In Which I Actually Have a Caturday Post

Thimble is roasting himself

Not a care in the world

Teenager Cats

Colby and Thimble are turning into teenagers, right on schedule. They're long and lanky and have no extra padding, and as a result, look very un-put-together.

The "if they were humans" emotional component of being teenagers ...

Thimble would be the teenager that if he had a 10 pm curfew, would be home at 10:05 (even if he had to wait outside to accomplish this) just to see what your reaction would be. He'd be the one going out for every sport he can find, pushing his boundaries in all directions to see where they were now.

For Thimble, who doesn't have a curfew, obviously, this means he's constantly pushing at the rules "can I scratch the carpet now? What about now? What about here? Is here different than over here?" but he's also a fairly calm companion--he likes to be with me and to be hugged, but he's not desperate. He's quite confident I love him and doesn't feel the need to have it proven to him repeatedly.

Colby, on the other hand, is the goth teenager who listens to emo music and reads depressing poetry and is quite sure no one loves him. He's become quite clingy and wants to be carried around a lot (previously Thimble's territory). Thimble tolerates this because Thimble is confident and Colby needs this right now ... at least, that's the way it looks to me. I rather wondered if Thimble was going to be smacking Colby around more if I started carrying him more, the way he did when they were babies, but he's fine with it.

Colby will sit on the kitchen stool and wait for me to notice him (unlike Thimble, who, if he wants carried, is quite likely to lead me to the kitchen stool and launch at my shoulder with only that minor warning)! Then I go over and stand by the stool and pat under his arm, as if I was going to pull his front leg toward me. This has become his signal to climb onto my shoulder. And it is a climb, not Thimble's acrobatic leap.

It's easier to carry Colby than Thimble, and it's not the few ounces less he weighs. Colby molds himself to my body, clinging to me, whereas Thimble wants to look around and use my height to investigate things. We've at least gotten to the point where he doesn't lunge off my shoulder to investigate something more closely. Thank goodness.

Holding Colby is like holding a half-stuffed teddy-bear. You can "squish" him against you and he just cuddles in tighter.

Colby has also started sleeping most of the night on my bed with me rather than roaming around with Apricot the way he did as a baby kitten.

And Apricot's view of the new teenager behavior? He mostly just sighs and puts up with it. Occasionally he'll come running over to me (usually as I walk through the room he's in) as if to say, "please reassure me they're going to grow up soon!"

I kind of echo him on that. I like the teenagers better than the babies. The teenagers, Thimble's boundary-pushing aside, actually know the few rules I have and mostly abide by them. I can ask them to do stuff and sometimes they'll do it. (One Thursday night I was making the bed and was exhausted and asked them to please just let me make the bed without help tonight, and all three of them stayed off the bed until I'd gotten the comforter on it.)

But I would also like to have more grown up cats. I know a lot of people like the kittens better (the shelter I got Apricot from said they pick up a lot of grown cats who have their shelter's chip in--an indication that they were adopted as kittens and then tossed out to fend for themselves as soon as they stopped being all cute and little. Which is horrible. If you don't want to have an adult cat, foster the kittens, you dimwit! Sorry not sorry.)

I like grownups better. Grownup cats aren't balls of energy all the time they're awake. Grownup cats are perfectly happy being next to you while you read, or play games on your smartphone, or whatever. Grownup cats can sleep next to you without suddenly becoming overwhelmed with a desire to pounce on the other cat on the bed.

And grownup cats understand what you say better, and can respond more appropriately to situations. Kittens are entirely unpredictable--one reason why my two wore harnesses until they got big enough to grab quickly... just in case they got into something where I needed to grab them quickly.

Being on the autism spectrum means I prefer predictability and "playing next to" rather than "playing with." Grownup cats are much better at all that.

Oh well. Enjoy my teenagers while it lasts, though. In a couple years they'll be grownup soon enough.

The Shirt of Great Desire

My mom gave me a shirt she'd had in her closet. Her closet has a perfumed soap bar inside. This meant the shirt, although pretty, had a perfumed smell to it that I couldn't tolerate that close to my skin. So when I got it home, I put it on the floor.

This served two purposes. One, it would let it air out, and two, it would allow the cats to satisfy their curiosity about the new smell and the new object without going somewhere I didn't want them to, like on the counter, or leaping up to pull it down, say if I'd hung it up.

I expected them to smell it, thoroughly investigate it, and then ignore it. The usual method of cat investigation.

Well, they did the first two, but failed miserably on the last. This was the latest "it" spot, the nightclub where everybody wanted to be. 

Apricot and Thimble trying to share

Occasionally they even shared.

Colby on the shirt.

Most of the time it was just one cat. Whoever got there first. I swear there was some sub vocal "na-na-na-boo-boo" going on. 

Thimble and Apricot arguing over the shirt

I feel like I should put a shirt on the floor all the time. I'd come home and find it all in a bundle. The minute I smoothed it back out on the carpet, I had a cat on it.

When I went to wash it this Saturday, I took one of those cat hair remover masking tape roller things to it. It's amazing how much hair there was on it! I think they'd turned a once-black shirt to a dingy gray. Even the roller and the washer didn't get all of it off. 

So, reluctantly, I hung it up in the kitchen to continue to air out (a week of cat sitting and a wash didn't remove enough of the smell). They don't seem to miss it, however.

Snowstorm!

We had the first ice/snow storm of the year. It was massive, affecting the entire East Coast of the US for the most part.

Very fortunately, we didn't get a ton of nasty stuff here.

Yesterday, Friday, I tried to go for a walk early (earlier than usual) since it was predicted to get worse throughout the day. Even at 5:30 am, the roads were so slick and icy slush with the sleet and frozen rain that I couldn't get past my house without slipping. So I sent my boss a snow-day text and went back to bed.

This confused Thimble.

I did go for a walk later, about 10:30 am, since my road looked fairly clear. And it was. It was just the only road that was, since it's wide and not overshadowed by trees like the rest of the roads on my walking path. Walking in ice and slush, while maneuvering an umbrella and winds gusting so strong sometimes I had to stop and wait, was a bit of a challenge.

In the afternoon it got colder and turned to sleet.

Puzzled and not sure.

Thimble wasn't sure he liked the sound. Apricot was quite positive he didn't like the sound but he didn't disappear like he does for rain. He just stayed away from the windows, whereas Thimble kept staring out the windows trying to see what was making that sound. It wasn't sleeting hard, just constantly all day.

Last night after we all went to bed late, it snowed. About 2 or three inches, judging by my shoes this morning. Because I went for a walk again, as much to gauge the roads as to get a walk in, and discovered a number of things about snow I didn't know.

a tree on my walk with a street light illuminating it

• It squeaks when it's new and you walk on it.
• It's hard to walk on, like walking barefoot on a deep sandy beach.
• It builds up on your shoes and you have to knock it off them every so often.
• And in the very few car tracks, the snow was refreezing into ice, but not yet, since the temperature was hovering around freezing. So walking was a choice between wet sludge and squeaky, difficult snow. I alternated.

My tracks crossing a previously laid-down cat track

Since not many people had been out either, I saw all kinds of tracks. One or two people tracks with paw tracks beside them. That would be the person out walking their dog. One track was confusing till I figured out it was one person and two dogs, a dog on either side, who occasionally crossed back and forth. I saw cat tracks, which I found interesting because it looks like cats outside walk with all four feet almost in a straight line! And one track that didn't look like a dog or a cat; I think it might have been deer hooves.

Highly suspicious snow

The cats hadn't thought much about the snow one way or the other until I brought it inside on my shoes. (I didn't go for a walk in those boots--I went to my parents' house in my car for breakfast since the roads weren't icy.)

At the time of the photo, Colby was over eating the snow where it fell off my boots onto the carpet when I was turning off the house alarm after coming inside.

Thimble wouldn't get close to it but he certainly wasn't going to allow it to get away with anything, either, so he watched it until it was obvious it wasn't going anywhere. (Little did he know.) Then he wandered off and, to all appearances, forgot about it entirely. He didn't seem a bit upset when he came back in the kitchen later and it was gone.

There's snow on the patio, so when they walk by the patio door they will often stop, in such a manner as indicates it wasn't a planned pause, and look at it in astonishment, and then go on about their business without much else changing. 

I really don't think they care one way or the other about it. It was new and different out the window but now it's not, and they're bored with it again.

The Story of the Coat

The cats are only a minor part of this story ... in case you're just here for them.

Anyway.

Years ago, like a decade ago, my workplace decided they were too busy to stop working on the weekends for even one weekend to have the company picnic. So instead, they brought a catered lunch in for us, and also gave everyone a lined coat/jacket/windbreaker type coat. It was a dark blue, but not navy, and it was a very nice coat.

I wore this coat for years every day in the winter when I started walking daily. It had elastic at the end of the sleeves so I could pull my hands back into the sleeves and hold the ends shut to keep out the cold. It had double pockets--a set inside and a set outside. I never did figure out what that was for, but sometimes it came in handy when I wanted to go shopping real quick but didn't want to take a purse. I had enough pockets for wallet, keys, and a pair of gloves. The sleeves were lined as was the hood.

The only problem with it was that it wasn't a men's or women's coat--it was a each-size-fits-both coat. It came in small, medium, large, and probably more than that, but even the small was a bit large for me.

However, it worked; I also wore lighter jackets underneath it when it got really cold, and it wasn't too awful big.

That was fifty pounds ago. Since I lost all the weight during the year two years ago, I could actually take one side of the coat and wrap it around to my back, and then lay the other side around to the other side of me. This would have been warm except there was no way to keep it closed doubled over like that.

And then the zipper started failing. I'd lost the zipper pull years ago, but a friend made me one for my birthday. The zipper kept getting stuck, and I'd have to jiggle it and try to gently undo it, and finally succeed.

This was still all functional and did not warrant me getting a new coat. I hate clothes shopping.

Last Saturday, however, as I was walking, I started getting too warm and, as usual, tried to remove the first layer--the first layer being this big blue coat with the zipper problem.

The zipper got stuck. With every indication of being stuck permanently. If I stop walking to step out of it, I will get chilled; if I don't get it off soon, I will get overheated. Since I hate being cold, I chose the overheating as the lesser of the two evils and just worked on the zipper while I walked.

I tugged so hard at one point my zipper pull came off. Luckily I kept hold of it and was able to stuff it in a pocket and save it to be put on again.

It took me half an hour to get that stupid zipper to come all the way apart. And I thought to myself, well, that's unsustainable. I can't have that happen again. Sigh. I'm going to have to go buy a new coat. I hate clothes shopping. (Yes, I really do think like that.)

What made it worse was that I was sick. So sick, in fact, that I went to one of those doc-in-a-box not-the-emergency-room-but-open-on-saturday places, after I went to breakfast with my parents. (I'd been sick for about three days so I figured I was long past being contagious.) The doc-in-a-box said I had sinusitis and prescribed antibiotics and a steroid nasal spray.

And then, instead of going home and resting like a sensible person, I went to a department store to buy a coat. Because that's where you buy coats, right?

The selection was terrible, and I went to two different stores before I found one I liked. It was a small, but it fit over the lighter jacket I had on, so I figured it would work.

Here I am in it, with Colby in the
background. The grate is the door
to Thimble's carrier that he sleeps in.
PS. Yes, I know about the front camera.
I don't like it--the resolution is less.

Well. Mission accomplished. I don't have to go hunting for a new coat for another decade or more, hopefully. The next morning I went for a walk as usual, this time in my new coat.

I discovered that although it looked nice, and the middle part felt warm, the manufacturers had sacrificed function for form. The sleeves were unlined, the ends of the sleeves had no elastic, and oddly, I was getting a chill across my back. (It was suggested later that this might have been due to a "vent" in the back that apparently is fairly common in coats.)

I believe there may have been some curse words involved in my thoughts at these discoveries. Now not only did I have to go out shopping on a Sunday (which I hate, since this is my day to stay home away from people), but I had to return one coat and then go somewhere else to get another one. 

Seriously?

Fine. Whatever. It was too cold to simply go without, and I was not getting stuck for another half-an-hour in my old coat.

Something one of the ladies at the department store said had triggered a thought--I could probably get more of a selection at an outfitters store, the kind of places that sell fishing rods and hunting gear and stuff. We have two of those in town now, new places (which I think means they opened sometime in the past three years). I chose the closest one to the department store where I had to go anyway to return the Saturday coat.

This was Cabela's. I'd never been in there before. It was huge. I asked the lady who was at the front of the store kind of like a greeter and kind of not if she could help me. She did so by getting another young woman to help me. 

Isabel was absolutely awesome. I'd brought in the old blue coat and pointed out the things I wanted. The length, the lining--in the sleeves too please--, the presence of a hood, the elastic at the end of the sleeves, pockets big enough for my hands, in gloves, in the sleeves, to be put in; long enough sleeves to accomplish this, wind-resistant if not a wind-breaker ... you get the idea. It was a laundry list of requirements and it was not easy finding a coat that fit them all.

But she managed, after going back and forth between several areas (apparently they, Cabela's, think it is logical to put the manufacturers' stuff together instead of "all winter coats", all "light jackets" etc). We even ducked into the guys' coats for a while, but ended up back in the women's coats, and finally found one that worked. The only thing I don't like about it is that the closure over the zipper is via velcro instead of giant snaps, and my preferred fuzzy gloves get caught on the velcro.

That's something I can adapt to, however, whether by finding different gloves (eventually), or by putting on my gloves after I have the coat on.

So here is the new coat. I had now done this picture taking thing two days in a row, and brought home two different coats for the cats to smell and investigate, so Thimble decided the mirror picture thing needed a bit closer look this time.

Here I am in the one I kept.
The tags are still hanging from the sleeves.

I went for a walk Monday morning with some trepidation (am I going to have to return this one too?) but it was admirable. It was nice and warm, even a bit warmer than my old one. Plus it's brighter in color, which, since I walk before dawn, might come in helpful one day. (Mostly I consider it my job to stay out of the way of the cars, since who in their right mind is out walking in 30 degree weather in the dark? That's not something you, as a car driver, are going to expect to see. Therefore it's my job to avoid you, not the other way around. (Although I appreciate the efforts the cars that do see me make to avoid me.))

The cats have approved of the coat, although Apricot wasn't too sure about the sound of the velcro. I don't have anything else velcro in the house, so he's never heard it before. He's gotten used to it after a week. 

Since I haven't seen my zipper pull friend yet, I haven't gotten my special zipper pull put back on yet, and Thimble (who wanted so bad to play with it and I wouldn't let him) has been investigating the zipper pull on this coat every time I hang it up when I come in. Apparently in the hopes that the old fun zipper pull will appear, I guess!

Thimble Has Digestive Issues

Warning: this story has some gross stuff before the cute stuff.

So a month or two ago, before the vet visit, I noticed Thimble was having some difficulty with, well, too-wet bathroom stuff getting stuck in his fur at his butt. I thought the logical thing, and decided to try giving him pumpkin before I took him to the vet again.

Pumpkin is fiber, and a lot of liquid as well, so it helps with digestive issues. You can give cats pumpkin as long as you make sure to get the 100% pumpkin, not the pie filling cans.

Saturday night that week, after I'd gone shopping that day, I gave him about a tablespoon of pumpkin. Turns out it was too much too fast (like they warn you on the fiber bars and stuff, you're supposed to increase your fiber intake slowly) plus the poor guy was constipated, not what I'd assumed. And Saturday nights he stays in the crate longer than usual, since I sleep in.

Well, he couldn't hold it, and pooped in his (tiny) crate. I felt absolutely awful, since he was trapped in there with it, and it smelled quite strong, and plus, well, stepping in it and ooh, gross.

I cleaned him up with dry paper towels just enough so he wouldn't be tracking it through the house, then cleaned up the crate. With disposable gloves on and holding my breath most of the time.

I was washing off my hands (even with disposable gloves I felt like I needed to wash my hands) after the cleanup when Thimble jumped up onto the counter. He still had dried gross on his paws. And apparently, he had made a connection between me washing my hands and washing hands in general, because he all but handed me a paw to wash.

Okay, no problem. I put some soap in my hand (I have special soap that isn't soap so I knew it would be okay for him if I didn't quite get it all rinsed off) and some water and washed off the paw I had been offered.

This resulted in the paw getting quite wet, and appearing quite a bit smaller in consequence. Thimble didn't even let me dry it (I had to grab him just to wrap the hand towel around it long enough that he wouldn't be going squish squish at every step).

He really didn't appreciate his paw being drenched and ran off indignantly, one paw clean but soaked, the other three still dirty.

About half an hour later, I was washing my hands again (for a logical reason but unconnected to the cleanup procedure) and Thimble jumped back up. I thought to myself, goodness, I thought he hated having his paw wet like that. It must really be nasty to clean up the other paws if he's back again.

But that wasn't what he wanted. He very carefully showed me both front paws. He lifted one paw off the counter and held it out, put that one down and then did the other, and then turned around and showed me both back paws the same way. Now he didn't hold his paws out until I "had a good chance to look"--it was very brief for each one. He did, however, show me each of his paws.

And they were pristine.

I think what he was saying was, "See, look, I got them clean. You don't have to do that water thing to me again!"

In Which They Aren't Bookends

Having both at one end makes them
really bad bookends