Today was one of those days that makes you feel as though you’ve stepped into a contemporary American novel: hot, muggy, oppressive, the fields shimmering in tune with the cicadas’ thrumming.

The puppy didn’t mind.  She’s a brush dog.  That is, she loves to wade through grass taller than she is.  If there’s a shrubbery nearby, she’ll curl up underneath it.  She spent a half hour running through the brush with Seth today, and still wasn’t tired.   It’s probably all those naps she takes.

Lily’s been feeling sick lately.  Yesterday, she slept for three full hours, woke up to throw up, and then fell asleep for another three hours.  Then she woke up one more time, and fell asleep for the night at 7:00.  That’s unusual — we’ve been putting her to bed at 10:00.  Of course, she woke up at 2:30, and again at 5:30, whining both times — also unusual.  Then today, she fell asleep next to me on the couch and proceeded to have a bad dream where she whimpered and whined and wouldn’t wake up.  I hope she wasn’t dreaming about the dog that killed her littermates.

Now it’s time to wake her up so that she can play for an hour and a half so that she can sleep past 5:00 a.m. this time around.  I hope this works.

]]> http://qfinder.wordpress.com/2009/08/10/the-lily-putian-chronicles-day-6/feed/ 2 SavvyChristine http://qfinder.wordpress.com/2009/08/09/the-lily-putian-chronicles-day-5/ http://qfinder.wordpress.com/2009/08/09/the-lily-putian-chronicles-day-5/#comments Sun, 09 Aug 2009 17:15:09 +0000 SavvyChristine http://qfinder.wordpress.com/?p=967 ]]>

We’re starting to see more of Lily’s personality, now that she’s settling in with us.  For starters, she’s smart.  And I don’t mean SMRT.  She has taken to asking at the door to go outside to go to the bathroom: she sits down at the door and stares at us until we figure out what she wants.  That’s pretty awesome.  Of course, she only does that when she has to poop.  When she has to pee, her choice is still the carpet — although she did ask at the door that one time this morning.

She’s stubborn.  When we don’t go her direction on the leash, she fights and pulls and jumps until she flops over, exhausted, then walks up to us as if nothing happened.  Brat.

We took her to the park this morning to let her run a little, and also so she could explore new situations.  When something catches Lily’s attention, she sits down and stares.  Then, when she’s processed it, she either moves on or moves closer.  We approached the tennis court today, and she had to sit down three times to work it out.  I think this is hilarious.

Lily hates the car.  I took this picture yesterday when we were on our way to Seth’s parents’ house, and she moped the entire way.   She’s getting better about being in the car, but she knows that going for a drive usually means a new situation, and she’s still so unsure of herself and us that I’m positive she thinks it’s going to be another change to her life.

When she’s home, Lily is the life of the party.  She and I, we danced yesterday in the living room.  She bounced and pranced, and I bounced and pranced back at her, and she thought it was the Best. Game. Ever.  Which is good, because her usual play is biting whatever she can reach.  We’ve supplied her with enough toys so that she has some good alternatives to the chair legs, though.  She likes the stuffed carrot that you can see in the photo, but she LOVES her Bobo, which is a long, thin, curly-haired dog with two squeakers in it that she stole from Seth’s parents’ house.  She licked and chewed it for forty-five minutes last night.

One final note — she’s learning how to play fetch.  If you catch her in the right mood, you can toss her carrot, tell her, “go get it!” in an excited voice, and she’ll run, jump on the carrot, then bring it back.  If you take it from her and throw it again, she’ll do it again.  I know a hundred other dogs can do that, but it’s like magic, watching her learn.

Oh, the puppy.  Last night, we met her in Maine.  She was happy, a little shy, and beautiful.  I mean it.  She’s a redhead, and she has a red and brown speckled body with one big dark brown spot on her back and a few brownish-black spots on her tail.

When we clipped the leash and collar on, she looked at me like I had scolded her, and when we brought her to the car, she was so terrified that she trembled the entire way home.  I sat with her for the first hour, and for the longest time she wouldn’t move; she just sat in the position we put her in.  What a heart-breaker!  The shelter gave us a blankie that she’s been sleeping with — apparently all dogs leave with a blankie, and it’s helped tremendously in making her feel at home.  It smells like her sisters.

We got home a bit after midnight and set the puppy down in the foyer.  The cats were intensely curious.  Lily?  Not so much.  She trembled and didn’t move, not even when Kairi came right up and sniffed her face.  I must say, I’m very impressed with the cats.  They’re not angry or scared, just curious.  It’s a good thing Lily is their size.

At any rate, we set Lily up with some of our blankets, a crate, her blankie, some water, and a kong stuffed with peanut butter.  We blocked off her own area in the space between the two master bedroom closets, laid some newspaper on the bathroom floor, and everyone went to bed.  Well, Seth and I went to bed.  Lily stayed on her blankets the whole night, not moving, and the cats stared.

In the morning, we woke up to Lily growling at the cats, who were still staring.  I took her out and she was SO happy; she turned into happy wriggly puppy who needed lots of kisses and belly rubs.  We’re working on getting her to walk into the apartment building on her own.

Once in the apartment, she barked a few times at Kairi, but then we picked up Kairi and petted him, and Lily realized Kairi was a friend — although she wanted to be pet too.  Then she followed Kairi around the apartment, apparently wanting to play but not wanting to get too close.   She’s super cute.  I think they’re all going to be friends, once they get used to each other.  It’s gotten to the point where we can let her off the lead in the apartment and she won’t go too far.  The cats get close but mostly avoid her.  Although Sadie did look at Lily longingly when the puppy was sleeping this morning, probably hoping to curl up in there with her and be warm.

She’s so good!  She slept in her crate for about a half hour this morning, with very little prompting on our part.  She likes our puppy food, likes attention, and even chased a tennis ball a few times.  When she’s unsure, she climbs into our laps for a few minutes, then heads off to explore.  And as for us?  We’re smitten.

I hate kittens.  When I worked at the Humane Society, we had a lot.  In July, high kitten season, we received kittens almost every day.  There was that one day where someone dumped a box containing a mother cat and five kittens in our parking lot before we opened, and the mother chewed a hole through the box, and she and her little 4-week old kittens squeezed out so they could get some fresh air.  The kittens scattered when we pulled into the parking lot, but the mother lounged on the pavement looking disinterested.

There was that other time when someone “donated” two kittens barely more than a few days old, and the executive director chastised me for not being able to magically divine how to take care of wee baby cats.  Like I’m supposed to know without being told that they should be swaddled, and regular milk is bad for them, and you need to wipe their bums to get them to urinate.

We turned the Maternity Ward into the kitten ward, because none of our cats were preggers.  At any given point, there were five cages full of kittens, with several more litters fostered out until they were old enough for adoption, and an entire room devoted to kittens ready to be adopted.

Most of the kittens that came to us were dirty.  They were scared babies with no mothers to clean them, and they had been found in someone’s backyard, or under a shed, or in a bag by the side of the road, or in a dumpster.  They had fleas and ticks, and needed help getting clean, and I was the only one the Cat Department thought could be trusted — the others didn’t know how to handle cats, or were too busy with their multiple duties (everyone does multiple duties in an underfunded animal shelter), or were too careless.  And so it fell to me.

I washed kittens.  For a while, it was my only job, washing kittens.  It’s an arduous process, but an urgent one because kittens can die from blood loss if covered in too many fleas and ticks.

First, I cleaned a new cage for the clean kittens to live in.  Sometimes this involved taking out the dirty kittens and piling them in a big carrier, then cleaning their old cage and lining it with new newspaper and towels.

Then I lined up my supplies by the sink in the vet’s office: all natural shampoo, nail clippers, three clean towels, tweezers, flea comb.  Then I retrieved a dirty little kitten, brown with flea dirt, and clipped its nails so it wouldn’t scratch me so much while I was washing it.  If the kitten had mites in its ears, I would wipe those out with a little saline solution and a cotton ball.  (Just for the record, kittens don’t like that.)  Then the kitten would hang out in a carrier, the first time ever in its life it would be alone, while I filled the sink with about an inch of lukewarm water.  I would take the kitten out again and comb it to get rid of loose fleas, inspect it to pull off any ticks I could find, and then I would start the washing process.

Kitten in left hand, I’d squirt of shampoo in my right and shampoo the kitten’s neck while it was still dry.  Then I’d start the warm water running, gently run the kitten under the water and massage shampoo into the kitten’s fur.  The kitten, of course, would be squealing and crying and trying desperately to claw out of my hand, sometimes hissing at me in a horrible way, even though I was helping.  Then I would quickly shampoo the kitten’s head.  I’d rinse off the rest of the kitten as fast as possible, noting how the water in the bottom of the sink was now red with flea dirt and full of dead fleas, and plop my sopping kitten on a towel.  I would soak up as much water as possible with the first towel, and wipe down the kitten’s head with a damp corner.  Then I’d move the kitten to the second towel for a much more thorough drying.

By this time, the kitten would be exhausted and quiet.  I’d wrap it up like a burrito and massage it, and then give it another once over to pull off any fleas hiding between kitten toes.  Then I would put the third towel in the carrier along with the kitten, and deposit the whole bundle in the clean cage, usually with a rubber glove full of warm water to keep the kitten warm because wet kittens catch cold easily.

Back in the vet’s office, I’d rinse out the sink, wipe the dead bugs down the drain, and start again.  I could wash two or three kittens in an hour, and about eight on a good day when someone else was in to show off the animals up for adoption.

You know how when you bake something like a cake, you’re excited and you want to eat it all right away?  And so you get through a few slices and think, “I could eat this all day!”  And then you have a few more, and then the cake just sits there, and you have a few more slices so it doesn’t go to waste.  And by the time you’re done with the cake, you never want to see cake again?  Yeah — me and kittens.  Spay and neuter your pets, please.  Oh, and that cat that comes to your back porch to be fed?  The one that’s not yours?  If you feed it, it’s yours.  Get it fixed.  If you see a cat that you think is homeless, but don’t feed it?  Get it fixed.  Seriously.

Image courtesy of Tgrwoods6. There are more where this picture came from.

I have a confession to make.  One of my cats is less than perfect.  “But isn’t that the point of cats?” you ask, “that they all have their own personalities?  Didn’t you just say that?”  Why yes, yes I did.  But the cutest 9 lbs. of calico I’ve ever seen has a massive problem: she pees on things.  Important things, like the bed.  Or my clothes.  Or Seth’s clothes.  Or Seth’s blankets.  Or Seth’s anything, really — she’s not picky.  As long as it gets our attention long enough for us to clean the litterbox, she’ll pee on it.

The thing is, she only pees on stuff when the litterbox is unacceptably dirty — and it doesn’t take much to make the box too dirty.  My sister bought us one of those automatic litterboxes, and it was great.  We found the solution to the peeing problem!  Until the box broke.  The sensor stopped sensing when a cat used the litterbox, so we’d have to manually flip the switch.  But by the time we remembered to make the box do its magic, the box would be so full (read: 2 days’ worth) of poop that we’d have to scoop it anyway or risk breaking the thing.  So we just fell back onto Plan B: scooping the litterbox all the time.

How exactly does one end up with a renegade cat full of urine?  The answer: The Humane Society.  We adopted Sadie almost three years ago because I foolishly fell in love with her on a friend’s birthday trip to the local shelter.  We planned on getting our original cat, Kairi, a friend eventually, so we just adopted Sadie.  “Oh, her previous owner’s son had allergies,” the people at the shelter told us.  Allergies.  Suuure.

Unfortunately, Sadie has her claws so deep into me that I can’t bear to think about giving her up, even when she does pee on things.  But I almost made an exception last night.

I had a migraine.  It wasn’t bad, as far as migraines go, but it was getting there.  Sadie had been annoying all day — she follows me, you know.  Meowing.  Around the house.  And she was doing it last night.  And if there’s anything that bothers me when I have a migraine, it’s high-pitched and repetitive noises.  I don’t mean “bothers” in the general sense, like Winnie the Pooh.  I mean “bothers” in the “if you do that again I swear I will bash your head into a wall” sense.  So I was annoyed.

I thought I knew the reason for Sadie’s meows, and picked up the laser pointer to play with her for a few minutes before I tried to sleep the migraine away.  Instead of hopping onto the bed like usual, Sadie started pawing at the blanket.  That’s when I discovered that the litter box just wasn’t clean enough.

If you’re curious, a migraineur with a cat pee problem on the night of a migraine goes berserk.  I throw things.  Yell obscenities.  Seriously contemplate hiring a hit-man for my cat.  Thankfully, I’m over it now.  Is there even a moral to this story?  I guess it would be to keep the litterbox clean.