Another first! We saw Saffy grooming Opal. She was licking her around the head and ears. Better yet, Opal was letting her. They still have their little hissy-fits now and then, but this was a nice thing to see.

Later, Saffy helped us pay the bills.

Sapphire: "The paperwork is never done until it's thoroughly scattered."

"I'll deal with this one. No need to pay it when I can disembowel it."

Time for a lick break after all that exhausting filing.

Opal has dveloped an obsession with my new walking shoes. When I get them out of the closet in the morning, she rolls around on them and sticks her head inside. This morning, she stuck her head inside a shoe and rolled around with the shoe on her head. Now that's silly.

Pippin practices his Buddha pose.

Pippin: "I am not fat. I am...majestic."

Sapphire: "Initiating mind-control beams...now."

Randy's gym bag sprouts an Opal tail.

Opal: "I'm ready for the gym."

Saffy and Pippin watch birds. Not a great picture, but it clearly shows just how much bigger he is than his sister.

Randy peered over his side of the bed this morning to find the following offerings: Opal had brought him the usual mousie; Saffy had brought him Mr. Scraps and the Brown Snake (a piece of elastic ribbon).

It's been hot, so we leave the sliding doors in the kitchen open at night to let in air through the screen. The cats have been absolutely glued to the screen door because we have rats in the back yard. Yes, you heard me right. Norway Rats. They love bird seed, so we've had to stop leaving out bird seed until we get a squirrel and rat-proof feeder. I could hear them gnawing away at seed. We spotlighted them with a flashlight and watched them scramble around the garden plants and scamper up and down the peach tree...where the feeder is hung.

It's tempting to let the cats out to try and catch them. We won't, of course. Frankly, I'm not sure they'd know what to do with them if they caught them.

Not much news from the home front. Work eats up most of my time. Pippin is less than enthusiastic about the new dry food, though he seems to like the diet canned food. We mixed a small amount of his other dry food into the new stuff to get him past his initial reluctance.

Kate continues to eat large quantities of food while getting skinnier. I wish something would have shown up on her blood work that would have given a definite direction to help her. Given her age, there are a lot of possibilities for what could be happening. She's still throwing up occasionally. Other than that, she seems content and spends as much time as she can in my lap purring.

I bought a new kind of canned food for Kate and Tosca. It's organic food from Whole Foods with salmon in it. You usally can't go wrong with cats and salmon. Kate and Tosca hate it. They hate it like I've never seen them hate a food. Kate usually hoovers up anything I put in front of her, but neither one of them will touch this stuff. I had to throw away the rest of the can. Yeesh. I have two cans left and I'm taking them back to the store.

Saffy had us in stitches this morning. She got in the bathtub and chased her tail. She'd whirl around, catch it, fall over fighting with her tail and generally acted in a supremely silly manner. She'd think she was three months old instead of three years old.

The vet and I finally managed to connect yesterday afternoon. He said that Pippin's red blood cell count is the same; neither higher nor lower. He said if this was an old cat or if Pippin was losing weight, he might worry about blood marrow problems, but Pippin is young and gaining weight, so that seems unlikely. He talked about the "normal" range for these tests being a Bell Curve. The majority of cats will fall in the middle range of the curve, but there will always be some cats that fall at the extreme ends, and Pippin is probably one of them. He suggested we get it checked again in a year with an annual exam as long as Pippin is in good health.

Now we need to get some weight off the boy and I'll be happier. We'll stop by the vet clinic on Monday and pick up some special diet food for him.

No news. We've been playing phone tag with the vet for two days, so we still don't know the results of the blood test. In the past, I've found that vets will usually leave good news on an answering machine, but will wait to speak to me in person if it's not such good news. Consequently, I'm feeling anxious about hearing the results.

Poor Pippin is wondering what the deal is with the reduced food. He's such a good boy about it. He doesn't whine or beg or carry on, but if one of us heads to the kitchen he'll race in there. Or he'll sit at the place where his food bowl should be and turn those big green eyes on us, wondering when the food will magically appear. It's hard to say no. I remind myself that getting his weight down will improve his health, but I sure wish there was a way I could explain that to him.

Pippin hissed and was mightily displeased when I oozed him into the carrier this morning. Randy hefted the carrier and said, "He sure feels like a twenty pound cat." And much to our dismay, after being on a carefully restricted diet for over a month...Pippin has GAINED TWO POUNDS!!!!

Yes, he's gone from 19+ lbs. to 21 lbs. and a smidgen. The vet says he thinks it's genetic, the same way some humans have morbid obesity. Some cats simply get fat. Yikes!

So the Pipster is going on even more of a diet. He's going down from 1 cup a day to 2/3 cup a day until we can pick up some special diet food that the vet recommended.

We're also waiting to get the results of a new blood count tomorrow to see if his red blood cell count remains high. If so, that's another issue to deal with.

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