Candy and Bethesda: One Year Update

One year ago last month we welcomed Miss Candy Cat into our household. We had a few iffy moments but no real trouble. No litter box trouble. No tufts of hair laying on the carpet trouble. No torn ears trouble. Some hissing, yes, but not “I mean it” hissing, if you know what I’m saying.

Welcoming Candy into our home turned out to be a great move. A living creature to enjoy and interact with every day. For people who have chosen not to have children this is huge, this “other living being” in your space dealio.

Candy and Bethesda get along very well.  All that “healthy exercise” the vets and toys encourage and we all know the animals need, they get that chasing each other in friendly fashion all over the house all day. There were some mild turf issues, which Bethesda lost to  my dismay, but then the other morning I walked by the bedroom and they were sleeping together on the bed.

Bethesda cries a LOT LESS. Amen. She doesn’t sit with her butt turned toward us to demonstrate her general disapproval of everything every night. She doesn’t whine about being bored. She’s lost 2 pounds and while she wasn’t over weight before, she’s now not in danger of being over weight. Candy gained 2 pounds and while she’s not in danger of being over weight she no longer looks like an animal who lives in a cage.

It’s all good.

There Are No Funny Pictures Because It’s Not Funny

I am a blogger. I blog. If something comes up in my world that would be a good blog posting, I try to post about it. My blog follows my life and my interests and my activities. I hope you all are interested in genealogy, ’cause you’re getting a lot of that right now.

Good blogging involves a certain level of visual interest – photos, maps, scanned images, etc. I’m pretty lame at this aspect of blogging – I’m a lousy photographer so I don’t bore you with a lot of bad pictures.

So, what makes for a good picture? What could even a bad photographer make look good? Well, a cream colored carpeting with clearly visible sooty black paw prints frolicking from one end of the room to the other, that would make for a pretty amusing photo. I am aware of that. It’s not that I don’t know that. It’s that sooty black paw prints are not amusing. They are expensive. So the only shot you got the other day was of the most damaged section.

It’s a second time around boys and girls, second time around.

The morning after the carpet cleaners came and steam washed the soot out of the cream colored carpeting in the basement family room I get up as usual and make my way to the kitchen to start a pot of  coffee.

All over the kitchen countertops are – you guessed it – black, sooty, putty cat paw prints. ALL OVER. We make this little joke, ha ha, hee hee, that the cats take over the house when we’re at work and probably – oh isn’t this cute – sleep on the stove. Well, they don’t. I can tell you that because I know exactly where they spend their time on my kitchen counter tops – EVERYWHERE BUT THE STOVE. THE CATS WERE EVEN UP ON TOP OF THE FLOUR CANISTER AND THE CEREAL CONTAINERS.

There is no cat food and no cat treats on top of the flour canisters and never has been. And yet, they were up there, way up there, way up under the cupboards:

No, I didn’t take a picture of the paw prints. I sprinted down the stairs to see what the basement looked like. It wasn’t as bad as the day before, but it wasn’t good, either. Sooty paw prints all over one end of the cream room, out onto the linoleum, up the stairs, up onto the counters. Of course there was soot cat vomit. TMI? Yeah, for me, too.

The two big containers of craft materials that we’d used to block the fireplace were pushed casually out of the way. I scrubbed down the kitchen while the coffee started. I didn’t take pictures. Yes, they would have been amusing. This situation is not even remotely amusing.

From the kitchen I went on a kitty hunt, looking at paws. Candy is the culprit. Little orange-and-white soot-eating monster that she is:

This weekend we decided to take care of the soot situation. We emptied, vaccumed and washed out the fireplace. Ever washed out a fireplace? Yeah, down on your hands and knees with bucket after bucket of not-ever-going-to-come-away-clean water it feels pretty much like that. And no, soot does not come out from under your fingernails or in the cuts on your hands very easily.

As I write we are waiting for it to stop raining outside so we can wash down the grate in the backyard, then put the whole thing back together again and wire-tie it shut. We wanted to drill it shut but the metal won’t support that so wire ties it will have to be. We don’t use the fireplace so it won’t be a loss. In between now and then, even though it’s been thoroughly washed down, here’s the state of the fireplace:

I can’t guarantee we’ll take that chest away even when it’s wiretied shut.

I Don’t Plan to Laugh About This, Like, Ever

Believe it or not, blogging was not the first thing that occurred to me when I went into the family room this morning and found the 13X30 space tracked from one end to the other with black cat paw prints. This means you’re not getting the “full effect” photos. The picture below is  after my best cleaning effort. Remember that sea of cream carpeting I blogged about last year? OK, this is totally it:

The grate in front of the fire place was pushed out and the paw prints started there. Under my craft table was a large wet spot of black: soot cat vomit. The entire room is tracked with putty cat prints. I am not exaggerating on this point. I couldn’t believe it as I got out the vacuum and did my best to get up the prints. They romped into all the nooks and crannies.

I called the culprits this morning with my cooing voice to get pictures but they didn’t get any damned treats for posing. Little bastards:

I have a call in to Maurer’s carpet cleaners. I could have waited until they were open but instead I called them at 6:30 when I found the mess and left a message.

I can’t even be cute and amusing in blog fashion about this. My sea of cream carpeting is an unmistakable romp of black kitty cat paw prints.

What Ike Wrought in the Wee Garden

Bethesda surveys the damage after three days of Hurricane Ike’s northern rains swept through Michigan.

The roof was rained on for three days, also. Know that roof we priced but planned to buy next year? Yeah, that’s going to be happening NOW. RIGHT NOW. Blogging of the event to come (but of course).

Bethesda’s Lion Cut

Pinch Hitting

I am the regular litter box cleaner in the Distribution of Household Chores here in the Snakelady and Hubby home. It’s all good.

When we lived in the two apartments, Beth would sit close by, usually in the pose of the sphinx, and watch me change the litter. I’d start fussing in her area and her bell would jingle and there she’d be, come to supervise. “Making sure I do it right?” I’d ask her. She’d disdainfully turn her head, and then come down to check out the final product when I was finished. Hubby pinch hit for me a few times during those years, no problems.

But things have changed since we moved into the New House two years ago. Miss B. seems very comfortable here, she loves her Domain of our fenced backyard where she gets outdoor time every day three seasons a year. And she’s never gone outside of her litter box, but there’s been a change in her when I change or clean the litter. We still share a guaranteed time together when I’m doing it, but now she’s sitting close by with her cute little face askew with anxiety. Askew. I talk her through the operation.

“Come down to make sure I don’t f*** it up, honey? It’s OK sweetie, you don’t need to cry.” I maintain a steady stream of Mumma-cooing. She looks up at me with suspicious eyes.

Twice since we moved in, hubby has changed the litter. The first time I was on a trip for work and he reported that Bethesda got violent, hissing and clawing at him, snarling, growling. Neither of us has ever seen her like that. She’s never actually attacked anyone or anything. This was long before Candy Cane joined our household.

The second time he changed the litter was yesterday. My back is out and so hubby went down to do it, but he asked me to join him to stave off Miss B’s vengeance. She followed us and stared anxiously and suspciously, but not making any moves toward us. Then.

Then. Hubby blew it. He was refilling one of the boxes and spilled several cups of litter on the floor.

“Mee-oww!” she interjected, trotting over to where we were and stomping over the spilled litter. “Me-ow, me-ow, me-ow, boo! boo!” Hubby put the litter in the box and we cleaned up, Miss B. the whole time mewling and complaining. When we stepped back she went to check out both boxes carefully. She looked up at me, “He sucks as a pinch hitter, coach.” she said, “Get better by next Thursday.”

Below: Miss B. in her Domain checking out the Wee Garden:

Cat Update

I had good signs from Miss B. today. First she woke me up by pushing VHS cassettes off the dresser. When I got up and checked my email, she started chewing on the blinds. This translates into, “I’m bored. Play with me now.” She has not announced boredom since Miss Candy Cane joined us. We got out the feather and traipsed around the house with it. Then, treats. She isn’t “back to normal” but she’s OK.

Candy has settled in nicely, now. Before Candy came to us, she was returned to Mid-Michigan Cat Rescue by a family for whom the other pets never settled in to her presence. And between that family and us she was living in a Rescuer’s home with 20 other cats. With constant food and water, human faces to lick, windows to gaze out of, sun to stretch in, her own personal, private heated water bed to nap on, she’s died and gone to heaven. We’re all doing OK here.

Cat Update

Candy has been with us 3 weeks now. She and Bethesda play a little bit, but there’s daily hissing on Bethesda’s part, too. And Bethesda is still moping, and her eating is down. She used to talk all the time, now she barely makes a sound. E. assures me you need to wait 3 months for everything to chill. I IMd her that the cats were playing and she IMd back “For now.” It’s that naturally cheerful and uplifting nature of hers.

We call them K1 and K2 (Kat 1, Kat 2). Despite paying extra attention to Bethesda, she has so far not found this naming convention backed up with the kind of action she would most appreciate: getting the little invader the hell out of her house. I have been letting her sit on the dining room table and the kitchen counters, though, 1. because I am a really bad Mumma with no sense and 2. there HAS to be SOME upside to being K1. Then, omm, we found this new treat Bethesda really likes in our on-going quest to find any treat that Candy will like and, omm, I let Beth eat the whole bag in four days (well, she has to eat something).

What I Learned from My Cats Today

Honesty: They never soft-pedal “status checks.”

Both Catching Some Blogging Time with Mumma