Greenstorm's Journal

Orlando the cat looks like he's being adopted by the neighbours. I strategically sent them two videos of him asking to be petted and nuzzling my hand through the bars of the crate. They're the ones who named him Orlando, since they've been feeding him on their deck, but I guess he hasn't been willing to go in.

They'll be a good home for him; they have the money to handle the vetting he needs. Speaking of vetting, I was worried about that swollen front paw and in consultation with the vet (this is why I was videoing him) he's going in today. I need to remember to ask the vet about crystals too; he's peeing for sure but in smaller bits than I'd expect, and he was definitely dehydrated when he came in. That symptom of smaller clumps of pee but multiple of them in the litter box is familiar to me from Hazard and his pee troubles. And I do know that stress can cause inflammation of the bladder in male cats even without crystals. So, having someone who can pay his vet bills is a relief.

He is a complete snugglebug. When I open the cage and sit next to it I think his first plan was to escape, but he had to go past me to do that. When he gets close to me I pet him and he gets distracted from escaping, instead trying to absorb as much love into his poor tiny body as possible. If I stroke him from head to tail he does both elevator-head and elevator-butt to get the most he can out of it. He's very happy in my lap, especially if I support him with an arm so he doesn't have to put weight on that front paw.

The way I understand it, feral cats born feral don't do this. Only cats who are socialized young can quickly re-bond to humans. That means he was dumped, or left.

I'm also still fascinated by his cheeks. I've only ever been around younger intact male cats, I guess, and even Whiskey when I got him had huge muscles but not these tomcat cheeks. They are huge pads of what I understand to be fat on the back and side curve of his jaw. They're really firm, maybe the texture of an actual testicle, definitely firmer than breasts, and just these big ovoid things under the skin. They aren't so much visible, though they do make his whole head look bigger, but they're very palpable and he loves beign scratched around them.

His fur has gone from dry straw feeling and falling out freely to starting to almost be soft in the areas he can easily reach to lick, like his lower back. I know that dry-straw feeling from when Siri first came, and I'm very happy for it to be retreating.

He'll meow at me when he sees me, asking for affection. I gave him a shrimp tube treat to get the video for the vet -- the shrimp is the stinkiest one so they love it most -- and he adored it.

The plan is for him to go home to the neighbours on Saturday.

Also on Saturday, the plan is for me to go to Prince George and pick up my tornjak pup. Until he's happily in my custody I won't write out the story, but he's about seven months old, he's bred in Penticton or Princeton (I cannot keep them straight) and I've been in touch with his breeder previously and almost got someone from his litter last winter but ended up passing, then this boy showed up on kijiji. They wouldn't mention the breeder but since there are only like 4 people who breed tornjaks in any given year in north america it wasn't hard to track her down, and then she had pictures and video that matched this same dog from when he was a baby. So I didn't need to get into it with the owner over it, I can just take him, get his vax records from the breeder, I have his parentage from her, and we're good.

I'm not sure what his name will be yet, his litter name was Roko and tornjaks are translated from the croatian by fb etc as "tower"s so he may get a mountain name. It probably should be pretty different from Solly and Thea but tbh everyone comes to every name, even the cats, so. It shouldn't be either Shass, Pope, or Baker because those are silly names, though those are the mountains I'm most familiar with, and I just don't want to call him Rocky even though everything seems like it should line up that way. Who knows, maybe he will be a Rocky. Cascade shortens to Cass which is the right sound to distinguish itself from the others and continues Siri's tradition of confusing people as to gender. It'll work itself out. Osilinka? Mesilinka? He'll tell me.

Sticking to names because although I don't know him he's... well, his face markings look like Avallu's. He has that same asymmetric mask, smaller on one side, though he doesn't have the freckles. His back markings are very different and his energy is EXTREMELY different. Avallu always had this intense gravitas, even when he was playing, but this boy is a lot like Solly from what I can tell, just a silly bouncy kid. I think he'll probably fit into the group better than Avallu did; Thea was always grabbing Avallu's tail to try and make him play and these days she keeps enticing the willing-but-obedient-to-the-leash Solly when we're out on walks, doing that straight-front-legged gallop in big circles to show how much fun she is. Although I'm sure she'll get tired of the puppy, I think Thea will be glad to have him.

I will be glad to have him but every time I look at his face I love Avallu so much and miss him so much. I know this is part of the process. My plan had been to get someone who looked very different; tornjak markings are pretty variable. But here we are, and I will live with Avallu's ghost more than I might have otherwise, and I'm grateful always that we had each other.

Doubtless I will also be very distracted by managing: a dog who needs four fairly low-energy walks a day; a puppy who's not yet poultry safe and because of Solly's injury probably can't just fully use the dog door even if I exclude poultry totally from the front (a couple ducks have snuck through and the muscovies fly everywhere; and planting an entire garden. Though pup can help me plant the garden, it's mostly pretty fenced off and he can wander around and destroy things while I plant them back.

Maybe Cascade after all?

At least I'll be distracted from missing the gentleman cat, who is so absolutely loving. I will definitely miss him. And I'm definitely glad about where he's going.

I very much want to tell this story but I'm a little foggy headed, for reasons that will come clear in the story. Still, here we go.

Some time ago (a few months?) a cat showed up in the upper woodpile. I took a picture and sent it to the neighbours to ask about it, since they seem to keep track of the cats around. They hadn't seen him before but came over to look because he had a facial marking the same as their cat who had disappeared last fall. It wasn't their cat, and it wouldn't let us get closer than about ten feet, but we noticed that he was an intact male at that time.

He's a black and white tuxedo type cat with a very distinctive Marilyn Monroe single black spot by his lip.

I didn't see the cat again after that for awhile, and I knew the neighbours were putting out food for him, I guess they were feeding three and then four neighbourhood cats. They have their own indoor cats as well, and take excellent care of them.

It slipped out of my mind until yesterday, when there was a flash of this cat as I came out my back door and he headed towards the dry creek and the winter field; the woodpile is past those, so he'd come quite far towards the house. He fled only a short distance, out of sight but not out of sound because I guess Hazard saw him, they both froze about six feet away from each other, and Hazard started a somewhat distressed howling song.

I went up to pet Hazard, which quieted him down, and this interloper cat meowed at me.

Throughout the day I went in that direction and the cat tended to be visible, and when he meowed at me insistently the first time I brought him out some wet food with lots of water in it (it's so dry, there's not a lot of water around right now). He came forward and ate it while I watched from ten or more feet away and puttered in the garden. I reclaimed the bowl. I thought that was that; it was early afternoon at that point.

Well, a couple hours later he was there again, in the upper field which is between the woodpile and the winter garden: a little further away, but in a flat space by the path which comes down to the house. Again I noticed him because Hazard was in a locked-eye standoff with him, though Hazard didn't meow as distressedly this time.

Again the black cat meowed at me insistently (I do always meow back) and I noticed he wasn't putting weight on his front paw. This took the situation from "how nice, the local cat is visiting" to "I need to do something"

Without thinking it through very clearly I slowly worked my way towards the cat over about twenty minutes, sharing slow blinks and talking lots and going at his pace. He let me pet him and pick him up. This was a poorly thought out plan because he didn't let me hold him, and I didn't have a carrier, so he jumped down and kept his space of about ten feet.

I got him another bowl of food from the house, making sure it was nice and mixed with water, and he ate that when given some space. As a gesture of goodwill I kept twenty feet or so away, in plain view, and I always chat away when I'm trying not to scare an animal so they can tell exactly where I am and know I'm not trying to sneak up.

Being a slow learner I made another slow approach and picked him up again, thinking maybe I had just picked him up in such a way to hurt his injured paw. No luck, he jumped down and I let him, and he kept some distance. I finally realized that maybe I should have somewhere to put him and put a carrier up in the field, so if I picked him up I could put him in it instead of trying to carry him all the way back to the house.

He of course didn't let me pick him up a third time but we chatted a bit and he went onto the woodpile and did a little long scratch on it, the kind of excited friendly thing cats do, but he couldn't scratch hard because of his poor paw and it just broke my heart.

At this point he had basically approached me or stayed in places I was likely to go and meowed at me several times. I was worried about him; he clearly wasn't fully feral, he clearly was injured, and he clearly had selected me as most likely to be able to help. I decided to leave the carrier in the field and try again tomorrow morning since I'd been sitting in the mosquiotoes for an hour or two at that point and had picked him up twice with no plan, and he was therefore keeping his distance.

As the evening wore on I had also accumulated a train of my own cats, all of whom were suspicious of him in different ways (except Little Bear, who was merely watching curiously from a distance and looking entertained). Around 8:30 PM I have Siri trained to watch me take my meds and then get a treat, and it was at least 9 by then, so he was trailing me and he's the most militant anti-cat of all my cats.

So, I went in. I took my meds. I brushed my teeth. I realized the rice cooker full of my dinner was there waiting. I heard a meow out my front door, stuck my head out, didn't see anyone, called "just let me get some clothes on, I'll be right there" and went out to see the cat about ten feet from my front door, by the woodscrap pile. He meowed at me. Hazard grumbled at him.

Long and short I managed to get him that time, wrapping him snugly in a scarf and carrying him in. An XL dog crate was still set up from when I thought Solly could fit in it after her surgery, so I popped him in there with a litterbox, food, water, and some of those extra fuzzy blankets cats seem to love, the plush kind with no long strands to get swallowed or caught. We stared at each other awhile, did some slow blinking, and I bade him goodnight and closed the door on his little understairs room where the crate was.

My troupe of cats followed me up to bed and didn't stay down there to harass him. Solly was a little concerned, kept her distance, and behaved very well. She didn't even super stare at his spot or anything, just watched me like "what are you doing now?"

This morning my cats are interested when I'm down there but not enough to hang out and harass the area. He'd eaten every bit of his food and used his litterbox several times. When I brought him breakfast and cleaned the litterbox he approached the door as if to go out, but he had to go across my lap and we had a snuggle instead. He didn't fight at all to go past me, and was very happy to be thoroughly scritched and then returned to the cage of food and blankets.

Up close, after a night's sleep, it's actually pretty heartbreaking.

He's thin, I think he probably can't hunt well with that injured front paw. There's no blood on the paw, so it's maybe something internal? He has those huge fatty tomcat pads in his cheeks which make him look less thin from a distance. They're super interesting to feel, they really stick out and are definitely, well, fatty pads. His fur is dry and rough and coming out a bit as I pet him; it feels very dusty too in the way that dry dust in hair will make it kind of tacky and dreadlocky, though he has no dreadlocks. His ears have that slightly crenelated edge from lots of fights that healed over and he has an abcess that's mostly healed over his eye. I guess that's a common spot for injuries when fighting and commonly gets infected. This one is nearly healed over but it still tells its story. Lots of nicks and scars all over him, though he looks pretty young yet.

Tomcat pee, even in a proper litterbox, smells worse than I thought, which I guess I knew.

He never once took a swipe at me, unsheathed his claws while I was holding him, or so much as hissed. He never swiped at the other cats. If he was truly purring and not just sniffing this morning while getting scritches he has a very quiet little purr. Last night when he was in the cage, after several eyenarrows, he kept falling asleep. He has not been safe for quite awhile. I hope he feels safe now.

Next steps involve hearing back from the neighbours about whether they actually want him -- they'd made a comment to that effect that maybe he'd end up in their home back at the first sighting. I emailed the rescue group saying that I'd found him, could they see if he was anyone's, and honestly probably was pretty incoherent because it was 10pm by then.

He needs vetting for that paw and for fleas etc though, and the snip. Siri had just started comfortably sleeping on the bed comfortably with his archnemesis Demon so I'm not sure my domestic harmony can survive him staying here, and he needs a home.

That's the story so far anyhow.

Today I took Siri back to the vet, with meds, to get blood and urine tested. He's been drinking a lot and if his food intake is disrupted he gets diarrhea, so I knew something was up.

I'd been overextending myself so I made no plans other than a quick trip in to the vet, stopping at the grocery for a pickup order they'd bring out to the truck, and going home.

I got out of the vet earlier than expected -- I've learned to put padding between things in town, so the pickup order was going to be a bit. I decided to pick up some sushi, then I got to the grocery store. As I pulled in to the pickup spot I got a call from the vet: Siri has diabetes, she wanted to catch me while I was still in town, there were 3 options:

-Put him down, she knew he was a stray I'd just found and this was going to take some commitment to deal with

-Insulin shots, which would require him to go into the clinic for a full day, then once every couple days for a couple weeks, then once a week for awhile, then once a month. He'd get the shots twice a day. The vet is a 5 hour round trip from me if nothing goes badly.

-A new drug she doesn't have much experience with, which he would take by mouth once a day, along with diabetic food. It would still require monitoring but some of that could be done by phone maybe. The drug isn't cheap but the vial should last a couple months.

I had pulled my truck really awkwardly into the parking space -- it's too long to super comfortably go into most of them, and I was trying to answer the phone. I'm sitting there on the phone in the row of 12 pickup spaces with someone pulled into the one space beside me that I was partially cutting off, while all but 1 of the other spaces were empty, sorting through this in my mind. The person in the other car, also on the phone, was glaring at me.

I went with the last option, the once a day drug that probably didn't require as much monitoring. This is why I can't keep my credit card empty, I guess.

I had ordered a bunch of frozen food because the plan was to go straight home. Even though I'd brought a kinda cooler thing running up to the vet was going to add an hour to me getting home, but so be it. I loaded my groceries into the truck, covered them with blankets and jackets, and drove the half hour back up to the vet, then back down again in pre-long-weekend-rush-hour (which, to be fair, is probably less in Prince George than nearly anywhere else people might live).

Got onto the highway, air conditioner blasting -- it had somehow gone from 19C to 27C -- and slowed down because the car in front of me had their flashers on. They were part of a line that stretched to the horizon, which at this point wasn't too far because of a hill. No one was moving.

After about twenty minutes the line of cars started creeping forward. Nothing on facebook about what was going on. Cars had been coming the other way intermittently, so I knew it wasn't a logging truck fully jackknifed or anything. Why weren't they alternating traffic past the blockage? Why were we creeping so slooooooooowly? At this point the cars stretched to the horizon behind me too.

Crested the hill finally and could see the long stretch to the next hill a little over a kilometer away. There were police lights flashing but it was too far to see what was going on. Creep, creep, creep--- never really stopping enough to leave the truck in park.

Turns out the police were worried about a suspect in the area (?) ahead and wanted to stop each car, make us roll down our windows, and say, "don't pick anyone up or stop for anyone in the next bit". They weren't screening cars on the way out of the area, just letting us know on the way in, and this was the way they decided to do it during the busiest time on that highway. When I got past the area, the line in the opposite lane was over a mile long.

I was in the line for about an hour, so that added another hour to my freezer groceries timer and "I'll eat this sushi I picked up when I get home" lunchtime delay. Between emotional stuff about Siri, stress from running all over and waiting in that line without knowing what was up (they had phone blockers deployed, so no internet, unless it's just that so many people were using all the signal), heat stress, and being already tired I'm impressed that I managed to get the truck into my driveway without ending up in the ditch. Most of the groceries were even still frozen, yay survival blanket supplies.

This is the kind of situation where, even if I'm figuratively crashing, there's not too much to do -- I can't really stop the car by the side of the highway in 27C with $300 of frozen groceries and a cat and nap or rest. The trip itself is pushing my resiliency, so then when enough events occur it's really not great.

Also someone should tell the cops around here about things like writing and signs. They could have slowed us to 50 and flashed a sign without having us stop drive-through style and have that poor guy repeat the same message to what must have been a couple miles worth of cars in the end.

Anyhow, Siri is home and recovered from the trip. Thank goodness he's such a good car and carrier cat. The other cats are loved on. I'm in bed, contemplating ability and a new symptom (random pinprick feelings, yay! I didn't notice a wasp had stung me earlier because I've just been getting that sensation kinda randomly throughout my skin).

We will see what tomorrow brings, but at least it will bring me a still-alive cat and some time in bed.

The kitten I ended up with is firmly integrated into the home and is growing up. He is Very Smart-- he learns super quickly from experience, and more than any other animal I've known he is able to attach actions and consequences in a less-general way. For instance, he understands that mugs might be hot so he approaches all my mugs cautiously after one unfortunate paw incident, but is unconcerned about water bottles. He knows not to attack bare feet but needs to learn not to attack each different pattern of socked feet, and when I'm putting on pants the dangling leg of the pants is fair game until my foot comes out the bottom. He knows when jumping on me not to use his claws, and is learning that per different pair of pants too. That said, the skin on my hands and arms hasn't been fully intact for awhile even while he has learned to mostly keep his claws in when playing. However he's a bit of a bully and isn't great at reading the room around the other cats. He's especially obsessed with Hazard, and will jump onto hazard's back with his arms around the older cat's neck and just hang on like a little black cape. Also, he has never been completely successfully photographed.

His primary mode is flitting from cover to cover like Things in the backdrop of a horror movie, or alternatively curling up with his paws around my neck and his head under my chin, sleeping and purring. Kittens, right?

Solly was disappearing for a day or a day and a half at a time and returning for food for the last little while. This concerned me for obvious reasons and I built more fencing, blocked holes in the fence-- and then the neighbour who has his own two LGDs tracked me down and let me know he saw her get hit by a car on Friday and had been trying to track me down and tell me. Now, when he told me she was in the fence and doing fine. I've been in the habit of doing a quick body-check when I haven't seen her in a day, just running my hands over all her limbs and spine and belly to check for injuries because who knows what could happen to her out there, and she'd always and continues to be fine.

The weather has been really mild and I'd made her a dog house in case that's why she was disappearing, but she didn't use it. After learning she'd been hit I let her come in the house and she stuck in there all day when allowed. She's still acting very afraid of Avallu even though Avallu politely ignores her now, though who knows what they get up to when I'm not around. Ideally she'd feel comfortable using the downstairs dog door but that's where Avallu sleeps, so it seems unlikely. At this point I'm letting her in through the front door to the upstairs, and it looks like she wants to be a velcro/house dog. If she could just let herself in and out I'd be fine with that, though I'll need to work on resource guarding around the cats. Like Avallu used to, she guards snuggles with me. I've also made her a second dog house that she seems to like better - at least, she slept in it last night. I'm not leaving her in at night until the upstairs is better set up, too.

She's been playing with the next door dogs when she escapes and I suspect she'd like a similar-aged companion. Four dogs at once is A Lot, but it does make sense to keep in age-similar pairs. Nothing is happening on that front while I still have pigs and a scary financial situation though.

Avallu seems to be doing well. He's staying outside more and is more active so it looks like the antibiotics worked to clear up his UTI. His x-rays showed a bit of arthritis in his back and he tends to want me to let him in and out instead of using the dog door, so I'm wondering if he does have a bit of pain and I need to talk to the vet about that. HE's not young anymore.

Thea is a little food-guardy around Solly, and I suspect would like more solid routine around food. They all get fancy fresh meat when the grocery store has extra in my expiry-day pickups and that semi-rhythm seems to upset her. We're getting into the time of year when they all need lots of extra calories, so I can start supplementing with fatty pork belly and that will likely help. I also want to renovate the A frame she chose for a doghouse so she has more visual range and more protection in it.

The other cats all still are very snuggly and also miffed at Bear. I don't blame them, since his primary cat interaction mode is attacking, and he initiates most interactions by attacking from stealth. Whiskey and Bear have been sleeping on my bed until I build a door to my bedroom, and Whiskey is very happy with that but even more happy when I work from home and sit in just exactly this one spot at this one time with my computer. Hazard wants me to carry him around whenever the kitten is nearby so he can't be attacked. Demon has taken it on himself to play with the kitten a lot of the time, which means he's often socialled out, but he very much appreciates quiet petting if he's protected from the kitten.

It's still extremely warm out, at least for this time of year, just hovering around freezing this week. We've had maybe 4" of snow total and it's mostly either melted or subsided into ice sheets. There's no insulation on the ground if the temperature drops quickly so I expect there'll be burst pipes in town all over this year-- unless we don't actually get those low temperatures. The ground has just finally got cold enough to begin freezing duck and goose feathers to the ice sheet overnight so they get left in the ice when the birds get up in the morning. I'm unsure if they'll go indoors or not.

When Avallu was feeling so bad I took down the original dog bed (crib mattress) I got for Thea that has gone unused. He slept on it and seemed to feel less painful on it, but now that the fire is on downstairs the cats have taken it over. He's far too polite to ask even a single cat to move off it, so he whimpers and settles down on the concrete. Combine that with pottery stuff and I'm making a pottery bench to replace my downstairs table, with the goal of enough room underneath for a second dog bed. I'm also making up cat beds that might be more appealing to them, potentially to put on the wall to give myself more floor space. I've also put up one shelf for pottery and need to put up a bunch more. There's no reason not to display this stuff. So, doing a bunch of rearranging down there ideally to increase both functionality for me and liveability for the animals.

I also finally started cutting out my winter sewing, which has been a challenge with one kitten, one Very Large dog, and three cats in the room. I basically made it work by putting up a gate to keep Solly in the kitchen, feeding the cats, and dumping Bear outside on the deck that doesn't have any way to the ground. By the time he had figured out how to climb down and gone around in through the dog door I'd cut out two and a half pairs of pants.

I take so much comfort in these loved ones, even when literally the entire floor and hall is covered in bodies and it's challenging to move around.

Had some great social days at the pottery studio, answering questions at the open house, and I met someone at the community studio who's equally obsessed with wheel throwing who I can actually talk to about it, so that's nice, but it doesn't feel the same kind of safe and interesting and loving that my pack does.

1) I think Whiskey is unsatisfied with the amount of attention he's getting: he's started stepping across both wrists and lying down on them when I'm typing.

2) Someone put a dead mouse in their food dish last night. Not sure if it's because they thought I needed it, or if they brought it in and traded up to the food in the dish.

So far this winter is about sitting on my new-to-me downstairs sofa more often than not, surrounded by a changing kaleidoscope of sleeping animals. Right now it's Hazard, curled up on his side with his teeth in the air, and Demon, sleeping up on the woodpile behind me with one paw draped over the edge. Half an hour ago it was Avallu on his blanket which serves the function of a carpet in front of the fire and Whiskey on his side with his head resting on my foot.

We've had really variable temperatures. It's swooped from a couple degrees above freezing to -20ishC once already, warmed up, and it's about to do it again. We had some snow, then some fluffy snow, then some wet snow, then some rain, then it froze, then it melted, and froze a couple times, then it frozen-rained. My driveway has about as much friction as wet glass: I should have snowblown it when it snowed, even though it was so few inches of snow each time it didn't seem worth it. Now I have something that would probably be nice to ice skate on.

Hazard has flopped most of the way onto his back and is clearly twitching and dreaming, and he just yowled in his sleep. It was a weird yowl but he's a weird cat.

Speaking of weird cats, last night Someone knocked a squash off the 4" high shelf and rolled/carried it about 8" into the alcove beside the woodstove. The dogs wouldn't go in there, which leaves... the cat Demon? He does tend to knock things off shelves, but I haven't seen him carry a couple-pound squash before.

Both Tucker and Josh are

(he just looooooong mrowled in his sleep again)

coming up around Christmas at different times. I will try to enjoy taking full advantage of the intervening time to sew. I was going to cut out fabric for mock-ups tonight but I put on a pair of half-sewn pants from the last time I did a round of sewing, to see what was up with them. It looks like I hadn't put cuffs or waistband on them, probably because I hadn't finished sewing up one leg, probably because the bobbin ran out of thread mid-seam and I was on a timeline to make stuff for the Cape Scott Christmas backpacking. I pulled the pants on to see what was up and they were so, so, so comfortable that I just sat around spreadsheeting and didn't want to get out of them.