Happy birthday!

Happy Fourth, everyone! And even more importantly, happy sixteenth birthday to Phoenix.



Phoenix is the old man of the house, officially an elderly guy now, but he still loves his mom and his family and greets me every morning with a bump to the forehead (as seen above) and sends me to bed every night with more of the same.

We found out this week that Phoenix is sick -- he's got both thyroid issues and kidney issues. Neither is too bad right now, but he's losing weight and it needs to be treated with a two-pill-a-day regimen. We start that tomorrow. Here's hoping he rallies, because I can't imagine living without this cat and am hoping for at least four more years of his company. I want him to live forever, but I also want him to live long enough that Sofie will remember him as her first kitty friend. If he can make it until she's four or five, I think she will.


***

Last night at the quilt guild satellite group meeting I attend, everyone except me was working on cute little patriotic quilts. I don't much like red-white-and-blue quilts or quilts with flags, but some of them were really sweet. Maybe I'll make one sometime soon.

In the meantime, I've finally sandwiched my log cabin top, so that's ready for quilting sometime this week, and I've almost finished the top for one of my three swap quilts. So I'm finally making a little progress.

***

We're enjoying our long weekend and making the most of some extra playtime. Today we got up and met friends at a local park for a couple hours of play, then home for lunch and naps and off again to Golden Gardens beach for a potluck picnic.

Brett's heading over early with the grills and some blankets to try to reserve two picnic tables withing easy eye-shot of the swingsets, so that the kidlets can play without having to be followed around too much.

Should be wonderful - the weather is good, we're making burgers and dogs, my friend Dianne is bringing STRAWBERRY PIE (my favorite), and we'll all just hang out for the few hours between naps and bedtime. No fireworks for us -- although we can see a tiny corner of the downtown fireworks from our upstairs bedroom windows, so I might try to watch a bit of them from up there.



Hope everyone is having a great day!

Second swap quilt finished

Here's the second of my swap quilts that have to go out in April -- all finished and ready to be shipped, today or tomorrow:



Looks a little wrinkly, doesn't it? I need to figure out how to use my new macro lens so I can get better closeup detail on these kind of pictures.

And here's the back -- which isn't really period fabric like the rest of it but the colors go and I liked it.



Two other bits of news -- yesterday Brett let me escape the house for a few hours to go fabric shopping and see a movie. I went and saw Forgetting Sarah Marshall, which was really great. I never used to like going to see movies on my own, but since Sofie was born it's all I can do not to run around in the lobby twirling and shouting "I'm ALONE! I'm BY MYSELF! Hallelujah!"

Lesson: If you see someone alone in the movie theater chortling and giggling before the movie even starts, rest assured it's a mom of a toddler out for a few hours of peace.

Second, last night around eleven, I closed the catdoor and headed upstairs to bed while Brett finished up some stuff downstairs. When I got up there I noticed that Max and Phoenix, our boy cats, were acting a little odd. Not upset, just odd. They were... very alert. And sitting in places they usually don't sit. And they both seemed really interested in one particular armchair that sits at the top of the stairs.

I finally put two and two together and realized something was under there. Fearing the worst (rat? possum?), I got down on the floor, lifted up the blanket that hides the underneath of the chair from view, and found this tiny little gray and white cat blinking back at me. Blinkblinkblink.

I called Brett up and we soon figured out from his collar that it was Dexter, who lives down the street a ways. He must've come in to explore and then gotten trapped under the chair by our overly watchful duo. We carefully peeled this very freaked out little cat out from under there and let him out for the night.

Bon voyage, Dexter. I don't think he'll be coming back anytime soon.

More kitties in boxes

And just as Phoenix is beginning to get back to normal about Cassie's sudden disappearance from our house, we decided to mess with his mind further tonight by packing Max into a cat carrier tonight, taking him to the emergency vet, and returning to the house without him.

Max is okay -- he had a bad abscess from someone biting him and needed surgery but he'll be home in a few hours -- but Phoenix is freaked OUT, man. Every couple weeks, some cat goes into a box and out the front door and doesn't come home! Holy schmoly.

I'm going to have a heck of a time getting him into a cat carrier for his next checkup, I think. At the moment, he's laying on the living room couch looking forlorn, unwilling to so much as lift his head to look around for fear that we might cart him away next.

Poor kitty.

Max's beloved or feline territorial acquisition?

Every night since Cassie died, Brett's cat Max comes and sits on my chest for twenty or thirty minutes while I'm falling asleep. He purrs. He lays down and puts his paws under my chin. He licks my hands. He completely ignores all entreaties from his dad to come visit him and just lavishes me with love and affection. (And drool. Lots of drool.)

It's great and I love it, but what gives? He'd occasionally visit me at night before but never with this kind of devotion. At first I thought perhaps he was sensing that I was sad and upset and trying to help. But a friend pointed out that it could also be that he always wanted to act like this with me but couldn't because I (and my side of the bed) belonged to Cassie, and that this is just part of the great reclaiming of territory that's going on around the house.

So maybe he loves me. Or maybe he just wants to own my chest.

Cat grief

Thank you to everyone who's commented so far on Cassie's memorial page. We're doing okay, sad but getting used to the fact that she's not here. It's getting easier to just think about good memories of her life and not just about the events of Friday.

Interestingly, Phoenix seems to be taking it hard; for all that they fought, they were constant companions for almost fifteen years. He's showing the classic signs of cat grief. He's wandering the house aimlessly. He wants a lot of affection and reassurance. He's eating less. He's listless and can't be bothered to get up for things for which he'd normally be beside himself with enthusiasm.

When we first got home from the vet, I couldn't bear to bring in the empty carrier, so we left it in the car. I brought it in last night and let Phoenix take a look at it. He jumped up excitedly when he saw it, like maybe she was in there, and seemed perplexed that it was empty. After giving it a really cautious sniff (normally he'd climb right in, but it probably smells like dying cat), he walked over and stared intently at the spot she used to lie in. Where is she? I could almost hear him thinking. Why isn't she coming back?

We've been talking a lot about whether cats understand death, or that they're dying. My personal opinion is that they don't have any long-term awareness of death, but that they do know when they're dying. I'm almost certain Cassie understood, that day at the vet, that she was going to die. I think Phoenix might know that she died; I'm sure she smelled sick or wrong somehow. But I doubt he has any deep understanding of that fact; if he does or did know it, he probably forgets from time to time. He's probably as much perplexed as anything else about why his long-time companion and frenemy disappeared.

Still, I feel bad for him when he wanders looking lost. I walked up to Mud Bay Granary this afternoon and got him a little care package - good catnip, some tasty snacks (bonita flakes - thanks for the recommendation, Jacki. He loves them!). He'll recover, but he's definitely feeling sad.

Last night I washed the towels from her carrier and the clothes she soiled at the vet and the blankets that covered her chair. We put away the sad, empty cat carrier. Maddie, her kitty sister, is slowly moving to take over Cassie's prime real estate inside the house - I found her last night sitting under the hutch in front of Cassie's favorite heating vent. Max is aware that something's up but not terribly affected by it, other than to perhaps be a little cuddlier than normal. Brett and I are talking about her without anyone losing their composure.

Things are moving ahead, minus one nose in the nightly nose count at chez Zalkan.

Memorial to Cassie

Cassie Zalkan
March 4, 1992 - November 23, 2007

This is a hard post to write. But I've been scribbling on paper for the last two days and I want to get it all down. Cassie deserves that. Here's a look at the life of our oldest kitty, who passed away the morning after Thanksgiving.


***
Cassie came to me as a one year old, desperate from having spent three days in the pound after her previous family gave her up for "allergies." She leapt into my arms, literally, and begged to come home promising to be the best and most devoted cat ever. When I got her home, she crawled under the bed and didn't emerge for three months, except after midnight when she would sneak up on the bed and curl up with me, as long as I didn't notice. So much for those promises. And thus began my relationship with the quirkiest and most neurotic but loving cat I've ever known.


Who was she?

Cassie was a zany, whacky girl. No one chased invisible creatures who weren't there around the apartments we lived in like she did. Flat Cassie, poised low to pounce on a ribbon or a toy, was of legendary cuteness. She had the best party trick ever, sitting up on her hind legs to catch a paper ball neatly with her front paws. She seemed to find many things amusing, unlike her almost humorless brother Phoenix.


Cassie was socially inept. For half of her life, she was so painfully shy that some of my friends didn't believe she existed. She hid for hours whenever we had visitors, only to venture out, maybe, in the last half hour to do a crazy, look-what-I-can-do routine that was her version of helping me entertain. But as she hit midlife, something loosened in her and she became visibly more sociable, greeting guests at the door, accepting petting, and begging for handouts. She blossomed.



Cassie was gentle with people, and ferocious with cats. She never deliberately scratched a person in her whole life, and her greatest joy was to be held or petted. She hated her brother, though, the one who she was supposed to be a friend to, and she beat him mercilessly at every opportunity. They, too, mellowed over time, and came to coexist fairly peacefully in the last few years, especially when thrown in with Brett's cats -- "us vs. them" proving a powerful inducement to peace. She was a fiercesome foe of moths, often carrying her latest prey up to our bed to show us. And once, in her fifteenth year, just months before she died, she caught herself a bird. I was proud of her - how could I not be? My wobbly, nutjob, geriatric girl had the chutzpah to take up hunting so late in life. Good for her.


Cassie was more clever than she got credit for. Clever enough to hide from a burglar when her brother stupidly fled out the open window he left behind and got lost for four days. Clever enough to open and empty a dresser drawer, climb in, and pull it shut behind her. Clever enough to realize that traveling across country by car is more pleasant when you ride on the dashboard and can see the scenery. Clever enough that I will go to my grave convinced that she communicated telepathically with me twice, in moments of great need.


Cassie was a lovebug. Every night for 14 years, she spent the entire night sleeping on me - either directly on my chest or under my arm like a stuffed rabbit. On my favorite nights, she'd turn belly up and wrap her paws around my arm, clutching me to her. We were spoons, purring away into the night. She gradually eased off of our nightly routine when I was pregnant, disturbed by the unfamiliar smells or the way my stomach would -- horror of horrors -- sometimes kick her. She viewed my stomach and later the baby with great and unremitting suspicion.

Now that she's gone, hardly any of the cats want to sit on my lap. While she was here, it was all I could do to get a moment to myself.

Cassie was peevish. When Sofie arrived, Cassie initially rallied but soon was displaced and disspirited, moreso than the other cats, who all managed to adjust. We saw less of her at night; the all-night-nursing phase was tough on her. She began to act out, pooping around the house at will. Once this began, we actively discouraged her from coming upstairs at night. She still showed up sometimes, but mostly she slept in the living room, on her favorite chair.


Cassie was an incredible pain in the neck. At least in the last year she was, and it was sometimes difficult to be nice to her. She pooped on the dining room table during dinner, she pooped on the bed in the middle of the night during a struggle. She whined. She sprayed the walls. She stole the food off our plates so aggressively that we could hardly eat. She ate directly off the baby, climbing right up into her high chair to take things off her bib and tray and even off her face now and then. We got to locking her in the basement when we had people over for dinner to spare ourselves the struggle and potential embarrassment - nothing puts a damper on a dinner party like a cat relieving herself on your table. We put her outside when she pooped. Sometimes we yelled at her. She was infuriating. She was crazy and sick. I wish we'd yelled less. I really do.

On the dashboard on our drive to Seattle.

Cassie was sickly. Over the last four years, my formerly portly girl, once so heavy that her belly swung with each step, struggled with recurring health issues. First too much thyroid, then not enough, then too much again. Then her intestines started to thicken in a way that suggested cancer. Then she got confused and surly, lost her bathroom training. How much of that was protest of the baby and how much was sickness? We'll never know. She ate ravenously but lost pound after pound. At the end, our once 12-pound tubby weighed five pounds and couldn't make her back legs obey her. When the doctor told us her time was up, we already knew. Her body temperature had dropped beyond the point of hypothermia and she was severely dehydrated. Her abdomen was one big mass. It was over.

She and I had a short reprieve at the end as we waited at the vet's office for Brett to find a babysitter and join us. Alone in an exam room for a little over an hour, I sandwiched her between two hot water bottles, wrapped her in a blanket, and held her while we talked over her life. For a while she slept, lulled by the warmth into a long deep nap she'd never have taken at the doctor's office if she wasn't so sick. When she woke up, I told her that now she got one hundred kisses. While I gave them to her, she wagged her tail weakly, happy again, and peed all over my leg. "I guess she really got relaxed," said the vet. I didn't mind. Then Brett arrived and the moment was really there.

One injection first, a strong sedative, and ten minutes to hold her while it took effect. "We're sorry about the baby," Brett told her. We jokingly told her to go towards the light -- there were moths to catch in the light. It's time to go, I told her, don't worry about us, just go. I think that's the last thing she heard - she went limp immediately after that and never stirred again. The second shot was almost immediately effective, and she was gone.

***

With Cassie gone, we can uncover the chairs whose upholstery she had a tendency to destroy with her "accidents." We can sit in "her chair" without facing endless protests. We can leave food unattended on the table, or the island, or in the trash. We can open the doors and gates that barricaded her from rooms she liked to do mischief to. Already the house feels cleaner, more open, more manageable. And more empty.

In one fell swoop, I told Brett, our lives have gotten much easier and much less rich.

"I hope she comes back to haunt us," Brett said this morning. Who knows, maybe such things can happen. I had an apartment once where the former occupant told me there was a ghost cat. I always liked that idea and would talk to it sometimes, even though I never saw it. A friend of mine swore he saw the ghost of his dog once. Maybe Cassie will come back to perch on her chair or sit with us in the middle of the night.

But I hope not; I hope she's not restless. I prefer to think of her off somewhere with lots of big, juicy moths, where there are no babies or brothers, and where she sits down to three square meals of people food a day - meat, potatoes, vegetables and dessert. And all the milk she can drink.

Her last picture, just a couple months ago.

Goodbye Cassie. You were a good girl. We love you and we miss you terribly.

Gadget envy

I want one of these camera collars for my cats! Check out Mr. Lee's photo gallery from his trips around the neighborhood, from watching the lovely neighbor girl kitty from afar to drinking from someone's pool.

What would we find out if we put one on Cassie? I suspect she spends a lot of her day doing wacky, secret things. And I also suspect we'd find her digging through the neighborhood trash cans for food.

Therapy jar

We joke from time to time about starting a therapy jar for Sofia - a jar in which we insert a dollar every time we do something we suspect she'll discuss with a therapist some day far, far in the future.

Tonight we should probably have made our first deposit.

Our daughter celebrated her eight month birthday by excitedly watching her second favorite cat -- Cassie, the fifteen year old whack job who has utterly lost her mind as well as most of her bowel control -- eat a cute little bird on the dining room floor.

Cassie has never caught a bird before. She lived indoors for the first twelve years of her life and has certainly never really hunted. We had no idea she actually could catch a bird or would know what to do with one if she did.

But catch one she did. We suspect Max, her more normal and much younger brother brought it into the house; all we know is that during dinner it was fluttering around in my office and then nutjob Cassie proudly dragged it into the living room and started eating it on the dining room floor while we looked on in shock.

Or while Brett and I looked on in shock, that is.

Sofie dove right into the experience, bouncing up and down in her seat and shouting "Kiddy! Kiddy!" with great enthusiasm. It's like she was an ancient Roman cheering the gladiators on to their kill. A little bloodthirsty, this one.

We shook off the surprise after a minute or two and got the bird away from the cat -- no point in encouraging her to upchuck dead bird all over the house later -- but even with this relatively quick action, Sofie still got an eyeful.

Luckily, she doesn't yet love (or know the word for) birdies.

Experiments in lighting

A few pictures I took today when the sun was coming in and making everything look golden.

Sofie, thinking things over:


Phoenix, backlit:


Front door wreath, all aglow:

Wild Kingdom

It's become wild kingdom in our house lately. In the last twenty four hours I have:

• Shooed a racoon away from our open cat door at about 8:30 last night - he was outside looking in when Phoenix noticed him and hissed. Good kitty.
  
• Come upstairs from the basement an hour later to find a small possum making a hasty exit from our kitchen. Yikes.
  
• Woke up this morning to find the brute pictured below, our newest guest cat, fast asleep in our bedroom.

This hulk of cat (he must be twenty pounds) is Sebastian. We know his name from his collar, and know his owners a bit since they're the parents of four month old twins and live down the street and around the corner. He's now, apparently, the third of our resident aliens -- in the tradition of Indiana Jones and then Trooper. (Oh, and also Gelato, our vacation cat. And Caesar, from Sun Mountain. Good lord, this happens a lot.) What distinguishes him from those two is that he seems to be a little nicer - no fights, no mess. He just wants to hang.

Why does this keep happening to us? If it's karma, is it good (we're good people, animals want to hang with us) or bad (we're being punished by the animals of the world by their constant intrusions into our house)?

On the possum/racoon front, this is bad news. We're obviously going to have to call critter control again about the possum, at least, and maybe the racoon. Brett has been fighting this a bit, because it's an unpleasant business, this animal removal thing, but the wildlife intrusions are becoming a nightly event and leaving the cat door locked shut forever isn't a great solution for us since two of our cats live primarily outdoors and need to come in to feed.

On the Sebastian front, the jury is out. He's a pretty amiable fella, so far, so he may get a free pass to hang out, IF the other cats accept him. Sebastian's owners, who I inevitably run into when we're both out with our stroller-bound infants, tell me that he lives in a lot of houses around here. "We went to a dinner party at the house of a neighbor who we'd never visited before," the father told me, "and when we arrived there was Sebastian, asleep on their couch."

Funny guy.

My companion

Phoenix, the cat who loves me like no other, has taken to getting up with me for the middle of the night feeding. Each and every night, when I get up to fetch the baby at 2 or 3 or 4, he drags himself off his warm bathroom floor and joins me on the bed, or downstairs in the baby's room, and proceeds to purr and sit companionably beside me for the whole process - even if it takes an hour. And when we finish, he gives me headbutts and kisses as if to say, "You're doing great. Keep it up. We love you."

What an amazing cat. I wish he could live forever.

He then sometimes will follow me into the kitchen, if my tasks take me there, and wrap himself encouragingly around my legs as if to say, "Hey, I know it's the middle of the night, but since we're here, how about you open up a nice can of catfood?"

Best friends

Cassie is adjusting to the baby better than we'd hoped...

Standoff at Chez Zalkan

Brett and I have a guy who comes in and does the heavy cleaning every two weeks - cleans the floors, cleans the bathrooms, etc. Lately we've also been asking him to strip the bed and remake it, because it's just one of those tasks we never get around to often enough.

Today, he showed up at eight, as usual, and I left the house around nine to go run errands. As I left, I noted that Cassie was curled up fast asleep on my side of the bed and Phoenix was wandering around as if he were about to join her.

Got home to this note from the cleaner guy:

"... A funny thing happened on the way to making the bed. Phoenix and the little brown one let me make about half of the bed, but their hissing and swatting (and overall failure to get off the bed) forced me to defer to their feline wishes. The pillows are recased but the sheets are only 60% on the bed. I blame them."

Heh. :) I can imagine Phoenix doing this, no problem. But shy retiring little Cassie? They must've enjoyed themselves, ganging up on the hapless housecleaner dude like this. They both looked strangely pleased with themselves when I got home...

Three pictures of Phoenix

Phoenix, demonstrating that the comma is his favorite piece of punctuation:

Fast asleep:


Waking up:


Will you stop taking pictures of me already?

Cat Karma

The world's cats continue to be attracted to us wherever we go, insisting on spending the night in our hotel rooms whenever possible.

First there was Mighty Caesar, at Leavenworth, who insistently meowed outside our cabin door at two in the morning until we let him in, and then proceeded to sleep happily on our bed until morning. This was in February of 2005. He visited us again on a return trip about a year later, but didn't stay as long.

This weekend, our first night at Sun Mountain Lodge, I went out to get a soda from the downstairs vending machine at around 10:00 and was meowed at enthusiastically by a big, friendly white cat, who of course I stopped to pet. We chatted for a while, I got my drink, and I said goodbye and headed back up the stairs to our room. But when I opened the door, who should rush in in front of me? Well the cat, of course. I had no idea she had followed me.

"Um, honey, I brought us a cat," I called out, while Patches settled in under the room's one chair and watched us for a while before deigning to accept a drink of water and some petting, and then settling in on the bed for a five-hour nap.

"Really?" said Brett. "Wow. Us and cats, man."

She did wake us up by walking over our heads around three a.m., wanting to go out and hunt. We let her out - I was up anyways, for the usual reasons - and went back to sleep. The next morning, on our way to breakfast, we saw her happily disemboweling a rat underneath the stairs of our building. Mmmm. Breakfast.



The people at the front desk confirmed that yes, she's officially their cat, and she's here to catch rats, and that they do feed her. There were two of them but they claim the other one got "adopted." We're not quite sure if that's meant to be taken literally or is the life-in-coyote-country version of telling a kid that their puppy went to live on a farm.

Happy Birthday Phoenix

Today is the day when people all over the country stop and shoot off firecrackers to celebrate the birthday of Phoenix Carmichael Shult Zalkan, who is now 14.

It's very moving.

Cat tricks

Cassie, our quiet and shy (and slightly crazy) cat, has a new trick. She's become a big game hunter.

Started last week, when she scared the crap out of us by sitting at the foot of the bed after we'd fallen asleep, meowing in a horrible, tortured, "Help me, I've just amputated a limb" kind of way that usually means trouble. I turned on the light to see what was wrong and she looked me in the eye, then regurgitated a large, live moth about the size of her head that she'd somehow been keeping in her mouth and meowing around. Then she ate it, looking incredibly pleased with herself. Came up for some petting and praise, and never made another peep all night long.

Two nights later, same routine. The "help me I'm dying" meow that can wake you in a cold sweat, flip on the light, regurgitate another live moth that just seems too big to even fit inside her head. Eat it. Look pleased as punch.

She's so, so, SO, so proud of herself.

Last night she did it again, but being obsessed with the quilt I was working on I was still up when it happened. I heard her go out through the cat door around midnight, and about ten minutes later in she came, calling for me. I found her in the living room where she'd apparently dropped it by mistake before getting to her desired audience.

This time she let Phoenix eat it.

Now I have to wonder -- what do moths taste like? They look like they'd be pretty gross, all fuzzy and probably bitter. Blech. But they do seem to be a delicacy to the felines of the Zalkan household.

Cats in contemplation

Brett captured the cats in some thoughtful moments out on the front yard earlier this week:







These were all earlier in the week, before the temperature hit 80, making the front yard scorching hot. Now if you go out looking for feline company, it's like searching for slugs - you're much more likely to find them scrunched up in the shade of one of the big tomato pots or in one of the damp places I just watered than actually laying out on the sidewalk.

More cat logic

Such interesting brains, these cats.

Phoenix seems to have set a rule or himself that he can only re-enter the house from the same door from which he left it. While he clearly knows the back cat door exists, he'll only use it to enter the house if that's how he went outside to begin with. Instead he'll wait, quite clearly wanting to come back in, for someone to open the screen door for him. Sometimes he'll even beg, when he could quite easily take a short walk and get back in on his own.

This rule leads to many situations in which he goes out the front door in the morning, won't come in before we leave for work, and is still there on the front porch ten hours later, shivering and quite glad to see us, when we get home. He enjoys his trips outside, but he's essentially a sissy who would rather sit on the couch all day than rough it outside unnecessarily. Today he waited in the rain. Luckily, I came home early to rescue him.

Why does he do this? Why are they such dorks?

Death by cat

My cat is trying to kill me.

As if it's not bad enough that I now have to get out of bed to use the bathroom about four times a night (yay, third trimester!), last night my small, neurotic tabby cat woke me up about every twenty minutes between each of these visits, full of some kind of terrible need for petting that only I could fulfill.

All.

Night.

Long.

If it happens again tonight, I may entirely lose my will to live.