" from The Wizard of Oz. I got hugely melodramatic, and my mom was getting worried about me. Caesar knew how to fix it. She reached up and swatted a paw at me to tell me to knock it off. And I did.

Once, she got out of the house, and we thought she was gone forever. Again, back in the day, we didn't know much and she was an indoor/outdoor cat (hello FIV, FeLV, racoons, coyotes, mean kids, cars, etc etc), but she always came home by my bedtime. Until she didn't. She was gone for four days when we got a call from a neighbor saying she thought she had our cat. She'd tried to shoo it out with her broom, but it was hiding under a chair in her living room. We hightailed it over there, and Caesar was so grateful to see us!

A mere few weeks later, we realized that she was pregnant. Oops. Nice going, Mom and Dad. Yeah, they forgot to spay her. She had seven kitttens. One was the tiniest runt, and we did our best to save her. We fed her with a medicine dropped, but it was for naught and we ended up burying her in a tiny bracelet box in our backyard.

As for the rest of the kittens, my parents were done with three cats. My mom was determined to get rid of the six kittens. She had me put them in a picnic basket and walk around the neighborhood to give them to friends. The friends happily took them, and I came home with an empty basket. Unfortunately, my mom started getting calls a few minutes later from the parents of those friends about how the kitten their child now had needed to live at our house and the child could only come visit the kitten. I'm still not sure how my mom managed to stay in the good graces of the neighborhood after that.

Somehow, we got rid of all but one of the kittens. I don't really remember how we did it, but one lonely kitten remained. My mom was getting desperate. Finally, I remember her sending me with the kitten into Monk's Dairy Bar (I wonder if that place is still around!) with tears streaming down my face, sobbing that if they didn't take the kitten that my mom was going to flush it down the toilet.

They took the kitten. I was convinced that my mom was going to flush him, obviously. Today, my mom tells a different story. She doesn't recall anything about threatening to drown the kitten in the sewer system, but I have a very different memory burned into my brain. Caesar was spayed as soon as the kittens were weaned, and we didn't have any more litters.

Shortly after that, Caesar made her second move, as we went from Connecticut to Belgium (I'd gotten her when we lived in Illinois). She was a great buddy, and she continued to be so as we went from Belgium to Illinois to Minnesota, where she lived out her golden years, still as my nightly pillow.

When I went to college, my mom told me how Caesar would sit in front of my door meowing at night. Eventually, she'd stop meowing and just lay down and sleep in my doorway, waiting for me to come home. During winter break, she fell into her old routine of following me around during the day when I was home and sleeping with me at night.

Spring break, we went on vacation in Florida instead of heading back home to Minnesota. A couple days into the trip, my mom told me to sit down on the bed because she had something to tell me. Caesar had died. I bawled. My friend since I was two was no longer there, and it was the closest person or thing to me that had died in my eighteen years. I'd had her since I was two and don't really have any memories of not having her around me.

Eventually, I asked for the details. My mom told me that she'd done everything she could, that they'd taken her to the vet for many visits, they'd given her fluid and medications but it just hadn't been enough.

That was when my brain started working again. My parents had done everything they could. Yet they were here with me in Florida. And this wasn't the first day of the trip. When I asked the question, I found out that she had died three weeks prior. My mom hadn't wanted to worry me while at school.

I believe I threw a Grade-A teenage tantrum at that point. How dare my parents deign to decide what I could and couldn't know about my dear friend. In a way, I'm still bitter that they didn't tell me when it happened. While I was upset, it was fully something that I was able to handle. I've always felt cheated that I wasn't able to grieve when she died but that it was forcibly delayed.

I've had cats since then, and we have cats now. None of them have ever quite held the same placce in my heart that Caesar did, as wonderful as they were. I just hope that the wee ones develop that same kind of relationship with the cats we have now, Meow and Roar. And when I peek upstairs at night and see them cuddled up sleeping next to Mister Man, I know we're well on the way.

And They're Off!

We all have our guilty pleasures. Things that our spouses or loved ones do that crack us up that really shouldn’t.

We have two cats. Unfortunately, they are really dogs in cats bodies’ (read: incredibly people oriented and friendly and affectionate). They love hanging out with the wee ones, and they’re so excited when we and they get up in the morning. In fact, if it was their option, the wee ones would get up much earlier. To that end, they like to sit outside their bedroom doors and meow. Loudly. Sometimes they choose to do this in the middle of the night, as well.

Needless to say, the buddies get banished to the basement each night before we go to bed. This job falls to my husband. The fat one (Meow) is pretty docile and mellow and goes along with it all. Sometimes he walks into the basement by himself even. At the very least, he allows himself to be picked up and carried to the basement.

The wily one (Roar), on the other hand, would prefer to stay up with us, and he lets us know it. If he sees me heading upstairs at night, he’ll meow at me to hurry before snuggling in with me. When my husband picks him up to take him to the basement, he gives a very dignified squeak of dismay.

More often though, he runs when he sees my husband approaching at the witching hour. And since we have an open floor plan where you can walk around the entire house, he runs in circles (much like the wee ones play their “running game”). With my husband chasing him.

Roar used to run around one time and then give up and head into the basement on his own terms. Lately though, he’s been a bit more determined. So around and around they go before my husband finally convinces him to head downstairs. The whole game has become a highlight of my evening, and I’m disappointed when I miss it. Fortunately, my husband is good natured enough to allow me to laugh at his attempts to herd a cat.

Ahhh, and here they go. Excuse me while I go laugh for awhile!