Finicky, Kitty Kat, 3 '19

 Ms. Kat  is now approaching 13 years old, (which places her in her mid 70s in human years) 

and has become a very finicky eater. 

She has seven selections of different food  choices to select from (plus water)

There are kibbles, and nibbles, and lickables , and stews,

there are cheeses, and chicken, and canned tuna too,

and she doesn't like any of them.

Sigh!  Same ole  cream of  salmon

This business of getting old, ain't easy,

 even for pampered kitties.

Ms Kat is becoming a Grumpy Old Lady: 1 ' 19

Ms.  Kat  is getting up there in years  and  showing signs that she is joining Bruce and I  in feeling   the weight of her years.   Her vision never was all that  great, but now she is also losing  her hearing.  Whenever she loses sight of us, she goes into a panic attack and starts screaming at the top of her lungs until one of us catches her attention to tell her we are still right here for her.  In addition  she is has developed a sensitive tummy, and whenever she  becomes  afraid, she starts barfing up her stomach contents.   

We've  both had a lot of appointments this past month which forced us to leave her home alone a lot, and she seemed to be seriously paranoid .  In fact she  has never been left alone for more than 10 hours straight and always has bowls of both wet and dry food and water before we leave. I guess when you can't see or hear well, and can't use a phone to call for help, those 10 hours must seem interminable to a lonely scared  little kitty.  She seems sure every time we go out the front door  that we were about to leave her locked and alone to die of starvation and thirst. 

Her panic attacks were starting to keep us awake at night.  And while Senior house cats are notorious for becoming picky eaters,  we  have become increasingly worried about her not getting enough nutrition, so I headed over to Petco today to see what OTC products they might help.

I found two:

There are several ways to administer digestive medication to a cat,  but after looking at the directions I decided the only one that we were at all likely to get Ms. Kat swallow is  The Homeopet Drops for Feline Digestive Upsets . We  are supposed to be put directly into her mouth before feeding her. Hah!  I'd like to see someone try that. LOL We hid the drops in a very small serving of her favorite wet food. The product doesn't have any detectable smell,  and if it does have a taste,  the portion of food  I'd mixed the drops into was so small that she had consumed it all before she even had time to notice any off taste.  So far so good. Ms Kat has been able to keep her stomach contents to herself and is showing no sign of digestive distress.

Sentry puts out several types of cat calming products.  I chose their 30 day Calming Collar, because Ms Kat is used to wearing a collar; and I thought it would be less stressful that products I'd have to spray on her coat, or shove down her throat.  The thing seem to start soothing  the second I put in on.  No more  panicked meowing,  No more frantic screams in the night as she chases around searching for us.. I'll let y'all know if I am wrong, but  I do believe this is going to work. 

We are so glad to be home!

We hit the road for home at daybreak this morning. It was a long hard drive home through the rain but we made it without incident and pulled into our driveway at about 1 pm.

I don't know who was more elated:  Me or Ms. Kat.

Settling in for the duration: 9'18

My desk assistant

We've evacuated to an executive suite ( living room, kitchen, bath, and bedroom in a hotel in Augusta, GA. It was hot and muggy when we got here after a 6-hour drive, so I brought MS. Kat  ( and her supplies) in first, and locked her in the bedroom while I brought in our remaining luggage.  She hid under the bed for the first hour, but soon came out and started exploring.  After finding her food dishes, litter box, and favorite blankie, she settled down on the desk next to me to help me blog about our adventure.

Kat in a Cage: 9 '18

Nooooooooo!

Ms. Kat likes to go on road trips, but she made it quite clear that she was not pleased about being confined to a cage for the evacuation.  

Seriously?

She used all her kitty wiles, including facial expressions and vocalizations to convince me to let her ride cage-free

But Mom, I didn't do anything, I'm innocent I tell you.

She continued to protest loudly for the first hour of the trip.

I am definitely going to report you to the SPCA.

 I pulled into a rest stop halfway through the trip and let her out ( on a leashed harness). She stood there scenting the air with a bewildered look on her face.  Once she realized she had no idea where we were, she resigned herself to the cage being the better than being lost and settled down for the remainder of the trip. 

MS Kat doesn't like cold weather 12'16

Ms Kat doesn't like this cold weather.  She's taken up residence in front of the fireplace.

If she gets any closer to the fireplace, she'll set her tail a light.

BJ and his service Kat: 11'16

Bruce came through his surgery with flying colors, but remaining inactive until he heals is  trying his patience.  Ms. Kat has volunteered  for service cat duty with the responsibilities of keeping Bruce company and comforting him through the boredom of  post op recovery.

Kat on the Bed: 7 '16

I'm allergic to cat dander so Ms. Kat is not allowed on the furniture. She follows the rules  when we're  at home, but  she loves to sleep on our bed  when we're not home;  apparently it makes her feel safe.

 Rather than locking her out of the room, I decided to compromise a bit

 by putting  a white towel down to catch the cat hair.

Notice where she is choosing to sleep  each day?

Apparently she is not in a mood to compromise.

Breakfast Time: 7'16

With so much of their habitat destroyed, we have seen an increase in hungry squirrels waiting for the seed  the birds drop from the feeder.  Bruce decided to take pity on them this morning and threw some extra seed on the ground for the squirrels.  As soon as BJ left, KAT planted herself  next to the seed.  Guess she was hungry for breakfast too.

What the ??? is that white stuff??? 1 '14

Kat really, really, wanted to go outside today... She got as far as the ice on the edge of the drive,  changed her mind, and turned right around and came back in the house.

My next door neighbors are clearly dog people who adore their two large dogs.  Even so, they are always very kind to our cat when we are away on a trip.  Even though we pay a cat sitter to attend to the cat's food water and other needs daily, our neighbors always  stop in  daily to talk to KAT, play with her, and to give our kitty lots of  reassurance that she hasn't been abandoned. By way of saying thank you for their kindness , CC made their pups some home made dog treats.

Bacon- Beef Flavored Dog Treats

Ingredients:
5 cups whole wheat flour
10 tablespoons melted bacon fat
1 cup milk
1/2 cup  warm water
1 cube beef bullion (dissolved in water)
2 large eggs
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon garlic powder
1/4 teaspoon 
Directions:

1. Mix all ingredients well. 
2. Dampen your hands in water, then pinch off pieces of the dough and hand  roll them into 3" to 6"- logs - about 1 inch thick.  ( You can continue to hand shape the ends into a bone if you want them to look fancier,)
3. Place on a well-greased baking sheet.
4. Bake at 350°F (175°C) for 35 to 40 minutes. Cool on wire rack.

Makes 12 to 24+ treats.  My Neighbors' dogs are quite large so I made some 6" bone shaped biscuits.  If I were making this for a smaller dog I would reduce the amount of dough used in each biscuit by half or more.

This recipe for Bacon-Flavored Dog Biscuits uses egg, milk, and bacon grease, all of which can spoil, if left out in the open, so be sure to store the cooled dog biscuits in a well sealed bag in the freezer until the day you are ready to give them to your pet.

Kat Walk 12 '12

One of the benefits of  winter is that the re are fewer golfers, and  by the late afternoon we can usually take Kat for a walk along the edge of the marsh and the woods that border the 17th and 18yh fairways.   A half mile  each way is a long long walk when your legs are only 4 inches long, but it's her favorite thing to do.  She'll pm;y go that far if both Bruce and I go with her. If we don't initiate the stroll, she will stand at the door and cry for us to open it then stand outside on the porch calling for us to join her.

New Years Eve 12 '10

We were fortunate to have all of our neighbors and friends over for New Year's Eve  

  And we all had a great time

While Bruce and I hosted the event, the ladies outdid themselves with  special  foods and treats

After dinner we all played some getting to know you games by trying to match the person to their baby picture.

Even Kat got in on the action by greeting everyone at the door wearing a large red bow and escorting them around the house.

Poor Babies 'May '10

Poor babies! 

 They had a rough day at the office (aka golf course).

RVing at Cheraw 4 '10

We took a 100 mile weekend trip in the RV trip to Cheraw State Park.  The park is named after the nearby berg of Cheraw.  From the colonial to the civil war, Cheraw was a thriving  and prosperous tobacco farming community.  It is also is the intra-state sister city to Georgetown SC.  After Sherman had razed Charleston, Georgetown sc ( which is 50 miles north of Charlseton on the coast ( and ten miles south of us)) figured it was next to be burned; so it sent all its public records to Cheraw, SC  for safekeeping (you know-- land deeds and property titles, marriage, death and, birth records,  etc.)  Sure enough Sherman bypassed Georgetown, headed west to Columbia, SC then went north to burn Cheraw to the ground.  After the civil war, many white landowners returned to Georgetown to find their homes and land occupied by blacks and ner’- do-well whites.  The former owners had no way to evict the squatters because they couldn’t prove they ever owned the property in the first place.

We didn’t spend much time in the town of Cheraw.  For one thing,  we arrived on a Sunday, and like most Southern cities, half the businesses close their doors on Sunday.  Then too the half that might have stayed open were closed down and abandoned.  Most small southern towns were dependent upon fishing, or agriculture, or manufacturing.  When manufacturing moved out of the US, there was little for non-farmer or fishermen to do but pack up and move  out of state to find work.  It’s kinda  sad going through once proud  old  towns with their sagging-porches, and empty paint-peeling mansions.

Our real destination in the area was Cheraw State Park.  The park surrounds a lake.   The northern side is fully developed with public recreational facilities including an 18 hole golf course.  The first order of business  for Bruce, after arriving at Cheraw State Park,  was a round of eighteen holes of golf. It's hard to imagine a more beautiful place to golf. The course is laid out in a long needle pine forest. Most of the fairways overlook Lake Cheraw. There are no houses along the greens, and what buildings there are, are designed to look like log cabins. It was easy to imagine that we were in a meadow in the forest.


 

The serenity of the setting seemed to help Bruce's game.

He played well on almost every hole.

 
 Cheraw is a very big lake.  The eastern end of it is bound by a man-made dam with a bridge over it that allows one to walk across from the camp ground on the south shore to the public recreation facilities of north shore.  The western end is a Pond Cypress  Tree swamp. On Monday morning, BJ and I rented a double sit-upon kayak for a paddle through the western portion of the lake.

The thing is Bruce only brought one pair of pants for camping … everything else he packed was country club attire for golf.  When we got to the kayak rental office, we found that all they had available were sit-a-top self bailers, which meant he would be sitting in water and wearing wet clothes for the rest of the day.    A 300 lb female state park ranger lumbered out of the ranger’s office and rode a golf cart the 30 meters down to the kayak equipment shack to issue us our gear.  She didn’t have a clue what she was doing, and didn’t know a thing about how to assemble the gear.  (She actually gave Bruce a child’s life jacket to wear.)   Now Bruce is not known for his anger management skills and he completely lost it.  Even though the kayaking had been my main planned objective for the trip, I almost canceled the entire exercise.   I can deal with the ideas of paddling through a swamp filled with alligators, cotton mouth snake, and protective nesting osprey, but having BJ behind me in a boat when he was throwing a tantrum… that is scary!

Eventually he calmed down and we were off.    It was worth it.

The swamp is magical... almost mystical in nature. 

The reflections were incredible. 
 

There were even carnivorous pitcher plants clinging to the base of the cypress knees.  (By the way carnivorous plants also grow near where I live in South Carolina.  Who would have thought I would find something so exotic growing in my own back yard?)

That afternoon the adventure continued.   Arriving back at the RV after the kayak, BJ shed his wet jeans and t shirt for his fancy (but dry) golf attire.

 Kat was happy to see us and greeted us  at the door.

   I didn’t want to spend the rest of the day sitting around, so we decided to take a hike down a graded dirt logging road that leads through the southern side of the state forest.   We were about four miles in from nowhere in these very isolated woods when we see  a  heavily muscled black male, in full fatigue gear,  with a loaded backpack, jogging towards us carrying two 5 gallon (obviously full) gasoline tanks ( one in each hand).  The guy was huge… he looked like a cross between Hulk Hogan and a character out of “Deliverance.”   (And here’s Bruce in his country club attire looking like Billy Crystal, in “City Slickers”).  The ‘soldier’ explained was preparing for a military operation (para-military no doubt.) He said that he’d just come from his bivouac camp and he’d catch up with us on the way back (Gulp… time to find a different route home).  In retrospect the whole interaction was very funny.  After all, we go camping rather than staying at resort hotels because we want to experience a wider view of society, and it certainly did make for some good stories to tell our neighbors later that week. 

Kat Walk

Kat loves to take walks with us .  We walk along the golf cart path in the early evening after all the players have left the course.  She follows about ten feet behind us  for a good quarter mile through three fairways and then back the same route.  Sometimes we cross the course to walk home along the edge of the marsh, and at other times stay to the shelter of the trees.  In any case she really looks forward to our evening walks and acts genuinely disappointed if we don't go for a stroll with her.

BJ's and Kat on Duty 6 '09

BJ takes his work very seriously

Everything in his office is in place and he has prompts written out to help him translate the complicated details of networking lingo into English that ordinary folk  ( like me) can understand.

But just in case he needs help, Kay sits dutifully at his feet and reminds him to breath when the problems get difficult.

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow 2'09

It snowed  enough tonight to cover the ground .  We've seen flurries in the past  couple of years, but this is our first true snowfall since we've been here.

Bruce couldn't resist the chance to build a snowman.

Kat seeing us out of doors thought she should be able to come out to play as well. I don't think she has ever seen snow before.  As soon as her paw touched the snow she retreated to the shelter of the eves with a bewildered look on her face. She kept looking up at me then back out at the yard as though she was asking, "What is all this white stuff?"

Kat in a Tin_Can

Planning a road trip in our RV, always presents us with a dilemma: Do we board our cat, get a pet sitter or neighbor to come in, or take her with us.?   

We have tried all four solutions and none of them are entirely satisfactory.

Boarding KAT is the least desirable option.  She absolutely goes nuts in a cage, is terrified by the other animals at the animal hospital, won’t eat, and shows sign of post traumatic stress syndrome for weeks after we return.

A pet sitter and neighbors  coming into our home works out a bit better, but it is expensive (for the sitter)  and feels like an imposition on the friendship to ask of a neighbor   Plus, at best,  the caretakers only come in for a few minutes once a day so KAT gets very lonely, and acts very neurotic and needy when we get home.

Taking her with us usually works out the best  as long as it is not a long road trip

The good news is that unlike most cats she doesn’t yowl, scream, and fight to get out, or hide.  Instead KAT actually seems to enjoy traveling with us in the RV.( or maybe she just remembers how unhappy she is with the alternatives.)

As soon as we take off she hops on the back of Bruce’s head rest and settles down to watch the road.   

If we come to a city or other stop-n-go traffic areas she hops on my lap to look out the window. (I always take a clothes brush when traveling with Kat)

A full stop (like at this Florida toll booth) will have her stretching to look out the front window.

And she loves to smell at the air vents for the different scents of the areas we are travel through.

When we arrive at our destination she settles down in the front  window of the RV to sleep or enjoy a sun bath,   

or she looks out the side windows, 

and  even ventures outside with us  (on her leash and harness). I usually take her for a walk on the leash and harness at both dawn and dusk, which seems to satisfy both her curiosity and her need for exercise.

Taking KAT with us seems to work out well as long as the trip is shorter than a week, she gets exercised regularly, and we are not around other animals.

The bad news is that the longer the trip the greater the odds that we won’t be able to keep her mentally and physically stimulated.  Then she starts behaving like “a cat in a tin can” (That’s what one of my friends calls RV traveling with her cat.).

I can’t always walk KAT… sometimes there are too many kids and/or dogs in an area, or too much traffic and she gets scared and wants to get back in the RV.  Sometimes the weather doesn’t permit us going out, and/,or we don’t arrive until late at night.  Unless she gets exercise she gets antsy, and keeps us awake at night trying to see out the windows next to the bed.

She also gets upset if she scents other animals on us.  She meowed all night after we visited ever so briefly with a friend who had multiple cats in her home.

And worst of all, she seems to get bored with being inside and wants desperately to go outside and explore without a leash.  I swear Kat used five of her nine lives on this last trip to Florida when she escaped from the RV three times.    The first two times were in Key Largo where she hid in a mangrove thicket.  Eventually she came home on her own volition…. But not before I got chewed up alive by mosquitoes trying to coaxes her out.

The third time was in St Augustine FL where she got away from Bruce at 5 am.  at got fed up with being confined to a "tin can" and ran away.  It took us another five days or searching door to door, and calling until we were horse, and two thousand additional miles of travel, but Yup, we did get her back.. Another RVer who travels with cats recognized her from the descriptions we had left and managed to trap her in their animal carrier.   We drove back to St Augustine   in the middle of the night to rescue her.  So at least the story has a happy ending

The Kat clinker

BJ  helping Kat jail break in the middle of the night in St Augustine FL

She is one lucky kitty.  She could be alligator or crocodile’s snack.