I'm greatly heartened by Ariel's behavior the past couple of days. She's had a couple of toys in there from the beginning, but I actually heard her playing with a jingle-ball for the first time. Not extensive play, given that she doesn't have a vast amount of room in there, but she batted it around a little.

Then this afternoon, I found her right at the child gate, looking out with interest, rather than in the back of the Cave. When I came up, she drew back somewhat, but sniffed my finger through the gate and didn't entirely retreat. Tonight, Mojo saw her at the gate, bounded over and they touched noses! This is fantastic improvement.

A few days ago, I told Ariel that when she was ready to come out of the Cave, it was all right. I think she heard me. The problem is, I have to leave for another trip and will be gone several days (with no computer, so no blog). I don't think it's wise to let her out now when I won't be around to supervise and make sure we're past whatever the blasted crisis was. When I get back, I'll see how things are going, but I would love to have her out and about getting exercise and interacting with the rest of the Horde again.

Mojo has been totally cracking me up. It's been bitterly cold, so I'm wearing an old wool sweater. Mojo thinks he should groom it. He tries to lick it..and his tongue sticks to the wool like velcro! I feel tugging and look down to see Mojo trying to pull his tongue free. He also tries to do the grooming-nibble on it, but the velcro tongue routine is hysterical.

He's also reached that age where I can see the early hints of the cat he'll grow into as he leaves kittenhood behind. He still totally cute, though.

We had a pleasant Thanksgiving trip and the moggies were happy to see us. My office mogs were so happy in anticipation of my return that they trashed the office. They broke one of their ceramic bowls in half. Saffy knocked down the box of bubble wrap and extracted the last of the roll, which she (no doubt with plenty of help) shredded and spread everywhere. I will be picking up stray bits of shredded bubblewrap FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE.

Simon promptly tested my printer for me...again.

Kate seems to be doing well, although the petsitters were completely unable to give her the pills while I was gone. I didn't take into account what a difficult cat she is to get a pill into. She fought them too much the first time they tried. After that, they never saw her again. She's an adept stealth cat when she wants to be. I gave her the last two pills after I got back, so she was at least at the end of the course. I haven't seen her throw up in a week now, nor have I found signs of her throwing up, so I hope she's all better.

I caught Zoe with a fresh puddle of pee she was attempted to cover up on a piece of cardboard in the back part of my office. I'm not thrilled her recent behavior. She went from being a tiny, sweet runt kitten to being an aggressive alpha female. Why she felt compelled to pee on the cardboard is beyond me, but I hope it's not the start of bad pattern.

I've been distracted with work, meetings and setting up a new computer system. It always takes a while to get the software reinstalled and everything back where I need it to be.

So, about Kate. I did indeed take her to the vet last Thursday where she was diagnosed as having a raging kidney infection and being somewhat dehyrated. They gave her fluids and she came home with a powerful anti-biotic to take. For some reason, the vet didn't seem to think the vomiting and weight loss was due to the infection. So far, Kate seems to be doing fine, though she has thrown up at least once that I know of since starting the meds. That's better than before, though.

She hates taking the pills. I think she bribed the other cats into trying to hide the pill bottle because I had to search ten minutes to find it the next day. Either that, or it was Simon trying to figure out how to extract treats from a sealed bottle. At any rate, somecat knocked the treats and meds onto the floor and proceeded to cunningly "hide" Kate's pill bottle.

Speaking of Simon, he loves to tread on one certain button on top of the printer which causes it to print out a test page. I've lost count of the number of test pages that Simon has printed so far.

I finally had to squirt Zoe with the new Water Squirter of Doom. She was harrassing Ariel right through the child gate while poor Ariel was trying to use the cat box. Zoe was greatly startled. I think it affected her for all of...oh, two minutes before she was back to bouncing around the office.

We'll be gone for a few days for Thanksgiving, so have a wonderful holiday and pet a few moggies for me.

Simon pulled his "If you don't pet me I'll bite your fingers" routine again. He wanted to be in my face, not in my lap. I finally had to get regrettably stern with him.

Kate goes to the vet tomorrow. She keeps throwing up liquid, has diarrhea and is losing weight. Not good signs.

Someone wrote to ask me about The Cave, in which Ariel is currently dwelling. The basic structure is a three-angled wooden desk that my late husband made for me to use as a computer desk. It didn't work for that purpose well enough, so when Randy and I needed a way to keep Owl comfortably confined for three months after his knee surgery, we simply blocked up the openings of the desk with bookshelves and other heavy flat objects, then attached a child gate to the front.

The front of the Cave. Mojo says hello to Ariel, who lurks in the back with glowing eyes.

Ariel in one of the back cubbyholes. Her catbed is to the left and her catbox is to the right.

Mojo is fascinated by the cursor.

Simon is a passively affectionate cat, meaning that he enjoys attention while not actively seeking it. The other day he had a rare burst of wanting affection and got on my desk to demand it. I petted him, told him what a good boy he was, then tried to get back to work. He was having none of that. Every time I tried to use my keyboard or mouse, he'd bite my fingers. After a few bouts of petting interspersed with finger-biting, he'd had enough. I swear he gave me a disgusted look as he jumped off the desk.

I keep forgetting to mention that a couple of people emailed me with interesting links or info over a month ago. Each reply I sent would bounce back. If you sent me something and I apparently didn't reply, please consider this a thank you.

Ariel is doing well. She's eating lots of food and drinking lots of water, which I suspect she badly needed. I let Puck inside the Cave to visit with her briefly a couple of times. Puck is the one cat in the Horde that Ariel would regularly cuddle with, so I wanted to encourage some socialization with a cat that I know she likes.

Mojo has discovered treats. I give out treats in the morning and at night to those cats who like them - Puck, Diva, Tosca, Saffy, Zoe, Simon and Theseus. I offered treats to Mojo several times, then had the idea of breaking them up into smaller bits. He found the smaller bits easier to manage. He's not a treat junkie yet the way Simon, Saffy and Zoe are. They get right in my face and demand their treats. We'll see whether Mojo turns into a treat junkie or is more like Puck, who is happy to take one, but doesn't beg.

I'm glad I decided to move Ariel. She's been eating steadily, but more importantly, she drank a huge amount of water. She may be have been getting dehydrated. She's still not a particularly happy cat. Zoe came near the gate and Ariel growled at her, so we have a ways to go yet.

Randy bought a realistic toy mouse for Opal and Pippin, thinking they might find it more interesting. No luck. Neither one showed the slightest interest, even though it has the entire shape and features and coloring of a real mouse. Opal definitely prefers her more amorphous fuzzy mousie. Pippin shows an occasional vague interest in it, but mostly I refer to it as Randy's mousie. He likes it better than the cats do!

Pippin with Randy's mousie

Puck makes himself comfy on the clothes and towels.

Beautiful feral boy, Bowie.

I have some gross stuff to relate about Theseus (who is fine), so if you're easily grossed out, you can skip the end of today's entry.

Ariel hadn't budged from her cardboard box in weeks. I've been saying hello to her two to three times a day and the other day she actually said hello back. It was a tiny little "hello", but it's the only time she's done that.

Today, I didn't like the way she looked. I'm worried that her health might suffer from hiding out in a confined space day after day. It may sound trivial, but I noticed that the color of her nose, which used to be quite pink, has changed and become dark. I saw that kind of a color change in Tribble's nose as he became progressively more ill. I asked my vet about it (in Tribble's case), but he had no response to it. I may mean nothing. I can't say for sure. All the same, I decided it was time to shake up the situation.

I placed a carrier in front of the box so that it blocked the entire opening. I put on heavy leather gloves. I used a trick I saw Lolette use when handling feral cats and I used a flat, soft cat bed as a "shield" so that I could open the back of the box and move Ariel forward into the carrier. Other than the fact that she emptied her bladder and bowels in the process, it went quite easily without resistance.

I had the Cave all set up for her and she came right out of the carrier when I set it inside. Now she has room to move around, but with secure solid walls all around her. I can monitor her food, water and cat box use. And she can interact a bit more with the rest of the Horde through the large child gate in the front. I'm hoping I might be able to "reset" her level of interaction and that this will only be a temporary move. When she seems ready to come out into the open again, I'll be happy to let her out. We'll see how it goes.

About Theseus (stop reading here if you're squeamish): I finally discovered on Thursday night where the persistent smell of cat crap was coming from, and yes, it was his behind. My only excuse for not thinking of him earlier was being so distracted by other cats and the Ariel situation. I happened to look over and see him trying in vain to reach his butt, which he is too fat to do, and realized that his rear end was completely caked with crap.

I set about trying to clean him up, but it was pretty hopeless. He was clearly in pain and tremendously unhappy about letting me do anything back there. I got one large glob off and realized he was in bad shape. His anus area was red and inflammed, possibly infected. I hauled the poor beastie off to the vet first thing Friday morning. They knocked him out, shaved him and cleaned him up. He's doing much better and is on anti-biotics as a precaution. As a bonus, I haven't found any more Random Piles of Cat Crap around the office since then.

However, if there is anything less endearing than having to smear oinment twice a day on a sick cat's ass, I don't know what it is. :P

Sometimes the simplest decisions can lead to a long, complicated series of actions. It began by smelling the not-so-desirable odor of cat crap every time I came into my office. Some cat is leaving small piles of crap all around the office and I have no idea who it is. Initially, I suspected Ariel thinking that she might be too intimidated to use the communal cat boxes. That suspicion was reinforced when I stepped in a soft pile of crap at the base of the filing cabinet on which she lurks in her hidey-box. And there's nothing quite like stepping in cat crap in a waffle-soled boot.

I decided to start putting bowls of food and water right outside her box, and decided it might help to put a cat box close by as well. When I was cleaning up at Lolette's, I noted that she had covered cat boxes for all the feral cats. If Ariel is afraid of being jumped, a hooded cat box seemed like a good idea. I still have the Booda Dome that used to be Nefreet's catbox, but I'd cleaned it up, put a round cat bed in it and set it on the front porch to see if the ferals would sleep in it.

But first, I had to clean up the space to put it in, which meant vacuuming the office. The vacuuming was way overdue because I couldn't buy vac bags locally and had to order them at Ace Hardware. They arrived, so I no longer had an excuse not to vacuum. That took an hour, given how messy the place was. I had finally gotten rid of the giant box that the computer monitor had come in, which the cats had turned into a scratching post and which was filled with large pieces of chewed up styrofoam.

I was thinking about how tough my vacuum cleaner was. This Kenmore canister has to be one of the toughest vacuum cleaners ever built. It must be twenty-five years old if it's a day and it keeps on working. I was down to the last two inches of carpet when the beater head snagged on some carpet fringe and the beater abruptly stopped working.

This led to taking apart the beater head to see what had happened. Removing the only two apparent screws didn't seem to help, then I realized there were directions in raised letters along the plastic edge, deeply buried in twenty-five years of grime. I cleaned off the lettering and lo! some foresighted engineer had kindly provided me with the final clue to pop the beater head apart. I discovered exactly what I suspected, that the rubber belt had snapped. Replacing that will be another epic for another day.

At any rate, the vacuuming was done. I went to get the Booda Dome. I had to crawl through dirt on my hands and knees under the front porch to put the cat bed that was inside the Dome into the large dog igloo we've put under the shelter of the porch in the hopes the ferals will use it in the winter. We have padding and some beds in there already. Then I had to thoroughly clean the Dome which had months of accumulated dirt that blows off the dirt road and gets on everything around here.

At long last, I had the Booda Dome set in place, ready to be used...and discovered I was completely out of cat litter. That in turn required a trip to the feed store for the chicken feed that I use. But at long, long last, everything was set up and I can only hope it makes things better for Ariel.

Unfortunately, it didn't solve the issue of the Phantom Crapper and I stepped in another pile of it today. Sigh...I really have to find out who has the problem and why.

Or go to Archive Index Page