End Table Build Thread 5a: More Pix

I got home before the sun set, so here's a few more pix:

In the above photo, there is a pallor where the left-most leg meets the skirting. This isn't on the actual table, but appears in several photographs. My guess is that it's an artifact of the gloss finish reflecting the light between the two neighboring pieces of wood. The next photo shows some of the depth of the grain, brought out by the stain:

Finally, a pic with Shadow, since she was there:

To be a pet, or not.

I often wonder/worry about my cats' happiness as pets. I worry more about this with Christian, since he was a stray into his adult life and so has some perspective on this - he knows what he has lost, and what he has gained, in the transition from stray to pet. Shadow, of course, has been with me since she was three month old, and so never had a chance to experience the outside world on her own.

The tally, as I understand it, is this:

Pros of being a pet:
- food is provided twice a day
- clean water is always available
- no predators
- no bad weather, aside from occasional thunder (which may be scary but can't hurt them)
- no cars

I don't add things like veterinary care, since I doubt that they understand its significance.

Cons of being a pet:
- severely constrained roaming area, with
- little to chase
- only one other cat to interact with
- no sex (though they're both neutered/spayed/fixed)
- sometimes a little too much interaction with the resident human (I'm happy to pick them up, pet them, etc a bit more than they're happy to be picked up, petted, etc. But I'm learning to read them and there haven't been any altercations.)

I think there was one other thing, but I forget what it was for the moment. And in any case, the real point of this post is this: when I open the door to enter or exit the apartment, even though they often look out the door (which leads directly into the outside world), they never try to escape. I realized the significance of this only this week, when it occurred to me that that was their vote: to stay as a pet. Which makes me happy.

The Water Bowl

I feel bad for Christian. Every time he finds a new hidey-hole (and hidey holes are important to a cat's sense of safety and well-being) Shadow comes along and evicts him, moving in herself (and abandoning her old hidey-hole (his old hidey-hole) to do so). His most recent find was his cat carrier, which lives nestled in a corner between two bookcases, behind the third book case that's been in the middle of the floor since the roof began to leak last month, and beside the box of papers that I don't know what to do with, but can't throw out because they're valuable somehow. But the point is that he found a place to sit quietly, which was protected but enabled him to see out, and once again Shadow ousted him. As I said, I feel bad, and I don't know what to do.

So about twenty minutes ago, when Christian discovered that his carrier was unoccupied, he went over to it and crept inside. He was mostly in - only his tail was poking out - when Shadow discovered him and headed over there herself. I stepped out of the kitchen to observe, and as I did, my foot caught something. The location of the object, and its weight, and the sound it made when my foot hit it all meant that I knew what it was before I looked down - it was the cats' water bowl - the one by the kitchen.

I have caught and spilled this water bowl before - it's really not in the best of locations, from the not-catching-it-with-your-foot perspective. The cats have upset it, too, when racing around and horseplaying. There was even the memorable time when they knocked into it, sloshing some water out, and then I did the same when stooping to clean up what they had spilled, sloshing yet more water onto the wooden floor. But we have never yet managed to empty the entire bowl onto the floor, until I tonight.

And this is no small bowl, either, because I am paranoid about the cats running out of water. I picture the power going out, and with it the air conditioning, and my poor cats, tongues hanging out, finally collapsing of dehydration because I didn't leave enough water. This is a bowl designed for dogs, which holds a liter of water when full, as it approximately was twenty minutes ago until I caught it with my foot.

(If that bowl proves to be insufficient, there is another, equally large bowl of water over by their water fountain, which itself holds over a liter of water when full, but more on the fountain in another post.)

So, there I was, with a liter of water on my floor, which is rented and wooden, and no doubt greedily drinking in all of that water because it's also unfinished. Or maybe it has lost its finish through years of deferred maintenance, not to say neglect, on the part of my landlord. More on that in another post, too. Either way, it's not protected from water. And apart from the water that was soaking into the Stop & Shop ad ("do you know an employee who deserves an A+?") and that which had soaked my jeans up to the knee, all of that water was on the floor.

No big deal, but all I can think of while stripping my bathroom of its towel and cleaning up the mess was "ooh, what a great blog post." And, "how do I wrap this post up?"

Curious Kitten

Curiosity and intelligence

Curious Kitten (who is no longer a kitten, but we'll leave that to one side) has developed a fascination for what might be on top of the dresser. This, along with the top of the TV, is the only place outside of a closet or cabinet that the cats can't get to.

This lead me to think about curiosity generally. Cats are perhaps notoriously inquisitive; the fact that curiosity killed the cat is a cliche', testifies to that. People are also curious. Dogs are curious. Dolphins are, too. These are also intelligent species.

Does curiosity lead to, or require intelligence? Indulging in curiosity involves risk; it can lead on into dangerous situations where intelligence needed to survive - would evolution therefor tend to favor those who are both curious and intelligent, rather than just curious.

Not sure how to test that, though.

"The next person who wakes me up is getting a face full of claws"

Shadow

I realized that I haven'd put up any photos of Shadow in a while, so, here she is.

I have been singularly unobservant of my cats

I had thought that Shadow had continued as dominant cat over Christian. Then, perhaps two weeks ago Shadow rolled backwards off of her perch, falling about 7 feet to the floor. There was a flurry of black fur and flailing limbs and then a 'thump' as she struck the ground. She did not appear to have suffered in anything but her dignity, though she was slightly less active for the next three days (she still ran around, but didn't climb the vertical poles as much) and it seemed in the aftermath of that that Christian became more dominant, as if the accident had upset the hierarchy.

But then I thought back over the past few months, and realized that perhaps Christian has been dominant for some time. This would explain why Shadow gave up some of her activities after he moved in (specifically, she no longer climbs the longer of the two climbing posts, even when I attempt to lead her up there with a favorite toy). So, I think she's been bumped.

All of which probably means a lot more to me than it does to her. I am guilty of anthropomorphizing the cats to a degree, and I feel very badly for her not being allowed to do things that she previously enjoyed. I also feel guilty, since of course it's my fault that she's in this position. This is in addition to the guilt I feel for Scruffy himself.

Because Shadow is the favorite. She has been since day one. She wanted attention when I first met her and her brother, Scruffy, at the store to which the shelter had brought them, and when I tried to reach over and pet him, he didn't respond (apparently it had been a long day for both of them) but she came over for further petting and attention. Really, he came to my house because I was enthralled with her, and couldn't see separating them. I liked him well enough, and developed real affection for him, but she was the draw. And when he was removed from their cage for me to meet and eventually take home, he clung to the bars at the door, not wanting to leave the safety of that cage.

And Christian, too, is here in some degree because of Shadow. I didn't want her to be lonely and bored when I was away all day. If both Shadow and Scruffy had died - if I had killed them both, I wouldn't have adopted Christian. There would have been no reason to do so.

Which brings me to my point. I want Shadow to be top cat. I want the best of everything for her, even more so than I want the best for Christian, or wanted the best for Scruffy. All of it is ridiculous - ridiculous and juvenile - but that doesn't change the desire, or the pain at realizing that she's at the bottom of the hierarchy.

My poor kitten.

My poor Shadow.

It's not easy to eat a Daddy Long Legs

Shadow found a Daddy Long Legs today, but though she was able to catch it easily, she had a very difficult time eating it. It's legs kept getting caught in her whiskers, and when she looked up at me the spider was siting on her muzzle, straddling her nose and mouth. I wish I'd had a camera; it was very funny.

I can vacuum my kitty!

Shadow's first exposure to the vacuum sent her running her to the other end of the house in alarm, but she has slowly become acclimated to its noise. So when I brought out the vacuum this evening to clean the rope shakings off of my bed, she didn't move from her spot on the covers, not far from the shakings that I was there to vacuum. So, I fitted the accessory hose with the upholstery brush attachment, and vacuumed the bed clean, and then I noticed that some of the shakings had gotten onto her fur, too (she supervised my work on the new climbing pole). Out of curiosity, for what she might do, I slowly brought the brush close to her, and she didn't move, so I carefully vacuumed the shakings off of her back. Based on the purring, I think she enjoyed it.

Christian, Shadow, dominance

I wrote earlier about the first meeting between Shadow and Christian, but as I said at the time, there was not yet harmony in Catsville.

The cats also had another session or two of seeing each other through the crack in the bathroom door. Unfortunately, each of these sessions placed me in the bathroom with Christian - there was no way to properly work the bathroom latch if I was on the outside - leaving Shadow alone. She was pretty disturbed, and when I placed her first into the carrier and then locked her into the bathroom (enabling Christian to explore the apartment some, locking Shadow into the bathroom so that she could get used to his scent, but not confront him directly) I think she became convinced that she was being replaced and I would soon be booting her out.

Christian stayed out in the apartment for the day, but shortly before I went to sleep for the night I swapped them again. Shadow looked up at me with big, sad eyes and went off to a corner to curl up and sleep, and, I suppose, to do the feline equivalent of crying. My last act before crawling into bed was to collect her from her corner and carry her to my bed - something I don't typically do - and this seemed to convince her that she wasn't about to be abandoned, though she still wasn;t too sure about the new cat.

I don't blame her for being uncertain - Christian is close to twice as big as she is (his paunch is also about twice as big as hers). Nevertheless after three or four days they not only were able to more or less tolerate each other through a gate, so I let them into the apartment together - first for only a few minutes, then for progressively longer periods.

I knew that perhaps the largest issue the cats would have to settle was that of dominance. With Scruffy, Shadow was dominant, though she rarely made use of it. She and her brother shared their food very amicably, for instance, each deferring to the other as they ate from the same dish. The only time I remember her showing dominace was at the climbing pole, which she rarely let him use.

But Shadow and Scruffy worked out their dominance issue before I met them, whereas Shadow and Christian would be doing so under my nose. I quickly discovered that I had difficulty determining whether their fights and chaces were in play or in earnest. On the one hand there wasn't any hissing or yowling, but on the other hand their ears were back much more often than when Shadow and Scruffy had wrestled. Shadow sometimes turned sideways and arched her back, bristling the hair along her spine, but just as often she had her tail in the air. Frequently they had standoffs - staring contests which were sometimes won by one cat, sometimes by the other. The issue of dominance was in doubt, and at times it seemed that the issue of Christian's successfully moving in and staying was in doubt, too.

Christian? Maybe I should rename him Jewish

One of my concerns, in the wake of Scruffy's death, has been to find a playmate for Shadow. Friday I went down to the Elmsford shelter and filled out paperwork, and I saw several lots of cats, including a beautiful little grey cat with a white chest, who was very affectionate and allowed herself to be picked up. She was absolutely perfect, but then it appeared that she doesn't get along with other cats very well. So, no go. By the time the shelter closed I hadn't found a cat that fit the bill, so I left empty handed.

I had completed the paperwork, however, and although I was up at West Point for the weekend, I did have time to get some of the litter and food that the shelter uses, to make the transition for Hypothetical Cat a bit easier. I returned to the shelter today, and quickly found another nice grey cat, but as I petted him I guess he got overexcited and he bit me with enough force to draw blood. He went back into his cage. The next cat that seemed a possibility, a cute black and white kitty, turned out to be part of a pair, so since I don't have the room for three cats, that cat was also a no go. But the shelter staff led me to a largish grey/brown tabby named Christian, who is about two years old and was a stray until the beginning of the summer. He was very affectionate, and seemed ideal. I guess they checked my references over the weekend, because they let me take him home right then:


For the moment, he is living in the bathroom (which, as was pointed out to me, is much bigger than a cage) so the cats can have the opportunity to get to know each other a bit without having the opportunity to maul each other.

The two cats have sort of met. I had the bathroom door open a crack so they could see and smell each other. Christian seemed curious, as did Shadow, but she also gave a tiny hiss - like a brief bit of soft static on the radio, so I don't think she's ready to accept him yet.

Lap cat, fat cat

A few nights ago, Scruffy, of his own accord, crawled into my lap to be petted for twenty or thirty minutes. He only left because I had to stand up - I forget why.

Of course, once he was out of my lap he ran off back to his lair.

I think it's a combination of general shyness and agoraphobia, as he sometimes will run to his shoebox, which offers him no protection at all.

Shadow, on the other hand, is overweight. That thought had been in the back of my mind for several days - her outline no longer looked quite right - though it hadn't moved forward enough to really reach conscious thought, and it has to be the reason for the real difference in weight between her and her brother. She was at the vet again a few days ago for her ear and this was pointed out to me. So, food is no longer available 24 hours a day, and I try to play with her and stir her up more that I had been, and we'll see what happens.

I'm also a little confused about her sociability. The past few times I've had visitors she has generally been willing to sniff an offered finger, but then will deliberately, unhurriedly walk off and disappear under the bed. Strange.

I have over a stone of cat

Scruffy went to the vet today to receive his microchip, and though Shadow already has one, I took her along for the opportunity to weigh her on their scale. Scruffy weighed in at 7.5 pounds; Shadow at 8.2. If a stone is fourteen pounds, I have 1 and 1/10 stone of cat.

Feline training has begun

Over the past few weeks Shadow has become a bit less active (she's no longer a little kitten, and I think that's the reason for it), and of course Scruffy has never been terribly active when I'm around, so it seemd to me that it was time for some training.

Last night or the night before I made chicken, and I prepared some of it for the cats (no herbs, spices, etc - just chicken with nothing added). I cut this chicken into pieces of perhaps a half square inch and froze it, and tonight I defrosted and diced one piece for use in training.

Shadow's exercises consisted of convincing her to climb her pole to close to the top, after which she received a few pieces of chicken, then she had to climb up and come down again to get more. The only problem seemed to be that she sometimes had difficuty seeing the chicken, which I held on a neutral colored dish (and which is neutral colored to begin with); perhaps I'll get a green plate to use in the future.

During this, Scruffy wandered over to investigate what his sister was up to. He was willing to sniff at an extended finger, but when I moved to get him a piece of chicken, he ran off. So, his training took place at his lair; if he sniffed a finger he got a piece of chicken. Unfortunately, there's no easy or comfortable place for me to stand and reach him when he's there, so his training session was shorter than his sister's.

At present they are silently playfighting as they sit in the shoebox. They don't fit in the shoebox without spilling over its edges when they are content to merely lie there peacefully, so their playfighting has a very comical look to it.

Green toys are good toys

Shadow seems to be able to see her green ball better than her balls of other colors. If, as I understand, cats see in blue and green, this would make sense.

My cats hang out in their carrier

One of the last things I do before going to bed is to take all of the cat toys that make noise and lock them into the cat carrier. Between doing this and turning my air filter up to top speed, when its fan produces a sort of white noise, I am able to sleep through the night without that cats waking me as they frolic. In the morning, I unlatch and open their carrier's door, leaving it to them to retrieve what toys they want to play with. My hope is the cats will see the carrier as their toybox more than as the path to the vet. Several times I have seen Shadow disappear into the box and reemerge carrying a toy, so I think this is working to a degree.

Of course, when I need to carry the cats somewhere in their carrier, I remove it from its usual location by my bed, empty it of most of the toys, and place it in the middle of the floor, which may offer its own cues as to its immediate purpose. From time to time I place the carrier in the middle of the floor and just leave it there, to reduce the validity of that cue, but I tend to leave the toys in place.

The result, and this is probably more due to the cats' sweet nature than to the dual identity of their carrier/toybox, is that I rarely have any difficulty in getting them into their carrier.

Then last night I collected the noisy cat toys and knelt down to place them into the carrier, but in placing my hand into the carrier I immediately encountered a warm, furry face. Shadow was lying in the carrier, stretched out and relaxing, and a closer look showed Scruffy in the carrier as well.

:)

No more plastic bells...

Both cats ran into trouble today. It started with the my discovery, on waking up, that Superfund Cat had once again soiled himself to the point of needing a bath, and had spread his feces about the bathroom and a window sill, too. Shadow had gotten some of his feces on one of her paws, but she could be spot cleaned.

Superfund Cat's bath went easier this time. At least in part this was due to my having a better sense of how to do it - I placed a towel in the tub to give him some traction, and the water was warmer than last time, but he did not enjoy the experience. He shivered as I toweled him dry, so I held him to me until the heat came up, then moved him to the floor heating grate.

Once he stopped shivering and seemed okay, I wolfed down breakfast and ran out of the house for an appointment, coming back in an hour, and then this is a neat thing about giving him a bath: he fluffs out as he dries (he's a long hair). He kind of has his own fluff cycle.

Then about an hour ago I found Shadow sniffing about the floor and eating something. Closer inspection revealed a broken piece of the plastic bell from a cat toy at her feet, and it looked like she had eaten at least one other piece.

The internet was not much help, other than to say that this might be a problem. So I called the off-hour animal hospital to confer with them. If she had eaten this plastic, I should bring her in, they said. Plastic can cause an intestinal blockage, which can be fatal. The consult would be $125, and X-ray, should one be needed, would be over $200, and on top of that any other diagnostic or therapeutic measures that looked to be necessary.

I'm already a bit hard up for cash - I'm in debt to my credit cards for more than I care to admit, I don't have enough hours at work, and yesterday I learned that I lost several hours of teaching that had previously been assigned to me.

You can therfor imagine my relief when, in gathering my jacket, etc together prior to placing Shadow in the carrier I found the rest of the plastic bell. It had occurred to me that it might be helpful to have a complete bell to show the vet and give her a sense of what Shadow might have swallowed, and the bell on the toy I picked up was missing a piece the size of the piece I found earlier at Shadow's feet.

After calling the animal hospital back to say that I wouldn't be coming after all, I had the chance to sit and realize how very attached I have become to Shadow. The thought of her dying of this was very painful. My beautiful kitten.

Water, water everywhere

Cats are, perhaps, notorious for their dislike of water. I think this is a simplification, however; I think it's more that they will accept water, but only on their own terms.

Scruffy and Shadow get their water in a steel bowl with a rubberized bottom. The bowl is pretty large for them - too big, as it turns out, as it often ends up with dirt or food in it before it's even half empty. A lot of water gets dumped when I clean the bowl and refill it with fresh water. So, the solution is a smaller bowl, yes?

Well, no. I bought a smaller bowl, and filled it with water, and Shadow, on discovering it, spent several enjoyable minutes pawing at the water, dipping her paw in it (then shaking her paw off, sending water everywhere) sloshing it out of the bowl, and in the end the bowl was empty, and the floor was very wet. Fool that I was, I refilled it, and was treated to a repeat performance, so we went back to the large bowl. We waste the same amount of water, but at least it isn't all over the kitchen floor.

Then, yesterday, the toilet broke. The part of the handle that's inside the tank snapped off (this is the only toilet I've seen where this was plastic, though I suppose they all are these days), so I have to lift the lid off of the tank in order to trip the valve and flush the toilet. Until this is fixed, poor Shadow is banned from the bathroom while the toilet is flushed.

So, I've taken a washtub and partially filled it with water, then placed it on the floor. This is a source of fascination for both cats, though Scruffy doesn't have the nerve to approach it while I'm nearby. And again, it's paw at water to see it move, then hastily withdraw paw and shake it off. Shadow will actually climb part way into the pan, getting her front legs (and occasionally a back leg, too) soaked in the process. As she walks forward she lifts each paw out of the water, shakes it off, then puts it back in the water.

So, I have water on the kitchen floor, water on the living room floor, and have to get my hands wet to flush my toilet.

Probably I should talk to the ladnlord about the toilet - I guess that is his job.

Please stand by...

I'm emerging from my two week funk, but now it's time for final papers, exams, etc. So, a quick update:

Cats: still getting bigger. Scruffy is more trusting, though it's still an issue. Presently he's stretched out with his sister on my old school bag, which is impressive, given how exposed a position that is. Shadow seems frustrated at the lack of spiders and crickets in the apartment - she's eaten them all and it takes time for them to respawn. She also destroyed another dangling feather toy thing, so I'll have to find another one.

Practicum: still not done

Thesis: have a meeting with my advisor tomorrow (Friday)

Katrina: Bush shares some of the responsibility at the local level, too, basically because he encouraged government at all levels to abandon their non-terrorism disaster prepredness preparedness work. Eventually I'll get around to writing about that in some more detail.

Cold weather: sucks

Things should be back to normal fairly soon; please continue to tune in.

- B