After almost exactly a twelve hour drive, we got home about an hour ago. Now we're cleaning up the collateral cat damage, as the door to Katie's room that I carefully closed before leaving wasn't closed when we got back.

Bad kitty.

And now Gretchen is giving the girls a bath while I dig through a lifetime supply of work-related e-mail.

Last night around midnight, daisy_knotwise said to me, "Where's fuzzbucket_cat?" And we compared notes and realized that we hadn't seen him all day, nor had he woken me up at sunrise that morning. I also realized that this might have something to do with why I hadn't been beaten up by Fuzzbucket over the litter scoop that Katie had thrust into his pan, blocking the entrance.

So we took turns going down and calling out the back door and checking all the closets and the basement. No cat. Now Fuzz has stayed out overnight before and for more than one night as well, but not in a very long time. I was pretty worried. When I woke up at 5 AM, I went down to call for him again, but still no Fuzz.

This morning, I suggested to Gretchen that she call the local Humane Society to see if someone had picked him up. This seemed unlikely unless he were badly injured, but I'd lost one cat to the outdoors with no further final resolution and I really didn't want to lose another the same way.

As I headed off to work, I stuck my head out the patio door. "Fuzzbucket! Here Fuzz!"

And I heard a rustling and a "Meow! Meow!"

About 15 seconds later, he popped over the fence to my right and ambled into the house, walking past me, and up the stairs to flop on the bed with Gretchen. Showed me, I suppose.

I'll let him out again, of course. He wouldn't be happy if I didn't.

And if you love something, sometimes you need to let it go free. Even if it means that you may never know what happened to it.

daisy_knotwise has been spending far too much time at I Can Has Cheezburger, which I must admit is pretty funny when I remember to do so. And I recalled that I had a perfectly good picture for the purpose...

bedlamhouse and ladyat were led astray by Mapquest which sent them through the center of Chicago on their way to our house. As a result, they were late getting here and we missed seeing the top of the first inning at Wrigley yesterday, during which the Brewers scored four runs on their way to a 13-4 victory. I still blame Sutton, although I'll give Mapquest an assist.

After the game, we collected Katie from our neighbor's daughter who was babysitting, grabbed some dinner, and headed home for conversation and eventual collapse. Bill and Brenda had to leave at 7 AM (while we were still asleep), so we had a fairly normal Sunday, save for time spent in the basement cleaning up the Bilbo adventures that had eaten through one of the vent pipes in the heating system.

Lenny is coming tomorrow to replace the wrecked pipe. We've thrown out a bunch of stuff. And I'm not sure what we're going to do about the dry wall...

Thank you everyone for the good thoughts and reassurances about Bilbo. It helps.

daisy_knotwise let Bilbo out of the bathroom this morning and went and sat on the couch with him purring on one knee and Katie sitting on the other. A little before ten, I put him in the cat carrier and took him to see the vet.

The nurse weighed him. Bilbo was down to four-and-a-half pounds, pretty much skin and bones. The vet looked at the growth in his ear and gave him a shot of a sedative so that he'd relax and sleep, since he clearly wasn't happy being at the vet.

We talked briefly. There really wasn't anything they could do to fix his problems. And it was time for him to go.

We'll get his ashes back later and sprinkle them under the maple tree with his sister, Shvaughn.

Tomorrow morning, I'm taking our older cat, Bilbo, to the vet. A year and a half ago, we took him in because he had some teeth that were so rotten that he was in too much pain to eat. The only thing he would eat was cream cheese which he would lick off my finger. The vet was reluctant to put him under anesthesia, especially because his blood work indicated that he probably had a lymphoma somewhere, but we decided to chance it.

As it happened, Bilbo came through the surgery just fine and resumed normal eating, although we did give him canned food from then on. It was some time after that that we found out where the lymphoma was, as a large red mass appeared in his left ear. We pretty much assumed that there wasn't anything that the vet could do for it and it didn't seem to bother him, so we left it be.

The problem with that was that periodically it would bleed dramatically. That could be dealt with. It's now to the point where it leaks fluid fairly continuously, leaving ichor wherever he goes, including on his head. It also occasionally mats in his fur, where daisy_knotwise has had to cut them out, giving Bilbo a rather patchy appearance. We had to start locking him in the downstairs bathroom at night to keep him from crawling on top of a sleeping Gretchen for warmth in the winter.

At this point, he could play Mrs. Norris in any Harry Potter film, given how disheveled that cat is supposed to look. With Ron's luck with familiars, obviously someone should gift him with Bilbo. But I digress...

We thought that the tumor would eventually take him, but it hasn't. And he can't continue to have the tumor. It won't work.

So tomorrow, Bilbo is going to the vet where they will try to do something about the tumor. And he may not wake up from the anesthesia.

Bilbo was Gretchen's mother's cat. He came to us when she did and has outlasted her by nearly seven years.

And tomorrow, the outcome is not likely to be good.

My food allergy has bitten me again, which means I need to be very careful about what I eat for the next week or so. I tried taking Benadryl this morning to see if it would help and it really didn't seem to help much, but it did make me feel even more cruddy. Right now, I've just got enough swelling in the hands and face to be uncomfortable.

I'm also minus on sleep, as fuzzbucket_cat decided to start walking all over the top of me around 5:30 AM. So when it got to be 3 PM at work and the network still wasn't working right, which meant that I wasn't getting any significant work done anyway, I told Doug I was going home.

Two and a half hours of nap later, I'm still swollen, but more coherent.

fuzzbucket_cat figured out how to push the collar off over his head. This is not a good thing, but the collar is back on again. And he hates it.

fuzzbucket_cat has had better days. Apparently, his right cheek contained an abscess of enormous size that resulted from a puncture wound and scratches from a cat fight at some undetermined time. This might explain why he's been reluctant to go out for some months, but since April?
( Feline Medical TMI Inside... )

Bilbo, our older cat, had pretty much stopped eating last week and we were afraid that we were finally about to lose him. (The vet had been prepared to put him to sleep in November, but he didn't seem to be in pain once the bad tooth was extracted.) But the last few nights, he's been demanding a can of Fancy Feast, wolfing it down, and demanding another. Then he curls up in my lap while we watch TV.

He is, as daisy_knotwise observed, still pooping in the dining room (Not for nothing did I nickname him the "Poopetrator"!), but in one end...

And I walked five and a half miles this morning, which wasn't too bad.

daisy_knotwise is home from work today with larygitis, trying to recover from her long-running cold. I've got a sore throat which is being annoying as I try to recover from one variant or another of this cold.

But in happier news, Bilbo the cat had three teeth extracted and is now back home. Apparently, he was happy to eat when the vet gave him a shot of painkiller so the teeth didn't hurt any more. So I'm assuming he's eating us out of house and home now...

Bilbo, the older of our two cats, has been feeling poorly for a bit. daisy_knotwise took him to the vet yesterday. He thinks that he may have an abscessed tooth, which would explain why he's been unwilling to eat anything but the softest foods. He's on antibiotics now, but wasn't much interested in eating.

At least until I got him to take some cream cheese from my finger. Later he took it from the dish and we got a good bit of cream cheese in him. It may not be a cat's perfect food, but it contains calories, which are important right now.

But, boy, does he have bad breath!

Update: Later in the evening, Bilbo had crawled into the sink to drink from a dish of water that was sitting there, so I'm thinking he's feeling better.

Up late tonight and we decided to let fuzzbucket_cat out, despite the hour. When I went to see if I could get him to come in a while ago, I noticed a strong smell of skunk in the back yard and closed the door. I went to check on him a few minutes later and watched the skunk run away from the patio area.

There's no sign of the Bucket yet. This could be unpleasant.

It seems only fair. After all, Bilbo started it.
( Saturday, mostly not in the park... )

This story came to me by way of Marty Burke and my first assumption on reading it was that it had to be one of those false stories that occasionally gallops around the Internet. Then I got to the URL at the end.
( If you like cats and dogs, this will tick you off )

I was sitting inside, reading e-mail and playing solitaire, when daisy_knotwise noted that the Bakeline plant not far from our home was baking something wonderful with apples and cinnamon. And the wonder of wireless networking means that the laptop can come out on the patio and I can just keep putting the red 7 on the black 8 (or something like that).

The good news is that aromas have very few calories.

Meanwhile, the cats seem happy that we're out here with them. I think.

Bilbo decided to hop up on a counter and set off the motion sensor at 5:30 AM. Bad cat!

On the other hand, it would have been a good excuse to get off to Marcon a bit earlier. It actually wasn't, but it would have been a good excuse.

Jeff and Carol have picked up QBit and the cats are much calmer now.

We have custody of QBit (short for Quantum Bit), my brother and sister-in-law's (Jeff and Carol) new Bichon Frise, while they're down in Champaign-Urbana at their nephew's graduation. This has greatly disconcerted the cats, who are wondering what this small ball of excited white fur is exactly.

More than you ever wanted to know about QBit is here starting on May 5th. (Apparently, Jeff hasn't yet set up a way to link to individual posts. Bad techie!)

This is just a bit over the top.

Ok, it's a lot over the top. (And if you really want to know what you're clicking into, it's a man who is transforming himself into a tiger.)

Here's an article with some more details.

And (for those of you who haven't read the replies to the previous entry) please welcome fuzzbucket_cat.

Like most humans, I've found that, given any excuse to avoid exercising, I'll avoid it. As a result, I hadn't managed to get back on the exercycle since I got it fixed for a wide variety of reasons. The latest was the cold that I picked up from daisy_knotwise.

But this morning, Fuzzbucket woke me up earlier than I'd planned and I decided that I felt pretty good and wasn't likely to go back to sleep. So I got on the exercycle.

Finally.

Fuzzbucket thoughtfully woke me up at 5:00 AM this morning, looking to be petted. Normally, I can fall back asleep after this sort of nonsense, but not today.

There's nothing like starting your day off sleep deprived to make everything look a little brighter.

He seems to be doing ok. Gretchen decided not to take him to the vet this afternoon, since he was behaving normally. We'll see if he shows up in the morning.

Maybe he's just tired...