Intermezzo

I’m gearing up for another week at the Indie Ink Writing Challenge. After taking a week off, I’m happy to get back in the saddle.

But we’ve had quite a week over here in this corner of the blogoverse, and that, coupled with seemingly endless rehearsals for the Month of Moderns (Latvian and Swedish and Seneca, oh my!), has made me a little loopy.

Therefore, I bring you: ADORABLE KITTENS.

Itchy

These are pictures of Itchy and Scratchy when they were kittens, while they were still cute.

Scratchy

I’m just kidding. They’re still cute, even though they’re no longer kittens.

Itchy & Scratchy, napping

Round Midnight

I remember the first time I ever met him. I had just finished a performance of Carmen at the San Francisco Opera, and as I climbed into the car waiting outside the stage door, I heard a strange sound coming from the back seat.

“Look who I have with me,” my mother said with a smile. She pulled a box from the back and handed it to me.

There was something moving inside the box. It meowed.

Of course I knew I was getting a kitten. This was my gift from my mother for turning the ripe old age of eight, and I had actually visited the family of kittens a few days earlier to pick the one I wanted. When I had played with them all, I had decided on a gray striped kitten who had been very rambunctious. I knew that I was going to call him Tigger.

I opened the box with anticipation and found…a tiny black kitten.

No Tigger.

Confused, I looked up at my mom and said, “I think you got the wrong one.”

She sighed and apologized. Apparently, by the time she had gotten to the family’s home, there was only one kitten left, so she took him. “But,” she said, “he is Tigger’s brother, so I am sure he’s also going to be just as fun.”

I started petting him and he purred loudly.

“Plus,” she added, “black cats are way cooler than other cats. Some people think they have magical powers.”

A magical cat? That sounded like a trade up to me. “But…what should I name him? He’s not striped, so I can’t name him Tigger.”  My exhausted eight-year-old brain was trying to come up with clever names. All I could come up with was “Kitty,” and I knew that was just dumb.

“What about Midnight? He’s as black as midnight, after all.”

Looking at this tiny little black ball of fur, I nodded in affirmation. As we drove home, I started telling him that his name was Midnight, and that we would be friends. By the time we had made the hour-long journey home into the far reaches of Marin County, I had dubbed him Sir Midnight of Forest Knolls.

As I grew up, he was my best friend. He comforted me through convalescence after a broken collarbone, a dislocated knee, and numerous sprained ankles. He loved watching me garden, and did his best to kill any bugs, newts, or birds that got in my way. His favorite napping spots were the porch, the laundry basket, and the roof (which he reached by climbing the plum tree that grew next to our house). He was incredibly intelligent, and learned how to open the sliding glass door for himself to let himself out.

We could never teach him how to close that same door, much to our chagrin.

When my mother’s boyfriend tried to molest me, Midnight knew. After that incident, he spent more time with me, on my lap and in my bed. When I fell into depression, Midnight would come over to me and sit on me. He would look at me with those big green eyes and tell me that he wasn’t going to let me kill myself, and if he had to sit on me to stop me from doing it, that’s what he would do.  He weighed 20 lbs. He was not a small cat.

When I went away to college and my mom started dating a woman who was allergic to cats, Midnight had to leave the only home he had ever known. He lived with my dad for a year, but my stepmother complained bitterly about having a cat in the house. And so after my second year in college, it was decided that I would bring Midnight back to the East Coast to live with me in my new apartment.

I know he was traumatized by the plane trip, especially since the tranquilizer we had given him had worn off by the time my delayed flight finally touched ground in Boston. The poor cab driver had to hear him yowl all the way from Logan Airport to Powderhouse Square; I tipped him extra for his trouble.

Midnight lived for 13 years. He died of intestinal cancer that I had not been able to catch early on (I was a poor college student and didn’t take him to the vet very often). I wasn’t even there when they took him to the vet, because I was at a summer apprenticeship program. When my subletter/catsitter told me what was going on, I borrowed a friend’s car and drove from Rhode Island to Somerville. The vet explained that they could do surgery, but there wasn’t a very good chance that he’d have a good life after the surgery…plus, I couldn’t afford all those expenses; I could barely afford the cost of putting him down!

It was an extremely difficult choice, but I wanted Midnight to be happy. I could tell he wasn’t happy at all the way he was, and after all he had done for me, I knew I needed to be strong for him.

I watched as the doctor injected him. I petted him and told him I loved him.

He purred loudly. He knew I was there.

And then his purrs got quieter. His breathing slowed.

And then he was gone.

My pencil sketch of Midnight (1988)

I cried a lot that night. I drove over to my boyfriend’s house and spent the night sobbing in his arms. Midnight had been everything to me as I was young, and I blamed myself for not taking care of him better as we both got older. But I was still young then, and he was very old, and I know now that it was just his time to go.

I’d like to think that he’s still around, watching from afar. My husband and I now have two wonderful (and crazy) cats, Itchy and Scratchy, and I like to think that Midnight has given them tips on how to deal with me.  Just because they’re not black cats doesn’t mean they don’t have magical powers, too.

(I wrote this post because I was inspired by someone who will be taking her dog in for surgery today. My thoughts are with her.)

Body-for-LIFE Week 4

I haven’t been posting too much about my progress, because it’s been pretty much the same old thing every week: alternate cardio with strength training days, and trying to eat better. But here are some things I’ve been noticing over the past few weeks:

  1. As is typical in most weight-loss situations, I lost a whole bunch of weight right at the beginning, and now I have plateaued at just about 180 lbs. even. Some days I’m a little bit above, but for the most part, I have stayed at 180 for about a week now, and nothing I seem to do can make the needle on the scale move further down.
  2. I do notice that my pants are fitting a little more loosely, so I’m assuming I’m replacing my fat with muscle (which is heavier than fat). That’s what I hope is happening, anyway.
  3. I mentioned in my previous post that I was worried about eating right while I’m out of the house; well, it’s been even harder than I imagined, and I think it may be one of the reasons I haven’t lost any more weight.
  4. Once I start working out, I can finish it through to the end, but it’s gotten harder and harder to motivate myself to do it every day, especially after a free day.
  5. In that same vein, I find that it is much better for me to work out in the morning; that way I’ve gotten it out of the way and I don’t have to worry about it for the rest of the day.

To help me figure out what to eat and what not to eat, I’ve started listening to the Nutrition Diva podcast, a recommendation from my friend Adam875, who has been very supportive in my quest for a healthier lifestyle (even though he tweets about making cupcakes from time to time, which I’m convinced he does just to torture me).

And after reading about how disciplined my friend Amy is about making food ahead of time, I realize that I’m really behind the curve in the “eating right” department. There was a time when I thought just eating a vegetarian diet automatically made me healthier than most of the population, but I realize now that that is not even remotely true.

Even though I grumble and complain about getting on the Bowflex or turning on the exercise programs, I think the really tough part is taking that extra hour or so a week to figure out what the heck I’m going to eat for that week, and then sticking to it. I’ve never done it before, and frankly, I don’t know if I have an extra hour to do all that planning — especially since to set up an efficient planning system, I’d have to put in three or four hours at least.

I am currently spot-checking the calorie count on everything I’m eating. When I get around to it, I log it into my account at Daily Burn, but I haven’t done that in a week, and I’m afraid if I overwhelm myself with too many things to keep track of, that I’ll just give up the whole thing altogether. I definitely don’t want that.

In the meantime, I’m still working out, trying to keep my metabolism rate up and burn as much fat as I can. My cat, Scratchy, has gotten very curious about my visits to the Bowflex every other day, and he will sometimes try to “help” by batting at the moving parts or rubbing up against my legs while I’m working out. Ray calls him my trainer; you can see in the picture that Scratchy by my right leg, checking out my form while I do a bench press.

Red Hawk Down

One morning two weeks ago, I started my morning routine as usual: wake up, hit snooze button, wake up again, get out of bed, feed cats, take a shower. Itchy and Scratchy are usually waiting (im)patiently at the sunroom door, ready for breakfast, and of course, when I feed them, Itchy usually takes three bites and announces he’s done. By the time I usually get out of the shower, Itchy’s insistent crescendo of meowing has woken Ray (and probably the whole neighborhood!); the only thing that will assuage him is to let him out into the garden.

On this particular day, Itchy had already gone outside, and I had continued my morning routine: check email, read the newest blog posts from my favorite bloggers, and finish getting ready for the day. I walked back into the bedroom, and I glanced out to the sunroom, where I saw Scratchy staring intently at something outside. I figured he must want to go outside as well, so I went into the sunroom to let him out.

And that’s when I saw it: a large bird, face down, on the balcony right outside the sunroom’s sliding glass door.

“Ray!” I shouted through the bathroom door. “There’s a falcon or something outside the sunroom. I think it’s dead.”

Ray opened the bathroom door, looked outside and said, “That’s not big enough to be a falcon.”

“Okay, a hawk or something. A large bird of prey. It’s not a sparrow.”

“Did Itchy catch that and drag it up the stairs?”

“Um, no, Itchy usually brings headless mice. I think bird this is a little big for him. But I think it might be dead. What should we do?”

Ray mumbled something about going to take a shower and retreated back into the bathroom.

Great, I thought. I guess it’s my job to take care of the dead bird, since I’m the one who cleans the cat puke and disposes of the aforementioned decapitated rodents. It’s hard enough to pick up dead mice, though; this bird was as big as the cats.

So I did what anyone would do when faced with a situation they know nothing about: I looked stuff up on the interwebs. Wikipedia told me that the accipiter in question was the Red-shouldered Hawk (Buteo lineatus), and a quick Google search told me, to my dismay, that NJ Department of Animal Control didn’t have an office in my county. I did find a phone number to call, though…only to find out that office hours started at 9:00. I looked at the clock. Crap. It was only 8:15.

Okay, I thought. This can’t be too bad. I’ve always enjoyed biology and never got squeamish when dissecting animals, so I’ll just treat this like a biology experiment. I put some gloves on and opened the sliding glass door.

Scratchy inched out the door, cautiously snuck over to the bird, sniffed it, and backed away quite quickly, retreating to the safety of the sunroom. Not a good sign.

I picked up the bird. The head lolled lifelessly to the side, its eyes closed. The body was still warm, but there was no muscular response to my touch at all. As I began to look at it more closely, examining it for puncture wounds or anything that would explain its appearance on my balcony, a spider scurried out from in between its chest feathers.

I screamed and dropped the hawk.

Then I felt terrible. I’m sorry, hawk, I kept repeating in my mind to the dead bird’s soul, if it was still around. I bent over to pick it up and saw that one of its eyes was open.

Now I started to freak out. Was that eye open before? Did it open when I dropped it? Is this animal really dead? Did I kill it by dropping it? Oh, no!

But I calmed myself down quickly, saying out loud, over and over again, “I’m an adult. This thing is dead. There’s nothing to worry about.” I took the bird down the stairs to the hole that I had dug for it.

But as I placed the bird in its grave, I thought I saw its leg move. It could have been a trick of the light, the way I was holding it, but I couldn’t bear the thought of possibly burying this bird alive, even if it was mostly dead already. I put the hawk down next to the hole and went inside.

Once inside, I told Ray about my experience. I told him I was having the heeby-jeebies, and I didn’t feel comfortable burying the thing. He said I should see if the state wants to take it and test it for whatever avian diseases there are in the area. It still wasn’t 9:00 yet, but I thought I’d try calling Animal Control just in case.

I got through to a dispatcher, who then patched me through to someone in Animal Control. I told them my story, and they said that if the hawk wasn’t dead already, it probably would be very shortly, so there was no point in them coming by to pick it up. “Don’t you want to test it for West Nile or something?” I asked.

No, they responded. The state hasn’t requested that they pick up any dead birds at this time, so they’re not going to bother doing it. I can do whatever I want with the bird: bury it, leave it be, or stick it in a garbage bag and throw it out. (It’s nice to know that the Animal Control people are so sensitive!)

I decided that I would put the bird to rest at the foot of my rose bush. I didn’t bury it, but I figured that with the heat and humidity forecast for that weekend, the body would decompose quickly, especially in the open air. I briefly thought about saving some of the feathers from its gorgeous plumage, but I decided that I wanted to be as respectful as possible, so I let it alone.

Backyard Habitat

Yesterday, I decided to venture forth into the jungle that is my garden to see what kind of damage the weeds have wrought, unchecked as they have been, lo these past three months.  My herbs have managed to hold their own against the weeds (some of them being weeds themselves), and I’ve been helping them along by “pruning” (okay, eating) them occasionally.

A friend had given me some of her extra tomato plants back in April, and they have been thriving, thanks to the red mulch and tomato ladders (oh yeah, and that super something in the NJ soil).

They’re almost ready to eat, but not quite yet.  As I was tying back some unruly branches, some green tomatoes fell to the ground, so I decided to have fried green tomatoes for dinner.  I cooked up some dandelion greens to go with them and topped it off with some fresh purslane, which is an absolutely delicious weed growing in our lawn.  Mmm. The only thing that would have made the dinner better might have been a little chèvre.

On my way back to the house, I passed the pond, which has COMPLETELY overgrown.  Last year I had planted some Anacharis to help filter out some of the decomposing material in the pond.  It’s cheap and apparently a very efficient oxygenator, and I figured if my one frog was still alive, he’d want some oxygen in the pond, no?  One of the common names for Anacharis is “waterweed,” and now I know why!  This stuff has taken over!  The good news is that it’s highly nutrient-rich, so all I have to do is harvest it and throw it on the compost pile for some bangin’ compost…if only I can GET to my compost pile through all the weeds.

I had given up on my one little froggy, since I hadn’t seen him all spring.  I figure he had lived in that pond for well nigh five years, and that’s pretty long for a frog.  But as I passed the pond, instead of hearing the huge croak-SPLASH I’ve gotten so used to hearing when my frog jumps into the pond, I heard eep!-splish! splish!

TWO frogs!  Two little frogs!  So the big frog has gone to the great pond in the sky, but left behind his/her(?) spawn.  I’m surprised there aren’t more frogs (maybe there are, and I just didn’t see them), but I guess my pond is kinda small…plus it’s sort of crowded, what with all the Anacharis about.

I managed to capture one of them with my camera (although in this shot, you can barely see him).  You can see my floating frog house on the left-hand side, which I’ve kept in the pond since winter.  The Anacharis is everywhere!

This shot is a little better.  He actually stood still, eyeing me while I took multiple pictures with my camera, trying not to fall into the pond.  When I got too close, he slipped gracefully into the water.

I know the cats enjoy catching and eating frogs; when I originally bought a bag full of tadpoles back in 2003, I was horrified to find vivisected frog carcasses every so often littering the pathways of the garden.  But perhaps that’s because there were too many frogs for one pond, and they were leaving the safety of the water.

Perhaps it was just nature correcting the balance.  Because recently, the cats haven’t seemed too interested in the pond, other than as a place to snooze.  I sure hope they leave the frogs alone right now, because they’re doing their bit to remove mosquitoes from the environment, and I’m all for that.

Feeding the Compost Monster

In our household, we have all sorts of characters doing domestic chores: our dish fairy will miraculously do the dishes overnight; the laundry fairy will take the dirty clothes downstairs and put them in the washing machine; and our trash goblin makes sure the trash gets taken out to the curb.

And we seem to have a gnome infestation as well.

Today, though, I spent a good amount of time in the garden talking to all the feral fairyfolk outside, including the compost monster, which is a friendly sort of beast that I feed kitchen scraps to. Some of them didn’t mind being photographed, so I thought I’d share my garden bounty with you.

Sage in foreground; behind that: lavender; in the very background, dill.

I also had some time to (finally) plant my herb garden, replacing the one I had cultivated two years ago, but which had been blithely mowed over by an overzealous yard worker last year while Ray and I were on our honeymoon. I didn’t have the heart to start over when we returned, but now I feel it’s time to turn over a new leaf (so to speak) with a new spot for my kitchen herbs.

My poor pond has been neglected for quite some time, and although the frog has lasted so far for about 4 years, I have not seen him this season, despite the fact that I had a little floating froggy home for him in the pond. It may be past time to clean the pond and populate it with new fish and tadpoles.

Oh, the pond needs to be mucked out, big time!!

Now that I am done with three months of nonstop singing, I can actually relax with a bit of pond-mucking. There’s nothing like getting in waist-deep into a pond full of partially-decomposed plant matter. Mmm.

Oh, yes, and Itchy was hanging out in his favorite catnap spot while I was puttering away.  He, too, allowed me to take pictures, but only because he knew I was getting his good side.

Itchy was taking a nap before I started bothering him.

Another Year, Another Dollar

Happy New Year! I know I should probably write something about new year’s resolutions and all that stuff, but this year, I’ve decided that I’m not going to have any resolutions, since I never keep them anyway.

I’ve been exceedingly busy this past Christmas season, what with performing in three Philadelphia Singers concerts and one Crossing concert, not to mention Christmas caroling. Oh, and did I mention I’m taking over said Christmas caroling company? Yeah, I was doing administration, HR, and payroll, while the current owner did sales. The deal isn’t done yet, but hopefully next year I’ll be running the whole thing myself, and by the time December 2008 comes around, it’ll be a well-oiled machine. Hopefully.

I did manage to get myself sick sometime around Thanksgiving, and I never really shook the after-effects of the bug. I’m still suffering from post-nasal drip, which is making me cough, and thus harming my voice. Very, very bad news, folks. My biggest problem is that I normally have quite a bit of time after Christmas to rest up and heal for the next round of concerts, but not this time! I’m currently in rehearsal for a Crossing concert with Piffaro (Jan. 5 & 6…come see us!) and then a barrage of Philly Singers performances of a Jennifer Higdon world premiere. So I’ve been in rehearsals since the day after Christmas, and I’ve only had New Year’s eve and New Year’s day off for some much-needed rest.

Of course, during all this craziness, my cat, Scratchy (no, not Itchy, who had the toxoplasmosis…Itchy is better, by the way, although his head is still a little bit sideways and probably will be permanently), got a urinary obstruction (essentially bladder stones), and we had to take him to the emergency room. He had to stay there for two nights with a catheter up his you-know-what, which, according to the attending vet, caused him to be “grumpy.” No kidding. Anyway, he is home now, and we have to keep both him and his brother (since they eat each other’s food) on a special diet formulated to raise the acidity of the urine in order to break up the crystals. They also have to be fed only canned food (it hydrates them and dilutes the urine) for the next two weeks, and man, that stuff is expensive!

Oddly enough, from all I’ve read and all the vets have told me, urinary crystals, or FLUTD, are pretty common in male cats of Scratchy’s age (he’s 5 years old). But when I went into the pet store, out of the myriad of cat foods, I only found one brand that made a canned formula suited to his condition. Oh, there were about two or three different dry types, but because I’ve been cautioned to keep Scratchy as hydrated as possible during the next two weeks, canned is all he should eat. So Purina has the monopoly on cats with urinary tract disorders. It’s either that or get the really expensive prescription stuff from the vet’s office. Oy.

Ray keeps telling me the cats are going to have to go out and get themselves jobs if they’re going to keep spending all of our money. I’m beginning to think he’s right. It’s definitely a good thing that I’m working so much.

Success!

After a full week of being outside, Itchy has decided to come home.

This is a HUGE relief to me, since I have been outside every single morning and evening with bowls of food, trying to coax him back, and I have the mosquito bites to prove it (by the way, there’s something about NJ that makes things grow extremely large…including mutant extra-large mosquitoes!). I had even started falling into a depression about this situation, mostly because I wasn’t getting very much sleep (getting up at 6:30 in the morning to spend a half hour outside, and then going outside again close to midnight) .

Itchy started off being very shy (as I wrote about before), but hunger started overriding his fear, and he would come up only when I had set the bowl about arm’s reach away. Then yesterday he wasn’t around for breakfast or dinner, and I started to think that he had either gotten completely lost and disoriented or perhaps had gone off somewhere to die. Scratchy was looking concerned all night, too, because off he went in search of his brother once again as I went to bed.

This morning, I got up and called for the cats, and I heard Itchy’s distinctive, familiar, somewhat annoying meow. He appeared by one of the bushes and walked right up to the stairs, something that he hasn’t done since he ran off. I walked slowly down the stairs, food in hand, and he waited for me to set it down by my feet and let me pet him while he ate. I was shocked. So was Scratchy, I think!

After he had had a few bites, and I had been petting him with him actually responding to my caresses, I picked him up and carried him upstairs to safety. Scratchy followed at a safe distance. When they were both inside, I put Itchy down and breathed a sigh of relief as they both descended on the food bowl.

Now I can actually give him his medicine. Maybe I’ll be able to help him out a little bit anyway.

Feral Feline

Well, Itchy is still out and about in my garden. He made himself known late last night when I returned home from dinner. He was hungry, but he wouldn’t let me get close to him. I left some food out for him so he wouldn’t starve.

This morning, I tried to use food to get him to associate me with good things, and I tried again this evening. He’s gone seriously feral, and I now have to try to domesticate him again. Scratchy’s still looking out for him, but I think he’s starting to think his brother is a moron for not coming up the stairs and getting food in the house like normal (Itchy tried to climb the stairs but still does not have enough balance to even get up the first step).

Itchy won’t make a move towards the food or the water until Scratchy has investigated it. Also, Itchy has taken to following Scratchy around, which I think annoys Scratchy a little bit. Scratchy was feeling kind of frisky tonight and wanted to play with Itchy, so he tackled Itchy, who freaked out again, mostly because he’s still jumpy from all the falling down. I tried to tell Scratchy that wasn’t helping, but he stalked off in a snit because his brother was acting like a moron again, so I’m not sure how much he was actually listening to me.

All in all, though, Scratchy is on my side. He will come up to me in the middle of the garden while Itchy is watching and purr and rub up against me, as if to say, “See? She’s not so bad.” This is behavior that would have previously been unseemly for a macho cat like Scratchy.

The upshot of it is, I think this is going to take a lot of patience. I’m not going to leave food out again, because I want him to understand that if he wants food, he has to deal with me being there too. Sooner or later, he’ll get so hungry he won’t care. This evening he took about three or four bites of food before retreating to the bushes. But I’m not going to try touching him again until he gets REALLY comfortable with me being there.

Kitty Update

I brought Itchy in to the vet on Thursday afternoon for a follow-up visit at the animal hospital (my regular vet was on vacation, and while he did call me to talk about the situation, there wasn’t much he could do over the phone) . The doctor was very nice, although she did admit that the problem with neurologic cats is that they’re incredibly difficult to diagnose.

She did check his ears, though, both of which have raging infections, so it may be that it’s as simple as treating the infection and maybe his sense of balance will be restored. She tested for FIV/FLV, which came out negative, and she reran the blood work (also still normal). If after the treatment for the ear infection is gone, she told me, we should test for toxoplasmosis, which is also treatable with antibiotics.

She’s also thinking that if it is none of the above, Itchy might have idiopathic vestibular disease, which is not a fatal problem, just disturbing, and nobody knows the cause of it, nor do they know a treatment for it. Sometimes it goes away on its own.

Of course, there’s always the chance that he received some sort of trauma to the head while he was out and there’s some sort of brain damage, and we could get an MRI and a CT scan, but that would involve going into Philly to the University of Penn, seeing a neurologist, putting him under general anesthesia, and shelling out a few thousand dollars for the specialist to tell us that they have no way of treating what he’s got. Can you guess that I’m hoping this all goes away on its own?

After the vet appointment, I brought him home and went out to get him some more kitty litter and a little kitty harness so we could go outside together. He has really wanted so badly to go out, ever since I brought him in, and since he hasn’t pooped, I figured he would be okay for me to take him out on a leash.

Boy was I wrong. He sat still for me to put the harness on him, but when we went outside and I sat him down, he raced for the bushes. When he felt the resistance from the leash, he FREAKED OUT. He was jumping up and down, doing acrobats, limbs flailing, claws out (he sliced my hand pretty deeply) , and he moved around so quickly and violently that the safety clips on the harness released, and he went running off into the night.

I am a terrible mommy. I should never have taken him out.

So now he is back outside. I saw him later that night, when he was under the bushes yowling like nobody’s business. I tried to go to him, but he wouldn’t let me near. I saw him again in the morning, when I brought some food out to him. He wouldn’t eat until I stepped far away from the food bowl. This afternoon after work, I tried to find him in his usual hiding places, but he wasn’t there.

The good thing is that Scratchy is just as concerned about Itchy as I am. The bad thing is that although Scratchy will be by my side while I’m in the garden, showing Itchy that I’m okay, he can’t pick up Itchy like I can, so he’s not really too much help right now. I went out again just now when I got home from rehearsal, and still no sign of Itchy. Scratchy has taken up his guard position at the bottom of the steps, on the lookout for his brother.

On the bright side, I’ve finally gotten a good night’s sleep. Also, I think the ear-cleaning has done something for his balance, because I was watching him outside, and although he’s still stumbling, he’s a little more confident in the way he is walking. Keep your fingers crossed that I will be able to charm him back inside tomorrow morning.