Watching the Storm

Snowflakes are like cat toys from the sky.

Best Breakfast

We found time for another brief Playa del Carmen escape for a nontraditional Thanksgiving this year, and true to form, the majority of the vacation followed this pattern: breakfast at Cueva del Chango, beach, afternoon guacamole and cocktails. Sometimes the secret to happiness is just finding what you like to do and doing it every single day.

In the past I'd never been able to get past la Cueva's glorious egg dishes on the breakfast menu, but this time a touch of gastric distress inspired me to order what turned out to be the most fascinating oatmeal I've ever eaten. Yes, you heard me right: fascinating oatmeal!

Oatmeal was really the least of it -- on top of that humble base were heaped generous helpings of kiwi, melon, banana, and pineapple, plus a bunch of other fruits I could not identify, then darkly toasted homemade granola, some kind of grain that may have been quinoa -- or maybe millet? -- and finally, the creamiest, most subtly, heavenly sweet yogurt on earth. While it didn't actually end up curing my tummy troubles, in the moments that I was eating it, it felt like it would, and like it might just make any other of life's various problems melt away, as well.

A young woman eating the same thing at a table near us was overheard to say, "I wish I could have this breakfast every day." Me too, sister, me too.

This little friend patrolled the patio during most of our Cueva sessions, but despite appearances, that industrious pink tongue had nothing to do with any hand-outs from us. We had a feeling he might have better luck with the nighttime menu though, which generally featured a nice tuna tostada.

Clawfoot

When it comes to quality drinking water, apparently nothing compares to what pools in the worn spots of our ancient bathtub. A certain feline has recently taken to galloping into the room following each shower, then leaping into the tub to avidly lap up the precious drops.

The Secret Language of Cats

Cat hieroglyphics interpreted:

Sign of the woolly caterpillar.


Please stop bothering me.


Oops, I swallowed a Slinky.

Cat Sad

One of our kitties had been flattening his right ear and squinting one eye for the past week, looking sort of like a grumpy stroke victim, so I finally took him in to the vet and determined that he has a mild infection.

As I was discussing treatment with the vet I felt the need to explain I would be getting married this weekend and afterwards would be away for a bit, wanting to find out if we could finish the course of ear drops before then. Once I said "wedding" the vet kept saying things like, "of course with a wedding going on the cat will take a back seat." I protested, but to no avail - he was convinced I'd be too busy stressing about napkin colors to take care of the cat. I mean, we'd like to still go on our honeymoon and everything, but I'm not going to skip the cat's antibiotics just because I'll be wearing a big white dress for a few hours this weekend. Some commitments are sacred, after all.

Anyway, it sounded like everything should be okay. As I was waiting at the front desk to pay, the receptionist got a phone call that was clearly taxing her patience. She kept rolling her eyes and saying things like, "Yes, that would be the normal course of the condition," and finally put the caller on hold. Then, as though against her better judgement, she burst out, "I don't know what to say to this woman anymore. There are these two sisters whose cat died, and after they buried it they dug it up three times. They're still not convinced it's really dead, and they keep calling to ask about it." She said they brought it in to confirm its condition ... after leaving it on their porch in a sealed Tupperware contained for a week. "Um, trust me, it's dead!" the girl said.

Meanwhile Bruno keeps moping around with his gimpy ear like a kid home sick from school, shaking his head madly as though that would get rid of whatever's hurting him. The twice-daily ear drops are the final indignity. They have to be kept refrigerated, and Bruno meows like we're doing something terrible to him when the cold liquid hits the ear.

The pain of pets: it's so heartbreaking.

Black Cats ...

... like Halloween pumpkin.




Happy Halloween!

Kitty's Guide to Good Grooming

Our cat Dinah has a self comforting habit, persistent since her kittenhood, that consists of madly licking a particular spot of fur on her hip while purring ecstatically. The licking is a little creepy-sounding and she always has a wet spot on her coat, but she never seemed to be doing herself any harm until the semi-recent convergence of two things: the fleece donut, and summer in Boston.

The fleece donut is a small blue cat bed that sits on our living room sofa. Dinah loves it so much, she consistently curls up in it rather than directly on the sofa, thus sparing our upholstery much cat hair and damage from the blissed-out kneading that happens during the lick sessions.

Unfortunately, the cozy, bowl-like shape of the donut causes her coat to rub and tangle against its sides. And this year, our first full summer in Boston, both Dinah and her brother, Bruno, shed like never before, which led to really big mats, basically covering her entire hind half. Even Bruno (who does not have the self-licking habit) developed a few nasty dreadlocks in hard-to-groom areas like the thickly furred neck ruff and the can't-be-bothered region around the tail. But those we could carefully cut out, with a little complaining on Bruno's part. With Dinah, even when we pinned her down for a two-person mat-trimming session, there seemed no way we could address the problem without having her fur completely shaved off.

So we resigned ourselves to having a professional deal with this procedure, and I finally settled on Brookline Grooming in Coolidge Corner, solely because a highly indulgent fellow cat owner I met at a party (he and his partner refer to their cats as "the princesses") told me, as I was asking for recommendations, "I haven't been to this place, but if I needed a groomer that's where I would take my cats." If it was theoretically good enough for the princesses, it was good enough for our beloved but distinctly plebeian Dinah.

When I made the appointment the clerk said I had to come in the morning - "we take the dogs in the afternoon" - and I asssumed this was arranged to avoid dog-cat conflict, kind of like the separate cat/dog entrances at our old San Francisco animal hospital. So imagine my surprise when I walked into the shop, fifteen minutes late and out of breath, to find at least a dozen dogs roaming freely behind the counter. I thought they might hustle us back to some safe, dog-free zone, but instead Dinah and I were led to a grooming table directly in the midst of the frolicking canine pack.

"Uh, you know this is an appointment to groom a cat," I said, vaguely pointing to the two standard poodles coming over to greet us.

"Yes, it's fine," the groomer replied. "This is our doggy day care. We find it keeps the cats on the table."

Well, all right then! And indeed, Dinah was incredibly docile, as she always is for the professionals. But especially so now! No mrowling or batting of paws, just the occasional half-hearted attempt to break free and make a run for it. Overall, she seemed to be attempting to keep as low a profile as possible until she was delivered from the nightmare. In short order the groomer had all four sets of claws clipped and was raking through those mats with various implements, with barely a peep from my cat.

Meanwhile a big golden retriever had made himself comfortable spread across my feet, and a little white poodle had settled in next to us, repeatedly balancing on his hind legs by my side, looking up at us expectantly. The groomer told me the little poodle lives with a cat at home. ("He likes to say hello.") At another table, a curly-haired brown dog was getting a thorough clipping, yelping at key moments. When the ordeal was over, his groomer held him steady and gave him a little spritz of perfume.

I've tried to use a de-matting comb at home like the one this groomer used, but neither of my cats would have any of it. In this new universe, this comb was all it took to remove Dinah's mats. The groomer didn't even think they were that out of control. (I had braced myself for a scolding for letting them get so bad.) What were once hard, felted lumps of hair lifted away like so many wisps of cotton candy, no shaving required.

None, that is, until the groomer asked if I'd like her to trim around "her behind." Um, is that a common practice? I decided we'd give it a whirl, and before Dinah could meow "Rio," she got her first kitty Brazilian.

The final step was a good tummy-brushing. To accomplish this, the groomer held her up full-length by the scruff of her neck and swiftly combed through the fur of her underbelly. By this point, Dinah appeared to have surrendered any idea of struggle and gone into a deep, pre-domesticated animal place. As she dangled limply from the groomer's grip, her yellow-green button eyes staring blankly into space, she reminded me of some sort of anonymous woodland creature, or even something hanging in a gamekeeper's shed - not my pet anymore, with all her quirks and characteristics so well known to us, but simply Cat, a furry animal with pointed ears and whiskers, and no personality of her own. It was a disturbing moment.

But then the indignities were over, and she willingly scrambled back into her carrier, never so happy to be there in her life. We skipped the bath this time - I figured Dinah had already been through enough for one day - but I may be a new convert to professional cat grooming. Dinah is obviously in a much better mood without the mats pulling at her skin, and I wonder if the summer heat would have been easier on both cats if we'd gotten their shedding undercoat fur more thoroughly combed out. I'm still undecided about the kitty bikini trim, but then again, Dinah does have occasional trouble with the old clinging dingleberries, and anything the helps avoid the dreaded dragging cat butt (cat owners know what I'm talking about) should be okay in my book.

Also, selfishly, while I know Dinah was petrified through the entire experience, it was fun for me to be out in the world with her. Cats are so different from dogs that way - you can't put them on a leash and go off for a day's adventure at the beach. And how proud was I, as we were leaving the shop, when the groomer said to me, as though we'd passed some kind of Miss Cat Manners comportment test, "She did really well today. She is welcome back here any time."

Little Dinah, princess cat at last.

Cats Over Somerville

In our old apartment, we had a piece of cat "equipment" known as the Cat Napper, a fleecy hammock thing that screws into the windowsill and allows Kitty to gaze out the window, revel in the fresh breeze, and make clacking gutteral noises when birds fly by.

At our new place, our landlord has been adamant that we not put nail holes in the sills, which is fair enough, but we still wanted to give our cats a comfy perch from which to survey the world beyond their indoor universe. Also, one of the cats had pretty much taken over my favorite red chair, infusing it so deeply with cat hair that no sane person would want to sit in it. I wanted to get them some sort of cat "furniture," but the things you can buy at the pet store are so ugly and carpety, not to mention expensive.

Here's what I came up with:

1 upholstered footstool, purchased at Target for $20.

1 fleecy cat bed thing, with sides, roughly the same diameter as the top of the footstool. Also about $20.

I sewed the cat bed to the top of the footstool, avoiding the fabric of the removable cover so it can still be taken off and washed when it gets too fuzzy. I also unscrewed the wheels from the bottom of the footstool after a cat jumped onto it and nearly knocked the whole thing over. Much more stable without those wheels! (It's still a little bit wobbly - I might bolt a piece of plywood to the bottom for extra stability.)

The result is a piece of feline furniture that looks okay in our living room, is easy to move from room to room if desired, was fairly cheap, and so far appears to lure the cats away from the people furniture in the room (at least some of the time).

The kitties feel that it is a good place for keeping tabs on the neighborhood ...


... as well as a safe place to snuggle down when they've had enough of it.