In Focus

It never fails, every time I make an appointment to get a cat fixed they go into heat.

Pumpkin is finally old enough to have the procedure, but I can’t get her in until July. Two days after making the appointment she became more...talkative. So far, there has been no howling, but she is chattering up a storm at all hours of the day. I can’t wait for July.

Yeti is still avoiding me after her most recent bout of asthma. She was not happy about the nebulizer treatment and even less happy about the vet appointment to get her shots. Her coughing has stopped, but the paranoia remains. She will run into the next room or out into the kennel to avoid me. She’ll get over it in a few weeks.

Going over vet bills, I noticed Oreo is older than I thought. Her records say she is 18 years and nine months old. I know Candy was older so she had to have been 19 or older when she passed. I don’t know how much longer Oreo has left. She is so spoiled. She kept turning her nose up at her nightly wet food dinner. Now she gets cooked hamburger, squash, leftovers, basically whatever she wants at this point. One night she ate a handful of French fries, which is one of her favorite people foods. For a very old cat, she still has quite an appetite.

The cat TV (the bird feeders) continue to be a hit with the cats. Mom put out another feeder that attracted Mocha’s nemesis, the woodpecker. Before the dead trees were removed last year, that woodpecker was an annoying alarm clock. Mocha would sit in the window and hiss and growl at the bird. It’s funny to see her sitting in the window watching the woodpecker at the bird feeder with her tail twitching and making growling sounds. Latté and Pumpkin sit in the window and chatter at the birds. It’s quite funny.

Bigfoot is probably the only cat right now that just doesn’t care about anything. We had a baby goat visit the house and the cats freaked. Bigfoot liked the little guy. The others would come up and sniff the goat and take up a position far enough away from the goat to keep an eye on him. Latté was the most freaked out and kept watching from the stairs and didn’t come down until it was gone. It was hilarious. The friendliest, most talkative cat shut down and watched from a distance.

The average day is filled with Pumpkin’s incisive meowing, Mocha’s growling, various cats chattering at birds, Yeti dashing out the kennel door and Oreo wanting dinner. Add Pepper the dog, who barks at everything, into the mix and the house is pretty noisy. All the while, Bigfoot chills out on the couch without a care in the world.