One last picture of Sammi

Seriously, I'm not trying to turn this into a deceased pet blog.  Really.

But I just love this picture, because it truly sums up what Sammi was all about.  I may have even posted this before, but fuck it.  Sometimes twice is just as nice.

That's what she like to do.  Lay on my chest and rub her face on my beard.  And she had this one fang on the right side of her mouth that, for some reason, was longer than it should have been. She would occasionally get you pretty good with it.  Not on purpose, ya see.  She just couldn't help it.

This kind of situation was usually pretty common after she ate, when she was just looking to settle down and be loved.  The resulting fish stank from her breath was merely a bonus.

By the way, it took just this side of forever for our relationship to get this way.  At first, I was the enemy.  OK, "enemy" was a strong word. But in the beginning, I wasn't one of the chosen few who was allowed to pick her up or even pet her.  She was all claws and nasty looks for a long while.  And when a cat has one long fang on one side of her face and one glassy eye on the other...trust me, you can get some nasty looks.

But I made her my pet project, and I gradually began to pick her up and give her some love.  I always tried to put her down right before she was ready to slice me up, and I think she understood that.  It took a while, but soon enough she was sleeping on my head at night.  The way cats do.

I don't know if I believe in the concept of Heaven, but if there is one then I sure as shit hope there is a place for cats and dogs there. And if there is, then I sure Sammi is there with her best buddy Syd, and she's giving the deity in charge the stink eye.  At least until she gets used to the joint.

Note: Partially inspired by Neil Gaiman's recent journal post about his cat Princess.  I think Princess and Sammi would've gotten along famously.  Or avoided each other like the plague.

Added Bonus:  A video of two cats getting the MST3K treatment while playing patty cake.  The one on the right looks a bit like Sammi in her younger, healthier days.  Enjoy!

Sunny Side of the Street

Thanks for the kind words yesterday. It really meant a lot.

Hopefully, today, Sammi is walking on the sunny side of the street.

Don't you just love that photo of Shane?

RIP Sammi

So we finally bit the bullet and put Sammi down yesterday.

She was so done. I stayed up with her all of Saturday and Sunday nights. Giving her little bits of water and cream...anything to get her to eat or drink something. Then on Sunday she pretty much stopped eating and drinking altogether. On Sunday night she started crawling herself around, maybe looking for a way out. Or a quiet place to lay down and die. Of course our other cats were having none of that. "Where you going? Can I come? Hey, that looks like a fun nook to hide in!"  Yeah...our cats often will leave a preposition at the end of a sentence.

So she feel asleep at the bottom of the landing of the staircase. I stayed with her until she fell asleep, but it was already 5:30AM on Monday by that point. I went to bed to catch a couple of hours of sleep, figuring that she would be gone by the time I got up.

But she wasn't. She wasn't really moving either. Just laying there...breathing. Barely recognizing us. It was time. So we called the Vet and said our goodbyes.

Here's my favorite picture of her with her best friend Syd...who passed away 2 years ago.

Syd cleaning Sammi

So long, little girl.  We miss you already.

Putting them down

Just wanted to give y'all a quick update on Sammi. She's still hanging in there. She's a tough old cat. She's still not getting around by herself, other than dragging herself this way and that way for about five feet. So we are taking her to her food, her water and to the litter box.  She sleeps most of the day and she seems comfortable.

So we are going to take it day-to-day with her.  I don't know what kind of quality of life she is enjoying right now.  She pretty much slept all day before whatever it is that happened to her last Monday, and she's pretty much sleeping all day now.  So not much of a difference there.  And on Saturday night she was actually able to jump up on the couch to lay down with me while I watched Notre Dame whupp Army.  Well, she got about halfway up and I helped her the rest of the way.

We've had the discussion, or many discussions, on whether or not we should just put her down. But she doesn't appear to be in pain right now.  She takes her medication like a champ.  Even if it doesn't appear to be correcting any issues that she's having.  The one med that we stopped giving her was a pain medication.  Like I said, she doesn't appear to be in pain and the drugs were making her even dopier.  She's been much more aware since we stopped those.

I think the only reason we WOULD put her down at this point is for our own convenience, and that just doesn't sit well for either of us.  Sure, she's putting a cramp in our lifestyles right now.  We've pretty much been on Sammi watch for the past week, staying home to be with her instead of going out.  That might get old pretty soon, but again...a pretty weak reason to put a beloved pet down.

I've already arranged with my sister to bring Sammi along with us to Thanksgiving dinner on Thursday.  We'll put her in the extra bedroom with a litter box, a blanket and some food and water.  Visiting with her often, of course.  We always spend the night anyway, so as long as she isn't too freaked out by the change of scenery I think it will work out.  The alternatives are either me leaving Gia home alone to care for Sammi while I enjoy Thanksgiving with my family or both of us staying home.  Neither of those appeals to me.

So we are in a holding pattern.  I don't know if she is going to get better.  She's an old girl.  But I just don't see putting her down so that our lives are made more convenient. 

I think anyone who loves their pets would agree.

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Note: Remember to play the Badgerdaddy Trivia Challenge every day. Don't blame me if it sucks.

Good vibes needed

Say a prayer (or whatever it is that you do when you need to do it) for our oldest kitty, Sammi.

Meow...see?

She's an older gal, and she's been having mobility issues for a while now.  Mostly just stiffness, it seemed.  Then yesterday she was really having a hard time walking.  Even to her food dish...her favorite place in the world. 

We took her to the vet and he thinks it might be feline neuropathy related to hyperthyroidism.  That's usually something that comes with feline diabetes, something she definitely does NOT have.  But in rare cases, cats with hyperthyroidism can get it too.  Right now we are just waiting for the lab tests to tell us, hopefully, exactly what is wrong with her. 

She is resting now, on a bit of pain medication.  So maybe it will be all okay.  We just don't know.  She is getting pretty old.

There should be some kind of offset for those of us who don't have children, and who never wanted children.  Our animals should be allowed to live for twice or thrice as long as normal.  It's only fair.

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Note: Remember to play the Badgerdaddy Trivia Challenge every day. Fingers crossed...

Coming Home

UPDATE: OK, we are coming home tomorrow. Got bumped from our flight today and the next one they could get us on was leaving at 9:40PM. Eff that! So we decided to spend one more night in Chastown instead. Wunnerful, wunnerful, wunnerful.

Later today. It's a good thing and a bad thing. Bad because who really wants vacation to end? Good because, well, I really miss my cats.

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Note: Remember to play the Badgerdaddy Trivia Challenge every day. CATS!

Do you like pussy? (SFW...very)

So we sat down the other day and decided to take a bunch of pictures of the cats. We are very proud parents and we love to show them off. Sammi (on the right) was just loving the cleaning she was getting from her buddy, Syd. That's a content look right there. This usually ends badly, by the way. She often ends these sessions by smacking him in the head. I picked one of her toenails out of his cheek the other day.


Check out that tongue action on Syd! Easy, big fella!


Here is Syd in his usual position during the day. Asleep with his head on a pillow on the futon in the TV room. He really thinks he's a human, ya understand. That's Sammi's ear or tail in the bottom right foreground. And the human flesh in the background? That's yours truly. Dead sexy, eh?


Sometimes he just curls up with whatever happens to be lying around. A remote control seemed like a good idea for a snuggle toy, I guess.


And since he is such a sound sleeper, we slipped the remote control out and dropped in a can of Dale's Pale Ale...a mighty fine beer from the mighty fine state of Colorado.

OK...go ahead. Make fun. Fuckers!

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Note: Remember to play the Bug-Eyed Trivia Challenge every day. All the cutest kitty cats are doing it. Nice start to the month yesterday from Avitable.

Biscuit Speaks

Over the past few months, our little girl Sammi aka Ebbs aka the Biscuit has been going through a metamorphosis. She spent years as the silent kitty. You would hear her every once in a while, but mostly she was a feline Helen Keller. Mute and blind in one eye.

But I decided a few months ago to make her my pet (get it?) project. I've been attempting to win the little girl over. This process is a slow one that has taken months to reach fruition.

It started with the simple task of picking the Biscuit up and holding her. Sounds simple, eh? But she is a 12 pound ball of claws and fury, and she does NOT LIKE TO BE PICKED UP. But I persevered. I began by picking her up a few times a day for only a few seconds. Then I would gently let her down. I slowly increased the number of times a day I would pick her up and the amount of time that I would hold her. Now I can hold her for almost as long as I want and she is fine.

For some reason, this arduous process also resulted in the Biscuit finding her voice. There is nothing wrong with her voice, she just chose to be silent for many, many years. She does meow differently than most other cats, though. I should get a recording of it, but it goes a little something like this: Step 1 - Biscuit opens her mouth wide. Step 2 - Biscuit makes a short, staccato "Ow" of a meow. Very high-pitched.

That's it.

She's also got a lonely cat warble that she does when she doesn't think anyone is in the house. She never does it in front of us, but I've snuck up on her a few times and seen it in action. Very impressive. I think it's her version of singing in the car or the shower.

My ten-step plan has had only one drawback. Now she won't shut up and she is constantly up my ass! I can't lay down without her yelping to be scratched. I can't work on the computer without her sidled up right next to me on the couch. I've apparently grown a cat tumor. It's attached to me at all times. Yelping for attention.

Good grief!

Black Metal Dreams

I've always wanted to be a child of the 60's. People who grew up in the 60's always seem so interesting and cool. I've got only the most modest of claims to that title. I was born in the late 60's, but I guess I'm more of a child of the 70's and the 80's. No JFK to look back on with a sense of awe and community service. Nope. I had Reagan.

Gia and I are the same age, but we experienced the 80's in much different ways. She certainly had a lot more sex than I did back then, but that's a whole other story. My musical tastes ran toward the alternative scene, modern rock or new wave ultimately leading to punk and ska. Gia was/is a metal chick. Everything from speed metal to glam rock. She loves that shit! Not me. Guns and Roses was about as metal as I was willing to go. Although I used to love MTV's Headbanger's Ball and that was mostly metal. I liked it for the comedy quotient more than the music. We used to try and guess how many of the videos played during the ball would show one of the metal guys in a straight jacket. That seemed to be a pretty common theme.

Lately, Gia has been getting into Black Metal from Scandinavia. If you don't know what it is, well...you're probably pretty normal. It started as an off-shoot of thrash metal with bands from the UK like Venom, and it is typified by ultra-fast guitars, incomprehensible singing and, um, Satanism. Well, not all of it is satanic, but a lot of it is. The occult, war, suicide and Tolkein are common themes as well. I really don't get it, but it makes her happy. Mostly the absurdity of it all is what does it for her, I think. I hope. ( Note - Gia is not nor has ever been a Nazi, pagan, Satanist, church burner or occultist. Just thought I would clarify. - Earl)

So we spent Saturday afternoon buying a bunch of stuff from iTunes to support her Black Metal habit. We also bought some stuff for me (Patti Smith) and some Led Zeppelin for the both of us. I found this online radio station called Black Metal Radio that we had a yabba-dabba do time with. It was campy fun. Well it was until I started reading the bios of some of the bands. Some hardcore freaks in there, let me tell you. The main dude of Burzum actually killed a guy from another Black Metal band and burned down some churches.

So I'm laying there on the bed looking up everything and anything to do with Black Metal when Syd decided to use the laptop as a pillow. Or maybe he just got curious and wanted to see what all the fuss was about.

He wanted to do some web-surfing, so I steered him towards this blog. I think he enjoyed it. He was purring, so that had to mean something, right?

Then I went back to the Black Metal radio station and we listened to a song by Dimmu Borgir. You can sorta see the demonic cover of one of their album's on the screen if you try hard enough. It's a little harder to see, but Syd is rocking with a couple of his claws out forming the classic headbanger's devil's horns with his big paw. He loved the Black Metal! Although he preferred to call it "Bleck Meh-tal". Something about a Norwegian accent, I don't know.

That knocked the poor guy out. Too much excitement. So he had to rest again. This time by crashing out on top of my legs. It's a little cute when there are small, but Syd is pretty large and my feet fell asleep shortly after this shot was taken. You can spy our girl Sammi by my feet as well. She likes to stick close by as well, especially with all the Black Metal playing on the computers. Scary stuff!

It was during this nap the Syd had his very first Black Metal nightmare. Syd has nightmares all the time. He will jump up from a dead sleep with a mini-growl, run over to one of us, and then bite us either on the hands, feet or head someplace until he actually wakes up. It's kinda funny. He really has no clue where he is for a few seconds. Then he figures it out, stops biting us and he goes to get a few mouthfuls of cat food to settle his stomach. Seriously. He does this all the time.

He woke up from this nightmare, maybe something from a Gorgoroth song, and he bit the nearest thing available. My foot. We know that it was Black Metal that did it because it took him about 30 seconds to fully awake from the nightmare. Satan compelled him. He just sat there with my foot pinned and his fangs sunk into it. I dared not move lest I incur his wrath. So I sat there, taking it, talking him down from his satanic high. He finally let go, stretched and jumped down to get a bite to eat. And that was our Saturday afternoon.

I love the Meh-tal. Love it, love it, love it. Bleck Meh-tal rules! Mwah-ha-ha-ha!!!!

PS - Just because all the Canadian kidz are doing it, I made a meez as well. The hair isn't long enough and the beard is way too long, but that's pretty much how I like to dress. Cargo shorts, sandals and a Hawaiian shirt. It's way down there on my sidebar for the curious. Enjoy!

On the mend

Psst...watch out for the big guy! He steps on cats!

Thanks for all the kind words. Syd is doing much better today. He slept in the bedroom all day with Sammi, but that's just a normal day in the life of those two. He's still limping, but he's moving around better than he did last night.

I managed to get a "big purr" out of him this morning though. That's a good sign. His "big purr" comes when he is the happiest and it sounds more like a pigeon cooing than a cat. It can be heard in the next county, and it can shake your very soul. The "big purr" is a good thing.

PS - All this kitty drama shouldn't dissuade you from checking out the latest review over at MovieGrenade! This one includes cold, hard personal facts about yours truly. Hot, right?

The Cat post - Part II

A little kitty cat montage for y'all today. Syd is the big boy up top, looking resplendent in his pre-haircut days. I think these were taken about 4 months ago or so. It was Syd at his hairiest, I believe. He had hair growing out of his hair, it seemed. And he didn't really drink that tall glass o' milk. He just kinda jumped up on the snack table and looked into it. It was very white.

Sammi is the kitty in the second two pictures. I believe I've posted one of those before, but I can't be sure. The large black mass in front of her in the second pic is Syd, of course. They were curled up in the bed together at the time as they so rarely do.

Good news: They've stopped fighting since I last posted about them. Well, mostly. Every once in a while he still gets in her face for no apparent reason besides being a bully. About a month ago I had to separate them after a vicious sounding argument. I picked him up and noticed one of Sammi's nails embedded in his cheek. Well done, young lady! Don't back down to the big boy on the block.

They both have been displaying a massive amount of WKB lately. WKB is Weird Kitty Behavior, for those not in the know. That should be just about everyone since I just made up that acronym. Syd likes to sit his big ass down on the alarm clock by the bed...changing the time, alarm options and whatever with his...ass, I guess. I'm beginning to think that he does it on purpose. Sammi, ever the skitchy (skitchy = not readily available to pick up and snuggle with) kitty decided yesterday was the day to sleep on my chest and neck while I was trying to catch some Z's in the afternoon. I'm guessing that she was trying to assert her bedroom dominance over me in some way. Worked too! I couldn't move for like an hour and a half.

The craziest kitty behaviour (hmm...should it have been CKB?) belongs to Syd's bathroom routine in the morning. Not his bathroom, per se, but what he likes to do in our bathroom. Taking a dump? He likes to lay between your legs and purr. Taking a leak? He likes to sit between my legs and stare up at the golden arch going into the bowl. And Gia got him onto this weird kick a while back where he sits on the toilet while we are in the shower and he drinks some nice "ice-cold" water out of a pint glass until we are through with the shower. Then he likes to lick the water off of our legs after we get out. Truly bizarre! Yet there he is, every day waiting for his glass of ice-cold water on the toilet.

Anyway, I leave you with one more picture. This one is a closeup of one of the flowers on my sister's Christmas Cactus. The remarkable thing about this plant is that is over 70 years old! It was given to my Great Aunt upon the birth of her son and it was in her sun room at that house for the next 70 years until her daughter passed away last summer. We were helping out by cleaning the house up for sale when we came upon this beast. It's huge and I remember it vividly from my childhood. My brother-in-law is a wunderkind with plants of all types, so he was granted custody. This bad boy has had a lot of offspring too. My mother has one in her kitchen that is over 40 years old from a shoot from this very plant. Enjoy!

Dead Sexy update: Added an old pic of my tattoo on the sidebar. You know...for the ladies!

The Cat post

No, not you Kat.

I'm talking about Syd. We finally got Syd groomed the other day. He's getting up in years and he doesn't take care of himself as well as he used to. Hence he started to get a bit matted in some areas. Plus, due to his ginormous size (he's large), there were areas that he just couldn't reach. We tried grooming him ourselves, cutting out the matted areas and constant brushing, but it just didn't work. We felt professional help was needed.

Here's a before shot. No one can crash out like Syd can crash out. He stayed in this position or positions similar to it for about 4 hours one day. He must have had a rough night.


And here's an after shot. Not the best one in the world because he hates getting his picture taken. Hard to see, but we left him hairy on his legs, tail and head. The rest of him would make a Marine proud. Just stubble. He's so happy now without all that hair. His energy level is way up and he now seems able to clean himself in those areas he previously could not reach. We are all thankful for that. By the way, that is my sexy pajama-clad knee that you see in the foreground. Rowr!


One side effect of his grooming that we did not foresee is the reaction of our other cat, Sammi. She might be a bit dim because there are times that she doesn't recognize him in the Emperor's new clothes. Granted, she has a bad eye so her sight isn't the best in the world, but don't cats go by smell most of the time? So they've been fighting a lot.

Oh, and he has become a bit weird about being picked up since we groomed him. Maybe he thinks we are going to take him away to the bad place again. I don't know. Last night I picked him up and he started a low growl. I knew this wasn't good so I immediately placed him down. Then he attacked my feet. No real bites or scratches, he just kinda pounced on my feet. Then he must have felt bad, because he followed me around the house for the next 10 minutes laying down at my feet every time I stood still. It was hysterical.

Crazy cats.