Still Life, With Cats

Here is the thing pet owners know: pets make noises.

Some are normal noises – in our house, Rupert is a narrator and Azzie and Ingrid are whiners and Ruby beeps, and Nutmeg only squeaks imperiously when I’m not going fast enough to lift her from the floor to the counter so she can drink out of the sink, and all of them chitter at birds.

But there are other cries that a pet makes that are *not* normal. So when I heard one of those sounds this afternoon, I flew downstairs to find Sherman hunched over, and backing into a corner.

At first, after he proceeded to hork all over the floor, I figured it was just a hairball. But then he went into a litter box and started straining and cried again, that horrible sad sound, and he tried another litter box, and when I went to pick him up, the second I touched his side he yelled and hissed and that is so very *not* normal for Sherman.

Richard called our regular vet but they didn’t have any slots available, plus they close early on Saturdays, so I called the local emergency vet, and once I described the situation they said bring him in.

Sherman hollered non-stop the entire drive. In the waiting room he calmed down enough to charm a nearby couple who were there waiting for news on their dog (and were, like me, anxious for anything to take their minds off the reason they were there – this isn’t a clinic you go to for regular care, so if you’re there, it’s for very bad reasons). But eventually that passed and by the time they’d stuck us in an exam room, Sherman was back to yelling that horrible, wrong cry that made it clear he didn’t feel well at *all*.

There is no clear diagnosis as of yet. It could be any one of a whole host of things. Because he was perfectly fine last night it’s not likely to be something chronic, and if he ate something he shouldn’t have (I remind you all that he’s the culprit in this story) there’s no guarantee it’d show up on x-rays.

They gave him some fluids and an antibiotic shot in case it’s an infection, and sent me home with pain killers that are apparently a controlled substance because I had to sign a form and provide my date of birth. He’s now locked up in the library, a little bit stoned from the pain meds, and at some point later today I’ll head off to the grocery store to buy up their available stock of baby food meat since he’s only allowed a bland diet.

And now we just cross our fingers, and wait.

‘Tis the season for Holidailies.

So for the past who-the-heck-knows how many years Richard and I have been hosting Holidailies, which is a daily blogging thing that runs during the month of December. It was started by another couple entirely, but then we took over when they decided they didn’t want to run it anymore, and this past year they decided to sign the domain over to us and hand it off completely.

Richard’s been talking for years about how he wanted to someday give the code an overhaul (this is in no way a reflection of the quality of what the original folks created; it’s just that any system starts to get a bit clunky after more than 10 years, especially as the rest of the internets kept on updating around it). This year he finally decided to give it a go.

We tossed around a couple of ideas for things we’d like to incorporate, and one of the ideas was to open the portal up for more than just the month of December. I came up with the idea of Horrordailies for October. Admittedly I was a bit vague on how that might actually work, but Richard’s preferred style of fiction writing tends to be horror or comic horror so I figured it might give him something to play with.

Anyway. All of this is to say that the site has been revamped, basic functionality is working (fingers crossed) and we’ve opened it up to beta users with the hopes that they’ll poke at it and play with it and let us know what isn’t working. If all goes as planned, Richard will have time to get all the (major) bugs smoothed out prior to the official launch in December, but in the meantime some of us really ought to be posting stuff to it. I suppose some of us also includes me.

Technically I ought to do a recap of everything I’ve been up to in the past several months, but I don’t really feel like it quite yet, so instead I shall share a short little story about Azzie.

Azzie is sixteen years old, with long black hair that tends to mat if you look at him cross-eyed (naturally, since he HATES being brushed with the fury of a thousand angry suns) and big round eyes and the brain power of your average overripe avocado. He is cute, but oh, he is dim. Here is an example.

Our house is 100 or so years old, and as is the way of old houses, some of the doors don’t quite hang true anymore. The closet in the office is one such door and we gave up long ago on trying to keep it shut. The latch doesn’t actually latch; the door itself just swings slowly open. The only thing that keeps it (mostly) closed is the fact that the door to the office itself opens into the door to the closet, so since we keep *that* door open all the time, that at least keeps the closet door mostly shut. There is still, however, always a bit of a gap. It is important that you keep this in mind, that there is a gap. Plus neither door is heavy and the cats all figured out that they could go in and out at will, just by pawing at the closet door.

All the cats, that is, but Azzie.

I was downstairs dealing with laundry and heard him start to holler. He’s gotten noisier as he gets older, so at first I thought it was just his usual ‘where are you?’ yelling, but then I realized it was getting more insistent so I came upstairs and went looking for him.

And by now possibly you have figured out where I found him. Somehow he got himself into the closet. But then, unlike every single other cat who has ever lived in this house, he couldn’t figure out how to get back out. So I saw him, through the gap, yelling at me, because he was stuck.

I reached out and poked at the door. It swung open with the power of one finger. Clearly he could have managed it himself if he’d tried.

Poor little Azzie. Sometimes the world is awfully hard for those who have very little brain.

Posting for Horrordailies. Boo.