Our Florida room is the perfect place to have a nice nap in the morning sun.
You would think that our cats would learn this and hang out here every morning, but cats can be unpredictable. As I write this on Thursday morning, all three boys are in the sunless spare bedroom.
Today is Throwback Thursday and World Cat Day. I thought I would combine the two and share a post I did in 2016.
Today is World Cat Day or International Cat Day. A day created to bring awareness to the special needs of cats, and some of them, I’m not mentioning Chris’s name. can be very needy.
My wife and I visited my mother-in-law about a week and a half ago. We sat down in her Florida room and she picked up her cat, Pumpkin, and put him on my lap.
Pumpkin has always been a friendly cat and would often sit next to me while I petted him but he was never much of a lap cat. I put him on my lap a few times but he would usually get down after less than five minutes, usually sooner. This time he stayed on my lap for a long time.
During that time we talked about how he wasn’t doing very well. My mother-in-law knew his time was coming to an end. She faced a difficult decision. One we have all faced before and can understand well. How long do we wait? How bad does it need to be before we are ready to let go? It is a decision everyone hopes they will never have to make.
She mentioned that Pumpkin was acting erratically, like he was disoriented, and thought he might be getting dementia. I thought of my father. During his last two days his mind became increasingly confused, but that was not dementia.
After a while Pumpkin got off my lap and went into the house. On the way in he bumped his head on the door frame. Later we noticed he was lying between the wall and the living room sofa, like he was hiding. Animals do that when they are sick. My dog Tasha did that before she died.
Yesterday I got word that Pumpkin’s time here on Earth was over. It was very sad, only comforted by the thought that ten of his twelve years were spent in a loving home.
The vet said that Pumpkin had become blind, which explains why he bumped into the door. Loss of vision might also explain some of his erratic behavior as well.
To tell the story of Pumpkin it helps to go back to Tigger and Flash. in 2006, my mother-in-law adopted Tigger but the shelter called the next day wanting him back because his brother, Flash, was in great distress without him. She didn’t want two cats at the time and we didn’t want to send him back to the shelter so we adopted both of them.
Shortly after that, Rose’s mom adopted a Maine Coon cat and named him Monkey.
A few years later, about ten years ago, she was ready for another cat so she adopted Pumpkin, who was about two years old at the time. Monkey and Pumpkin did not always get along but they did have their moments.
A few years later Monkey died and it was just Pumpkin along with several strays that came around.
The last two pictures make me wonder if I was wrong about him not being a lap cat.
Pumpkin was a very lovable cat and will be missed.
It has been a while since I let Frankie and Chris go outside because it has been so hot. I decided to get out with them very early on Friday before the outside oven was set to broil.
Frankie, for some reason, always seems very interested in plants.
I usually like to limit my Photo Friday Posts to one photo but sometimes more photos are needed to tell a story.
For example, this group of photos illustrates how Frankie’s initial curiosity . . .
. . . turned into a full fledged obsession with these plants.
Does anyone know what these plants are? I know Frankie seems to take an interest in several different kinds of plants but I don’t know if they have something in common that attracts cats.
Update: Thanks to Fran Hunne I found out this is a spider plant. I also found the following page that talks about why cats are interested in them: https://www.gardeningknowhow.com/houseplants/spider-plant/spider-plants-cats.htm
For Throwback Thursday I thought I would share this post about watching The Fourth of July fireworks with Chris in 2014.
We have unusual cats, especially Chris. There is just no better way to say that.
Yesterday we had a lot of company at our house and, as usual, Chris was up in everybody’s business. There is nothing surprising about that. Chris is a very social cat. What is a little surprising is what happened later.
We had planned on walking around the corner where we could watch the city fireworks display but a thunderstorm rolled in just before the fireworks were supposed to start. We sat on our patio as the wind pushed the rain through the screens. We were hoping it would be like a typical summer shower and be over quickly but it lasted long enough for us to give up on watching the fireworks.
Then the rain ended as suddenly as it began and several locals began setting off their own fireworks that we could see from…
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This was supposed to be last week’s post but I just realized I accidently published it as a page instead of a post. Oops.
I used to write about How Chris would manage to get up into almost impossible locations in our house (see here and here and here). Now he is more than ten years old and a few pounds heavier than he used to be. He also seems to have developed a bit of arthritis. Lately, I have to help him onto my lap sometimes.
Chris may be somewhat grounded but Frankie hasn’t lost a step. He is now going places that only Chris would have gone before.
Here he is on top of our cabinet. The height of the jump isn’t as impressive as the accuracy needed since it is a very narrow space and it seems like it would be easy to bang your head on the ceiling.
Who else has a cat that reaches for the sky?
I haven’t shared an old post for Throwback Thursday for some time so I thought this would be a fun one. It is a video from 2014 when Chris was still spry enough to get into high cabinets.
When you have a bad cat in the house you learn to expect the unexpected.
Today marks 50 years since Neal Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin made that historic first moon walk. We would like to honor all the men and women who worked to make that increadable feat possible.
Our boys love a good adventure and would have probably signed up for the mission if they were human.
Since they weren’t around back then we were fortunate to have three brave and capable men to fill the role,
It was an exciting time to be alive. I just turned six at the time. While I remember watching the Apollo missions, my memory is a bit fuzzy and they all seem to blend together.
What about you. Who remembers this day? What were you doing and how did you feel?
After getting an illustration of Chris, I decided I needed one of Frankie and Floki too. Actually I wanted at least three versions of each. I again ordered from alicialucdesign on Fiverr and she came through with some awesome illustrations.
I want to change the header image and I decided to play around with a few ideas. I mostly did this for fun while I was looking for inspiration.
These are just some of the images. There are actually a total of twelve, four poses of three cats. I love the images and I am impressed that she made Floki slightly cross-eyed even though I said nothing about that to her.
So far I am still thinking about the header. What do you think?
My wife bought some gifts Saturday evening and was given a large shopping bag to carry them in. When we got home Frankie was immediately interested in getting inside the bag. So much so that I had to move the bag to the bedroom where he couldn’t get to it.
I don’t know what happened after that. I’m sure Rose probably went through the bag and took out whatever was not meant as a gift. Whatever she did, she moved the bag and set it on the floor next to her closet.
We went out for lunch today and shortly after we returned we heard a commotion in the bedroom. It sounded like Frankie knocked the bag off the dresser, where I thought it still was, but the noise didn’t stop. Soon we saw Floki racing down the hallway with a large bag attached to him.
He ran up onto the table and then down under the table and then into the living room. We tried to stop him but he was completely freaked out. At one point the bag ripped and most of it fell away but there remained a large piece still attached to him. He jumped onto the coffee table and then up onto the sofa where he ran across the back of it and then back down. He then ran into the Florida room. I followed him out there and closed the door. He stopped on one of the cat perches and I tried to get the bag off him but the handle was around his neck and under his right armpit. I couldn’t pull it off.
I called out to Rose, “Can you give me the scissors?!” She immediately got them and brought them too me. Unfortunately, As soon as I tried to cut the handle the scissors broke. I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to keep Floki calm for very much longer but then I remembered I had another pair of scissors nearby so I grabbed those and cut the handle off.
Below is a video of the last part of this drama. There might be some mild cursing so turn the volume down if that offends you.
Floki immediately jumped down and went into the cubby hole at the bottom of one of the perches. There we could see that he had a large amount of drool coming from his mouth. I assumed that is what happens after spending a long two minutes frightened out of your wits.
Fortunatly he seemed to recover quick and was napping next to me not long after the incidence.
Bag handles are very dangerous for cats. I have known this for a long time. Probably since Chris was young and almost got stuck in a bag handle.
At the time I thought it was funny but if it happens when nobody is around it could be life threatening, especially if the cat freaks out like Floki did. If we were not around and if that was a canvas bag it would not have ripped and would have eventually hooked on something and with Floki in a state of panic he might have been strangled. It is a scary thought.
Most of the time I do a good job keeping bag handles away from the cats when I am not around. I fold the canvas bags so they are not an enticement and I cut the handles off the paper bags I get at whole foods if they don’t go to the trash or recycling right away. Sometimes I do let them play but only if I am there watching.
On a side note, you may be wondering about the video. I saw this camera on Amazon on sale for under $20 so I thought I would buy it. I wanted something I could leave on so I can check up on the cats when we go to Germany as well as something I can use for security. The camera I bought takes relatively good quality videos for the price but it has issues that make it a bad buy.
It not only saves the videos in a format that my computer does not recognize but it puts every little clip in a separate folder. I can only view them using my phone and if I want to save it I can’t just download it I have to play it and hit the record button while playing. It then saves an mp4 file that has the audio and video out of sync. You wouldn’t believe the trouble I had getting them back in sync before uploading to YouTube. After uploading I noticed the end is further out of sync than the beginning. Lately I haven’t been using the camera but fortunately I decided to plug it in before we went to lunch.
