Temporary break in your usual programming.

As some of you may know, I just got back from vacation on Sunday.  I was all prepared to write some witty and clever posts about how amazing it was.

Those posts will wait.

When we got back from the airport on Sunday evening, my cat Anoosh couldn't stand up.  Her eyes were glazed over and she didn't seem aware of us.  We took her to the emergency vet clinic where my friend Crystal works.  Several hours later we made the difficult decision to put her down. 

Anoosh was at least 12 years old, possibly older.  She had uncontrolled hyperthyrodism, a heart murmur, and liver issues.  We're not sure exactly what was wrong in the end:  her blood work had a lot of possibilities but showed no solutions.

But I don't want to talk about that.  I don't want to talk about how it broke my heart to see her slip away at the end, how I wasn't even sure if she knew we were there.  I don't want to talk about how thin she was or how her fur was matted.  I especially don't want to consider if I made the right decision.  Because how can it ever be right?  How could I have done anything else?

I adopted Anoosh five years ago, about a week before Batman and I went on our first date.  I was living in house with three veterinary students and they told me about a blood donor cat that needed a home.  Anoosh had spent several years living in a vet lab, giving blood every so often.  The other cats were mean to her.  I met her and fell in love.

 I considered several other names:  Gizmo (after the Gremlin) and Pi, because of her perfectly symmetrical face markings.  But "Anoosh" just seemed to fit.

She was a weird cat.  All cats are weird to a certain degree, but she was odd in an un-catlike fashion.  She liked to be held upside down and cuddled like a baby.  If you scratched her under the arms, she would gently touch your nose with her paw and lick the air.

We joked that she wasn't actually a cat, but rather an alien species sent to observe human behavior. 

She was fascinated with water.  She loved drinking from the sink.  If you made the mistake of leaving a cup of water where she could get it, she'd gently hook her paw over the rim and spill it.  Then just watch the puddle as it spread.

One summer we didn't have air-conditioning, so I got her shaved.  The poor thing looked like a squirrel with a tiny body, huge fluffy tail, and giant head.  She didn't let me pet her for several weeks after that.

She was a world-class cuddler and spent hours with me when I read. 

Most cats didn't like her because she didn't behave in a cat-like manner.  She never participated in dominance games, nor did she react when other cats hissed at her.  It took about a year, but Fat Momma and her finally became friends.

I worried that when Mo-mo was born, she would be jealous.  She, more than any of my other pets, was my "baby". 

But she loved Mo-mo and Mo-mo loved her.  She'd let Mo-mo pet her, even when the pettings were more like grabbing and slapping. 

I was lucky to have known her.  I was lucky that I had Batman, my stepmom, and my friend/vet Crystal with me when I had to make the crappy decision to let her go.  I am going to miss her. 

I already miss her.    

"Until one has loved an animal, a part of one's soul remains unawakened. "

--Anatole France

Instead

I was going to write a "Meet the Animals: Part 4" for my cat Anoosh.


Instead, here is a cartoon I drew about her a couple of years ago.






It explains everything.

Meet the Animals: Part Three

This is Fat Momma.

She does have a proper name--it is technically Isis. But we never call her that.

When we lived in Texas, we (and the rest of the neighborhood) fed outdoor cats. They kept down on the tarantulas, scorpions and snakes. I wish I could have adopted them all--instead, I just satisfied myself with feeding them.

As we got to know the regular cats, we named them. Mostly unofficial, undignified nicknames like Squinty, Ducky, and Bad Momma.

Then Fat Momma, so named because she was scrawny with a huge pregnant cat belly, had kittens in our carport. It was as if she chose us--so we had to adopt her.

We gave her kittens away to a neighbor and she stayed with us. When we lived in Texas, she was still pretty wild. She was an indoor/outdoor cat, sleeping outside and coming in mostly to eat. She did not trust our dogs. She liked being petted but hated to be on the ground when we were walking around--she acted as if she thought she'd get stepped on or kicked.

Moving was pretty hard on her. We had to stage our trek up to St. Louis in segments-- there was no way to get two dogs, two cats, two cars, and all our stuff there in one trip. Fat Momma lived with my mother-in-law for a month or so during the transition. She hid most of the time. Once we became convinced that she had gotten out and were frantically calling to her all around the neighborhood. It turns out that she just was hiding in the basement ceiling.

Fat Momma and my other cat, Anoosh, have slowly forged a truce. They were not fans of each other at first, mainly because Anoosh is unrecognizable to other cats as a cat. Now they'll share a chair and play kitty tag.

Fat Momma is a pretty relaxed cat now. She doesn't go outside anymore and she seems okay with that. She responds to a whistled tune--she always comes to investigate. She loves to sit on laps and get petted. We entice her to cuddle sometimes by petting the air and she'll hurry to us to get those missed pettings. She hates to travel and hides when she sees suitcases but is okay once we get to our destination. She likes toy mice but our dogs tend to steal them.

We call her Fat Mar-mar, Fat Meow-Meow (we've been attempting to move away from Momma because we don't want to confuse Mo-mo), Batman, Tuxedo Cat, Fat Panther, Volumptious (misspelled on purpose) , and even rarely Isis.

Meet the Animals: Part Deux

In a previous post, you met Odin. Now meet Athena.



I had always known that we wanted two dogs. I think that it's healthier for dogs to have a companion and a friend. Odin was so co-dependent on us when he was a puppy that we quickly realized that he needed another dog to bond with.

We were at the party of a friend of a friend in Texas and the neighbors mentioned that their dog had just had puppies. If someone mentions puppies or kittens, it is physically impossible for me not to go see them. I looked at the puppies (i.e. cuddled and baby-talked them), mentioned I would be interested in adopting one when they were weaned, and the neighbor called me a couple of months later.

When I went to pick one out, all of them looked almost exactly the same. I was overwhelmed with cuteness. I decided to sit down and pick out whichever one came to me first.

None of them came to me.

Finally the mommy dog walked behind me and one puppy tried to follow her. That was close enough in my book.

From day one, she and Odin were best buddies.


We decided to stick with naming motif with had going (names beginning with vowels, various gods and goddess) and call her Athena.

Her mom was a husky and her dad (as best we could figure out) was a pit bull. She had beautiful light blue eyes when she was a puppy and now they're closer to a tawny yellow.

She is as brave as Odin is meek. While he wouldn't even jump off our bed as a puppy, preferring to whine until we set him on the floor, she would throw herself off of the five foot high drop-off in our back yard.

She's an escape artist. Odin knows the boundaries of the yard, and probably wouldn't even leave if a gate was open. She routinely hops the fence at my parent's house and used to squeeze out of our yard through the tiniest holes.

She's smart but a little lazy. When we were teaching the dogs about the electric fence, we'd put them on leashes, throw lunchmeat on the ground until we gradually got to the boundary, let them hear the beep and get shocked, pull them back in and tell them how good they are. Odin learned that beep = shock. Athena learned that lunchmeat on the ground = shock. She spent a week on our porch before she learned the boundaries by following around Odin.

She'll sit on command if Odin does it first. She thinks that fetch is a game of tackle Odin, or sometimes of taking the ball and running away with it.

She's a fierce defender of Mo-mo. She even growled at Odin the first week if he came too near--but she's ever so gentle to Mo-mo herself. She is a compulsive licker and a stealer of the pettings. She dislikes swimming and getting baths. She bolts down dog treats and steals Odin's if he doesn't watch them well enough. She loves getting her belly rubbed. She has horrible manners on the leash. She's tough--she doesn't whimper when she's hurt like Odin does. For anyone who says that pit bulls are a horrible breed and should be outlawed, we point to her and her sweetness. We call her Theena, Tina, Theen-bean, Theeners, Beena, and Butterscotch Ears.

She is also a Good Dog.

Meet the Animals: Part One

I've had a hard time writing recently, so I've decided to steal some writing prompts from here.

As most of you know, I'm an animal person. I love all of the fuzzy wuzzy little animals, great and small. Except scary birds that bite. And megamouth sharks. (Have you ever seen one of these? I think they're endangered because the only natural reaction to seeing one is "Eeeeeee! Kill it! Kill it now!")

I like cats, dogs, horses, rats, turtles, and so on. When my husband and I own a house I'd like to have chickens and bees. I'm such an animal person that I worked at a vet clinic in high school. I even roomed with three veterinarians in college (I was the token liberal arts McUseless major.)

I have two cats and two dogs. This is the story of my one of my dogs.

When we were living in Texas, Batman and I wanted to adopt a dog. We repeatedly went to the Humane Society but every time we tried to fill out paperwork on one, it was already being adopted.

We stopped one day to look at "roadside puppies"--dogs being sold by random people on the side of the road. They were mostly fighting dogs or the breeds that were popular around there, like chihuahuas. In the midst of a bunch of tough looking pit bull pups was a lone puppy that clearly didn't belong. He was the last of his litter, he was whimpering, and he was being stepped on by the other dogs.

We were worried that he was going to end up in a sack in the river if no one bought him. So of course we did. Price: $30


He shivered in our arms as we went to Petsmart to get supplies. We bathed him to get rid of the fleas and ticks, fed him, played with him. We named him "Odin" after the Norse father god of war (and I love the book American Gods!).

In less than a week, he got sick. He kept vomiting and couldn't keep anything down, not even water. The vet in our town specialized in cows and livestock and seemed totally unimpressed--as if he couldn't imagine why we were so upset about a dog. He gave us calf medicine and told us that all we could do is wait it out. Odin started to get even worse, so we drove an hour and a half to get to an all night vet clinic and found out he had parvo. Odin was put on an IV drip for two days as he rode it out. Price? Incredibly expensive. But worth it.

Odin is our co-dependent, whiny baby dog. He loves to be near people and whimpers if he can't be. Some of our nicknames for him include, "Odin Pants", "Odie", "Handsome", and "Han-term" (a messed up version of "handsome") .

He loves our other dog, Athena, deeply and truly. He loves people and being pet. He sprained his neck last year and became a bit of a chunker while he was on doggy bed rest (outside on harness only) and also because of the steriods/anti-inflammatory medicine. He split his ear defending my mother-in-law's house from a stray dog. He loves swimming. He'll play fetch with a tennis ball. He knows "sit" and "lay down". He's terrified of the electric fence. He likes to sit on people's feet. He is horrible on the leash but will walk next to you without one.

All in all, he's a Good Dog.