Feeding the Compost Monster

In our household, we have all sorts of characters doing domestic chores: our dish fairy will miraculously do the dishes overnight; the laundry fairy will take the dirty clothes downstairs and put them in the washing machine; and our trash goblin makes sure the trash gets taken out to the curb.

Today, though, I spent a good amount of time in the garden talking to all the feral fairyfolk outside, including the compost monster, which is a friendly sort of beast that I feed kitchen scraps to. Some of them didn’t mind being photographed, so I thought I’d share my garden bounty with you.

And we seem to have a gnome infestation as well.

I also had some time to (finally) plant my herb garden, replacing the one I had cultivated two years ago, but which had been blithely mowed over by an overzealous yard worker last year while Ray and I were on our honeymoon. I didn’t have the heart to start over when we returned, but now I feel it’s time to turn over a new leaf (so to speak) with a new spot for my kitchen herbs.

Sage in foreground; behind that: lavender; in the very background, dill

My poor pond has been neglected for quite some time, and although the frog has lasted so far for about 4 years, I have not seen him this season, despite the fact that I had a little floating froggy home for him in the pond. It may be past time to clean the pond and populate it with new fish and tadpoles.

Oh, the pond needs to be mucked out, big time!!

Now that I am done with three months of nonstop singing, I can actually relax with a bit of pond-mucking. There’s nothing like getting in waist-deep into a pond full of partially-decomposed plant matter. Mmm.

Itchy was taking a nap before I started bothering him.

Oh, yes, and Itchy was hanging out in his favorite catnap spot while I was puttering away.  He, too, allowed me to take pictures, but only because he knew I was getting his good side.

Another Year, Another Dollar

Happy New Year! I know I should probably write something about new year’s resolutions and all that stuff, but this year, I’ve decided that I’m not going to have any resolutions, since I never keep them anyway.

I’ve been exceedingly busy this past Christmas season, what with performing in three Philadelphia Singers concerts and one Crossing concert, not to mention Christmas caroling. Oh, and did I mention I’m taking over said Christmas caroling company? Yeah, I was doing administration, HR, and payroll, while the current owner did sales. The deal isn’t done yet, but hopefully next year I’ll be running the whole thing myself, and by the time December 2008 comes around, it’ll be a well-oiled machine. Hopefully.

I did manage to get myself sick sometime around Thanksgiving, and I never really shook the after-effects of the bug. I’m still suffering from post-nasal drip, which is making me cough, and thus harming my voice. Very, very bad news, folks. My biggest problem is that I normally have quite a bit of time after Christmas to rest up and heal for the next round of concerts, but not this time! I’m currently in rehearsal for a Crossing concert with Piffaro (Jan. 5 & 6…come see us!) and then a barrage of Philly Singers performances of a Jennifer Higdon world premiere. So I’ve been in rehearsals since the day after Christmas, and I’ve only had New Year’s eve and New Year’s day off for some much-needed rest.

Of course, during all this craziness, my cat, Scratchy (no, not Itchy, who had the toxoplasmosis…Itchy is better, by the way, although his head is still a little bit sideways and probably will be permanently), got a urinary obstruction (essentially bladder stones), and we had to take him to the emergency room. He had to stay there for two nights with a catheter up his you-know-what, which, according to the attending vet, caused him to be “grumpy.” No kidding. Anyway, he is home now, and we have to keep both him and his brother (since they eat each other’s food) on a special diet formulated to raise the acidity of the urine in order to break up the crystals. They also have to be fed only canned food (it hydrates them and dilutes the urine) for the next two weeks, and man, that stuff is expensive!

Oddly enough, from all I’ve read and all the vets have told me, urinary crystals, or FLUTD, are pretty common in male cats of Scratchy’s age (he’s 5 years old). But when I went into the pet store, out of the myriad of cat foods, I only found one brand that made a canned formula suited to his condition. Oh, there were about two or three different dry types, but because I’ve been cautioned to keep Scratchy as hydrated as possible during the next two weeks, canned is all he should eat. So Purina has the monopoly on cats with urinary tract disorders. It’s either that or get the really expensive prescription stuff from the vet’s office. Oy.

Ray keeps telling me the cats are going to have to go out and get themselves jobs if they’re going to keep spending all of our money. I’m beginning to think he’s right. It’s definitely a good thing that I’m working so much.

Can’t sleep…astronauts will eat me…

I should be in bed right now, catching up on all the sleep I’ve been missing over the last few days. I should be dreaming all the dreams I haven’t been dreaming, and I should have gone to bed two hours ago when I was moderately sleepy, instead of staying up and catching up on the crack TV I’ve been TiVo-ing for the last week or so.

But I’m not. I can’t sleep, so I figured I’d come onto the computer and blog, mostly because I know I haven’t been blogging for a while, which Neenyd reminded me on Saturday. Has it really been a month? Sheesh.

Cat update: Itchy’s still no better, although he’s off the ear medication. We now lovingly call him the “sideways” cat, since he constantly tilts his head to the right. He’s been managing with his disability so well that we let him outside, but he can’t get up and down the stairs by himself, so we (read: I) have to pick him up and carry him in and out of the house. He enjoys being outside, though, and I figure as long as the weather’s nice, it’s not so bad. I’m going to make another appointment with the vet, though, just in case there is something else they can do to make him “normal” again.

In the news: Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor is the first Malaysian to go into space. When I heard the story on BBC World News this morning, I actually thought he was also the first Muslim in space, but apparently I was wrong about that. He is, however, the first Muslim to be observing Ramadan in space, and he actually got the Islamic National Fatwa Council to write up a whole handbook on how to pray, fast, and otherwise observe Ramadan properly in space.

This is just another reason why I don’t like organized religion: they spend all this time and energy working out the correct way to pray instead of actually manifesting those prayers into something tangible, like helping the poor or working on peace in the Middle East or doing something about the atrocities in Darfur.

Argh. Okay, back to bed again…maybe I’ll try counting sheep.

Success!

After a full week of being outside, Itchy has decided to come home.

This is a HUGE relief to me, since I have been outside every single morning and evening with bowls of food, trying to coax him back, and I have the mosquito bites to prove it (by the way, there’s something about NJ that makes things grow extremely large…including mutant extra-large mosquitoes!). I had even started falling into a depression about this situation, mostly because I wasn’t getting very much sleep (getting up at 6:30 in the morning to spend a half hour outside, and then going outside again close to midnight) .

Itchy started off being very shy (as I wrote about before), but hunger started overriding his fear, and he would come up only when I had set the bowl about arm’s reach away. Then yesterday he wasn’t around for breakfast or dinner, and I started to think that he had either gotten completely lost and disoriented or perhaps had gone off somewhere to die. Scratchy was looking concerned all night, too, because off he went in search of his brother once again as I went to bed.

This morning, I got up and called for the cats, and I heard Itchy’s distinctive, familiar, somewhat annoying meow. He appeared by one of the bushes and walked right up to the stairs, something that he hasn’t done since he ran off. I walked slowly down the stairs, food in hand, and he waited for me to set it down by my feet and let me pet him while he ate. I was shocked. So was Scratchy, I think!

After he had had a few bites, and I had been petting him with him actually responding to my caresses, I picked him up and carried him upstairs to safety. Scratchy followed at a safe distance. When they were both inside, I put Itchy down and breathed a sigh of relief as they both descended on the food bowl.

Now I can actually give him his medicine. Maybe I’ll be able to help him out a little bit anyway.

Feral Feline

Well, Itchy is still out and about in my garden. He made himself known late last night when I returned home from dinner. He was hungry, but he wouldn’t let me get close to him. I left some food out for him so he wouldn’t starve.

This morning, I tried to use food to get him to associate me with good things, and I tried again this evening. He’s gone seriously feral, and I now have to try to domesticate him again. Scratchy’s still looking out for him, but I think he’s starting to think his brother is a moron for not coming up the stairs and getting food in the house like normal (Itchy tried to climb the stairs but still does not have enough balance to even get up the first step).

Itchy won’t make a move towards the food or the water until Scratchy has investigated it. Also, Itchy has taken to following Scratchy around, which I think annoys Scratchy a little bit. Scratchy was feeling kind of frisky tonight and wanted to play with Itchy, so he tackled Itchy, who freaked out again, mostly because he’s still jumpy from all the falling down. I tried to tell Scratchy that wasn’t helping, but he stalked off in a snit because his brother was acting like a moron again, so I’m not sure how much he was actually listening to me.

All in all, though, Scratchy is on my side. He will come up to me in the middle of the garden while Itchy is watching and purr and rub up against me, as if to say, “See? She’s not so bad.” This is behavior that would have previously been unseemly for a macho cat like Scratchy.

The upshot of it is, I think this is going to take a lot of patience. I’m not going to leave food out again, because I want him to understand that if he wants food, he has to deal with me being there too. Sooner or later, he’ll get so hungry he won’t care. This evening he took about three or four bites of food before retreating to the bushes. But I’m not going to try touching him again until he gets REALLY comfortable with me being there.

Kitty Update

I brought Itchy in to the vet on Thursday afternoon for a follow-up visit at the animal hospital (my regular vet was on vacation, and while he did call me to talk about the situation, there wasn’t much he could do over the phone) . The doctor was very nice, although she did admit that the problem with neurologic cats is that they’re incredibly difficult to diagnose.

She did check his ears, though, both of which have raging infections, so it may be that it’s as simple as treating the infection and maybe his sense of balance will be restored. She tested for FIV/FLV, which came out negative, and she reran the blood work (also still normal). If after the treatment for the ear infection is gone, she told me, we should test for toxoplasmosis, which is also treatable with antibiotics.

She’s also thinking that if it is none of the above, Itchy might have idiopathic vestibular disease, which is not a fatal problem, just disturbing, and nobody knows the cause of it, nor do they know a treatment for it. Sometimes it goes away on its own.

Of course, there’s always the chance that he received some sort of trauma to the head while he was out and there’s some sort of brain damage, and we could get an MRI and a CT scan, but that would involve going into Philly to the University of Penn, seeing a neurologist, putting him under general anesthesia, and shelling out a few thousand dollars for the specialist to tell us that they have no way of treating what he’s got. Can you guess that I’m hoping this all goes away on its own?

After the vet appointment, I brought him home and went out to get him some more kitty litter and a little kitty harness so we could go outside together. He has really wanted so badly to go out, ever since I brought him in, and since he hasn’t pooped, I figured he would be okay for me to take him out on a leash.

Boy was I wrong. He sat still for me to put the harness on him, but when we went outside and I sat him down, he raced for the bushes. When he felt the resistance from the leash, he FREAKED OUT. He was jumping up and down, doing acrobats, limbs flailing, claws out (he sliced my hand pretty deeply) , and he moved around so quickly and violently that the safety clips on the harness released, and he went running off into the night.

I am a terrible mommy. I should never have taken him out.

So now he is back outside. I saw him later that night, when he was under the bushes yowling like nobody’s business. I tried to go to him, but he wouldn’t let me near. I saw him again in the morning, when I brought some food out to him. He wouldn’t eat until I stepped far away from the food bowl. This afternoon after work, I tried to find him in his usual hiding places, but he wasn’t there.

The good thing is that Scratchy is just as concerned about Itchy as I am. The bad thing is that although Scratchy will be by my side while I’m in the garden, showing Itchy that I’m okay, he can’t pick up Itchy like I can, so he’s not really too much help right now. I went out again just now when I got home from rehearsal, and still no sign of Itchy. Scratchy has taken up his guard position at the bottom of the steps, on the lookout for his brother.

On the bright side, I’ve finally gotten a good night’s sleep. Also, I think the ear-cleaning has done something for his balance, because I was watching him outside, and although he’s still stumbling, he’s a little more confident in the way he is walking. Keep your fingers crossed that I will be able to charm him back inside tomorrow morning.

Catwatch

So I came home this afternoon, and Itchy had been asleep all day. I suppose that’s good, since then he hasn’t had to freak himself (and Scratchy) out stumbling all over the sunroom. When they gave him the subcutaneous fluid last night, it was all bubbled up in a hump over his left shoulder blade that made him look like a feline Quasimodo, but now in the light of day, much of the fluid has been absorbed by his body, and what’s left of the fluid has obeyed the law of gravity and has kind of pooled into a pocket around his armpit (well, it would be his armpit if he was a human…you know what I mean).

Oddly enough, he hasn’t used the litterbox yet, which concerns me, since there’s no way he couldn’t have the urge to urinate after being injected with that much fluid. But again, he’s been asleep most of the night (and day), and maybe getting to the litterbox is too much of a hassle for him right now…he’ll get to it when the urge is too strong to overcome.

When I woke Itchy up, he meowed sleepily and tried to get up but fell down again, which to me means either A) whatever fluid he got hasn’t done the job because it hasn’t been eliminated from his body yet, or B) this might be permanent brain damage. I called my vet’s office, only to find out that he’s on vacation. He’ll be in tomorrow morning and in the evening, the receptionist said, and then everybody is off both Friday and Monday for Labor Day weekend. So I left a message and am hoping Itchy pees all the toxins out really soon, so that when my vet calls me back, I can say, “Never mind. He’s all better now.”

The only funny thing about all of this is how comical Itchy looks when he’s trying to walk. Ray thinks it looks like he’s drunk. I think it looks like he’s got cerebral palsy. Either way, it’s very, very sad, but funny. But sad. But funny. But sad. I hope he gets better soon.

Curiosity Did Something to the Cat

My cat, Itchy, is the adventurous one of my two cats. Where Scratchy usually doesn’t go very much farther than the borders of our backyard, Itchy roams far and wide. My immediate neighbors at least know who both of them are and that they belong to me, so I feel relatively safe letting them wander around unsupervised.

Every once in a while, usually after I’ve gone out of town for a few nights, Itchy will get into a snit and decide not to come home for several days. This used to concern me greatly, especially the one time when he was gone for over a week. But now I’ve figured out his pattern: he stays away for a few (no more than 2 or 3) days to punish me, and then when he gets hungry enough, he comes back.

This time, he was gone for 4 days and I was starting to become slightly alarmed. I had seen him on Friday afternoon, and then I spent the night at my friend Amy’s in NY and came back on Saturday around lunchtime, and I saw neither hide nor hair of him until late Monday afternoon, when I went out into the garden to pick some tomatoes. I actually didn’t see him hiding amongst the plants by the pond until he started to move, and I thought he was going to come towards me, but he didn’t; he scrambled off underneath the shed, where he knows I can’t get him.

When he was scrambling away, it looked like his foot was getting caught in something in the bushes, because he was not as graceful as he normally is. I shrugged it off, happy to know he was nearby, and hoping that he would show up for dinner that night.

He did not. Scratchy showed up, and while he was outside, it looked like he was keeping watch out for Itchy, but Itchy never showed up.

On Tuesday night (last night) at about 9:30 PM, I saw Scratchy waiting on the stairs for Itchy again. Scratchy had been in and out all night, so I knew he wasn’t hungry. I opened the door and called for them. Scratchy came up the stairs, and Itchy poked his head out from under the stairs. But he had a really hard time climbing the stairs, since he was walking as if he had caught his foot in something again. Sort of half limping, half falling, I took pity on him and brought a little bit of food down to him to calm him down, and he let me pet him (which is unusual for both of them when they’re outside; it’s like they’re too cool for Mom to pet them in front of their friends).

He ate the food like he was famished, and I carried him upstairs to the sunroom/cat room, where Scratchy followed like the concerned brother he is. Once they were safely inside, I watched Itchy walk some more and saw that there was definitely something wrong with one of his forelegs. It looked like the left one, as if every time he put weight on it, it would collapse. And it was freaking him out, I could tell that.

I gave him some more food (of course he must have been ravenous if he hadn’t eaten in 4 days!) and I called Ray upstairs to show him what was going on. I decided to call my vet’s emergency line, because if it was a break or a sprain or a dislocation or who knows what, someone should probably look at him as soon as possible. But the vet’s emergency number said, “If you want to page the doctor, leave a message and the doctor will call you right back. If it is between the hours of 10 PM and 8 AM, call the animal emergency room.”

I looked at my clock: 10:10 PM. Damn. I wrote down the number of the emergency room and went back downstairs to discuss our options with Ray. My concern was that if we kept him inside all night, he would meow the entire night, especially if he’s scared or in pain. If I took him to the emergency room, it would cost more, but they might be able to give him something to calm him down. Ray had lots of leather work to do, so he wasn’t keen on going to the ER.

Still, I thought it was important to go, so Ray helped me get Itchy into his carrier (which Itchy was not happy with; he ruined a perfectly good shirt trying to climb out of my arms), and I drove Itchy to the hospital while Ray stayed home to do leather work.

At the animal ER, they gave me a bunch of paperwork to fill out and called a nurse out for triage. As they took Itchy away, I sat down and watched a sappy Disney film they were playing on the TV in the lobby. From what I could tell, it was about some boy and his dog (no, not Old Yeller or Lassie): the dog could play basketball, and the boy’s mom was played by Susan Sarandon. I thought, “Susan, what are you doing in a movie like this? Do you need money that badly?”

While I was half-watching the movie, I saw a nurse carry a huge dog into one of the exam rooms where a man and woman were waiting.  About five minutes later, the couple left the exam room sobbing, but thanking the doctor profusely.  It reminded me of when I had to put down my beloved cat Midnight in college.  He was 15, so he’d had a good life, but he was suffering from intestinal cancer and had to be put to sleep.  I started crying for that couple and for Midnight and for what might be happening to Itchy.  I was on the verge of crying because of the movie, but it was so sappy it actually made me want to laugh.

A nurse called my name and brought me into an exam room.  She told me that they think the problem might be neurological because of the way Itchy is moving his head in a very stilted manner.  She had him walk around for a while and pointed out different mannerisms.  The doctor came in and told me the same thing:  that they didn’t find any wounds or broken bones, no sprains or dislocations, and that they were very sure this was a neurological issue.

Something, anything could have happened while he was outside, but the most likely thing is that he ate something that affected his brain.  They ran blood tests on him and said that his liver and kidney were functioning normally, which was a good sign.  The doctor gave him subcutaneous liquids which would hopefully flush out his system and get the bad stuff out of his brain, but gave me no guarantee that it would work.  I now have to keep him inside (which is pissing him off) and watch his behavior.  If it doesn’t get better, I have to bring him to my regular vet.

Keep your fingers crossed that the fluids he got last night are doing the job.  I don’t want to have to put him back in the carrier again.

Stoned Cats

Not much to report these days. The lazy, hazy days of summer are upon us, and Itchy has taken to lying in and around the catnip every day. Whenever he comes in for dinner, he acts very out of character and starts rolling all over the ground and trying to eat our feet. I told him he has a problem, and his response was, “Meow,” which I interpret to mean, “Hey man, I can stop any time I want!”

In the meantime, Scratchy is in search of the best shady spot in the garden. Sometimes it’s under the shed, sometimes it’s by the pond. But when he’s inside, he likes to go under the chairs that have skirts to hide from the sun (and his annoying brother).

I took this picture of Scratchy the other day…I think I thought at the time that one leg was a hind leg, and the other is a front leg, so you can only imagine what position I thought he had contorted himself into. But now that I’m looking more closely, it just looks like those are two front legs. Well, you get the idea, anyway.

Some people call me Maurice

What a surreal day I had yesterday!

After coming home and falling into bed at 11:30 or so Saturday night (I was up in NY helping my brother with his Tisch audition material), I was awakened at 4 AM by Scratchy , who was meowing at the door wanting to be let out. Usually when he does this, I don’t even remember his meows because I instinctively get up as soon as my subconscious registers it, but this time I kept dreaming about being in choir practice and having one person in the choir who just couldn’t quite hit the note and was scooping up to it. After about three takes of the dream, I finally realized that this person sounded way too much like a cat meowing and, oh, yeah, I guess Scratchy wants to be let out.

A more portentous dream I could not have had.

The morning started out as a usual Sunday morning: the alarm went off, I hit snooze a couple times, and then finally rolled myself out of bed and into the shower so I could to church. I was still a little groggy from lack of sleep, so instead of wearing black tights that would have matched the black blouse I was wearing with my burgundy skirt, I pulled on a pair of dark brown tights. It wasn’t until I was walking from my car to church that I looked down at my shoes and realized my mistake. Too late now, I figured. Of course, there was also a big run in one of the legs that clued me into the fact that I didn’t have the mental capacity today to dress myself properly.

Church itself was pretty normal. We have a new assistant rector with abysmal writing skills, and I’ve recently taken to counting the number of times he repeats a word or a phrase within the sermon…today the word "life" came in first with a whopping 35 repetitions, with the word "priority" a far second with only 21. I think it wouldn’t be so noticeable if he didn’t use the exact same words in a different order to fill three sentences in succession. He’s fond of phrases like, "We all prioritize things that matter in our life; in other words, things that matter in life get prioritized." Uh, did anyone point out to you that you’re not using other words at all, but the SAME EXACT WORDS? I might forgive him his redundancy if he created a chiasmus with them (like The Sphinx in Mystery Men : "Learn to hide your strikes from your opponent and you’ll more easily strike his hide"), but he’s not nearly that clever.

After church, we had to sing in an evensong at another church in Asbury Park. It was several church choirs combined to sing at this one church — they’re hoping to make it an annual event, which by itself it not a bad idea, but they’d better put someone else in charge next time. The whole affair, from the rehearsals up to the concert itself, was infuriatingly disorganized. Asbury Park is on the Jersey Shore (some people recognize it as Bruce Springsteen’s home town), but it’s a good hour’s drive away from our church in Moorestown. By the time we were done with the second service at church, I barely had enough time to scarf down a sandwich before all the section leaders piled into one car and headed out to the shore.

Asbury Park should be renamed as Ass-bury Park. That town is a real dump. The church is smack dab in the middle of a pretty bad neighborhood, and we all agreed if we never had to return it would be too soon. When we got there, the airhead in charge was unable to answer a lot of questions and had clearly not communicated what needed to be done in the rehearsal with the other church choir directors or with the clergy from her own church.

We were also dealing with the added bonus of children’s choirs. Our children’s choir managed to behave themselves, thanks to one of the moms who sat opposite them in the choir stalls and glared at them the whole time. But the other kids didn’t have that type of oversight. One kid sat in the back and didn’t even pretend to sing; another one didn’t have any music because some of the other kids had stolen it. There were no parents anywhere; I assume they must have thought with 40+ adults around, there was plenty of supervision. Boy, were they wrong.

The concert itself went surprisingly well, with the exception of the tone-deaf priest who really wanted to cantor. He had been practicing all month, you see, and was really nervous about it. Too bad his chant didn’t have any resemblance to the notes on the page at all, and our harmonized responses would have crashed and burned if it weren’t for the quick-thinking organist, who played our chord before each response.

When the concert was over, I couldn’t get out of there quicker. On my way home, I called Ray, who asked if I could stop and get some pizza for dinner. Pizza sounded good. And beer. Lots of beer. But when I got to the pizza place, they had an order ready for me under the name "Maurice." You have to be seriously not listening to an order if you hear "Maurice" from "Maren." Ray even spelled it for the dude. So I guess now you can call me the space cowboy or the gangster of love if you want…

What a perfect end to my wacky, crazy day.