Bathroom Kitty

Well, the fun around here never stops....

Last night, J and I were going through some stuff and one item is this fish tank that I got from my friend D that we have never had fish in but would like finally set up. So I suggested that J take it to the bathtub and put some water in it to make sure it was still water tight as it has been moved a lot over the years and has not been tested....

I should mention that he chose to carry it to the closest bathroom to the family room, which is the hall/guest bathroom....this is the bathroom that we have practically dimantled because we are going to paint it. There is a very large mirror that goes above sink that we have been moving around a lot to keep it from being broken during the delivery of our furniture. At the time, it was in the bathroom leaning on the vanity.

So back to the timeline, J checks out the tank in the tub, seems to be okay. He cleans it up some, lets it drain and brings it back to the family room. He doesn't close the bathroom door because his hands are full of tank.

Unfortunately, I have already learned the hard way that you can not leave doors open to rooms that you don't want our cat in, because there is some kind of "unexplored" magnet that attracts her only to those spaces. This bathrooom is one of those spaces....

Needless to say, a few minutes later, while we are waiting for the next commercial in our program on TV so we could get back to work, we hear this loud crashing sound from the other room. I look at J and say "What was that?". He says, "I think it was the mirror". Now fortunately the crashing sound was not accompanied by a glass breaking sound but we did hear some thumping so after a thorough search of the house, we concluded that the thumping must be the cat.

We were correct. Unfortunately, when the mirror fell, it lodged against the door in such a way, that we could not open it to rescue her or the mirror....it would not even open enough for us to stick a screwdriver in the gap....

I started to talk to the idiot cat on the other side of the door to assure myself that she was not dead or pinned underneath a 25 pound mirror, and determined that she was not. J could not control the fits of laughter at our predicament. We both considered leaving her in there for the night to teach her a lesson but realized that we would end up with the "shitty" end of the stick if we did that...

To make a rather long uneventful solution short, we ended up having to use a pry bar to remove some of the door casing so we could slide a spatula in to lift the mirror enough to get our hands in there and support it. Fortunately the mirror didn't damage the door much ( a few small dings that we can paint)...unfortunately, our removal of the casing did damage the door as it was a prehung door and the casing is pretty much permanently attached. I am not sure how we are planning to fix it so it looks nice again, but I guess with this level of excitement around the house, we don't have to worry about not having enough to do.....

Painting that room and getting it set up like it is supposed to be is now higher on the priority list than before (right behind, killing the cat)....perhaps I will have it done sometime in the next few months....ha ha. No, it really is right behind unpacking, getting my livingroom furniture, and doing Christmas.....so it should be anytime now...

It is twenty degrees out this morning (clear and cold) so I am making sure to double check the doorknobs, I would be a popsicle in a few minutes if I got locked out today...

Locked Out

One of the things about our house that I have not gotten used to yet is the fact that the doors to the outside are like hotel doors. They feel unlocked from the inside but might be locked from the outside. We had just talked about this the other day, when the next morning, in my quest to move my empty trash can back from the curb, I locked myself out of my house....

Since we had just talked about it and the possibility of leaving a key outside, I was ready to shoot myself for not having already done so...

Now, fortunately, I was fully dressed and even had a fleece on because it was a bit chilly in the house as well. Unfortunately I was only in slippers since we don't wear shoes in the house....

I went around the entire house which we had locked up like a bug in a rug....no getting in anywhere, but all was not lost because J had worked during the night and I was expecting him home any minute. So I really just needed to find something to do for a while so I would not count the seconds to his arrival and continue looking suspicious on my porch.....

So I decided to work my way around the yard, removing long pine needles from our bushes to make them look nicer and in preparation for possible Christmas light application. Did I mention that almost every bush in our yard is a holly bush???? Needless to say, by the time I finished, I had scratches and pokes all over my hands and upper body from reaching for the pieces in the middle.

Now you might be saying, hmmm....why doesn't she 1. call a locksmith, 2. call J, or 3. at least hang out at a neighbors for the time being???? All good questions but I have answers for all. Firstly, I thought J was going to be home at any minute so I figured if I called a locksmith, they would show up just as J did....next, I didn't call J or the locksmith because I didn't have a phone handy and I was in slippers, which leaves us with option 3, which is negated by the first two reasons I didn't do options 1 and 2. I couldn't possibly introduce myself to my only neighbor (that is right, we only have one neighbor on our circle street of only 5 houses or so) in my slippers, admitting that I locked myself out of the house. How stupid would that look???

So I continued on my pine needle extraction project in hopes that not watching the road would make J come home faster....it didn't. He didn't get home for almost 3 hours....I finally finished in the yard, could not think of anything else I could do that wouldn't be weirder looking than doing yard work in my slippers, so climbed into the back of our truck (we have a canopy) and laid down on some of the flattened cardboard ready for a trip to the recycle center, and tried to nap. By this time I was getting very hungry and was just thankful that I didn't have a teapot on the stove.

After being in the truck for a little bit, J drove up. I climbed out without him noticing and could have kept the entire torrid story to myself, but figured he needed a laugh and I needed a way to explain the lovely bushes up front when I was supposed to be deligently unpacking.....

R.I.P. Madison

She was a gift to us from a familiy friend when I was still in high school. She was so little when we got her. When we would let her out to use the bathroom, she would lose track of where we were and start meowing. When my parents moved to a new house while I was college, she learned the art of being a pet slut....that is what I called it because she would do anything for a pet. We had a part of the yard that was at waist height for pedestrians walking past our house and she would lay there and get pets from strangers all day long.

At Christmas, she always broke into the doggie treats under the tree instead of her own treats. She would sit for hours in the kitchen watching under the stove in the dark, and on a few occasions, we would catch her running around the corner of the house with nothing but a mouse tail sticking out of her mouth. She always was a talker...meowed all the time to fill us in on her day, or if she wanted something, even just if she had something she needed to add to the conversation. She also liked to butt her head up against the coffee table or your leg if she wasn't getting enough pets. Sometimes she would hit it so hard on the coffee table that you could hear it in another room. In the days before animals were banned from being on the futurniture, she loved to be the lump in the bed....she would climb up under the covers and you would see nothing but a little circle-shaped lump.

After my husband and I got married she came to live with us in our apt and had to be turned into an indoor cat. She didn't like this much at first, so we would let her on our third floor balcony once in a while. She eventually came to love being an indoor cat and didn't like to even try for the outdoors, but still liked a warm spot in the sun through a window if she could find it. She didn't appreciate it when we adopted Chase a few years later, but after a bit of time, she did learn to tolerate her.

She moved across the US and back, with us even though she was never fond of being in the car. She also moved to Japan with us. She was our first traveling kitty (Chase became the second). She became deaf when we were in Japan...didn't stop her from talking though. I would have to stomp on the floor if I wanted to get her attention. She always came to you when you called her (a trait she taught Chase, thankfully). I always said I tolerated our two cats because they acted more like dogs than cats...LOL.

When she was 19, I noticed that she wasn't eating much, and took her in to the vet. They weren't sure what was going on with her. She was on prescription food for years because she was allergic to the fillers in regular cat food so we knew it wasn't the food. I started making plain chicken for her and she bucked up and ate again. But this only lasted for a few days and then she stopped even eating that. She wasn't drinking much water and developed a UTI. I took her back in. They kept her all day, took some scans of her and ran some blood work. Results were that her liver was very tiny (not sure if it had been like that forever or had shrunk during aging). Her liver wasn't functioning right.

Our options were bleak, involved surgery and a feeding tube. We didn't want that kind of life for her. She was 19 years old and had been a great companion to our us and deserved to not suffer. Putting her to sleep was the hardest thing I had ever done. J and I both were completely torn up but we toughed it out to do the right thing for her. I miss her terribly...she was always such a joy to us. We feels like our family has shrunk.
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Five Years Ago on In My Words...Many Times