Gord's tail is unquestionably obscene. But, then, like many aging ginger tom cats, Gord is a bit obscene. He's eight years old -- just middle-aged for a cat -- but he looks like if he were human, he'd spend Saturday afternoons sitting on the sofa, beer in hand, watching whatever sporting event the season offered while his teenaged son mowed the lawn.

Yeah, I know -- kind of amazing. Neither of them ever wants to share anything, but they'll camp there on that blanket for hours together. Well, until Gord decides he doesn't want to share anymore and either begs Tink to groom his head until she's sick to death of him and leaves, or he starts a fight.

Tink has been obsessively grooming the fur off her belly and one of her front legs. Not that I didn't know she was a bit of a twist, but there's no really good explanation for the timing. I first noticed it after the 'tainted mole' episode, back when Tony went to San Francisco (last spring or early summer, I think). She was grooming a lot because, I think, her innards hurt and it seemed to soothe her to lick her belly. Since then she's denuded herself from hock to hock and about two tits up. And a spot about the size of a quarter on her right foreleg, as well, which can't in any way be explained by the tainted mole episode.

I'll check and see if I wrote about that one, and if not, I'll add an entry. Needless to say, it was about as unpleasant as any non-fatal thing I've ever dealt with, with the critters in this house.

And, finally, a picture of the dog that makes him look as if he were carved out of wood:

Told ya'!

Tink & Gord. Mortal enemies except when one considers their mutual desire to dominate Blankie, sweet Blankie. They will, on occasion, compromise, in other words.

Another day, another Blankie they both felt compelled to dominate, of course.

Is it just me, or does Doodle look positively demented in this? Well, okay -- I have the advantage of knowing that she really is kind of demented, but you know.

A shot of Squeek looking marginally less shirty than usual. It was because even though the shot is blurry, she's not squinting because she knows that black box we hold up to our faces means "ow! Eye hurting!" If it doesn't, she only looks like she'd like to kill us and eat us, not like she expects to in the foreseeable future.

It is nothing if not freakish how formal this critter can manage to look, sometimes. He could probably be doing dog food ads, if we really wanted to sell him. I don't think he behaves well enough to motivate me to go to that much trouble, but he is pretty and good-tempered. Eh. Who needs a Macaulay Culkin dog, anyway?

What Tink thinks of ... well, pretty much anything that isn't dinner.

No, he didn't do that to himself. He did, however, remain buried in that pile of blankets for at least ten minutes after the picture was taken, and then look at both of us as if we'd done something horrible to his entire litter.

Tony took this picture. I love it -- at the coldest point of the year, especially at night (when the thermostat drops to 58 degrees), Gord secreted himself under Tony's dresser, with his ass firmly planted on the heating register. When not camping on blankie, he also likes to sit directly below one in the dining room that's about a foot and a half off the floor, so it blows the fur on his 'shoulders' visibly. My mother had a Yorkie who was like that -- he'd stand so close to the register, you could see his fur blow back. Gord is a heat sink. What he plans to do with all of it he's saving, I have no idea.

Hasta ...

Here's one:

This ... thing that Gord does with his foot, when he's cleaning his 'nether regions' (/ren hoek), just creeps us out. At least in this one, he doesn't have his back toes splayed out. Admit it -- it's weird!

Here's Max ventilating on the floor. The piles of blankies and beds? It's because Max likes to go out in the run when I'm sitting around at my desk in the mornings, and sometimes I walk away to ... oh, I don't know, refill my coffee or something ... and he flings himself back in through the door and leaps off my desk. I figure if he's too stupid to aim for the pile of blankies and beds, it's his problem. Of course, that's not really realistic -- it's really my problem, since we'll end up paying for steroid shots or arthritis meds later in his life, if he injures hisself.

Her Highness, Tink. She's an impressive specimen, and tell me if you saw this cat you'd know she was eight years old, because she will be in not much more than a week, and I'd never guess. Lucky Tink (and us), she seems not to have any signs of arthritis so far. I worry about that with this crew, though more with Gord than Tink, since we don't know his history, and until we had the run, Tink didn't get to go outside much.

He almost -- almost -- looks like a real cat.

I can't help it -- I like this shot of Tink. Can't really explain it.

In the 'general information' category, Doodle's got what looks like a rodent ulcer going on her upper lip this time. We've decided to give it another week to see if it gets worse -- it's inflamed, and has been, but sometimes she gets things like that and they go away. Unfortunately, rodent ulcers on the upper lip can cause tissue erosion, and (fortunately) we know steroid shots will usually settle her skin down, so if the mess ain't cleaned itself up now that the weather's cooler (and potential allergens are less highly concentrated), we'll take her in and get her a shot. She'll hate it, give us grief and probably shoot her anal glands, but better that than have her upper lip erode and give her more trouble than her half-toothless mouth already does.

Doodle, for all we love her dearly, falls into the 'no good deed ever goes unpunished' box. Absolutely no question.

If she was yours, you delivered her to the Clermont County Animal Shelter in the autumn of 1997. She was one of a litter of three, if the shelter employee was right. I don't know what her mother looked like, or her father, or even the male kitten from the litter. I can make a guess that her father was probably also a gray tabby, or else her mother; the other female kitten in the litter looked just like her except she was a medium haired cat. She was just as big, for a two month old kitten (that's how old Tink is, in this picture). This was winter, so there weren't many kittens -- she had a fair shot, especially if her mother was already taken by the time we got her. Another couple took her sister at the same time we took Tink. I imagine they have quite a piece of cat on their hands, if they still have her.

Was this yours?

Probably not, and you probably don't care if she was. She was found at my mother's house in a small town in Clermont County. She was about six months old, not neutered, and didn't appear to have had much (if any) veterinary care. She was eating junk off the compost pile and probably eating mice or birds. If she was yours, I'm glad you don't know where she is, because if you'd kept her, she'd be dead by now, one way or another.

Was this yours?

If Gord belonged to you, you dumped him or let him run loose in Oakwood, Ohio. Someone who fosters animals for SICSA found him. He was around two years old and had never been neutered. I still see kittens around here with the same round belly, golden eyes, tomato soup coat and stubby legs and tail -- he must have fathered hundreds of kittens before he was neutered through the shelter. He's very sweet tempered, though, at least now he's been neutered. He's scared of a lot of stuff, mostly noises, but even if he was yours to begin with, I can't say with any certainty that's your fault. Running loose on the streets in a fairly high-density suburban area can make a cat neurotic, even if the people who lost or dumped him were perfectly decent to him. You lost a sweetheart of a cat, though he does whine for food a lot. He'd look like an ambulatory basketball if he got all the food he wanted, so that's okay, too.

Was this yours?

It's unlikely that you really cared very much what happened to Squeek, but she was a door-darter when we first got her, and before we put in the animal run and she could go outside as she pleased (more or less), so I'm willing to entertain the possibility you might have had her and she might have slipped out the door unnoticed. We ran a week-long ad in the local daily newspaper lost and found section, though, and put her on the registry at SICSA. If you'd looked very hard for her, you could have found her. She's shirty. Real shirty. She also has a white tip on her otherwise mostly black tail, and has a voice that would cause you to name a cat Squeek. She was somewhere around five or six months old in the picture (it was taken the day after we found her), hadn't been neutered and we assume either wandered off or was dumped pretty shortly before we found her, since she wasn't pregnant and didn't have fleas. For her age, she wasn't especially underfed -- she really was in decent condition. If she just wandered off, and you didn't think to call SICSA or look in the lost and found ads in the newspaper, well, I kind of feel sorry for you -- she's a very entertaining little cat.

Was this yours?

This was Max when we first adopted him. He came from a shelter in Brookville, Indiana, but as his foster told us -- he could have come from anywhere. With all the Interstate highways running through this part of the country (I-75, I-70, I-71), he could have started out just about anywhere north, south, east or west of here. He could have bolted at a truck stop, wandered out of the yard, or you could have dumped him 'in the country, because somebody will take him in.' Yeah, people used to do that to friends of mine down in Clermont County. There was one guy who had so many female cats he started having to take them to the county shelter because even the biggest farm only needs so many cats, and after a while, it becomes a burden. But back to the original subject -- if Max belonged to you, you treated him at least relatively well. I say this because with a dog, even more so than with a cat, you can tell a lot about his previous owners by the things that frighten him now. There are many things of which a dog can be frightened: a raised hand, a rolled newspaper or magazine, thunder, loud noises, other dogs, strangers, children. Max is frightened of exactly none of these things. The only thing that seems to scare him is scolding. I definitely feel sorry for you if you simply lost this little guy. He's a little headstrong, but at his size that's kind of tolerable if we don't need him to mind about every little thing. If we wanted to do agility or pet facilitated therapy with him, he could be taught to do what he needed to do -- he's bright enough to learn. I still want to know why he looks at me like I'm saying something when I say certain words. 'Dinky' is one of those words. Don't ask me how it came up, but strangely enough, 'ureter' is another. I don't know if he was named Dinky, or if he was around other animals named Dinky (or something that sounds like it, like Pinky or Winky), and damfino what the response to ureter was about. It wasn't said directly to him, but boy did his head snap around when he heard the word. There aren't many words that even sound like ureter -- and he didn't have that kind of response when we started saying words that sounded simlar. I'm baffled.

But I'm baffled by a lot of things, especially the histories of the critters in the house. Tink's wasn't long before we found her, and having grown up in the house my mother still has, I know what life is like for cats who aren't inside cats in that little town. Gord probably wasn't treated badly, and Squeek seems trusting enough. Max was originally owned by people who couldn't possibly ever have abused him -- nothing that would intimidate a dog who'd been abused bothers him.

I dunno -- sometimes I just wonder.

This is a nice little transposition -- the PowerBook in the background has one of Max's 'dodo' shots on it. He doesn't actually look like he's drooling into his beard in this one, we just liked it because of the image on the PowerBook.

This one, however, consists of pure, unalloyed dumb.

He left a noseprint on the camera that lasted through the next couple of shots. No, I don't know what the bloody hell he thought he was doing. Assuming he thinks is probably gilding the lily.

Max buried in my hair. Tony took that one, and also the one where Max's nose is jammed on the lens and he looks like some bizarre light anomaly sent back from the Galileo space probe or the misaligned Hubble telescope.

And as a palate cleanser, a dose of pure, unalloyed evil:

Also known as "yet another crappy, not at all characteristic picture of Squeek."

The reason I know this is, almost everybody on our block who has a dog, except for us, lets the dog shit in the yard and doesn't bother to go out and pick it up.

Since I don't find dog crap in our yard often (now that the old goofball from the next block up who used to walk his miniature poodle without a lead and let it run wild and shit anywhere it wanted, and though he carried a plastic bag in his hand I never once saw him touch a turd), I have to guess that at least nobody's walking their dogs and letting them shit in other people's yards and not picking it up. If they are, they're not doing it at our house. If they're doing it somewhere else, they're breaking the law -- our municipality has rules about that stuff.

Max seldom shits in our yard, so it's not much of an issue to pick up after him here. He usually has to walk about three-quarters of the way around the block before he looses his bowels anyway, so I always take the morning's newspaper bag and pick up the poop in it, and we put the poop in the garbage.

I actually think some people think dog poop is good fertilizer. They're wrong -- commercial dog food largely consists of vitamin-preserved cereal grains and meat protein (which don't decompose very quickly). When's the last time you saw a blanched white dog turd? For me, it's been at least a decade.

This isn't necessarily a bad sign, by the by -- it probably means the dog food they're selling now has a better protein percentage than it used to, and the preservatives they use now are effective. It also means, however, that a dog turd will sit in the grass for a week, or until rain or irrigation dissolves it (or the dog goes back and eats it some time when you're not watching). Dumping preservative-treated grains and meat protein in your yard isn't good for the grass at all. There's nothing in there that's good for your grass, even if the turds did decompose at a faster rate -- meat protein and grain aren't things you'd use to feed a lawn.

There are 'doody composters' you can buy that will turn the crap into compost that could be used on the yard, but if they had those, the turds wouldn't be lying out in the grass six inches from the sidewalk for two or three weeks (or, in the winter, when there's snow on the ground, right smack in the middle of the freakin' sidewalk) like these do.

I don't understand people -- why would you just let the dog shit in your yard and leave it there until it melts? Even if they're only polluting their own yards, what the hell is wrong with somebody who leaves animal feces sprinkled over their lawn all year 'round -- especially when they have little kids? There's all manner of things humans can pick up from contact with animal feces, like roundworms, pinworms, whipworms, amoebic intestinal parasites like coccidia and giardia, bacterial infections like E. Coli... they might as well just smear dog shit on their kids and get it over with.

People are so lazy about this, in fact, that there's a growing business opportunity -- going around and picking up other people's dog shit. I kid you not, go to Google and type in something like 'dog poop' and 'service' and maybe 'lawn' and you'll probably be able to find one in your area, if you look long enough. People actually can't be arsed to pick up their own dogs' shit even when it's five feet from the front door. They would rather pay somebody to go out and pick it up than do it themselves. Tell you what -- good on the first guy who thought of offering that as a service!

Feh. I suppose letting your dogs shit in your own yard still isn't as annoying as letting your cats go off and shit in other people's yards. Ours won't even shit in the run -- I don't even have to clean up after them. I don't see very many cats roaming here, though. There are a couple a block up that I see outside, but they stay on the porch or in the front yard. I suppose running the gauntlet of dog shit is just too disgusting for their delicate sensibilities, I don't know.

On edit -- scanned some analog camera pics, so there's one of Max in there. Sorry in advance for the quality of the scans -- scanner glass is probably dirty, since I don't use it very often (it's a snack table, for the most part), now that I have a digital that will do photos sufficient to post on line at lower than 300 dpi resolution.

Here are a couple of shots from the Nikon, of the cats looking out at the snow a month or so ago:

I love to take pictures of them around the blinds -- they always look better than pictures taken anywhere else in the house, a combination of the contrast of the blinds with the shape of cats and better light, I guess.

This image, and the next ones too, are great examples of how I described Squeek at the end of the last entry -- shirty. She's not that bad, actually, she just gets pissy after the first time the flash goes off in her eyes. Only problem is, she won't sit still long enough to let me get the Nikon SLR set up to take low-light pics of her in the house, and besides that, those always come out kind of yellow. Not that flash pictures of her are all that much of an improvement ...

See? Shirty as it gets.

Shot of Gord on the top of the tower. Most of the time, Tink's up there, but Gord's up there the rest of the time, pretty much.

And Her Royal Highness taking her turn.

Interestingly enough, Gord goes through these phases where he acquiesces to the hierarchy in the household and plays subordinate to Tink. Not sure what it was about, this time -- there hasn't been anything really unusual going on around the house, so he's not feeling insecure. Whatever it is, it's pretty funny for us, especially as big a bully as Gord can be.

Gives you an idea how much Tink thinks of Gord -- she didn't move her tail for at least half an hour. Gord knew it was there, but I guess he decided it wasn't worth it to get her to move it.

Ah, but once in a while they have their moments, too.

The only recent digital shot of Doodle that's worth putting on here.

Here's another one of Doodle, this time an analog shot taken at another time -- you'd think she never moved from that spot, but actually she's the busiest cat in show business. Not sure how it happened.

Finally, the last two shots of Squeek -- she was in the kitchen, the light wasn't bad, and I had the camera. Gord, of course, is lurking in the background in the second picture -- if we're anywhere near the kitchen, he labors under the delusion that food just might possibly happen and, as always, he would have some of that:

Here's one of Max from the roll on the Nikon:

The answer is, "yes, he does that a lot."

Then she usually flops down on the near upper corner of Tony's pillow (with a not-insignificant portion of her ass blocking my book) and closes her eyes.

No, I don't really think she wants any attention. If I reach up to pet her, she bails out that much faster. She just wants to have her thirty seconds or so of prancing about, then to flop down in that somehow consecrated spot for a brief while. Once I turn the light off -- if not before I turn the light off -- she evaporates.

She's also the one who can least tolerate being ignored, though we've yet to come to any deep understanding of precisely what she wants when she solicits attention. Tink usually wants some portion of the standard package -- a few minutes of petting (usually at a time or in a situation that makes Max jealous); for you to close yourself up with her privately in the upstairs bathroom; for you to sit on the bed and let her mount herself like a Manitou on your back or your chest. The only unpredictable think about Tink's soliciation of attention, for that matter, is when it will come.

Gord, for his part, doesn't really give a shit if you pay exclusive attention to him. He likes to sit on your lap, but he's content to have little or no individual attention focused on him when he does. He'll sit there for however long he had in mind to begin with -- five to ten minutes, usually, though he has been known to camp for as long as a half-hour -- and then he'll bail out.

Doodle wants -- at least when she comes to me -- for me to follow her around from window to window, and sometimes to wind up the 'tour' by sitting sideways in the bath tub with my feet hanging over the edge, petting her in the remaining (however limited) part of the open tub, while she purrs loudly and rolls around with her motley feet waving in the air ...

And, well, we all know about the dog. He would sit on my lap 24/7, with only temporary breaks to eat and poop, if he thought I'd let him get away with it.

Squeek will suddenly show up off the port bow of my computer chair, when I'm sitting at my desk. She'll grumble a bit in her pathetic excuse for a voice (remember why we named her that?), and if this doesn't accomplish anything -- and frequently, it doesn't -- she'll stand up with her front paws on the arm of the chair and glare at me. If this escalation doesn't result in any action, she'll flip out her claws and insert them into my triceps. Sometimes, she'll drop her ten pounds against whatever I'm wearing, so she's actually pulling my shirt down off my shoulder with her weight.

What she seems to desire is for me to go upstairs with her and sit cross-legged on the carpet remanant in front of the front door. After that, it's a bit of a poser -- sometimes, that's all she wants, and after that, she wanders off. Sometimes, she wants more, and that's where the mystery enters in. She doesn't really liked to be handled about 90% of the time, she just wants to flounce back and forth while I sit on the cold floor on my butt. She doesn't really seem to want to play. The four of them have, between them, made every single toy I've given them upstairs in the past six months disappear, somehow (even with the new futon, which clears the floor by at least five more inches than the old sofa that we had the garbage folks take away months ago) they've been spirited off into one of the myriad piles of assorted stuph (we still have Christmas gift bags on the floor in the front room). Squeek goes all shirty if the dog, say, or one of the other cats larks on in nonchalantly. If I try to play with her, pretty soon every non-human mammal on the premises shows up, including groundhogs and squirrels, so she has to know by now that's not really a great option.

Actually, I shouldn't say Squeen 'gets shirty' -- that would be inaccurate.

See, Squeek apparently exists in a more or less constant state of mild annoyance all the hours of the day she's not asleep. Kind of like me, if I were honest. Which is to say, as aggravating as it can be, I can hardly say I mind it. She and Tink seem pretty intelligent, as these things go, and they're both attractive and/or entertaining enough to offset their usually barely incipient bitchiness.

Kind of like, as I noted, me.

Of course, she probably knows that if she genuinely felt threatened, those eighteen daggers at the ends of her toes could easily slip the hide off a buffalo without the buffalo breaking stride, so she has no reason in the world to lack confidence. She's the size of a Jack Russell terrier and probably stronger. Though she's fairly peaceful, I dread the day she ever has to do more then bop Max on the nose to keep him in line -- she could really do him some damage, if he got too uppity.

It's easy to ignore Tink, most of the time, because even though she was the first cat we got, once she developed the grudge she seems to carry to this day sometimes, over us going away for our honeymoon, she really didn't want a whole lot of high-volume contact or attention from the humans. Don't get me wrong -- the girl would have some of whatever you're eating or, if you won't offer it, the food you're determined that she eat. I've never had her turn her nose up, if it was something she could reasonably be expected to eat. She's the easiest cat ever, except for the hairballs, and all that requires is a good-quality maintenance food with enough bulk to keep the hair moving out her asshole.

Royal Canin, since you asked. Indoor formula. I think the 'key number' on that formula is 27, but I'm not sure. It's got the same basic stuff the Iams has -- dental plaque removers, bulk-forming hairball movers, lower overall fat and calories than the kitten or young cat/outdoor cat formulae. Unlike the Iams, she hasn't yakked up a hairball for quite a while (about a week after we put her on the RC, for that matter, after a month of weekly pukes for her, and daily regurgitations for Doodle).

Okay, so here goes. I can't fault Iams for their community service -- they genuinely go out of their way, here in Dayton, to donate to animal charities and help out the shelters. Unfortunately, I can't say with great confidence that their food is as good quality as it once was. The one thing you'd think a low-calorie, high-bulk hairball food would accomplish would be to keep cats from puking hairballs up all over the floor. It accomplished this admirably for a long time -- I think we had all four cats on it for the better part of two years, altogether, though we did go back to the regular hairball food for a while.

When the food you pay extra for so it'll keep you from having to clean up gut-slimy cat hair off the floor is no longer preventing you from having to clean up gut-slimy cat hair off the floor, it's time to re-evaluate your loyalty. I did that, and I decided to find something else.

Net result -- everybody happy. No hairballs, no puke, rare regurgitation from Doodle (though she does still yak occasionally, usually if I feed her too big a portion or she eats what she gets too fast), good dental condition, nice coats on everybody.

I still won't talk Iams down, since they do seem to try ... but their shit doesn't smell like candy anymore around here, since the quality is off. Procter and Gamble didn't do them any favors buying them, except to make beaucoup bucks for the people at Iams who received the payoff. Whoop-de-do. I can hardly bring myself to feel good for the people at Iams who raked in an assload of dough when I'm peeling cold, slimy cat puke full of protein matter off the soles of my feet at two in the morning on my way to the pisser.

And that's the way it is.

The ebb and flow of which cat is where is kind of a funny thing. When I wake up in the mornings, Tink and Gord usually are somewhere in the bedroom. Sometimes Doodle and Squeek, as well, but not always -- sometimes one or both of them will be in a window in another room.

Tink heads immediately for the bathroom where, while I'm making my morning stop, she will prance around so I can pay my respects, usually walking under my legs at least once, flicking herself back and forth along the edge of the bath tub right under my nose (it's a tiny bathroom for a master bath; I didn't design the house), then licking the plastic bag for the extra rolls of toilet paper, if they're still in it. The licking of bags is Tink's way of telling us she's hungry. She'll do it at night, if I haven't shown signs of going to bed soon enough for her after Tony's gone to bed; sometimes she wakes us up with it if we've left a plastic bag on the bedroom floor.

Tony gets up way before I do, gets his shower, then lies down on the futon in the front room for a nap most mornings. Doodle almost always camps on him there.

Once I'm up and moving around, everybody shows up in the kitchen for food, of course. Even if Doodle and Squeek don't want it especially, they'll show up. Doodle eats on the divider (I don't give her very much -- she yaks it back up, if I do), Gord and Tink on the floor on either side of the filtered water bowl, Squeek wherever -- right now, it's on top of our Coleman cooler. She likes to stand on something to eat, and she won't eat out of a bowl -- the food is scattered on top of the cooler for her. She's never eaten kibble out of a bowl the whole time she's been here. She won't do it.

As soon as they're done eating, I let Max out of his crate (Tink won't eat if he's loose) and the cats retire to either the windows or the family room, where the door to the run is. It's been fairly warm the past week, so most mornings as soon as I get downstairs, I open the run and they all wander out for a few minutes, then in, then out. That's the reason, more than any concern I might have for them, that I don't open it when it's colder out. They fan the door so much they create an arctic microclimate right next to my computer.

Mostly, Gord and Doodle and Squeek go out, though Tink frequently makes one pass and then settles in somewhere warm elsewhere in the house -- most often, the back of the futon in the living room, where she can see out the front window.

Squeek and Doodle take turns soliciting food all morning, when I'm at the computer. If they can get into the run, that's the cycle -- beg for food, go outside and wander around until their feet are wet, come back in, flop down somewhere, get up, go outside, beg for food ... lather, rinse, repeat.

Tink frequently hangs on the periphery in any room the humans are in. She always did, from the time we went on our honeymoon and left her with the MIL on. I think she felt betrayed. The MIL fed her and came around, but she wouldn't have known all the interactive games we played and probably wouldn't have catered to Tink's obsessive-compulsive need to play those games for, oh, say a half-hour or forty-five minutes. In the townhouse in Clermont County, Tink used to love to have toys thrown up into the stairwell. She'd chase them up, then bat them back down the stairs until they landed at the bottom, at which point we pitched them up the stairwell again. Once we moved into the house, she started playing fetch -- she did that until we brought Doodle home, because Doodle thought she could get into the act, too, but she didn't have the smarts to bring the toys back. She'd just carry them off somewhere else. Tink quit playing, though once in a while if she's the only one upstairs and you throw a mouse or a cork down the length of the living room, she'll still follow and bring it back once. After that, she remembers we ruined her life by bringing other cats into the house and goes off to sulk.

At any given time of day or night, if we can't find Squeek, she'll have buried herself in what I had thought to be the single most unsuccessful cat bed ever made. I made it by hand, it's a structural foam box with one side open; the outside is covered in heavy flannel, the inside in polar fleece. None of the cats ever wanted anything much to do with it -- it's too small for everybody but Doodle, and I don't think Doodle liked having her view restricted in a house with three other cats in it.

When we first brought Squeek home, the thing already had been remaindered under my desk. Imagine my surprise when, one night, I looked down and saw a pair of eyes shining out of it. We tried moving it out into the room again, but she'd have nothing to do with it unless it was buried somewhere, barely accessible and you couldn't tell she was in it. It now resides under the coffee table at one end of the family room, just behind the laundry room door. Any time we can't find her anywhere else, that's where she is.

Doodle and Squeek both like to get into the cabinets in the kitchen, too. It's not that they're looking for anything -- they like to get under things, and the bottom shelves of the glassware cabinet under the divider between the kitchen and the dining room are perfectly spaced for a small cat. If we're not careful to close the doors completely, one of them (usually Doodle) crawls in there and goes to sleep. More than once we've had to look all over the house for her before going away for the day or going to bed, because she'll be trapped in there.

The worst part with both Squeek and Doodle getting shut up in places is that neither of them can muster up a decent 'meow' unless she's really ticked off. Squeek yowls like a banshee when Gord picks on her, and they both holler like they're on fire when we pick them up to clip their claws.

Sometimes, I find Gord lying under the barstools upstairs, in the dining room. There's a heat register in the dining room about a foot and a half off the floor that blows directly on the floor. He'll park his butt right in front of it and go to sleep for several hours.

Other favorite spots are the futon by the picture window in the front room, the spare bed in the second bedroom (Doodle and Tink, especially, like to kip there), the cat furniture in the family room, the leather sofa there (if there's a blanket on it) and some odder places. Squeek sometimes crawls under the bed with the dog to snooze. She couldn't care less about him, she doesn't curl up next to him, I don't think -- she just parks herself somewhere else under there.

Oddly enough, we seldom find any of them on our bed if we're not in it. The dog sleeps under there during the day, but even before we got Max nobody much used it. They prefer the second bedroom. There are litter boxes in there, that may be the reason; the headboard of the bed heaves right up under the windows in that room, so that may also give preference to that one. They do like to sleep on a cardboard storage box I put on top of my tall dresser. I threw a towel over it for them, since they've now identified it as a sleeping place. You really can't fight it, and frankly I can't see what harm it does. The only place any of them prefers that's inconvenient is Doodle and the glassware cabinet, and it's more a problem of her getting shut in there and not being able to make enough noise to get somebody to let her out than anything else.

At night, Tony usually goes to bed twenty minutes or so earlier than I do. When he crawls in bed, usually one or both of the torties joins him. Doodle will, on occasion, assert her right as a higher member of the hierarchy and boot Squeek off the bed, though if we go to bed at the same time she's less likely to do it, I guess because she gets Tony and doesn't care if I pay attention to Squeek. As long as Squeek doesn't 'horn in' on her attention, she's okay.

Lately, if I come to bed and try to read for a while, as often as not Squeek climbs up on the bed, walks across the pillow between my face and the book, then camps on Tony's pillow by his head until I turn the light off. I have to lie on my stomach to read because, you see, Tink sometimes heaves herself up on the bed for the night before I kill the light. If I'm not in the position I want to be while I sleep, she'll plant herself somewhere inconvenient for me -- so I have to hang a leg out from under the covers, or cross my legs on the bed, or somehow contort myself around her. I've been doing it so long -- she's done this off and on since she was a kitten, though she used to let you move under the covers and would just get up and resettle. Now, she'll grunt, flop around and generally express her annoyance or else make a great show of hopping off the bed in a huff.

It's the only time Tink goes out of her way to be right there with us, so I try not to discourage her from doing it. I think that was the reason she had problems with us leaving the dog out overnight. He'd crawl under the bed, and she wouldn't come sleep with us. She just doesn't trust him, I guess. Considering she was five years old before we wedged the dog into the household, and that she's pretty finicky about having things changed (at one point I went from working part-time to full-time, and that was when the occasional turd on the floor started appearing in the downstairs bathroom, where we keep the other litter boxes), I suppose we're fortunate we can compromise enough to suit her. The dog sleeps in his crate overnight, and she's okay with that.

Well, that's not the only reason we crate him, actually. The last thing you need when you're logy in the morning is an overexcited dog getting in your face. I found that out the hard way. He scratched my cornea once, which sent us to an urgent care waiting room full of flu victims who inadvertently shared the wealth with both of us, and ruined one entire Christmas break for both Tony and me.

Gord also likes to kip between Tony's tall dresser and mine. There's a heat register under Tony's dresser with a plastic directioner on it; it puts his butt right in the heat flow. All of them also will sleep on anything left on the floor in the bedroom -- clothing, mostly. Gord went through a phase of liking to wallow on my underpants, but he seems to have gotten over that. I don't think there was anything to it but that the fabric was soft -- he likes that more than the other cats do.

I ruined Gord's life for a while, a couple of weeks ago, when I went from a CRT monitor to a flatscreen. Though I put a box on my desk behind the flatscreen, where he used to sit, he won't sit on it. The CRT monitor housing was warm, you see, and Gord's a big heat sink. Fortunately, unlike Tink and Doodle, he's able to adjust -- he just camps somewhere else. We went through a big scare with Doodle once, when we'd bought a new mattress for our bed and moved the old one into the second bedroom, to put on a bed frame we hadn't set up yet. We moved the chair in the corner away from the window, you see. She couldn't get to the window, and commenced to barfing everything she ate. Cost $200 in tests and overnight observation at the vet clinic just to find out the thing that was bugging her was that we'd moved the chair away from the window. As soon as I moved it back, and we assembled the bed, no more acting out.

It probably sounds kind of wacko to somebody who doesn't have a house full of cats, but I don't think it would make that much difference between two and four, to be honest. Tink and Doodle are the nutty ones, and if we'd stopped with them we'd still be having to check the cabinets upstairs, go to sleep in the position we wanted to be in all night, never move any furniture without the expectation one or both of them would 'go off,' whatever. Gord and Squeek both handle those things reasonably well. We already had the two nutty cats in the house when we took on more, and Tink had more trouble accepting the second animal in the house than she's had with any of the other cats (the dog is a different story, not surprisingly).

Obviously, Gord owns it.

Well, except when Tink does, of course. Nobody's on it all the time, and so far I think everybody but Doodle has managed to fall off the top.

Got it for about $120 at the local pet store -- I know I remember seeing it in there for twice that about a year ago, but I guess nobody wanted to pay that much for it. I didn't either, obviously. Paid about the same for it as we did for the old green one that was getting so shagged. I moved it upstairs for the time being -- it's right next to the picture window in the front room upstairs, now, until I can decide whether to part ways with it or not. Funny that it's better hidden in the front room upstairs than it is down here, in the back, in the family room.

Okay, it isn't really funny at all, is it?

See, as far as we're concerned, Max has no history before the month he spent with Barb (Weimer, his foster with Franklin County Humane Society in Indiana), he came in as a 'found on street' dog to her, but clearly there were few or no problems while he was with her. Aside from the occasional reflexive kick-off of his hunt mechanism, he's a model shelter adoption. See, if one of the cats darts across in front of him and startles him, sometimes he'll snarl and start after them, though he never gets to them because they're faster, and all are good-sized and fully equipped; only Tink is afraid of him, and that wouldn't keep her from defending herself if he went way off the deep end. He's smarter than that -- he knows they could hurt him bad.

Incidentally, I write off the chasing to the fact he may well have had to feed himself by snatching squirrels or rabbits -- who knows? He did manage to grab a fledgling robin out of the air once, grabbed a mouse up out of some ivy, and has cornered both a squirrel and a rabbit that doubtless he could have taken if I hadn't pulled him away.

Max may have wandered off from somebody who just didn't have the resources or energy to care for him while they had him or look for him once he was gone -- he's a very energetic dog, and emotionally needy, so clearly he would have required plenty of attention. A person or family with too many kids, too many bills, not enough time ... an elderly person who was growing too incapacitated to care for him/herself ... there are many situations I could understand somebody cutting him loose, few of them having entirely to do with Max himself. Cutting a dog like him loose to fend for himself seems singularly cruel, but it doesn't seem to have done him any long-term harm -- better if they'd turned him in directly to a shelter, there's no way a pretty, well-behaved dog like Max would have been put to sleep even at a kill shelter.

It's doubtful that Max came out of a puppy mill situation, but I guess it's possible. I think Barb would have known, though; as trusting as he is, and as good with people and other animals (not to mention the fact that he's clearly not breed standard Pomeranian, if that's what he is) it's unlikely. But I got off on that tangent today, anyway.

You see, neither Tony nor I have ever bought a pet from a breeder or pet store. Every dog he had growing up was taken in because somebody else didn't want it -- one of the dogs, he and his mother took in when his grandmother was no longer able to care for it, another they found during a snowstorm and nobody ever claimed it.

I never had any pets of my own growing up, though until I was in school there was a stream of outside cats, ending with Blackie -- an unaltered male who wound up on the shoulder of our street with his head crushed by a car's wheel. He was the last cat. Mom and Dad had a Chihuahua named Pepe (yeah, original, I know) when I was born, presumably a purebred. Between having to deal with being displaced as the center of attention and having to deal with an active, curious toddler he was a real joy to be around -- for me, anyway.

When my younger brother was diagnosed with juvenile diabetes, back when we both were teenagers, they let him research and pick out a dog ... who promptly fell ill with parvovirus and bonded with my father, then really never favored anybody else in the family as much as he did Dad for the next eleven or so years.

Robin (named after the British Olympic figure skater Robin Cousins) was also unaltered, a purebred Yorkshire Terrier with horrible flea allergies (this was before the advent of Advantage-style flea treatments, when about all that could be done for Robin was frequent bathing, chopping all the hair off his ass and Prednisone pills). What time he didn't spend lying in front of the heat registers trying to make up for the hair he chewed off because of the fleas, or chewing off his hair because of the fleas, he spent biting the crap out of everybody but my father. Sometimes, he even bit him.

Me, I never bought an animal. My first husband and I took a 'free to good home' cat when he was in the service (who lived over 18 years, well outlasting the marriage). Tony and I adopted Tink from an animal shelter. We took Doodle and Squeek in off the street. Gord was at the shelter where we volunteer, and Max also came from a shelter. By taking them in, that made for five slots at various shelters for five more animals who'd end their lives that much sooner, if we'd just left them or let somebody else take care of them.

I know that with all my animals being foundlings, and volunteering at a shelter, you'd probably get the idea that I'm anti-breeding. I'm not, actually -- but I am for thoughtful breeding toward a purpose. There are responsible breeders in the world, people who breed animals for the same kinds of reasons we adopted other people's castoffs. It's fairly common among shelter and rescue people to resent any deliberate breeding of animals, and I think understandably so -- they deal with all kinds of animals, from 'oops' animals to those bought from the most reputable breeders that the people who bought them just didn't put enough research and thought into, and found they couldn't mesh them with their lifestyles. Most of the people I deal with at the shelter where Tony and I volunteer are more like we both are about it, though -- there's a case to be made for some controlled, thoughtful breeding of dogs, though anything beyond that makes me cringe.

Let me give you a hint about what I think makes a reputable, responsible breeder -- it ain't money, and it ain't about money for them. To breed animals responsibly, people generally have to invest at least as much, if not more more, in grooming, medical treatment and care, research, etc. than they'll ever make on the progeny of their purebred, registered, good specimen animals. They do research into the lines of the animals they plan to breed, and the ones that aren't suitable they neuter and keep, or neuter and sell as pets (or with a contract that specifies they be neutered, in some cases). They agree with the people who take the animals that if anything happens and the animal no longer has its original home, they will take the animal back and, in some cases, they'll even refund part of all of the purchase price because they aren't in in for the money, as I noted.

Now, people who buy an animal at a pet store at the mall and don't get it neutered ... and without any consideration toward whether it's healthy, well-adjusted, psychologically and mentally sound, or in other ways a good specimen of its genetic line allow it go get pregnant or impregnate another animal ... don't ask me what they're into it for. I wouldn't think it was money -- you can't get an awful lot for a pathetically inadequate, non-standard animal, whether it's purebred on paper or not. Nobody who cares anything about breed standard is going to pay for your borderline mutt's puppies, and anybody who knows so little about it they don't care about anything but the breed name (and knows little or nothing about the breed standards, conformation or behavior) isn't going to pay very much. If they do, they're not too bright -- poorly bred puppies aren't worth much.

This applies to kittens, as well, but I really think the backard and mill breeding problem is more extensive with dogs because particular breeds go through fads, unlike with cats. Oh, sure -- occasionally, you'll see a Siamese or a Persian cat in a movie or a commercial, but usually the cats you see in ads, even if purebreds, look like the cats you see at the animal shelter. Tink, for instance, is one of the most beautifully formed cats I've ever seen, and she's a Porch Cat. The ex and I had somebody offer us a couple of hundred dollars for Norman Bates when he was about a year old, because this person bred American Shorthairs and thought he was an excellent specimen that would be good for adding a little genetic diversity to his lines. Bates came out of the front yard of a fellow Air Force enlisted guy's trailer in a trailer park.

There is some snobbery with cats, but most of the people involved in cat shelter and rescue, while moderately savvy about breeds, really don't care much about that. Even without breeding of cats, there would be plenty of strays. Maybe it's because cats vary from one to another almost as much as human beings do, and there aren't that many behavioral characteristics you can breed into or out of a cat, unlike dogs.

I don't know if the same is true with dogs, but anecdotally, it seems to me most of the mutts I've encountered over the years are neutered. Because dogs are more trouble than cats to begin with -- I don't care how you slice it, they take up more space, require more care and cause more trouble when they do cause trouble, for instance with neighbors -- I don't think most average dog owners allow their mixed breed dogs to breed indiscriminately. I know many men have some kind of primitive, reflexive fear of having their dogs neutered, but if they're willing to deal with the aggression and the reflexive indoor pissing that seems to go along with unaltered male dogs -- as long as they don't let them breed -- I really don't care one way or the other. Most dogs adopted from animal shelters these days are already altered by the shelters, so that cuts down on it even more. The average mutt or shelter dog adopter, in other words, neuters or has no choice, or keeps the dog inside if s/he doesn't neuter.

Most unwanted dogs who wind up their lives at a shelter have likely come, whether directly or indirectly, from pet stores. Virtually every dog (or cat, I guess, though it's been years since I saw a breed kitten at a pet store) sold from a pet store is bought from a broker, who buys the animal at auction from a commercial breeder (or puppy/kitten mill operator, to be less delicate). The hobbyist, reputable breeder breeds for his or her own pleasure and for the benefit of the animals; his or her ultimate goal is to enjoy the animal, give joy to the animal, improve the breed and potentially give joy to another owner, if the animal isn't of sufficient quality to continue to breed or to show, but is healthy and attractive and mentally sound.

The backyard or 'oops!' breeder has no goal, s/he simply hasn't thought ahead far enough to consider things like how expensive it is to whelp and raise a litter of puppies, how unlikely it is that s/he would even recover the feeding and medical expenses of a litter, etc. Commercial breeders don't care if the end-user neuters the meat machines they sell, though it would seem to me if they wanted to drive demand they'd see to it their little genetic sports were neutered so they didn't lose market share to the 'oops!' folks. Just my 2¢ worth.

Commercial breeders exist for one goal, and one goal only -- to make as much money for themselves as possible for as little expenditure as necessary. Improving the breed, enjoying the animal or providing any joy to the person who buys the animal are, if they are factors at all, secondary or tertiary factors. Number one is to get the money; number two is to avoid any liability if the animal winds up sick or develops a disease or genetic abnormality that was missed or overlooked during the operation of the extrusion of small mewling fists of meat and bone for the purpose of pure commerce.

Here are a few links on the subject:

Puppy Mill Rescue

This organization rehomes animals taken from mills that are shut down on animal cruelty violations, animals bought from mills for the purpose of rescue, and animals bought at broker's auctions. They're not shrill or strident -- they don't need to be. They show the animals in the condition in which they left the mills, and that's plenty to disgust most people.

What Is A Puppy Mill?

This site is maintained by and for people involved in both mill and breed rescues; the link is to a page that discusses various ideas about what constitutes a 'puppy mill' and some of the things that happen.

Pet Store Animals

A little bit of 'tough love' from someone who breeds for the benefit of the dog, on where pet store animals come from and what you're dealing with when you take one home.

Where They Come From

Information on all sources of animals, from reputable hobby breeders to mills and everything in between.

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There are other links out there, of course, but I decided not to post any of the more activist ones, because the ones I already posted -- which aren't shrill, especially, and generally tend to present the 'ugly truth' about the whole thing without a lot of emotional garnish -- are difficult enough to sift through, especially for someone whose only contact with the breeder might be buying the dog (if you actually bought the dog from a reputable breeder).

If you want to find activist links, you can find some off the pages posted. Any site that calls commercial breeders 'puppy mills' is likely to have pictures from one of several high-profile rescues from really disreputable, cruel operations that have occurred in the past decade. There have been cleanouts in North Carolina, Indiana, Missouri and Ohio that have resulted in scattershot enforcement of the relatively weak animal cruelty statutes in the states involved.

To be fair, it's generally not the fault of the animal welfare orgnizations or law enforcement that those who abuse animals this way aren't hit harder -- the laws in most states, especially in the Midwest and near eastern states, treat dogs and cats as chattel and require little more consideration to either farm or house animals than they do a chair. If someone else kills or abuses your animal, they're likely to be prosecuted approximately as if they'd come into your house and ripped your chair, too -- as if the animal were simply property, and any damage focuses on the real replacement value, not any punitive losses.

You are likely, as with a chair, to pay more dearly for abusing someone else's animal than for your own; in some cases or states, you may be seen to have a right to abuse or kill your own animals.

And I suppose, to some degree, that's not necessarily a problem. If you're stupid, cruel or callous enough to mistreat your own animals, it's your problem and, in whatever way you believe the universe works, eventually you'll pay for it. It takes a sickness I can't begin to understand to take on an animal you only want to mistreat, but then some people do it to their fellow human beings, too, I suppose it shouldn't be surprising they do it to animals. Okay, it's not really surprising to me -- just incomprehensible.

But, then, I don't understand acquiring a cat and then spending a hundred dollars or more to mutilate its feet, either, so I guess I'm a step more toward the activist side on this one than the ambivalent. The idea that volunteering for any given animal shelter is, because of people who see animals as a computer manufacturer sees computers, trying to piss on a forest fire is, admittedly, quite frustrating. As I noted, it's somewhat less frustrating when one works with cats, since many of the cats kicking out litters aren't decisively 'owned' by anybody. They're generally ferals, semi-wild cats or strays. Often, if they're dumped, they wind up at a shelter and are spayed before they're out of the building again. Few of them would have any papers even if you could find the original owners, because a relative minority of them ever had papers to start with. They came from the parking lot at SquallMart, or out from under the porch; they wandered across the lot when the people they lived with moved away and didn't take them.

Oddly enough, so much of this is stuff I would never have thought about if we hadn't gotten a dog from a shelter. If we'd bought a purebred dog, chances are (considering how I generally approach these things) we'd have researched it to within an inch of its life, talked to several breeders and gotten references. We wouldn't have wound up with a mill dog, in other words -- it would have been a dog from a decent genetic line, one whose breeding had been considered with some care. We wouldn't have bought from a pet store, or from some germy stall at a hicktown flea market (apparently, selling so-called breed dogs at 'th' flea markut' is all the rage with the mouth-breathing knuckle-draggers in my neck of the woods, these days). Yeah, boy -- that's where I want to buy my dog, at a flea market. About says it all about Ohio, doesn't it?

Oh, I could say lots and lots about Ohio, but I still have to live here. I've already said plenty, anyway -- our animal cruelty statutes and record of prosecution for animal abuse is enough to make anybody involved in shelter or rescue embarrassed. The only thing that seems to be a priority, oddly enough, is making sure that there are restrictions on the ownership of pit bulldogs. Sha' -- cuz everbody knoze them pitz'll kill a baybee! Once they taste blud they ain't wuth nothin', haw haw haw.

Yeah, Ohio's criminalized a breed of dogs because some of its owners are freakin' morons, but it won't criminalize the abuse or killing of animals to the point that the punishment means something or attempt to put any controls on breeding operations within state lines (they have to pay something like $20 and get a certificate; they're only required to have an inspection to acquire the certificate, and there are no inspections after that unless there's a complaint that the municipality or local law enforcement deem legitimate). That oughtta' tell you plenty. Money talks, bullshit walks -- that's what it oughtta' tell you.

We already cut down four trees (all silver maples that were full of bugs that would eventually have killed them, as little as I like to lose greenery), so I'll have to replace the 'visual interest' with something. So the home and garden planning software kills time before the mid-February seed starter date I gave myself last month, when I bought the starter packs and the seeds for the forget-me-nots, pinks and lobelias.

This is the software I've been using:

Oops -- was going to link to the page on the Broderbund site for the software (it's Broderbund 3D Home Architect Design Suite 6.0), but it's completely disappeared between two days before I purchased the software and now (a span of a whopping four days). I'm impressed they axed it that fast, and with so little warning -- I suppose the product support will be impressive, and the updates frequent. NOT.

Sigh. Oh, well -- at least the animals don't require upgrades. That's reassuring. Hope the seeds I bought to start early don't require any customer support -- I'm fooked if they do, because the original owners probably have left this plane of existence. Kali, I'm looking at you...

Anyway, enough about gardening -- this journal is intended primarily to be about the animals. Not much changes in big ways, but there are small changes, however transient they may prove to be.

For instance, this past week, Squeek has suddenly and firmly decided books that I want to read in bed at night are her enemies. If she wants to get up on the bed -- even after Tink is there, which doesn't seem to bother Tink, perhaps because she knows Squeek will leave voluntarily once the light goes off (or she can bully her off, if she doesn't) -- and have some attention at bedtime, well, screw my book. Squeek is more important, after all.

She gets right up in my face, on my pillow (I have to lie on my stomach and splay my legs to read, since Tink affixes herself to the bed for the night about ten minutes after I get into bed), between my eyes and the book, and walks back and forth until I give up on reading entirely and pet her.

This is unusual because Squeek usually doesn't ask for much, affection- or attention-wise, if she's not asking for food. She likes a minute or two at night from Tony, usually after I get in bed, and she'll let me run a hand over her head when I deliver food on the table by my desk, but that's about it most of the time.

But this time of year, I always enter the 'insomnia zone,' and no amount of melatonin, or antihistamines, or really much of anything not manufactured by Big Pharma and requiring embarrasingly candid admissions to my somewhat arrogant (however competent) primary care physician, seems to make much difference. So I try to read around the usual diversions that don't really matter much any other time of year -- Tony's snoring, Tink's camping between my knees and pinning me to the bed, the joy of wearing industrial-strength earplugs that almost but don't quite block out Tony's snoring (because they're designed to cut damaging high-frequency noise, not annoying low-frequency snoring), that sort of thing.

As has happened off and on for the past seven years, since we first brought her home in ninety-seven, Tink settles in between my knees early on; add to that the fact that Tony snores like an outboard motor; plus, this is the time of year my ears get tired of having mega-compression earplugs jammed in the canals and rebel by either developing ingrown hairs or just plain aching like a broken tooth when I jam the plugs in because to really block the sound I have to create a mild vacuum against my eardrums...

So to lull myself to sleep, I try to read something not too exciting for a while, when I first get in bed, since it has some return even if I'm not sleeping (which, quite frequently, I am not). Only the past few nights I haven't been able to, because it's pretty much impossible to read through ten pounds of tortie meat, however transparent the fact she's jealous of the book may be. Her jealousy, in other words, may be perfectly transparent; she is not.

Not that it matters to Squeek. Oh, no -- she doesn't seem to sleep much more than I do (cats generally spend about 60% of their day asleep, at Squeek's age, but there's no way she clocks more than half, when we're around), and I sleep somewhere in the vicinity of 25-33% of my time. No wonder she's a bloody psycho-freak -- for a cat, she's suffering sleep deprivation, most of the time.

Max is enjoying the snow, now that it's frozen fairly solid and, even when soft, not piled up above his ribcage. He actually loves to go out and run in the snow, and the cold seems to affect him not at all. Wish I could say the same -- when it's this cold, it takes me almost as long to wrap up to take him out for his late-morning walk as it does to do the walk itself, up and around the block.

Today, we walked the longer, Friday walk -- up two blocks, over one, down two and back -- and my kneecaps felt like frisbees by the time we got home. Max seemed unfazed, even though it was about ten degrees with a headwind for half of the walk. He's eating an ice cube, right now. I swear, this dog could live in Antarctica and never notice it was cold.

Not much other animal news. Tink and Gord are their usual food-begging, occasional lap-stealing selves. Gord steals a lap two or three times a day; Tink only does that on Fridays, if I'm sitting in my computer chair, just before Tony calls to say he's on his way home from work.

Some folks fool themselves their cats want to sit on their laps and petition for attention because they like them ... I'm convinced Tink does it because she's afraid if she doesn't, I'll somehow forget to give them their five o'clock/late afternoon (they don't get it until Tony gets home on the days I work) kibble. Because, you know, I forget it so often. Same thing as Schnickel walking on the bed, searching desperately for my bladder to put pressure on, first thing in the morning -- because I so frequently forget to feed them when I first stumble out of bed. They get their food before I get my coffee, and that tells you all you need to know about my priorities vis a vis the cats. It means one of two things -- I love them, or they're so freakin' annoying that if I didn't feed them before I poured my coffee, I'd kill them and stuff them in the freezer.

I refuse to answer that question on the grounds it may incriminate me.

They whine because they're on a permanent diet, of course, so they always think that if they're hungry I must have forgotten to give them food. Because there's nothing wrong with a normal (American) domestic shorthair housecat weighing 18 pounds, right? Except the possibility of them developing diabetes, and the fact that if something happened and one of them couldn't eat for a few days, they might develop fatty liver syndrome and croak. Other than that, there's nothing at all wrong with them being so overweight they're greasy, grumpy, itchy and covered with dandruff. Heh.

Which is to say, they can whine all they want, but they're getting what I say they're getting to eat, and that's it. The vets at the clinic give me the stinkeye if the cats get much over fifteen pounds, and I guess looking at them, I can kind of understand it (though Tink doesn't show her weight much because, unlike Gord, who actually gets a spare tire, she puts it on evenly all over her body and she's enormous), and they're better-tempered when they're not tubby and incapable of grooming themselves.

You gotta love winter, trapped in a small house with five domestic animals. It gets so, by this late in the season, the little shits own the place more than we do -- we lose the will to fight many of their quirks, and they generally decide many things. For instance, if you're not sitting at your computer right now, typing with a 22-pound Pomeranian mix draped across your arms, you have no idea what I'm talking about.

Seriously.

Other than letting them out into the snow for entertainment purposes, we haven't much. Two days after it snowed, the temps rose into the forties, and it's been between forty and sixty for the past week; the run is a huge chocolate pudding. When they go out, they return with wet feet and leave little kitty footprints on everything just inside the window, including the leather sofa.

The point was to write about the everyday stuff, and especially the stuff people don't think about when they start acquiring enough animals to put a basketball team on the floor.

We've been applying an antimicrobial gel to them all periodically -- we try for once a week, but we're among the most notorious procrastinators ever born (if not, I'd post here a hell of a lot more). The vet's advice was to apply the dental gel to Doodle every day for a week or two and see what happened, in hopes that it would settle down the gingivitis. We've been doing that -- well, such as we can with her -- by smearing a gob of it on one of her front paws every evening.

You see, Doodle is just one of those cats who reufses to tolerate having her head messed with. Tink will put up with a good twenty or thirty seconds' worth of handling out of us before she even gets grumpy about it, we could probably do just about anything to her she needed that we could do at home, and we might not even have to tag-team her -- we've both given her pills without any help.

Same goes for Gord, except one of us would probably have to hold and the other work, since he's strong and has no hesitation to dig in his claws if he doesn't want you to do something (I used to have to give him antibiotics when he was still at SICSA, so I know what that's about); if we tag-team him, the job gets done without too much fuss.

Squeek is small, and she's reasonably trusting, so though she'd squirm and probably holler, we could do anything we had to if we were careful and did it quickly if it didn't hurt her. Most things require two of us, though, just because she's squirmy and it's less likely one of us will hurt her trying to hold her and perform some quasi-medical function at the same time (though we've both done the dental gel on her solo, she doesn't seem to mind it too much).

Doodle will attempt to remove whatever body part is between her and running off to hide under something within the first five seconds. She flails, hollers, attempts to bite ... you name it. Anything ten pounds of fur and muscle can accomplish, she will at least attempt. Tag-teaming her isn't all that effective, because even when you grab the scruff of her neck out of desperation to just get something done, she still jerks her head back and forth.

We've tried bagging her in a pillow case, wrapping her in a towel -- nothing really works very well, though for pills I can kneel on the floor and back her up between my legs, then Tony can usually get a pill into her from the front. Liquid antibiotics are even easier, though she sometimes will flap her head and spit them out all over one of us, and it still takes two. It is easier to get them in her mouth, now that she's missing most of her back teeth, which is a mixed blessing.

Every time we take her to the vet, we go with our fingers crossed that there's nothing wrong with her that will require pilling her. We tried a pill injector with her, at one point, but we discovered it intimidates her even more than having us try to shove a pill down her throat and she won't even open her mouth for that. It would require three people to do it with a device (one to hold her still, one to open her mouth, one to inject the pill), where we usually can get them down her if we use the method above, if it takes a couple of tries sometimes.

Max is good about almost anything that isn't painful. All you have to do is call him and, even if he knows he's going to get a bath or be brushed, he'll come. It's the cookies we give him at the end, and the fact that he frankly adores both of us, of course. He's good, at least about those things, and he'll sit and let Tony smear dental gel all over his teeth without complaint. The only thing he hates is having his dewclaws clipped, and even that isn't a major production. One of us does have to hold and the other clip, but that's no worse than clipping any of the cats -- we always tag-team them for that, too, though I think I could do Tink and Gord by myself, and Tony probably could, too. Max actually begs for his heartworm pills (they're flavored, he thinks they're treats), and anything else can be molded into a gob of canned dog food and disappear in one swallow.

The temptation to think that Doodle's paranoia about having things done to her stems from some abuse before we took her in is very strong, but I really can't say I'm convinced it's all there is to it. Gord was on the street for who knows how long before we got him, possibly from kittenhood, I don't know. He wasn't neutered and he had an umbilical hernia when he got into the program at SICSA, so I'm guessing he never got any medical care before then or a vet would at least have fixed the hernia. If any of the cats is as likely as Doodle to have suffered abuse at human hands, it's him. He does struggle when you try to do some things, but not other things. If you get a pill into him quick he's not too bad, and he never fights about having his claws clipped; he doesn't always run off after we apply the dental gel, and Tony's given that to him before without my help.

I think Doodle's just one of those cats. Like Tink, who's not very affectionate even though she's been with us since she was barely weaned. If being handled at an early age were the only qualification on a cat's ultimate development she'd be a total lap wart, but she isn't -- she's actually quite stingy with her affection. She's not scared of people, particularly. If someone new comes to the house, she will at least come into the room and check them out; if they have food, she'll even be nice to them. She's not scared, she's just aloof and a bit cranky at times; she prefers us, but she will whore for food.

Doodle's an outright nut case. She'll sit on the divider between the kitchen and the dining room, if we're in one room or the other, and growl if she hears voices outside in the summer. Kids' voices, especially, but anybody gives her 'the goo.' She can even sense when we want to do something to her, as soon as one of us stands up she'll haul ass out of the room and disappear somewhere upstairs (usually under the old red chair in the second bedroom), remaining there until she forgets. Of course, the best part about that is Doodle doesn't remember very long, so usually she's back after a half-hour or so. The fact Tony telegraphs that stuff rather obviously doesn't help, she's more adept at reading us (and especially him) than anybody around here but the dog.

I've theorized Doodle may have a wee soupcon of brain damage, possibly related to poor in vitro and early diet. The other problems she's had kind of feed into that theory, too -- the weird eye stuff, the probably immune-mediated skin trouble, the lousy teeth -- all the stuff could be the result of poor development due to malnutrition, I'd think.

Gord's clearly pretty healthy, though his teeth also are borderline -- he gets gingivitis occasionally, and has had to have his teeth cleaned at the vet's every year or so since we've had him. Tink and Squeek have not, and Tink is seven years old -- she's never had to have her teeth completely cleaned, though they did scrape the tartar off during one of her annual checkups. That's how Tink is with people -- they actually just took her back, set her on a table and scaled her teeth without any anesthesia of any kind. She weighs fifteen pounds and has claws like leather needles; if she ever did decide to fight back, she could easily rip a hole in a human big enough to jump through. Never has.

All the cats around here have their 'kitten moments' -- flinging themselves at toys or each other, running through the house at top speed, that sort of thing -- but Doodle is five years old and never acts like a grown cat. She always acts like the same half-feral kitten she was when we brought her up here. If, as some animal activists accuse, neutering and homing animals with us turns them into 'eternal kittens,' they'd all be that way, but they're not. Even Squeek, who's the youngest in the house and lowest on the totem pole of cats here, acts like a 'big cat' much of the time. Less than Tink and Gord, especially Tink, but I really think with the three of them their behavior relies more heavily on the hierarchy between them than their physical development.

Doodle, though technically second in line, is always sort of kittenish. Having dealt with half-wild kittens all my life, growing up in a small town where there always were plenty of them around, I can say with some certainty she acts like she's still about six months old most of the time. In many ways, she may be exactly that -- which is fine for her, since she's safe here, but it does make it difficult to do anything to her she doesn't want you to do.

So we smear the dental gel on her feet. It's not the worst alternative -- if you can't get in the cat's mouth to put the gel on its gums, the second best thing is to get the cat to get the gel into its mouth and smear it around quasi-voluntarily, and grooming it off her paws accomplishes that. I've heard lots of people say it was the only way they could get cats to take hairball remedies or nutritional paste, so it's not uncommon. Anything that gets it into her mouth is a better solution for her than not at all.

Only problem is, it's damned near impossible to get her to let you look at her gums to see if they're less pink than they were. She was intimidated enough at the vet to let the vet do it, but in her own territory she goes into wolverine mode as soon as one of us touches her head. So, I don't know if she's any better or not.

The post-snow, rainy, unseasonably warm weather has made it a pain in the ass to walk the dog, too. We live in an older 'burb, built in the fifties, and many of the properties haven't had sidewalks replaced in over fifty years. Most of them are below ground level, so they become huge troughs for rainwater when it's damp; especially when, as now, the ground is partly frozen underneath and totally saturated, so the water that can't make it to the storm sewers in the street just stands there on the sidewalk. Add to that the fact that many of my anal-retentive neighbors seem to feel that having a lawn like a photo in a Scott's ad in a magazine is not just something but the only thing, and they edge their grass (which means they cut a big mud ribbon along the edge of the sidewalk) at the end of the season, most of those puddles are full of the topsoil that's washing out of their 'lawns.'

So Max winds up a damp, muddy mess when we get in the door. He loves it -- I've never seen a dog with that much coat who liked to be wet as much as Max does. My mother had a Yorkshire terrier (come on -- a British breed!) who wouldn't go off the front porch if it was raining because it meant he'd have to get his feet wet. He'd pee on the porch posts and squat to poop in the yard just off the porch, cringing all the while. Max just doesn't care -- we've walked him in pouring rain before, so that when he came into the house he was as wet as if he'd been bathed, it doesn't faze him. Drying him off with the towel is a 'fun game,' not an annoyance.

He has as sunny a disposition as I've ever seen -- even when there's a stranger at the door, and he's barking to tell us about it, he's usually wagging his tail. The only time the tail goes down is when he's feeling neglected or when one of us hollers at him for something. Most of the time, if one of us looks directly at him (before we even say anything) he wags his tail.

One of his favorite things to do, especially when I've just come in from work (I work later than Tony does, so I'm usually the last one in), is to have me crouch on the floor so he can ... I don't know what you'd call it. He sort of butts his head into my stomach, shoves up against me and snorts around for five minutes. I know it's some kind of display of submission, but I don't know that I've ever seen a dog do it to a human, before. They do it to each other, bending down and shoving at each other. I guess since he considers me the 'alpha dog' around here, that's my job, to reinforce the hierarchy.

I don't know, I suppose that's like what the cats are doing when they come and thrust their heads at us to be petted, though unlike Max I think they do it more because they know we like it than because it reinforces any imaginary hierarchy between the cats and the people in the household. I don't think cats make the mistake of thinking we're cats, in other words; I think Max does, in some sense, feel we're dogs.

Dominance and submission among the cats don't seem to require constant reinforcement like they do with the dog. All the cats but Squeek come to Tink to have her groom them, and I do think that's about the hierarchy, but with four of them around I think it's more a badge of acceptance than an affirmation. She doesn't seem to have to constantly establish herself as the 'boss cat,' in other words. The rest seem to accept that she's the alpha, and they don't fight much over the other levels. Cats aren't as big on that stuff as dogs, anyway, I don't think -- I think the hierarchy seldom applies with them, when they're living in a household. Cats are too much different from each other, perhaps, so unlike a group of dogs -- all of whom want many of the same things, like food, attention from the humans and the best places to sleep -- they're not constantly fighting over who'll get certain things. This, in our household, is a good thing.

I've had this conversation with people with more than one cat, before: "Oh, you have three females? I feel so sorry for you -- I bet they fight all the time! I've heard you can't have more than one female in the same household or they'll always fight all the time."

Uh ... wow. Funny -- it really isn't like that, around here. Mostly, the only 'fighting' that goes on consists of Gord picking on Squeek or Doodle, or Squeek stalking somebody to play (and that is more likely to result in them chasing each other back and forth through the house with little physical contact, not even play fighting). So, no -- that isn't necessarily so.

I always find this "you can never" thing among cat people to be laugh-out-loud funny. You'd think somebody who liked unpredictability enough to take a cat in, in the first place, would resist the temptation to let anybody else tell them anything about cats that was an 'always/never' equation, since there is no such thing as always or never with cats. Any two of the cats in this household are more different from each other than Gord and Max are different.

But I know people hesitate to question so-called 'conventional wisdom.' Some of them actually believe that a long-lasting relationship can only work if two people are very different from each other. That sounds like grounds for physical violence, to me, so there's what I think of conventional wisdom. Not that it's any surprise, I guess -- I resent the word 'conventional' to begin with, and to call anything a large number of people believe 'wisdom' is a pretty chancy affair.

Ah, well -- no secret I'm atavistic. I think there's probably a gene for that, somewhere.

So much for I-75 only going one way. If it's nasty on Xmas, they can forget about it -- we're both off for the next week and a half, our families can wait until the weather is better.

S'anyway, looks like we may be weather-bound on the baby Jesus's birthday. I'd like to say we're heartbroken about not having to go through all the doo-dah I posted on Thanksgiving, but we're not especially. We're both off work the following week, so we can go down and visit with all of them on a day when it doesn't dawn ten below zero with two feet of snow on the ground.

Max, I probably don't need to tell you, is ecstatic about the snow. Here's a little Quicktime movie of him flouncing about in it this afternoon -- we've noticed he looks a lot like a float in the Rose Bowl Parade when he moves through, if it's deep enough to be above his legs:

Max flounces about in the snow

In other "news" Gord and Squeek have discovered the joys of camping on the ventilation slits on the top of my computer monitor. I guess they're kinda' screwed if I ever invest in a flatscreen. Here's a shot of Gord enjoying the heat:

He's always been a heat-sink, though. The first winter he was here, he spent a good bit of it lying on the dining room floor directly under a foot-and-a-half high heating vent, stirring himself only to eat and poop. Now, since the floor is cluttered under that particular vent, and the floor now has tile rather than carpet, he crams himself into the gap between two of our bedroom dressers, under one of which is one of the bedroom heater vents.

Tony took this shot -- rather rare, frankly -- of Gord and Tink canoodling on the sofa. Gord had approached Tink and solicited a lengthy grooming, after which they shared the sunny spot on the futon without beating the snot out of each other for some minutes:

Finally, here's the view I frequently get from sitting directly in front of the computer. The small set of drawers is next to the monitor -- presumably, this was on a day when it wasn't cold enough Gord felt he needed the warmth of the monitor parboiling his innards:

Max has been chewing on his leg again -- or, to be more precise, licking it until he licks all the hair off. We've been through this with him before, and we're pretty sure it's idiopathic (nothing tangible or real causing it), though I suppose it's possible a four-year-old dog could have some pain in his leg. He never limps, so I'm guessing the licking thing is just nerves. We've both been home a lot, the past couple of days, and he's used to spending a lot of time under the bed in the master bedroom on the days I work (he goes up there when I go up to take a shower, comes out long enough to take his late-morning constitutional, then gets right back under there until I leave for work and call him down to get in his crate). Maybe he's just unnerved by being out all the time and having us both here, I don't know. It's nervous licking, that much I'm pretty sure of. None of the 'lick-stop' preparations seems to make him stop, so it's obsessive. One of these times, he's not going to stop and he's going to develop a hot spot, and then we're going to have to take him to the vet over it, I'm sure.

Doodle had her teeth cleaned, the other day. Didn't lose any teeth, fortunately, but we need to hit her with the dental gel at least once a day for a week or so, and then make sure we get her once or twice a week. There's no way in hell she'd ever let us brush her teeth every day, she won't even let us touch her head unless she wants us to. We have to put the dental gel on her foot and let her lick it off, she screams like a banshee and tries to bite us if we try to mess with her mouth. Worst of all, she usually manages to eject some 'butt juice' on one or the other of us. If it's butt juice or Doodle becomes a gumby cat, she's gonna have to be a gumby cat.