The Ankle Biter @ Quibbling.net

…it seemed appropriate anyway.

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More on the online Poker Cats Contest

The good news is, the Dreamhost support wiki is ALL OVER it and provided me with the answer to the exact problem I’m having with posting from external services.

 The bad news is, the file editor that’s part of Wordpress is ALSO not working (not sure why, maybe a misconfig on my end), so I can’t fix the problem until I get home tonight.

Which means I can’t embed photos of our adorable new kitten (named Macro, naturally) from Flickr until tonight. So until then, you’ll have to click through to see Macro macro’d, in tribute to the fact that he and Jack woke our asses up at 4:30 this morning.

By the way, I haven’t seen a lot of coverage about this, and I had no idea it was happening until I got an email from my father-in-law… There’s a pet food recall happening because some pets are getting sick with kidney failure after eating certain can and pouch food products. The Iams website has info about the product codes you should look for to see whether your pet’s food is affected.

I checked Jack’s food this morning, and discovered that the food we’ve been feeding him all morning was not affected, but the box I was about to open was indeed part of the recall. So take a minute, check your pet food packages, and make sure your furry little buddy is safe, and if you’ve fed him some of the recalled food recently, keep an eye out for signs of illness and call your vet if you have questions. Fortunately, His Jackness has been his normal demonic self all week, so I am resting easy and buying him a box of non-recalled food today.

P&G Pet Care Announces Voluntary Participation in Menu Foods’ Nationwide U.S

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We have returned, safe and sound, from our Christmas trip to my ancestral homeland.  We had a nice visit with my family and enjoyed some serious Christmas Coma.

I love Christmas Coma. It’s that delightful feeling you get after Christmas dinner when you can nod off to sleep without any part of your brain saying, “You know, you should get up and do laundry/clean the house/pay the bills/whatever.”

Not that my family makes that hard.  Any holiday gathering is marked by enough food to feed a small army, and my grandmother’s fretting that people aren’t eating enough and there’s going to be too much left over for my grandfather and her to finish.  Not that it isn’t delicious, of course, it’s just that there’s a metric buttload of food.  (Not to be confused with the imperial buttload.)  It’s especially relaxing now that my younger cousins are old enough to not be all wound up and yelling on Christmas morning.  Not that I wasn’t fond of them during the commotion phase, but now that they’re a little older and feel like they have to play it cool, they’re more fun to be around.

We did have one mishap on the way up, but what holiday would be complete without a ridiculous story to tell?  Tom and I had decided to leave after Christmas Eve church services.  We wanted to take Jack with us, so we headed back to the house to load up the car and get the cat.  We tried putting him in the cat carrier but he Would. Not. Go.  He fought, he howled, he struggled.  Maybe it’s that every time we put him in the carrier, he gets stuck with needles, I don’t know.  Finally we decided that he’d probably be fine in my lap for the ride and we took him, still struggling and terrified to the car and I held him and tried to comfort him as we got under way. (Some grossness to follow behind the jump.) (more…)

…Guinness is still with us.

 

Sacked out With Mommy

Originally uploaded by tbridge.

The Bridge family is going through another crashing wave of missing Guinness hardcore. So because it’s my blog, and this is where I work out what’s going on in my head, I’m going to post this photo for y’all. It’s the one I was thinking about yesterday as Jack fell asleep in my lap for the first time in weeks, and I didn’t have another cat hovering nearby, angling for his share of the attention.

A couple of disconnected thoughts about all of this:

- First, the ridiculous. When Tom brought Guinness’ ashes home and we put the box in the window, I was deprived of my chief worry- that the container was going to be substandard. Now I have a new one- at some point, someone is going to pick up the box and ask me what it is (the window is in the dining room, where we now not only have a table, but also chairs, so shortly our friends will be spending time there). I’m going to have to ask them to put it down before I tell them. It’s not that I mind them holding it, it’s that I’m terrified they’ll drop it when I tell them and it’ll break open.

- Related: The box is the only thing Jack hasn’t knocked to the floor in that area of the house. He just sits quietly next to it in the window. I’m sure he’s not capable of knowing what it is, but it’s weird just the same.

- Lessons learned: I spent some time with Jeff this weekend, and the topic of Nelson came up. (His dog, not the twin blond hair band.) I confess that when I was reading Jeff’s blog during Nelson’s illness, I thought the range and intensity of Jeff’s reaction was Jeff being, well, Jeff. It’s not that I didn’t get it, and I didn’t think he was overreacting, it’s that I didn’t expect that I would cry so hard I could barely see straight on the ride home from the vet hospital when Guinness died. Now I know better.

- The theological: In my years of theological study, I’ve never run across any scholarship on the topic of afterlife for animals. I suppose that’s far too fluffy (no pun intended) a topic for us serious Presbyterians. Either that, or John Calvin didn’t have a cat. So I’m going to call this one a case of “I get to believe whatever makes me feel better because it doesn’t matter either way.”

Jack brought us a live mouse last night.

Tom had let him out late that afternoon, because the poor kitty is going stir-crazy with no one to play with.  So he went out for a while, and Tom had left the back door open so he could come back in at his leisure. 

After dinner, Jack comes trotting into the living room, looking very pleased with himself.  I spied a tail dangling from his jaws.

“Tom, he’s got a mouse.”

Being closer to the cat (I’m not terribly squicked out by the things Jack brings us, I was just across the room), Tom jumped up to praise Jack while convincing him to drop what was in his mouth.

It was then we noticed that it was still moving.

And then, after Jack dropped it, it RAN AWAY.  IN OUR HOUSE.

This does bother me.  I think mice are adorable little creatures, and don’t at all object to the little pet shop mice, but outdoor mice carry disease and are scavengers, and I just don’t need vermin in my home.  Jack chased after the mouse but didn’t quite catch it, so Tom picked it up and set it outside.

Jack must not have seen what happened, because he started frantically running around the area, trying to figure out where his mouse went.  Tom picked him up to try to calm him down, stroked him a bit, and took him to the kitchen for some (not germ-ridden) dinner-from-the-Iams-pouch.

Just the same, Jack was anxious and bouncing off the walls for a good while afterwards. 

Tom went to the veterinary hospital today to pick up Guinness’ ashes. It was hard for him; I wish I had been able to be there with him when he went. He has borne the worst of this whole ordeal simply because he has no corporate masters, and it seems terribly unfair. He has complained not a bit about it.

I had been terrified (to the point of nightmares) that Guinness was going to come back to us in some mundane vessel- a cardboard box or plastic deli-type container- completely inappropriate for the place he still holds in our hearts. I had begun to look around at the various tins and chests I’ve collected, trying to choose something adequate to store his ashes in until we’re ready to plant catnip in the spring.

I needn’t have worried. His ashes rest in a beautiful, shining cedar chest. We have set this box in Guinness’ favorite window until it’s time for it to be opened.

His brother Jack is curled up next to me on the couch as I write this. His tail is curled around his hind legs, and his head is resting on his front legs, his ears twitching with whatever it is that cats dream about.

We’re all coping in our way, I guess.