Shortly after we adopted Big Kitty (at that time called just “Kitty”), we decided it would be a very good idea to get another cat. Kitty really need a friend to help keep him out of trouble. Since Kitty was still a teeny kitten himself, we thought it would be nice to get another teeny kitten. That’s when we found Lightning, which is what she was called when we found her. (She was in a little cage with Thunder, of course.) Andy liked her name, so we kept it, but I couldn’t spell it and thought it was silly, so I started calling our pair Big Kitty and Little Kitty.

BK and LK were a great team, and having another cat around did help BK stay out of trouble. Of course, there was then LK to get into trouble. Because they were both black, it was a bit hard to tell who was who. There were a few ways to tell them apart, though. Little Kitty purred pretty much if you looked at her (at least back in those days). Big Kitty was…well…bigger. Their eyes were also different. Little Kitty’s gaze, to me at least, always seemed much more intense. And, well, yes, we gave them different colored collars!

The two Kitties weren’t a pair for long, though. Over the next two or three years we added several more cats to the family. Bob was fine, but TreeFrog wanted to be boss and tried to dominate Little Kitty–who would have none of that. Then we brought Buddy home, and TreeFrog bribed him with extra kibble or something, and Buddy started beating on Little Kitty. During one fight, I tried to break things up, and Buddy chomped my hand. (That’s when I learned, the hard way, how bad a cat bite can get.) During another fight, Buddy somehow sliced Little Kitty’s tail and pulled a tendon out. [That was actually a sort of funny story. One day I was petting LK, and I found a piece of string hanging off her tail. Actually, it looked more like dental floss. I couldn’t figure out how she’d got that caught on her tail, and I couldn’t really see where it was stuck. I called Andy in, and he couldn’t figure it out either. It sort of looked like the string/floss had gotten tangled on and cut her tail a bit. I trimmed the end of the string with nailclippers so it wouldn’t get caught on anything, and we took her to the animal urgent care. The vet was as perplexed as we were for just a moment, then he announced that the string was really a tendon that had been pulled out of Little Kitty’s tail. I freaked out a bit until the vet assured me that the tendon I’d snipped off was toast and he wouldn’t have been able to fix it anyhow. It must not have been a very important bit because her tail never looked funny or floppy. (I would like to add that Little Kitty did get her fair share of punches in. I found wounds on Buddy several times, too.)]

For the next few years, Little Kitty hid most of the time. She lived on the china cabinet for a year, coming down only to go potty. Eventually, she traded that place in and moved under our bed. Sometimes she lived in the bed, crawling into the box spring through a hole she’d shredded in it. We’d put little bowls of food and water out for her wherever she decided to be, and sometimes we’d hear her purring and know she was okay. Andy and I were both pretty sad about this, but we didn’t really know what else to do. I suppose we could have found her a new home, but she was our Little Kitty, and we were family.

When we moved out to the boonies, things started to look up for LK. Buddy became an outside cat during the day. Little Kitty was free and we saw her more than we had in years. She was still a loner and preferred to stay to herself, and she’d run off and hide at night when Buddy came in. They still had fights but nothing like before. And then a few years ago, Buddy died, and Little Kitty was home free. She was still pretty quiet and reclusive, but we did get to see her more.

Little Kitty always had a pretty sensitive stomach. When she was a young adult kitty, she started barfing everything she’d eat. I took her to the vet, and they did x-rays, and the vet found a mass. I was all freaked thinking she had a tumor, but when they did surgery, they found out it was a really hard piece of poo. Ha. Still, after that surgery we had to feed her and give her water with a syringe for a while because she was so weak and wouldn’t eat or drink on her own. I remember sleeping on the floor next to her on a sleeping bag, waking up every few hours to give her some more. When I had to go to work, she stayed with a friend who did feedings for me. Little Kitty healed well, but after that she’d every now and then have troubles with food. We had to make sure not to change food much because we never knew if she’d be okay with it.

As she got older, her eating got worse and she started to fade. For the last few months we fed her canned food only…and it had to be on a clean plate…and the spoon used to scoop the food could not have touched any other cat food…and no other cat could have touched her food. There was a bit of a ritual to it, but we did what we had to to try and get her to eat. For a while all she’d eat was tuna fish. Over time, she ate less and less, and she was skin and bones. We made an appointment to put her to sleep back in April, but she still had that glimmer in her eyes and she started to eat more, and so we held off. One day about a week and a half ago, she started eating like crazy. I’d feed her and she’d lick the plate clean and meow for more. She went from eating maybe 3/4 of a can of food to at least 2 in a day. This went on for a few days when we decided a vet check was in order. Something weird was definitely going on. The morning of the appointment, she stopped eating. She wouldn’t touch any food. That afternoon, the vet confirmed that the end was here, and I took Little Kitty home so we could all have a chance to say goodbye.

About a week after we adopted Little Kitty, she got a cold. I remember her tiny little body curled up on our big, giant bed…snot bubbling out of her nose. She was so, so small. The last night Little Kitty and I spent together, she was that teeny, sick kitten again. I slept on the couch, holding her for most of the night until she seemed to slip into unconsciousness. I made her a little bed on the floor and talked to her and in the morning she was gone.

For all of you pet people out there, here is a very important piece of advice: If you decide to adopt nine cats, be sure to stagger them by age. What I’m saying here is, avoid having nine cats who are all about the same age. It’s not a big deal in the beginning, but around the 14th or 15th year, all your cats start to die.

Larry was named Lawrence when we found him at the humane society. We changed his name to Larry. Sometimes Larry Boy, sometimes Larry Bear. My mom called him Larry Lightning Butt ’cause he had a white swoosh on his back side. (Much much much later, we found out he should have been named Lori.) We took Larry and Spam home at the same time (buy one get one free!) shortly after our kitten, Tama, died of FIP.

Larry was our only declawed cat, and I think that had an effect on him. He always seemed to be trying to make up for that by being a tough boy. Andy and I’d play a game with him where he’d flop on his back and bat at my hand (or Andy’s)…thwap thwap thwap….and he’d start to growl and snarl and try to bite. Sometimes I’d trick him a bit and tug on his tail. He’d flop around to defend that side of his body while I tickled his then defenseless tummy. Eventually this game would get him super riled up, and we’d have to run and hide from him and his pointy teeth. At heart though, Larry was a lover. He loved to snuggle and sit in laps. His little claw-less paw would tap-tap-tap on your leg when you sat at the computer or table. It was his way of asking if he could climb up and take a rest.

Larry and TreeFrog had a very interesting relationship. For most of their lives I thought they were like an old, cranky married couple, fighting and yowling one minute and snuggling and purring the next. When we found out Larry was really a girl, the conflict between the two seemed to make more sense as TreeFrog was always trying to be alpha female. Larry didn’t really seem to be close with any of the other cats. He was more of a people person. When he got smaller, Anya started picking him up and carrying him places. I think if the idea had ever occurred to her, Anya would have dressed Larry up in doll clothes and pushed him in a stroller.

Larry loved to eat. He’d eat about anything and especially liked slurping up the milk Anya would leave in her cereal bowl. Larry wasn’t terribly graceful, but he was stealthy and quick and could nab a tasty tidbit off a plate in no time. Strangely, in the last year or so, no matter how much he ate he kept getting skinner. (Lab tests showed nothing really wrong.)

Last summer, I noticed something strange about Larry, and it took me a while to figure out his right pupil was totally dilated and not reacting to light. We did some googling and decided there wasn’t much that could be done whatever it was. The vet later confirmed this. When his eye went black and started to protrude, the vet agreed that it was most likely a tumor. Because Larry was so old and skinny and weak, he would not likely make it through surgery to remove the eye, so we decided to let things run their course. He got a little slower, the eye got grosser, and eventually we felt it was time to put him to sleep. It was a lot tougher making this decision with Larry than the others because the others had diminished so much from their normal selves…they were slow and tiny. But Larry was still Larry until the end.

Goodnight my little Larry Boy.

TreeFrog is a weird name for a cat. Especially for a fat black/brown tortie cat. I always used to say that when we got her she was concave but she got convex pretty quickly. She ate like crazy at first, and we always figured it was because she lived on the streets for a while. We also always imagined she’d had babies ’cause she seemed so much like a mother. She loved Sana like a mama, and I often found the two curled up together in a puddle of cute.

Anyone who knew TreeFrog figured out how she got her name fairly quickly. She didn’t meow; she croaked. I think in a past life she was a chain smoker. Perhaps even a chain-smoking frog. After she ingested the Tide with Bleach (stepped in it and licked it off her paws), her voice got even cracklier. (Did you know there is a poison control hotline just for pets?)

I don’t remember why we chose to take Froggie home, but I do remember asking Andy a few times in the early days if we could take her back to the humane society. She was so darn annoying! She always wanted someone to pay attention to her, pet her, scritch her ears, tell her what a great kitty she was. If I’d wanted that sort of thing, I’d have gotten a dog. Arg! And then her other favorite hobby was peeing on the carpet. She was the reason we pulled all the carpet out of the main floor of our old house. (Though I guess I should thank her for that, ’cause the hardwoods under the carpet were way better.) But, taking her back wasn’t an option. She was part of our family the day we brought her home.

Eventually, I grew accustomed to her needy ways and am glad Andy knew I was being crazy and didn’t let us return her. She loved to crawl under the blankets at night and curl up next to my leg. She was the favorite of most every visitor what with her being so friendly and cute. Lots of folks offered to take her home with them.

A few years ago, TreeFrog started loosing her teeth until she was more like her toothless name sake. (Frogs don’t have teeth, do they??) She started getting concave again. We think she developed kidney problems. In late April, she stopped eating all together, and she began to fade away. On May 11, Andy took her to the vet, and she left us.

Goodbye, my little Froggie.

178 | Craft | Art | Stamping: Completed

I think I’ve found my next new thing. Linoleum block printing. I got a starter kit for Christmas two years ago, and it’s been patiently waiting for me. When I saw that stamping was an art item, I knew immediately what I was going to do. The two little people in the image are from our Loafkeeper logo. I planned to have “Loafkeeper Farm” written under the people, but I had a tough time getting the image to transfer from my paper to the block (using carbon paper). I was able to see enough of the carbon image of the people to trace over it with sharpie, but the letters were totally lost. Plan B was to cut the letters out of cardstock with the cricut, use removable adhesive to stick them on the block, and then trace or carve. With that in mind, I left a big uncarved spot on the block. This morning when I looked at the stamp, I realized how much that uncarved spot looked like a little hill and how nicely the people seemed to be sitting on it. I curved the edges a bit and decided to leave it. I love the way it turned out. Lino blocks rock. Cheap, easy, and fun!

144 | Craft | Handicraft | Creative Toy: Completed

When I was at our local yarn store, The Woolly Jumper, buying expensive yarn for 108 | Needlework | Knitting | Infant’s Set, Anya saw a kit for a knitted, felted dollie (Knitted Felted Kuku Doll – “Ella”) The kits were put together very cutely, and displayed way down low where little hands could easily pick them up. Anya had to have one. She picked her favorite one up and carried it around the store. When I told her we were just there for some yarn, she was heartbroken. And determined. While I was chatting with the yarn lady and another customer, Anya clutched the doll kit to her chest and raced for the door. After explaining how we don’t take things from a store without buying them because that is wrong and is called stealing and yes the police will give you a ticket, I said that thing parents often say in December when their kid wants something the parent isn’t going to buy: Maybe Santa will bring it for Christmas. Well, Santa must have heard because the dolly showed up under the tree at Christmas. (I’d like to have a word with Santa about that because while it was a gift for Anya, it was a project for me. Shouldn’t Santa have made up the kit before delivering it??)

The doll knit up quickly, but I hit a snag. About one third through the second arm, I ran out of yarn. I was visiting my parents in Georgia, so I couldn’t just dash over to The Woolly Jumper. I googled yarn shops in the area and found one, but it was closed that day. (Why had I never thought to look for a yarn store there before??) I tried finding a match at Michael’s (HAHA). I thought about giving Anya a doll with only one arm, but she already has one of those, and it seems to make her a bit sad. So, I did what Andy would do, and I wrote a forlorn email to the Dolly Mamas (who made the kit). They wrote back right away, asked for my address, and put some more yarn in the mail. They even offered to send it super-fast-mail, but I told them not to worry about that.

I finished up the knitting and prepped the doll for felting, but then Anya saw her and grabbed her and ran off shouting, “DOLLY!” For a while, I wondered if Anya would let me felt her. She finally did this weekend. The felting went quickly, and after the doll dried (wet wool smells far too much like cat poo), I needle felted a face, and now the doll is done.

175 | Craft | Art | Drawing, Ink/Pen: Completed

I already posted this picture, but I forgot to say that it was a Fair item.