And then there are porches.

In the continuing saga of the lousy housewife, how about front porches? You know those pretty ones with the wicker (or faux wicker, now) furniture and the pretty wreath on the door...and that's ALL?

Where do they drop their junk when they are weary? What about the muddy shoes, the cooler that was used and not put back yet, the water bowl for the dog....if you scanned right in this photo, you'd see the junk I haven't found a place for. And the pile of stuff I'm taking down to the barn, but haven't yet, of course.

Let's talk towels

OK, on the topic of being a good wife to your house...what about towels?

How do people keep their towels looking like this EVERY DAY?



If I arrive (even unannounced) at other people's houses they have clean bathrooms. The toilet is always spotless, their towels are neatly hung, there is no dust anywhere, their hairbrushes, for God's sake, have no HAIR in them...

How? Please, tell me how! Our towels are usually rumpled, and there is always one hanging over the shower curtain. Mark is from the "if you use a towel rumple it so the next person know's it's dirty" school. I am from the "refold hand towels neatly so no one will know but always make sure there are absolutely clean towels for showers for houseguests" school. When there are no guests, I toss the damned things in the dryer for five minutes and rehang them if they were just used to dry off from the shower. I mean, it's just the two of us.

I would also like to point out the only reason we have nice towels of matching colors is that we ask for them for Christmas. This batch my mom got us. I said "if you want to increase my life quality by 100%, buy us nice moss green colored towels...a few every year." And at Christmas she presented us with a whole set, which I hope she managed to get a few bucks off on sale, because it was a lot of towels. The previous decade our mint green towels had been supplied by Mark's sister, I believe.

What do your towels look like right now? If your bathroom is clean everyday, PLEASE share this secret with me. Between intermittant hairspray on the floor and cat and people hair, I can clean my bathroom one day and have it look like it hasn't been cleaned in a week a single day later.

Do people leave a new hairbrush out for guests and put the ones they REALLY use away? If someone needed a hairbrush in our bathroom they would drop ours in disgust, I swear.

Poor Ivan

...is still blocked. We are on catherization Number 3 today, and as they say "three strikes you are out" if this doesn't work. Next step is surgery. Financially this was not going to be an option, however, some incredible generosity on the part of veterinary staff may make this possible if needed.

Entropy

I am a lousy housewife.

By "housewife" I don't mean any sort of traditional "husband role/wife role" commentary.

I mean I am a lousy wife to my house.

When we purchased our first (very little) house, I was a pretty good housewife. Now, it wasn't a regularly clean house by any means. But I took great pride in painting the inside, situating the furniture just so, having fresh flowers around, etc. This may not always be the way the house WAS but it was the way I wanted it to be.

This house was purchased with all sorts of charming nature in mind. We even had bed-and-breakfast sort of aspirations (hysterical laughter, now). We HAVE gotten most of the rooms painted. But in general, it is a repository for furniture that people give us, and a piece or two we have purchased. Nothing goes together. An artistic eye might be able to make it go together, but my artistic eye fell asleep from world-weariness long ago. Each painted room has something that's not quite done yet. The kitchen needs a third coat. The den needs molding. This poor house begs for a good wife, and instead it's stuck with me.

Mark is a good house husband. He made sure the water pump got fixed yesterday (and dug out the pump access) and he's out their mowing the fields now on his tractor.

It just seems like all of my wifely duties are constantly degrading ones. If I get up in the morning and clean up all the breakfast things, wipe down all the counters, clean off the stove, vacuum the floors, clean up the bathroom...the next morning, gosh, it needs to be done all over again.

Tomorrow we are having overnight company so I am cleaning the house. Company is a good thing. Things that we tolerate (a dingy shower curtain) get cleaned up for company.

I'm going see if I can shake out my wifely skills and wake up that poor artistic eye.

What?

The phones out there are just garbage. I've gone through several phones, even the expensive ones. This is different," said Albert Livingstone, 62, in Chicago. "It's the newest toy. I'm 62 -- I don't have much time left to buy toys."

Again: WHAT?

Mark keeps the home water running...

About a week ago, our water pump began making fairly alarming noises. We began seriously reducing our water use, hoping the pump would hang in there until we could get a plumber out (no cat laundry again! Looks like another trip to the laundromat!).

The plumber is on his way today, and Mark dug up our well cover. Hopefully the drama will all be over by the weekend and we won't have to wait until next week for a total fix.




Here's a sign that Nick the barn cat is getting older and slower. You used to never see chipmunks around our place...except dead on the front path. This year we are infested with them, which I don't mind because I really enjoy them, until they get in the walls of house of course.



Ivan is at the vet's all day today. Let's hope he stays unblocked. Keep your fingers crossed.

Every once in awhile there is good reason to use the overused "OMG"

And this is one of them. Katwallks.

Headbutts to Cape Mews who posted it first.

Hot cats means they lie still for photos.

It's a warm evening, and the cats just want to sprawl on the cool floors.

Ivan's catheter was pulled this morning at the vet's but by evening he was blocked again, so back he went, and he's got a new catheter and his headgear back on, plus anti-spasmatic meds and his special food, til Friday a.m. I have been to the vet seven times this week, and we've got one more trip (I hope just one) to go. I'm bushed, and I'm sure Ivan is too (all the trips were not just for Ivan). My vet, Cornerstone Veterinary Hospital has been incredible.



Espie. She was quite the cuddle bug tonight:




Dude, being Dude:



Really, she looks so peaceful when she's asleep:



And of course, handsome Shakespeare:



Someone adopt us! (Mariah the gray kitten has a home, and Ivan, of course, is my special feline).

Cyclops didn't make it

With all the running around yesterday with Ivan, I had postponed Cyclops' neuter/testing appointment which was to be today. But last night when I went into see him, for the first time he hadn't finished his wet food with his Clavamox, and any time he crouched down, he breathed more heavily. This would indicate chest congestion and likely pneumonia, which isn't good. It's really not good.

If he was moving from an upper respiratory to a lower respiratory infection after being on antibiotics for five days of "doing OK", then likely whatever he had wasn't susceptible to Clavamox. I have a few Baytril tablets specifically in our protocol for a situation like this, and I ground one up in baby food and gave it to him by a syringe. He was pretty tolerant of this for a "feral" and I wondered if were because he was so ill or because he was actually tame.

There was also the concern about rabies. We had had a rabid fox in the neighborhood just a few weeks before. Changes in personality, and also this type of lethargy, can be due to rabies. I wasn't seeing neurological signs, but rabies can take so many forms. Pneumonia seemed the likely cause, but I didn't want to be stupid, either. If he died in my arms here, he was going to have to be tested for rabies.

I wiped out his eyes...no problem. And I began to pet him. He was OK with that, but it caused him to crouch down, which made breathing harder, so I sat him up and began scritching under his chin and jowls. He had little scabs everywhere that were mostly healed, and I'm sure they itched something fierce.

And he began to purr. It was hard to tell the purr amid all the rasping, but it was unmistakably a purr.

I folded up a towel and laid it over the end of his bed (which was a large cat litter pan with a towel in it) and set him in there with his front legs over the edge. This kept him off his chest.

When I came back out later it seemed like he was breathing a bit more easily, and purred again as I scritched him. I decided he had to go to the vet in the morning even if I had cancelled his appointment. Pneumonia is a serious issue. It can kill kittens in a matter of hours. And Cy had been through a lot.

And he was still sitting with his paws over the edge of the bed in the morning, watching me. His breathing was still labored, but I wanted to believe it wasn't as bad as the night before. Certainly he was no worse, except he was more dehydrated. Perhaps the Baytril was having an effect. I stole Mark's car by driving Mark into work, and went straight to the vet without an appointment. They let me right in.

His temp was 103, which originally pleased me (a cat's normal temp is 100-101, so 103 is bad but not too bad). But the vet pointed out to me that dehydration suppresses a high temp and once they gave him fluids his temp might spike higher. He was very congested, but she said "Yes, it's bad, but let's not give up on him yet." They were clearly suckers for an old fighting tom, too. She ran him through some balance and movement tests to do a quick check for neurological issues (rabies). He was fine in that regard. They gave him Baytril injectible, and some fluids, and then we realized we should have combo tested him BEFORE starting all this treatment.

All of his canine teeth were broken off. He was missing a toe (long healed), and of course an eye (long gone). He had tiny scabs under his fur from head to toe, ear mites, and the pneumonia, and some sort of unknown orange stuff stuck to his fur.

And then he tested positive for FIV.

That changed everything.

It seemed then that he had probably gone into pneumonia because his FIV-striken immune system could not fight off the respiratory infection, and this tilted the liklihood of survival heavily against him. And with FIV, even if he somehow managed to pull off a now-unlikely miracle, he could not go back to his colony-mates (all of whom thus far are FeLV/FIV negative).

So we decided to put him down. And that was difficult, since we had all been in a "hey, maybe he's not quite over the edge yet" mood just a moment before. He got some more petting, and didn't seemed frightened at all.

So Cyclops, rest in peace, guy. It sure would have been nice to see you sitting lean and glossy with your spayed lady friends in the sun up on the Hill with your one gold eye. But there is nothing worse than watching a scared cat rattle away the last days of his life in a cage, hooked up to an IV, fighting to breathe.

I came home and left a message on Valarie and Craig's voice mail, which is a bad way to let someone know about their back-porch feline visitor, but I didn't want them to read it here first.

At least he got one last chance to purr.

Personal cats get the blues.

Ivan had another urinary blockage, so Mark came home from work since my truck will be in the shop a few days, and drove us into the vet. Ivan is now in a cage in our great room with an e-collar around his neck and a catheter stitched in, and feeling very dopey.

The Nick wandered into the yard and I could hear him snuffling from ten feet away. He had a winky eye that we were treating for the past two days, but it has turned into a full blown upper respiratory. So I hauled him to the downstairs of the barn and caged him up. No more tramping around for Nick, until he's better.

I postponed Cyclop's vet visit tomorrow to Thursday, when I can borrow Mark's car again. Ivan will have to go back in again in 48 hours to have the catheter pulled.

Ivan's bill was $235, which I consider pretty reasonable under the circumstances.

On the up side, in the hour and a half when Ivan was being worked on by the vet, Mark and I went to Sapsucker Woods (as it made no sense to drive 60 miles home and back) and walked some of the trails.

It's the first nature walk I've taken in probably three years, not counting short walks on our own property. It's time to get out more.

OK, back to work!

Good Day for Coffee and Kittens

Nibbles was adopted, and the family who has a hold on Mariah the little gray kitten came by to visit her today. And we have a new volunteer, Cheyenne, who will be here some Sundays this summer to help socialize the cats and perhaps create some new admission/medical records for us. Cheyenne also gave Mariah a name, so she isn't just "the little fluffy gray kitten" any longer.

The cat facility is looking better and better although it still has a long way to go. I won't be able to afford any more paint until payday next week, although I do still have white so can work on the ceiling.

Paint is great

As I painted today I kept thinking "Why didn't I paint sooner? WHY didn't I paint sooner." Until I ran out of paint. Then I remembered. Oh, yeah, $23 a gallon.

"Ginger Peach" is really more like "Orange Creamsicle" but it's still better than "Dusty Dark Barn Board." And it sure brightens up the room.

Cyclops is still eating his food and meds. His good eyes seems less goopy, although he still looks like something you pulled out of the bottom of a dumpster. Poor guy.

Coffee and Kittens tomorrow, 2-5!

Come visit! We have one adopter coming to look at Nibbles, and a new volunteer coming by for an orientation. There will be coffee, soda, cookies, and kittens, as well as cats.

You'll get to see the Orange Creamsicle color I picked for upstairs. I DON'T think I'll do all the walls that color. :)

If you need directions, email info at americancat dot net.

Homebound -- truck at the truck hospital

Well, it's been one of those mornings.

First, Mark discovered that the raccoons that someone dumped here (that have been desperate for food and have been finding at least one new thing to destroy nightly, even though our property is fairly raccoon-proof) broke into the chicken pen last night and killed Hillary and Cornelia, our pet hens that we have had for six years.

Then the brake line on my truck burst...AFTER the back was filled with trash for the landfill.

Mark put a tarp down in the back of his spiffy little Matrix and we transferred the trash to his vehicle. It was a bit of a haul with 300 plus pound of trash plus two adults, but she made it OK. Although now she reeks like cat litter and Odor-Fresh garbage bags. I took down the cat poster at the waste transfer station, as all the cats and kittens caught there have been placed or spoken for.

Craig came and fetched my truck while we were gone, then gave me a call. The ball joints are shot as well, and I had already scheduled the catalytic converter to be replaced, so I told him to just keep my truck as long as he needs to, go over her nose to tail, and we'll just have to put it on a credit card. For those of you who don't know me, I "don't do" credit cards, because access to credit means I just spend more on cats. "Cash only" means I operate within my means. But Mark has a zero balance credit card just to bail out his wife in situations like these.

So I am homebound, other than when I can borrow Mark's car. For those of you to whom I promised anything requiring my truck...whether it was cat shelters, or merely my presence, I will not be able to follow through until my truck emerges from triage, and I told Craig to take his time since I do not need the truck to commute.

Poor Cornelia and Hillary. They were such great birds.

Next batch movin' on up

Now that it looks like the buff kitten litter is "mostly" placed, we're going to start lobbying for Lily's kittens.



Check out those silly spots!

Cyclops

I stopped by Valarie and Craig's tonight, to take photos of foster kittens and have Craig look at my ailing truck (diagnosis: catalytic converter). Craig pointed out poor old Cyclops on the front porch. He and Dixie are the last of the feral cats in their small colony that need to be captured, and Cyclops has been sniffly (plus missing and eye) for awhile. Tonight he was on the comforter under the bench, where they say he never stays--always runs away. Tonight he was feeling too poorly to run and he was surrounded by all the other beautiful glossy healthy cats who were fixed and had had their vaccinations. Cyclops only shows up now and then, so it's hard to arrange to catch him.

I tried to net him, and could have had I been more patient, but he ran off the porch. Still, he didn't run far, and watched the house while Valarie put out food. As he watched, he slowly crouched down, obviously feeling bad. Surprisingly, I was able to sneak around behind him and net him. Anyone who knows ferals knows that "sneaking around behind" one to net one is almost never successful on a healthy cat or even a sick one. Cyclops obviously feels like crap.



He's a mess. When I got him home, he just stuck his head in the back of the crate and didn't respond to me. I thought about calling Valarie up and just telling her we should put him down. I left him there and came in the house to think about it, and told Mark I'd pretty much decided he should go. I was sure he wouldn't eat in his condition.

Then I got the following email from Valarie:

"Cyclops" is a very sick adult cat that needs a helping hand. What ever you can do for him will be appreciated. Even if it means putting him to sleep. Secretly, I hope that all he has is an upper respiratory infection. He really is "harmless." We affectionately named him Cyclops because when we first saw him, he had just one eye that just wept and wept. He was healthy otherwise. Now.... he is sick and hurting. He needs our help and what ever he needs we will provide.

Sorry for blogging that without checking first, Valarie, but that is an incredible email.

Well. I read that over, pulled a can of Nine Lives out of the cupboard and went out to see Cyclops. He was now facing the crate door, and this time he gave me a nice spirited hiss. I mixed up some amoxicillin in the wet food and slid it inside and went away.

By the time I came back and hour later and took that photo, it was gone.

So there you go, Cyclops. It's up to you. If the meds kick in and you look better by Monday, we'll get you into the vet to be fixed and FeLV/FIV tested, and then we'll let you fatten up for a few weeks. If you continue to fail despite the meds (I'll get Clavamox for him tomorrow after discussing him with the vet...and she's coming over Sunday as well) then we may have to put you down.

But when people care, how can you give up on a big old feral half blind cat with spirit?

He reminds me of Dude. And look at Dude now. And he came from the same place, where he was dumped.

So I was cleaning the extended cab of my truck...

And I found cardboard poster tube from the ASPCA with a poster in it.

So I pulled the poster out.

"June is Adopt-A-Shelter-Cat Month" from 2006

And it's June. 2007.

Hey, I put the poster up in the cat facility. Because it's Adopt a Shelter Cat Month 2007.

I should clean my truck more often.

What do you do with an FIV+ cat?

I guess we put him up for adoption.

We played together awhile on the first floor (as cats thundered on the second floor overhead, and coyotes howled outside). He sure is a sweetheart. Here is Lawrence:


Roll left...


Roll right...



Smack that mousie!

(Thank you, Cary, for the mousies!)

Thank you for your gifts.

Just an update. We have received $150 in the Amazon.com tip jar these past 30 days. This covers the spay/neuter of two more cats (one female, and one male), which makes a huge difference to our small out-of-pocket venture here.

Thank you to everyone who has given in the past, and for every hour people have spent here at Wildrun volunteering for the cats, for the visits just to say "hi!" and of course every visit to the blog (which I am able to track via Site Meter to see how many, what city you are from, and how you arrived here...but not who you are, so don't worry!) Money isn't everything. The moral support of visits to this blog sustains us as well!

I have to say, when "blog friends" have shown up physically at off-site adoptions and volunteer events here at Wildrun, it just boggles my mind. We were told that the Internet could be "alienating." I have found it to be anything but.

Once upon a time I used to feel all alone in cat rescue, but since the advent of the Internet I've learned that this just isn't true. There are countless other folks out there doing just what I do--and often far more! I wish more of them had time to blog so we could share more stories. And there are countless people who have adopted pets from their own shelter or rescue group who are here with us virtually as well.

I remember when I first got internet access at a job at Ithaca College. I recall watching the Mozilla dinosaur slowly slowly slowly download, thinking, who the heck has time for this?--shutting it down, and getting back to my MASS-11 wordprocessing (which--funny--is just like .html is now).

Who would have thought.

Thank you all again!! You make all the difference.

Triple play!

Nip, Nibbles, and Billee all have potential adopters!

Wouldn't it be GREAT for Billee to have a home of her own?

Keep your fingers crossed!