wickedqueen.net

Her name is Isabeau. “Izzy” for short; “Dove Isabeau” for long; “the foulest beast in Christendom” for longest. It’s from a folk song (naturally).

Already she has improved my life by immediately developing an upper respiratory infection upon her departure from the Humane Society, resulting in two days of not eating and concomitant frantic worry and attempts on my part to get her to EAT SOMETHING, followed by a Monday trip to the vet that ran upwards of $50 for a penicillin injection and instructions/equipment for syringe-feeding. She’s already eating a little on her own now, and is a total crazed ball of energy again. For my part, I now remember why I don’t actually want a human infant any time in the immediate future. Win-win.

As you can see, she a) has giant ears like a bat and b) enjoys sitting on my shoulder/back during those rare moments when she is not break-dancing in mid-air for a mouse on a string.

She also likes the cat tower.

She did sleep under my desk for a little bit, but it was while she was starving and not in top form.

For the most part, she is in isolation in the bathroom; I put Bart and Dora in the bedroom to let her out to play. I was planning a slow introduction anyway, but now that she’s got hideously contagious cat flu it will have to be even slower. On the plus side (for Bart and Dora), I feel bad enough about disrupting their lives that I am constantly plying them with treats, including special hoity-toity grain-free wet cat food in various flavors that include 100% quail. I know; it’s a little embarrassing.

I’m so glad ONE of the cats takes full advantage of the eight-foot kitty condo.

In other news, we went to our new vet today and Loxley tried to bite the vet. It turns out he’s not an aggressive biter… unless you’re trying to give him a shot. Not terribly surprising, in retrospect. The vet took it well. Also he does not have intestinal parasites.

Bart, on the other hand, got a shot of steroids and a trial bag of hypoallergenic food, because there were no demodex mites or other parasites in his stool, either, and yet he continues to chew off all his fur and a non-trivial percentage of his skin. I’m almost hoping it turns out he has some kind of airborne allergen reaction instead, because they can desensitize them for that and even with the initial expense of testing, it’s probably cheaper in the long run that 10+ years’ worth of hypoallergenic cat chow…

Some background in case you don’t know that Legba is now living with my parents: So last month, my parents hired the son of family friends to drive up to Wisconsin with a bunch of my stuff that had been in storage at their house, including my cats. I got a phone call at about 7:30 the day that this was supposed to happen, informing me that Legba would not be arriving that afternoon because my father was unable to get him into a carrier. I was a little snippy in response to this news, but I’d like to note that a) the phone call woke me up, and b) I didn’t know at the time that Dad’s valiant ATTEMPT to get Legba into the carrier ended up costing him a course of antibiotics and a tetanus shot.

So Bart and Dora arrived safe and sound at the end of August,* and Legba stayed at my parents’ house. Since he was the only remaining cat in the basement, my parents decided to let him come upstairs and mingle with the rest of the household. Now, Legba has always gotten along fine with Bart and mostly been tormented by Pandora, although occasionally he would refuse to cower when she swatted him and then she would go into paroxysms of feline rage. But apparently, he gets on with my parents’ two female cats, Finch and Darwin, like a house on fire. He loves them. He loves my mother;** apparently, when she goes to the bathroom, he and Finch and Darwin all hang around outside the door waiting for her to come back. He pays no mind to the dog. He also kind of terrorizes their older male cat, but Gurgi only spent like 30 minutes a day inside before, anyway.

My mother was lobbying for custody almost immediately. I was heartbroken, but when even my generally anti-extra cat father allowed as how he thought Legba was really fitting into the household and would probably be psychically scarred by yet another upheaval, I realized that I was going to have to leave him there. It’s not that life with me before was untenable, but making him come live with Pandora again after spending months with two sweet young things who worship him seemed borderline abusive.

And now we come to the upshot: I am not accustomed to a mere two cats in my home. I specifically sought out an apartment where I would be allowed to have three, so it’s on my lease. I love Bart and Dora, but I just felt bereft. I thought about it for awhile. As Travis pointed out, I didn’t want to go adopting a Rebound Kitten.

But I thought about it for a month and I still wanted a third cat, so I went out looking for one. The problem was that it’s not really kitten season anymore; the rescue groups have some strays and former ferals between 4 and 6 months old, but there’s really nothing much younger available in early fall. In general, the younger a cat is, the easier it is to introduce it into a household with adult cats, but I wasn’t sure how much of an advantage I’d have with a juvenile, and the only one that really struck me already had an application ahead of me.

So on Monday night, Keely and I went to the Humane Society, thinking they might have a bigger selection. As it turned out, they had no kittens at all, and so I thought some more about how MUCH of an advantage a kitten would really have, over an older cat, with winning the approval of a cat as inherently bitchy as Pandora. Then I thought about how, actually, I didn’t even WANT a kitten, because they are babies and they cry all the time and jump on your back with all their claws out and need special food that you have to prevent your already overweight bitchy cat from eating.

Then I asked the Humane Society people to bring out one male adult who seemed pretty cute and had all his original claws–this is a big issue at the Humane Society, where most of the animals are surrendered and I would estimate more than half of the adults are front declawed***–and was only two years old, and they told me that he’d only been surrendered three days ago, so they had his intake paperwork for me to look at first. The first thing the forms said was that he had been quarantined for biting a child, to which both Keely and I reacted immediately and identically: What the hell did the child DO to him?

So the former owners reported that he was a “chronic biter” and “gives no warning signal” and that they feared for the safety of their seven-month-old infant. Probably you shouldn’t leave your seven-month-old alone with the family pet regardless, but whatever–they also lamented that “he likes to go outside but he can’t in this neighborhood,” to which one might reply that a cat is not, say, a human adolescent, and can be contained pretty effectively in most cases, but you know, again, whatever.

Then I noticed that although the cat’s attitude toward other cats was unknown, the paperwork also said that he “got along well with former owner’s dog.”

At this point, I’m going, “Jesus Christ, how many owners has this two-year-old cat HAD?”
“Oh,” says the shelter person, “The people who surrendered him only had him for three weeks.”

Of course! I’d been figuring that these people had a cat, then they had a baby and the cat got kind of territorial, as they do, but no! There you are, with a six-month-old infant, and you think to yourself, What is this household missing? I know! A strange adult animal! An exciting unknown quantity! Some people are idiots.

But wait! It gets better.

“They got him,” says the shelter person, “at an estate sale.”
“WHAT.” is basically my and Keely’s simultaneous reaction.

That’s right. An ESTATE SALE. Apparently you can get cats at estate sales. Maybe he was inside an armoire or something. I’ll note at this point that this is a cute but unremarkable domestic shorthair. He is not a Persian or a Manx or a freaking Bengal or something. Just a brown tabby with extensive white splotches (see photos below).

So they bring in the cat, and we play with him for awhile, and okay, I’ll admit it: he bites. He’s not an AGGRESSIVE biter. It’s playful biting, but if you are an idiot–say, the kind of idiot who picks up a cat at an estate sale to watch their infant–and don’t, as it were, nip it in the bud, it can escalate into pretty intense biting. Still playful, from the cat’s perspective, but not so much fun for us tender little humans.

Also, it is extremely easy to tell when he might be about to bite you: if he has just been chasing toys around and is all hopped up, exercise caution. And if he DOES bite you, squirt him with a water bottle and watch him run like hell. (Unfortunately, Keely didn’t have one of those in the little room assigned for making his acquaintance at the Humane Society, but I don’t think she concluded that he was incorrigible, either.)

So yeah, as you might imagine, I adopted the two-year-old child-biting two-time loser estate sale refugee. I’ve named him Robert of Loxley, Loxley for short.**** Right now he is staying in the bathroom, with a blanket shoved up against the crack under the door since Pandora hissed at his paw when he was able to stick it out. I put another litterbox under the kitchen table,***** and when I’m home but not getting in bed, I put the other two in the bedroom and let him run around the apartment. For the time being I’m just trying to get everyone’s smells everywhere; I may try to introduce him to Bart in a week or so.

He’s two years old, but I think he probably didn’t get enough attention as a kitten–one assumes that his original owner was elderly, since he was SOLD OFF THE BLOCK AT AN ESTATE SALE.

Anyway, he’s two years old and has the adult cat physique, but he is CRAZY energetic. He basically acts like a kitten, but with less crying, and I actually think he’ll be pretty open to meeting other cats just based on his behavior so far. I have to take Bart to the vet on Saturday for further consideration of the demodex problem, so I made Loxley an appointment for the basic check-up–he’s got his vaccinations and is negative for feline leukemia and FIV, but he should have check-up. Microchipping was included in the adoption fee, which for an adult was a measly $40. (This represents quite the savings over a kitten, which would be $125.)

So. Yes. I got another cat, prompting a “What the hell?” email from my father when he saw the clues scattered around Facebook, but he is a sweetie and dear god, he needed me with his record. Poor Loxley. Ransomed from the Saracens and all that.******

It almost looks like he’s wearing a brown tabby hood, doesn’t it? Ha.

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*Well, mostly sound. We’re back at the vet for another round of ivermectin for Bart, who seems to be having another demodex flair-up.

******Humorous literary/folkloric reference. Not meant to malign actual Saracens or members of related cultural groups (see Gwen’s blog).

In case you haven’t already heard about Oscar, the cat with the amazing ability to sense the approaching icy hand of the Reaper…

As Travis pointed out, it may have been published as an editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine, but it sure reads like something your obnoxious elderly relative decided to forward you via Hotmail:

Making his way back up the hallway, Oscar arrives at Room 313. The door is open, and he proceeds inside. Mrs. K. is resting peacefully in her bed, her breathing steady but shallow. She is surrounded by photographs of her grandchildren and one from her wedding day. Despite these keepsakes, she is alone. Oscar jumps onto her bed and again sniffs the air. He pauses to consider the situation, and then turns around twice before curling up beside Mrs. K.

One hour passes. Oscar waits. A nurse walks into the room to check on her patient. She pauses to note Oscar’s presence. Concerned, she hurriedly leaves the room and returns to her desk. She grabs Mrs. K.’s chart off the medical-records rack and begins to make phone calls.

Within a half hour the family starts to arrive. Chairs are brought into the room, where the relatives begin their vigil. The priest is called to deliver last rites. And still, Oscar has not budged, instead purring and gently nuzzling Mrs. K. A young grandson asks his mother, “What is the cat doing here?” The mother, fighting back tears, tells him, “He is here to help Grandma get to heaven.” Thirty minutes later, Mrs. K. takes her last earthly breath. With this, Oscar sits up, looks around, then departs the room so quietly that the grieving family barely notices.

…

Note: Since he was adopted by staff members as a kitten, Oscar the Cat has had an uncanny ability to predict when residents are about to die. Thus far, he has presided over the deaths of more than 25 residents on the third floor of Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Providence, Rhode Island. His mere presence at the bedside is viewed by physicians and nursing home staff as an almost absolute indicator of impending death, allowing staff members to adequately notify families. Oscar has also provided companionship to those who would otherwise have died alone. For his work, he is highly regarded by the physicians and staff at Steere House and by the families of the residents whom he serves.

As Travis also pointed out: Barf.

Furthermore, I think anyone who has ever owned cats can attest that, if they COULD kill with mind bullets, they probably would. Especially if they were hungry, or someone had failed to clean the litterbox, or they were just feeling generally neglected in favor of someone’s dissertation. “Uncanny ability to predict,” my ass–hasn’t it occurred to anyone that Oscar the cat might be psychically smothering the elderly?*

And man, since when do we refrain from assuming that correlation equals causation, anyway? When it would interfere with the innate human need for Baby Jesus Angel Death Kitties, I guess.

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*Shout out to frippy, who once had an argument with a co-worker who insisted that cats DO, TOO suck the breath out of babies.

If you have ever had occasion to wonder why your neighbor needs to run the vacuum at quarter after midnight on a Thursday, it’s possible that her cat just projectile vomited all over the rug.

This is why I hate rugs.

Although I have finally shed the sense that I will be surrounded by disorganized piles of my crap FOREVER (read: I am getting closer to being finished unpacking), the apartment is still too much of a disaster to photograph for posterity (and also I still have decor to put up). However, I thought I would offer photographic evidence that, despite the deep psychic trauma inflicted upon him by all this moving around, Legba does sometimes come out from underneath the bed.

Legba being insouciant.

Bartimus and Pandora on the living room couch.

Legba almost never looks at the camera. He is pictured here with Ishibana-kun, my stuffed Easter Island head.

More of Bart and Dora on the couch. Bart is the Switzerland of cats.

Legba close-up. I like how his eyes match the sheets.

And just so it’s not ALL about how I am a crazy woman with three cats, a few pictures of my neighborhood, which I know you’ve been dying to see.

There are nice houses in my neighborhood. I don’t live in one, but they’re attractive to look at.

That’s right: Hooker Street.

That’s my building on the far right. The scary tenement. (To be fair, my apartment is hardly overcrowded, except when the cats are feeling needy.)

It was not easy to get a photo link for one of Dad’s Flickr pictures. I must speak to him about this.

Hey, look–we’d been drinking. The room looks significantly different now. (No link because it is too hard with Dad’s photos.)

Written mid-afternoon; posted from the motel in Harrisburg, PA*

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What makes Legba so difficult to medicate, aside from the fact that he is near 20 pounds of solid muscle, is his absolute terror of almost everything. When you try to give him, say, a tranquilizer, he is 20 pounds of solid muscle fighting for his life. As Dad discovered at 6:15 this morning.

So he didn’t get a tranquilizer. It was touch and go there for a few minutes whether we were going to be able to get him out of my parents’ basement, but fortunately I’d had the foresight not to feed him for over 12 hours, so he was eventually lured out from the depths of a pile of boxes and plywood with chicken ‘n’ cheese flavored moist treats.

Even then it was a damn good thing that one of my cat carriers has a top-loading option. A 20-pound cat in near-seizures of terror sticks out in many and ever-shifting directions, and is difficult to push into a carrier through the front.

Pandora, however, is the real problem cat when it comes to traveling, and we were able to pill her with little difficulty. She only weighs about 12 pounds and much of it is pudge. She once yowled for five and a half hours straight while being transported in the car, and she only stopped because we reached our destination. Not the kind of traveling companion you want on a two-day drive from Missouri to Boston.

So we got tranquilizers from the vet, along with a wonderful pill gun contraption for sticking them down kitty throats–Pandora might be easier to restrain than Legba, but she’s still pretty bad about taking pills, so it’s nice we had the pill gun. It’s been 7.5 hours on the road now and nary a peep. Legba’s made a little noise, but not that much. He doesn’t have Pandora’s persistance.

(Bart isn’t much for vehicular yowling anyway, but I figured he’d be happier sedated, and he’s the easiest to medicate of the three.)

So we’re currently in Ohio. It’s grey. We stop every 90 minutes so that I can walk around and not get a blood clot (I am also wearing my prescription compression pantyhose.) We’re listening to Freakonomics on CD, which I kept meaning to read all last year, so that’s improving.

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Motel update: Miraculously, none of the cats went to the bathroom in their carriers in 15 hours in the car (yes, we drove 15 hours–we’re hoping to get into Boston with some daylight left tomorrow). We’ve let them out to wander around as they please. Legba is still hiding inside one of the carriers, but at least he ate. Pandora is rolling around on the bed demonstrating how adorable she is. I feel sort of bad about not putting my laptop away and petting her for three hours as she so clearly feels is her due.

I owe a special thanks to Deborah Carr for her recommendation of travel litterboxes. They are great.

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*There’s a song by Josh Ritter called “Harrisburg” that I absolutely love. It is perfect for singing mournfully when you’ve been drinking.

Oops. I went a week without updating.

I’ve been BUSY, okay? I discovered episodes of Daria on YouTube, and in less than an hour I will be leaving my rented rooms forever, taking a bus to the CalTrain station, taking CalTrain to Santa Clara, and then taking another bus to the San Jose “International” Airport.*

Last night I shipped most of my stuff to my parents’ house in Missouri and my storage unit in Boston. The FedEx Kinko’s on California is open 24 hours, and at 9:30 the employees are starting to get a little punchy. I was greeted with, “You must have spent some time in BOLIVIA. …You know, when you spend time in Bolivia, you come back colorful?”

When I came out here, I shipped five big plastic tubs of stuff. One of the tubs got pretty banged up in transit, so I didn’t ship it back. In addition to my four remaining tubs, I shipped a liquor box (full of books), a standard-sized paper box, the box my full-size memory foam mattress pad came in, and, uh… five 20″x20″x20″ FedEx boxes. One of them weighed 50 pounds.**

Where does all this crap COME from, a person might wonder. I mean, there were some things I bought here that I probably should have just shipped from home, since work was paying: a backrest pillow, hangers, that mattress pad, a crockpot, some dishes… On the other hand, hangers are bulky to ship and cheap to buy. And I’m shipping all that stuff on to Boston, so I’ll be using it again.

And there were Christmas presents. God, were there Christmas presents. I made one last run into the city with Katherine on Saturday, and picked up a few things I’d been meaning to get. I also visited an H&M for the first time. They put one in Madison right when I left for California, and if they had them in Tokyo, I didn’t know about it–on a related note, for like the first six months I lived in Tokyo, I thought Tower Records was a Japanese chain, because I’d never seen one before. Now they are going out of business, and they sell DVDs and books as well as CDs, so I encourage you to seek out your local store, if you’ve got one, for some discounted loot. And you can marvel at how 40% off $18.99 is kind of like a reasonable price for a CD. No wonder they’re going out of business. Anyway.

Still. My ability to accumulate stuff–oh, there were also those two Palo Alto public library sales I attended–is kind of ridiculous. The thought of what I could do in a semester in Boston with an entire apartment to fill is a bit daunting. I bet they have H&M there, too. Oh, for the first couple of weeks, with the memory of having to clear out this place AND my Madison apartment still fresh in my mind, I’ll be cautious. I’ll avoid garage sales.*** But as the weeks wear on, and I forget about the horrors of packing and moving…

Of course, I’ll have my cats. They’re bound to destroy a few things. God, I miss the little fuckers. Homeward!

One last picture of the yard for my rented rooms:

You may note that my landlady did, in fact, get rid of that toilet. No one is more surprised than I. Well, possibly Katherine.

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*It is the dinkiest little airport you can imagine. It’s like if Madison’s airport was “international.” Apparently they have flights to Mexico.

***Which reminds me, I am leaving a nightstand for the landlady to deal with, because it was $2 at a yard sale my first week here and it is made out of particle ROCK or something; it weighs a ton. I definitely wasn’t shipping it.

Recently I have been reading S.M. Stirling’s post-apocalyptic science fiction tomes, Dies the Fire and The Protector’s War. My father recommended them to me, knowing well how much I love the post-apocalyse, in all its many and varied forms:

1. Nuclear war
2. Meteor strike
3. Zombies
4. Plague (this is usually my favorite)
5. Slow inexorable human destruction of the environment (cf. Tank Girl)
6. Alien invasion (this can be followed by either enslavement or diaspora; the latter case, as in Titan AE, is probably my second favorite)
7. Abrupt replacement of science with magic
8. Miscellaneous

Stirling’s books seem to fall into this last category, although they combine elements of several–thus far, there has been some cataclysmic event that has caused the basic chemical reactions behind combustion (guns, engines, also electricity, including, like, digital watches) to stop working, but no one knows how or why. Aliens have been speculated about but have not actually appeared. Apparently there is a companion trilogy, already written, in which a chunk of Nantucket disappears and reappears in the 17th century or something, but given that combustion has stopped functioning as we know it in these books, it doesn’t seem like it would be a straightforward case of geographic time wormhole. And while the story does have a strong mythic flavor to it, which I like, no one is casting magic missile or anything.

I don’t really know why I love the post-apocalypse so much, especially given my extremely focused love for the internet* and my deep appreciation for impractical attire that sparkles, but I’ve always had a special place in my heart for it. I suppose as a child I did have some pastoral fantasies, in a gothic kind of way. I wanted to be Robin Hood, or possibly a widely feared forest-dwelling witch.

The latter is probably the best position for my post-apocalyptic skill set, except for the part where I know nothing about herbs–well, except for a bunch of things that are poisonous, which might interest some. I can also read Tarot and act pretty freaky, and I have strong cat lady tendencies.

It might also be good to remove the temptation of human contact, since one thing that would be a really terrible idea for Post-Apocalyptic Me would be pregnancy. Not only do I have a genetic factor that makes it more likely that I would have a blood clot, for which pregnancy is a precipitating factor,** but I have my mother’s non-existent hips. She was in labor with me for like 36 hours before the C-section, an option I imagine would be fantastically dangerous if available at all, in the post-apocalypse.

On the other hand, my clotting disorder is fairly common probably precisely because young women are unlikely to get clots (I am an outlier), and it probably confers a slight advantage from an evolutionary perspective–I’m more prone to blood clots because my blood, in general, is slightly thicker and faster clotting than your average person’s, but this also means that I am less likely to bleed to death from traumatic injury. My genes certainly don’t care if I get a fatal blood clot on my fifth or sixth pregnancy in my mid to late thirties, but if I ignore reproductive survival in favor of the more personal, hey–less likely to bleed to death.

Furthermore, I have some training and experience in fencing. I am not very good by the standards of people who have fenced for any length of time, but we can assume that I’d be better than most members of the drastically reduced post-apocalypse population. I am generally fit–while my low body fat might leave me at a disadvantage in starvation conditions, I am willing to try my hand at beating the shit out of the less fit for their share of the food.*** While not a runner, I have stamina. I could cover long distances, especially with, say, a post-apocalyptic mountain bike.

And finally my hair, even–or perhaps especially–reverted to its natural state, is FEARSOME.

Of course, it’s not like fearsome hair is unwitchy. So it’s hard to decide. Isolated cat-keeping sorceress or bicycle-mounted Amazon? I would hope that as the latter I would attract a few groupies (of the non-pregnancy risk variety), but on the other hand, just because it’s the post-apocalypse doesn’t mean I have to be a NOMAD. I have nesting tendencies.

So where are YOU in the post-apocalypse?

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*Some people might describe this in more pejorative terms, believing it to be unhealthy. Some people think that light sockets are leaking poisonous electricity. I’m just saying. So far it doesn’t seem to be inhibiting my ability to function.

***I would, however, try to avoid cannibalism. You will just get diseased and weaken and die anyway. But if you MUST eat the flesh of other humans, for godsakes, cook it THOROUGHLY.

How to make tedious gruntwork for your job seem important and almost appealing: know that when you stop doing the tedious gruntwork, you will have to spray three cats with pesticide, hold them down, and rub it into their fur.

No one in this household is brimming over with cheer at the moment.