Just got back from a four day trip to San Diego Comic Con. This morning, we found another dead baby rat...on the front porch. Now, none of my cats ever go outside, which means that some neighborhood cat must have gotten it and left it as a gift. I suspect the very pretty tortie that lives a few doors up the street and sometimes visits the yard, but why she decided to leave it for us is a mystery. LOL!

Things that cats do to drive us crazy. You try and try to coax the cat into your lap while you're relaxing on the sofa watching tv. Cat ignores you until the program is over and you're one minute away from getting up. Then said cat leaps onto your lap, curls up in a contented ball and purrs at you. Naturally, you end up sitting on the sofa when you really need to get up and do other things because the cat is so very happy and so are you...except for needing to get up. Sigh....

Judging from Tosca's behavior, I'd say she's becoming hyperthyroid again. She'll need to be retested and I suspect put on a very low dose of the meds. The vet said she might be a cat who is extremely sensitive to thyroid meds.

A yellowjacket got into the living room via the fireplace. Being an inside cat and not knowing any better, Opal figured this was a great toy to play with and got stung on the pad of her paw before Randy managed to kill the wasp. Fortunately, she doesn't seem to be having much of a reaction to it. There's no swelling, she's not limping and everything looks fine on her foot.

I took a big chance and wrote a letter to my landlord asking permission to bring the rest of my cats up here and keep them in the garage/home office. Sadly, he said no. He's a nice man, but he wasn't comfortable with doing that. I'm deeply unhappy about the situation and really don't want to leave the cats down south for another year or more.

We're searching for a new place to rent, but I don't have much hope. People aren't as tolerant of multiple cats in the Bay area. It's not like living in some little mountain town. Rentals are at a premium around here with a huge demand, so landlords have no shortage of prospects. Why rent to someone with way too many cats when they can rent to a dozen other people? But we'll keep looking, unless some other solution presents itself.

Tosca and Kate paid a visit to the vet this week. I had Tosca in to recheck her thyroid level and her FIP titres. Tosca is fat, sassy and seems totally healthy and happy, but we needed to find the right dosage for the thyroid meds.

Kate got the full work-over and blood tests, including running all three virus tests. She has lost more weight and is barely over 7 lbs. She eats desperately and keeps getting thinner, which reminded me of what happened with Zebedee.

So imagine my befuddlement when the results came back the opposite of what I expected on both cats.

Kate's tests came back great. All virus tests were negative and everything else came back healthy and normal. The vet figures this could leave something the blood tests don't detect, such as a form of cancer...or maybe just old age. He wants me to bring her back in a few weeks to recheck her weight. At that time, we may do an x-ray to look for masses. But right now, her weight loss remains unexplained.

But Tosca...her thyroid levels remained in the basement and her titres have doubled. On the thyroid, he's surprised because her initial reading was super-high and we've already cut back the dosage. He's thinking that the initial reading may have been a fluke or some kind of error. We're stopping the thyroid meds for now, but he wants me to watch her carefully and bring her back in for a retest in a couple of weeks.

It's the titres that really have us baffled and worried. Her previous two tests had extremely high readings of 1 to 1600 (very bad news). Now it's 1 to 3200! And yet, she shows no overt symptoms. She actually gained a little weight from her last visit. The vet says it means that she's fighting a virus -- maybe FIP. She may be winning, she may be losing. We really don't know what to make of it at this point. There's not much I can do at this point except wait and see.

Tosca hasn't lost her Mad Skillz though. I came into my office this morning and found a dead baby rat on the floor. Yes, we have rats here, believe it or not. It makes me feel like I'm back in the mountains. I can't really see Kate being up to catching a baby rat, so I'm pretty sure I can thank Tosca. I'm surprised she didn't eat it, but at least she made sure it wouldn't have the run of my office.

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