The One No One Wanted….

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Where do I start with Pippi? She’s got many nicknames: Poopie, Poopitar, Poopula. Usually when we foster we get to name the kittens, but her batch came named and quite frankly Pippi suits her, she’s a Pip.

We’ve been told that cats don’t do things out of spite and we’re giving her too much credit when we say she does. But I’ve seen her watch me clean out the litter box, then minutes later she goes down and does her business NEXT to the clean box. At first we thought she preferred a clean box but I can tell you that’s not the problem. She leaves us gifts when she’s displeased, like if we’ve gone out for an extended time. Now I realize it’s possible we are reading too much into this, but she has more of a tendency to leave her mark when we’re gone too much.

When we were fostering her, her sister and her brothers we weren’t sure who was doing their business next to the box. As the boys got bigger, got neutered and went up for adoption we were able to narrow it down through a process of elimination. We actually thought it was both of the girls, turns out it was just her. They had to disclose this fact to potential adopters, that’s why she just sat there at the shelter.

The shelter is closed Sunday & Monday and we’re such suckers we didn’t like leaving her all alone those two days. Ok, she wasn’t all alone, they do come in and clean and feed everyone. It’s not the same as being WITH us though. The shelter supervisor let us bring her home on the weekends, which in retrospect was probably a bad idea. She decided this was her home, she was a perfect angel here. At the shelter she was a terror. After her sister got adopted they tried to put another kitten in the cage with her so she’d have company. Yeah, she wasn’t having that….she growled and hissed at the poor thing. She also climbed the sides of the cage and CRIED all day long, so much so that the workers were sick of her. It got worse when we came in, she got WILD and even louder. After about a month of this routine Bob joked with the shelter manager, saying “soon you’ll be paying US to take her off your hands”. A little while later we were out with the dogs and the shelter manager came out and said “Do you want her? If you do you can have her, get her OUT of here. We’ll update her shots and you can have her”. I’m sure we are giving her far too much credit but I honestly believe that’s what she wanted all along.

If we hadn’t raised her I’d say some of her behavior problems are a result of a rough “kittenhood” or a bad mother. We have had her since she was about 2 ½ - 3 weeks old so I know that’s not the case, she’s just a punk. If you pick her up and she doesn’t wish to be held she growls at you. Actually she starts off whining, works up to a growl, then she’ll try to bite. She doesn’t bite hard, she’s never broken the skin but you know she doesn’t want to be held. It’s pretty funny when this little cat starts growling at you, we find it so entertaining that we hold her until she gets worked up into a tizzy. I know, we’re mean but it’s funny. She’s over a year now so it’s pretty safe to say she’s full grown and she weighs 9 pounds.

Pippi’s other claim to fame is her fascination with knocking things off counters and dressers. Cats don’t understand the concept of sleeping in or weekends, they just have an internal clock that tells them it’s time for breakfast. Since we get up early during the week (4:30-5:00AM) the latest they will ever let me sleep on the weekends is 5. Around 4:15 Pippi starts knocking stuff off my nightstand. She starts with my water bottle, I try to ignore her. She then moves to the actual alarm clock which always wakes me up. I’ve taken almost everything off my dresser because she’s knocked everything off. We lost the remote because she knocked it off and kicked it under the dresser. Pretty much anything is fair game, empty boxes, pens, silverware, bottles, cans, mail, magazines, etc. It’s REALLY annoying and I swear she knows it. Another fun thing that Pippi likes to do is run across the bed early in the morning or sometimes she’ll wrestle with Jack or Hurley. It’s always on my side of the bed because Bob sleeps through everything. Sometimes I have scratches on my hands from her running across me. Oh and I can’t forget the CRYING, good grief. She’s small and yet she has a set of lungs. She’ll stand at the top of the stairs CRYING like someone is torturing her.

Pippi isn’t all bad she can be very sweet when she wants to. She follows me around, she sleeps with me and she’ll sleep on my lap. She was definitely meant to be a part of our family; she fits right in with Jack. It’s hard for me to imagine life without Pippi.

Ernie the Orange Boy

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I’ve never been so focused on poo in my life. Let me explain, Ernie has megacolon. What that means is his colon doesn’t work properly and poo just builds up in there. He DOES go poo, but it’s a long drawn out process for him. He goes to the box multiple times and tries to make product, about 75% of the time nothing comes out. Eventually he does make chocolate but it’s hard, like clay. We had him on a schedule where he was getting enema’s roughly every six months and we changed his diet. Recently however that wasn’t enough and he spent three days with our vet.

He’s on new medication that seems to be working, it’s been less than a week but it seems promising. I’m pretty sure he can’t tell the difference between a fart and a dump because he goes to the box a LOT and farts a LOT….audibly. We’re pretty excited about this new development because it means that the medication is working.

Through all his medical problems Ernie has remained a sweet boy. He never cries in the car when I take him to the vet and most of the time he’ll get in the carrier on his own. He likes to lay with us at night when we’re watching tv. He comes up right by my head and curls up next to me.

When he was really backed up he would make the ‘potty face’. I know this sounds crazy, but I can tell when he has to go. He wouldn’t go by himself because Jack & Hurley and Pippi would gather around the box and watch him, he doesn’t want an audience. So he’d sit in his cat bed looking at me with his potty face and I’d take him to the box. Now that he’s feeling better he goes all by himself, which is also huge.

Ernie is a funny little man, he was smitten with our first foster kitten Boo Boo Kitty. I’d go looking for her and I’d find them together. I think he was crushed when she left us, after she left he wasn’t interested in any other foster kittens.

I actually wish he would eat people food or drink some milk. If he would he might get rhea, which would be a huge improvement over his current situation. But he’s only interested in dry food and he prefers water with ice in it. He’s on prescription wet right now and he seems to like it, but I think the novelty might wear off.

Anyway, every time he goes to the box we gather around and wait in anticipation of a big dump. I can’t tell my non cat friends this stuff because they’d think we’re nuts.

Bob said I was a little too graphic with Ernie's medical problems. I was going to go back and edit this, but I got to thinking about it. I don't want to get all preachy but we see a LOT of animals that are brought into the shelter because they 'didn't work out'. Sometimes animals with medical problems are abandoned. It's really unfortunate and I certainly understand that these days money is tight and sometimes owners have to make the difficult choice to surrender their pet. But how often do people adopt a pet without thinking it through? My point in writing this blog is to share what it's like living with 6 cats, they bring as a lot of joy and pleasure. However, it's not without some sacrifices, animals require work and money. I don't want to mislead anyone into thinking that it's all rainbows and butterflies, you roll the dice when you adopt an animal. They might be perfectly healthy or they might end up developing medical problems, you just never know. I wouldn't trade any of our cats for anything and there's nothing I wouldn't do for them. We made a lifelong commitment when we adopted them. Anyway, I apologize if any of the above is too much information but Ernie's medical problems are part of our daily life.

When do we eat???

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Jack’s life revolves around learning and getting into things, he gets up in the morning thinking about what he can get into. Hurley is the exact opposite; his main focus in life is eating followed by sleeping. Remember Jack and Hurley are brothers from the same litter. You wouldn’t know it if you saw them, Jack is skinny like a Grey Hound and Hurley is more like a bowl of fat.

Even when Hurley was a tiny little kitten he was more interested in food than anything else. At feeding time he’d be climbing our legs in anticipation of food, then mash his face in the bowl and end up with wet all over his face.

A little known fact about kittens is that they’re messy, very MESSY. Once a day we’d let them out of the bathroom for supervised play while I cleaned up their mess. Hurley’s brother and sisters couldn’t wait to get out and explore, not Hurley. He wanted to rest, so I’d have to clean around him.

We call him Joey Chestnut, the hot dog eating champion. Hurley eats his food so fast I don’t think he tastes it. He powers through it so he can push other cats out of the way and eat their wet. I try to give him a little extra so it takes him a little longer…he’s like a vacuum.

When we’re eating dinner he’ll get up on the table and steal food from Bob. He knows not to do that with me because I won’t share food. I don’t want to encourage the bad behavior, though it’s probably too late now. The thing is Hurley will eat just about ANYTHING, not just your usual suspects like chicken and pork. His favorite is asparagus, Saturday he ate FOUR stalks of asparagus. I made BLT’s a few weeks ago and there was a piece of bacon left. He got up on the counter and stole the entire piece and ate it, like a dog would. He never put it down; he kept it in his mouth and just munched on it. I’ve never seen a cat eat people food like he does. One time I made chicken skewers and he stole a piece of chicken and hid in the cat condo to eat it. Another time he bit Bob’s thumb because he thought it was chicken. The absolute funniest thing was when he stole a piece of spicy sausage. He ate it, but he shook his head afterwards and ran to the water dish. Most cats would have stopped when the spice hit them, not Hurley.

We have this ongoing debate about how Hurley learned to fetch. Bob thinks he taught him, I think I taught him, in reality I think he figured it out himself. That’s about the only exercise he gets. He’s very particular about what kind of mouse he’ll use. It has to be one that he’s broken in properly. He dunks them in the water dish and pulls the plastic inside of them out. You end up with just the outer ‘fur’ covering, he’ll dunk that as well and bring you a soaked mouse. Jack LOVES the plastic insides and they always disappear after awhile, I'm pretty sure Jack has a stash of them in his secret hiding place. If you try to throw a brand new mouse Hurley will just look at you like “you think I’m going to get that?” When he was little he would play mousie for hours, now he gets tired after a few throws.

6 cats 6 different personalities

Anyone with pets will tell you that their pets have distinct personalities. When you have six cats you have to be mindful of the fact that people who don’t have pets don’t understand this concept. Also, they already think you’re nuts, so if you start rambling about a cute thing your cat did their eyes glaze over. I make it a point not to talk too much about the cats unless I’m specifically asked. Even then I try to keep my stories short.

We have six cats, all with different personalities. We’ve been volunteering at the shelter since 2007, we’ve fostered kittens, and I grew up with cats so it’s safe to say we’ve been around a LOT of cats. I have never met a cat like Jack.

Jack is truly exceptional, he doesn’t just do cat things. Even when he does the usual cat stuff, he does it with flair. He likes to open drawers and cabinets and take stuff out. He opens our closet doors and pulls things down, he’s particularly fascinated with Bob’s ties. He gets on Bob’s printer and steps on the buttons until he gets it to print test pages; this is particularly annoying because he wastes a LOT of ink doing that. We come home to stacks of paper on the floor. Last year we had everyone over for Easter, Bob went out to play golf after everyone left and I took a nap. When I got up I discovered the front door wide open and Jack standing outside. He watched everyone leave and decided HE wanted out. At first I thought someone didn’t shut the door properly, but then I SAW him do it. We don’t have typical round door knobs; they are more like flat paddles. He jumps up and pulls on it until the door pops open. He does this with the front door, the garage door and the coat closet. We had to put latch on the front door, we have to keep the door to the garage locked and we have door stops wedged under the coat closet door. But that doesn’t stop Jack, he picked the door stops out and got into the closet. He climbed the vacuum cleaner and got on top of the coats.

I hope I can post some pictures of Jack’s destruction because words don’t really do it justice. We put bird seed out for the birds, the cats love to watch the birds come on the patio. There was a bag of bird seed on the patio by the glass door. Yesterday I came home from the gym and discovered that Jack had picked a hole in the screen door and pulled the bag through the hole. Most of the bird seed spilled out on to the patio, some got on the floor. When I came in he was laying on the empty bag looking through the hole. That’s what Jack does.

We’re missing small things, like a small crystal cat, pens and pencils always disappear. Bob saw Jack go in the spare room, a few minutes later he went trotting by with a pencil in his mouth. We don’t know where he keeps his stash of treasures, we’ve been looking.

We keep the dry cat food in a cabinet in the kitchen. Jack knows this and likes to go in the cabinet. He shredded a bag of food, not sure why because they get plenty, but he made a huge mess. The cat food is on the bottom shelf and my baking supplies are on the top shelf. He knocked over a bottle of molasses, it formed a puddle and ran down the back of the cabinet on to the second shelf. It took me over an hour to clean it up. Afterwards I put packing tape on the top and bottom of the cabinet. Bob and I watched Jack, he tried to open the cabinet door. It literally took him five minutes to figure out that the tape was preventing him from getting in the cabinet. He picked the bottom piece off, got on the counter and picked the top piece off and got back in the cabinet. When Jack wants to do something, he’s going to do it. He’s not afraid of anything, in fact he follows me around when I vacuum. You can spray him in the face with a squirt bottle; he just flinches and continues what he’s doing.

UPDATE Right after I posted this I discovered that I forgot to lock the garage door. Of course Jack opened the door and went in the garage, he didn't walk on MY car. He walked all over Bob's car and he got IN the car. The window wasn't even open that much, maybe that's why it was so exciting. There are claw marks and holes in the leather seat like he probably clawed his way up the side of the seat to get out of the car. Most cats would go out in the garage and sniff a few things, maybe climb on some boxes....not Jack. Nooooo Jack has to cause some destruction.

How the Insanity Began....

We have SIX cats and I’m embarrassed to tell people. I’m quite sure people picture a filthy house that smells like cat pee and they think we’re nuts. We work pretty hard at containing the cat odors, it’s a lot of work but it can be done. We should probably buy stock in Zero Odor (it REALLY works by the way)

We didn’t intend to become crazy cat people. When we met I had a cat, Herbie. When it was time to move in together Bob said “What’s going to happen to Herbie when we move in?” I said “What do you MEAN what’s going to happen to him? He’s coming WITH me, we’re a package deal” I’m pretty sure I heard him mumble ‘damn it’ under his breath. Once he realized he’d be living with Herbie he spent some time getting to know him and Herbie grew on him. About a week before we moved in together we adopted Lucky, from the Marin Humane Society. I figured I’d have Herbie and Lucky could be Bob’s cat. Lucky definitely bonded with Bob; he spent a week at Bob’s old apartment before we moved in. I was a little worried about how Herbie would do with Lucky since he didn’t actually like other cats; he used to beat up my mom’s. Herbie and Lucky became fast friends, Herbie hid under the bed for about a week and I would often find Lucky under there with him just hanging out.

It’s hard to believe we lived here for almost a year with just two cats. After about six months Bob started talking about a ‘tea cup kitten’, you know the cute pictures you see of kittens in tea cups? He wanted one like that; Lucky was seven months old when we adopted him so he was almost full grown. Bob wanted a TINY kitten. He found an orange tabby at Petaluma Animal Shelter, his name was Ernie. We ‘interviewed’ him but I was worried about introducing another cat. Herbie had done so well with Lucky that I didn’t want to upset the apple cart. Bob went away for business and while he was gone I thought about it, Ernie WAS cute. When Bob got back I said “let’s go get Ernie”. We were too late, he’d been adopted. However, there was this other orange boy named Tiger. We ‘interviewed’ him and ended up adopting him, we changed his name to Ernie.

We started fostering kittens in 2007 and we did really well at first. One of my friends has our first foster kitten, Boo Boo Kitty. We brought William and Fluffy home next. Then we had Niles, Frasier and Quentin. Jack, Hurley, Abby and Penny followed. We started off with their mother as well, but she wasn’t very happy about being a mother so she didn’t stay here very long. The kittens were in one carrier and Crazy Joe (that’s what we named the mother) was in another one. Bob shook the kittens out; Hurley was the last one out. He was as wide as he was long, just a total butterball. Bob declared him to be ‘the one’ and said we HAD to keep him. So all along we knew we’d keep Hurley, but I got attached to Jack. I CRIED about Jack when it was time to turn them in. Not just a few tears, I’m talking full on CRYING. When Bob saw me all broken up he even shed a tear or two. In the end we kept Jack AND Hurley. The last batch pushed us over the top into crazy cat people land. It was a batch of five kittens and their mother, Miss Kitty. Miss Kitty was a very good mom, but she got tired of being cooped up in the bathroom with five kittens that were always climbing on her. After two weeks she went back to the shelter and we kept the kittens, Edward Munster, Ernie Jr, Snuffleupagus, Pippi and Fluffy. Edward and Snuffy were big and got neutered and put up for adoption first. Ernie Jr was next, the girls were about a week or so later. In the end Pippi was left, and it was clear no one was going to adopt her. She pooped next to the box, she growled at other cats (not ours mind you, just other cats at the shelter) and she cried NON STOP at the shelter and drove the staff crazy. One day we went into the shelter for our volunteer work and Bob actually joked with the staff saying “Soon you’ll be paying US to take her” About ten minutes later the shelter manager asked us if we would just take Pippi off their hands. They updated her shots and sent her home with us. And that’s how we ended up with SIX cats.