EMERGENCY CIRCUMSTANCES: Low Humidity & Your Pets

A local vet clinic here has seen a dramatic uptick in the number of cases of cats with urinary and kidney problems since Tuesday, Dec. 8, 2009, some requiring surgery. They hadn't seen any cases in 8 months, then suddenly, over the last 3 days, there's apparently been nearly a dozen, one of them being one of our cats, Arlo!

In bringing Arlo home to recuperate last night, getting him to drink is not much problem, but urinating is another thing.  You can't pee if you don't have enough to go through your kidneys in the first place.

Where's it all going?

We realized that this problem may correlate to excessive low humidity due to the recent extreme cold temperatures, and dry beautiful skies as we have here.  The humidity in my home is 30%, and that's with humidification techniques, best as we can manage.  It's just 32% r/h outside right now as well.  Everything is still frozen.  Even if I boil hot water, it won't vaporize and disperse, it just evaporates, so a humidifier won't work any better for now.

The best way to keep yourselves and your pets hydrated is to simply drink more water.   Unfortunately, that's not so easy to get your pets to do.  Here's the recommendations from the vet:

• Place multiple bowls of fresh water around the house, and keep changing them out a couple of times per day.  You'll be surprised at how they'll drink from a new bowl more readily than the same old bowl they usually drink from!

•  Put the stoppers in your bathtubs and sinks, and fill sinks and tubs with a little water for evaporation.  If you can place a tray of water in the sun, or in front of a fan, this will create some evaporation.  Evaporation is based on the surface area of the water, so more surface area, more opportunity for evaporation. 

• Use a syringe if you have one, to gently force a little water into your pets, every hour or so until this weather breaks.

As for Arlo, when I did the syringe, I thought he'd have a cow. He wanted more, and quite happily took three more syringe-fulls right away.  The other cats were just as cooperative, once they realized it was just water.  And Charley the Wonder Dog too.

Good luck - I know many of you all over the country are dealing with similar weather conditions, I doubt many of us realized that this could be a problem for our pets in this manner.

If you have any questions, leave a comment, I'll try to help in any way I can!

Satanists in the Neighborhood

They come from near and far.  They point.  They talk about "those people".  "How can they flaunt that right in our faces?" they say.

Oh, it's soooo in their faces too - more so than Macy's Christmas Window.

Stay with this story, as it really illustrates something quite important.

Every year on Thanksgiving, we give thanks for the opportunity to get people all worked up for yet another season of merriment - ours.

It all started about eight or nine years ago, when we decided to do something I'd always wanted to do, but never really had an opportunity, since it takes certain circumstances to pull off.  I really wanted to do it because (duh!) we have cats.  At that time we had - Norman, The King of the Christmas Tree.  He took enormous joy in climbing the trunk and popping out near the top, to my continuous chagrin.  I just wanted to best Ol' Norm.  That's all -really.  At least that's how it started.

The ceiling in our living room peaks at about 12', and with about 30' of windows across the front wall where the peak is, that's a lot of windows.  These windows open onto a wide open neighborhood, where we are very visible at night time and have always provided for a beautiful display at Christmastime for the neighborhood.

The beam at the peak of the ceiling provided our opportunity.  We concocted an aparatus with chains by which we could hang the Christmas Tree, rather than sitting it on the floor.  Upside down.

Because, like, why not?

Here's how it happened:  We got the tree up (7.5'), fully lighted, and proceeded to decorate it.  The decorations hung out from the tree like dangly earrings.  How cool!  Every year the decorating has grown - more dangly and interesting ornaments, and, as planned, less cat interference. Another really neat benefit was that it took up NO floor space, giving us a lot more room for the entertaining we like to do.

Well, with the exception of Abby (story here).  Abby uses the Christmas tree like Tarzan's jungle vine.  But that's another story.  Initially Norman (who died at 13 a couple of years after the first upside down tree) was indeed bested by this hanging Christmas Tree.  I definitely won that round of the cat wars - and he seemed to enjoy that I had. There are ornaments on the tree that look like him, so we call it Norman's tree.

This gets better, truly.

Here's what's transpired as a result:   Some neighbors up the street interpreted this upside down Christmas Tree as a clear sign that we are Satanists.  As all rumors do, this spread.

Really. 

And people have come as word has spread.  It's really beautiful from inside and outside, and it's been amazing to us when we've made the comment of our upside down tree, people remark, "Oh! You're the one's with the Satan Tree?"  This has made it back to us numerous times over the years.

Did you know Satan had a tree?  I didn't either.  If people are really that stupid, we are overjoyed to provide them the fodder for their ignorant selves. 

Merry Christmas.  Merry Xmas.  Happy Hannukah.  Happy Kwanza.  Happy Solstice.  Happy Retailers Bonuses.  Happy Cats.  All of it.

But be careful!  Rumor has it, we MUST be Satanists. 

The really frightening part of this story is that it's totally indicative of today's political and social rhetoric - "Facts" based on simple, uneducated assumptions. 

How One Little Kitty Will Save the World...Or Break It

I'm often asked what inspires me, so here's the explanation:

Blondetwit. Yeah, well, that's me...sort of...and kinda not. Got that?



The picture you see as Blondetwit is actually Abby. She's a pistol. She's just a year old, and is one half of the pair that's turned this house upside down.



Abby is not only attitude, or "cattitude" as we call it in these parts, but she came equipped with extra devices for which to execute her endeavors. She has 6 toes on each foot. As did Hemingway's cats, but Abby has additional phalanges (bones) on each toe, meaning she also has extra joints...giving her opposable thumbs, and actual fingers, rather than the usual kitty paws. Who needs claws when you have HANDS?



Now, add hands to the cattitude, and you have an entirely new species!

Ab's, as we call her, keeps at whatever she's doing until she conquers it. Then it's done - over - no longer on her mind. And I like that.



Even if it means there's a box in my office labeled, "Broken Shit". Everything in there had made the mistake of being in her way. I'll fix 'em in a couple of years...then they'll seem all new again to me.

(hear a kitty-snort now)

Somewhere along the line, I realized that Abby was really my alter-ego. Remember that old television show, Greatest American Hero? Where Ralph finds the super-hero suit in the desert, but loses the instruction manual for operating it? The running gag was Ralph learning to use the suit (magic jammies) by trial and error, where he'd fly upside down, run splat! into buildings, etc. If you never saw the show, go find it on the internet...it was fun.

Abby is Ralph. And I am Abby. So that means I have "Magic Jammies" somewhere, right?

Yeah, I'll go with that. Magic Jammies good.