Recently in Cats Category

A couple of friends had a kitty they needed to rehome. He was just too active and too high-energy for their new baby. Since we were in the market for a kitty, we brought him home for a trial, and things are going great.

We've renamed him Schwa. His former name was "Dingo" which we agreed was a bad-luck name around babies.

He came with his own cat tree, which has been a real boon. When we finished the dining room walls, we moved the tree by the back window and now he spends most of the day up there staring at the birds in the garden.

He also uses the vantage point to keep track of what the dogs are doing.

It's not his only spot. He's adapting quite well to living in an old house under construction.

This morning we had Ana put down. She had stopped eating and was moving with great difficulty, and had stopped purring. She was not as angry as she used to be. She was still drinking but was clearly not going to last.

She was 18, which is not bad for a barn cat.

Here are some photos of her. It's all very raw right now because she was my bestest friend for 17 years.

Here she is napping in 1999 or thereabouts. I was forever coming up and trying to get a photo of her asleep, and just as I would hit the button her eyes would pop open and she would glare at me for waking her.

With her co-cat Mikey in 2001. Mikey died in 2003 and is buried under our Cecile Brunner.

Scowling at me to get the camera out of her face and leave her alone. Ana was a very angry cat.

Coming out of the greenhouse window in our kitchen in Berkeley. When you saw this you knew some poor plant had been chewed within an inch of its life.

We buried her by the side gate, next to the clematis. I put a bed of grass in the grave because she liked getting out and eating grass until she puked, and a bouquet of flowers over her head because she loved eating cut flowers and puking them up on the stairs. We planted a yellow miniature rose over her, sent by Noel's parents for our anniversary. I miss her already.

Edited to add: By popular request, this photo of Ana being introduced to Rosie in December 2001. She got up there and arranged herself on that doily without any hinting or helping from anybody else.

This is Simon. Simon has cancer. We had a tumor removed from one of his boobs last year and at the time the vet said that it might already have metastasized, and that has proven to be true; the tumor came back and lately he's been coughing a lot, too.

There are options for treating cats with cancer, but in this case they aren't right for us (us being the combination of me, Noel, and Simon). Rather than put an elderly, skittish kitty through a lot of surgeries and treatment (which he hates more than anything) we are trying to keep him comfortable and letting the disease take its course. When it gets to be bad for him, we will have him put down.

He now has an enormous tumor. It's under his left front leg, and you can sort of see it bulging here. He seems mostly comfortable except the tumor seems to get in the way of his lounging. I may take him to the vet this weekend to get some pain pills, because he's starting to act a little achy which means he is a lot achy.

This is the last cat we get Ana. When Mikey died, we got her Simon because she was inconsolably lonely. But this time she will have to just Get Over It, because there is a limit to the number of cat graves I want to dig in the back yard in the next few years.

The sunbeam is slowly moving away from Simon. Too bad, because he's looking really suave right there.

Just a second or two before I took this photo, they were touching.

In other news, Ana has evicted Goldie from her crate and adopted it as her new favourite napping spot. Goldie refuses to go in there any more, because she knows better than to mess with the cat.

Simon joins the morning lounge time with the doggies.

Simon has gained some weight on his new food.

He's resumed his original spherical shape, but his coat is much better, so we're dealing with it.

Yesterday I caught an act of inter-species grooming on camera:

Both animals have been fined and warned about future violations.

This afternoon the cats were hanging out on the bed together. Ana was being remarkably tolerant.

Simon was feeling very lovey. He really wanted to get right into the camera and drool.