Deepish Wednesday

In one of those expected turn of events, I can no longer squeeze into spaces that once used to easily fit me. In restaurants, I get stuck between chairs. Entering my house, I never seem to open the door wide enough. I walk into walls. And, in related news, food seems to land on me, where once it might have fallen on a napkin in my lap. If I could eat more elegantly, this last one would not be an issue.

When not eating or trying to navigate the increasingly tighter world, I am often asleep. It's hard to stay awake for more than 8 hours at a time, which made my most recent sleepless night (last night) even more unpleasant. Rob is out of town, so Smokey wandered the house looking for him FOR HOURS. His rotation included stomping into the bedroom and hopping over me, meowing and walking around until he had established that Rob was, in fact, not there. This did not stop him from checking every 15 minutes, usually just as I was about to fall asleep. Smokey, despite being 7 pounds, manages to walk like a baby elephant through the house. Emma punctuated his antics by howling into the night at random intervals for totally unknown reasons. She doesn't share Smokey's deep connection to Rob, so I'm pretty sure she was just being an asshole.

Last night I also finished Kurt Vonnegut's Armageddon in Retrospect. I loved it--it opens with a letter from Vonnegut's son Mark, who calls his dad "Kurt" and who also calls him out on some of his more nonsensical thoughts:

"I'm as celibate as fifty percent of the heterosexual Roman Catholic clergy."

What? Mark Vonnegut called this "a sentence with no meaning." But then there are so many sentences full of meaning, that you just kind of go with it. There's a letter home after Vonnegut was released from a POW camp in Germany, and the short fiction that follows is all connected to his experience of World War II. The book is almost exclusively about war, which is a theme that ran through our house this weekend. No, we're not fighting, but we went to see Avatar, rented The Hurt Locker, and had friends over to watch that annual battle known as The Super Bowl (was it just me or did the commercials totally suck? I have reached my yearly quota of Budweiser ads, for sure.)

I'm thinking the theme for this week should be a little different, maybe fluffier and not so bomb-oriented. It could help the cats sleep easier, if nothing else.

Nine Lives

I want you to know how I now start and end my day: by chasing both cats around the house and forcing them to drink terrible, vile medication from a little squeeze tube. They gag, grit their teeth, and scream and I have to sit on them and fight to get the antibiotics down their throats. It is so, so not awesome.

Why are we doing this, you may wonder. It's not enough to say that the cats are just old or that we wanted them to see a vet as soon as we got to the west coast to make sure all was well. Those things are true, and eventually we would have taken them to get checked out. Smokey, however, forced our hand by taking it upon himself to jump out of an open window last week on moving day. Rob found him screeching on a ledge outside the 1st floor neighbor's kitchen window. At first, we were more confused than worried. Why would he jump? Does he hate life so much? Should we stop feeding him the same boring food every day so he has more to look forward to? Should we have short therapy sessions before bed each night to reinforce his worth as a cat and family member?

Then we realized that he had a huge fat, infected lip. So not only did he jump, but it was clearly not so graceful. Oh, the shame.

Anyway. I took both cats to the vet last week and it turned out that while Smokey just needed some meds, Emma had to go back in the next day for THE MOST EXPENSIVE DENTAL SURGERY THAT HAS EVER BEEN PERFORMED ON A CAT. She had 5 teeth removed and was with the doctor all day. Hence, the drugs for Smokey's lip and Emma's teeth.

Between his fluids for kidney disease, pills for thyroid disease, and antibiotics for the fat lip, I'm not so sure what will keep Smokey from making another attempt to jump. For now, the windows are all closed.

A Room with a View

We are in our hotel room in Burlingame. Smokey and Emma have spent much of their time out on the balcony, watching birds fly over the bay. I think they like it here, now that the sedatives have worn off and Emma has sort of stopped freaking out over the fact that Smokey smells weird. She tried to attack him repeatedly for about 2 days, but now it's just random hissing here and there.

The drugs we gave them didn't work exactly the way I had expected. We slipped them into tiny, ingenious snacks called Pill Pockets. Smokey, being Smokey, ate his right away. We could have put it on a chip, a piece of salami, or a garbanzo bean and he would have eaten it. Emma was not fooled, though. Rob had to hold her down and force her to swallow the pill. Not pretty.

Anyway, I thought the cats would pass out. But instead they just started yelling, and yelled all the way to the airport.

"Ahhhhhhhh!" yelled Emma.

"Ahhhhhhhh!" yelled Smokey.

Over and over. Then Smokey started bashing himself into the sides of his soft carrier. I was reminded of the warning from the vet. "Definitely test out the sedatives before you leave on your trip," she said wisely. "Sometimes they have the effect of making the cats more hyper."

So I confess that we did not test out the drugs. Obviously. But the bumpy cab ride seemed to be the worst of it. Once we got into the plane and put blankets over their carriers, they seemed to calm down. Or maybe it was just that we couldn't hear them.