Roadrunner Twice

Vale Tampa, the surly porch cat who came with our house.

Her final decline accelerated in the last two days, and this evening we had her peacefully killed by a home euthanasia vet. She was probably like 17 years old, we think (based on a neighbor's best recollection some years back), which ain't bad for a basically wild animal.

In celebration of her life, here's a short film we made together back in March 2018:

( Cat video )

( Cat stories, including illness, death, and me killing a mouse )

I'm assuming everyone who follows my Mastodon/Twitter/old-Instagram already knows about Mogwai, Muffin, Willa, Tampa, Glitch, Zero-Day, and Bruce "Wipeout" Jones III, the cats who, at various times, have lived on our side of the block. But there are also some other cats we see occasionally, who hang out on one of the other sides of the block.

I don't have photos for most of these, sorry.

• Little Black Cat — a medium-sized black cat, but we call her little to distinguish her from Glitch and Zero, who are approximately cinderblock-shaped.
• Northern Spawn of Bruce — a smallish female with the exact same markings as Bruce, who hangs out on the northern side of the block and gets food from one of the houses there. Seems sweet-natured.
• Southern Spawn of Bruce — a medium-sized male with the exact same markings as Bruce, except in a darker grey that looks almost black from a distance. Extremely skitty.
• Fluffy Black Cat — a very large cat with tuxedo markings who is MASSIVELY FLUFFY.
• Muffin-Alike — a small tuxedo who looks almost exactly like Muffin from a distance. You can distinguish them by size (Alike is slightly bigger), face (Muffin has one off-center eye), and disposition (Alike is skitty at any distance; Muffin seems very sanguine until she doesn't).
• Orange Cat at Tyrone's — a medium-sized orange cat. Skitty.
  • Ruth also calls him Angry Orange Cat because he always looks furious.
• MissingNo (emeritus) — the third of the identical cinderblock-shaped black tomcats called Glitches, who we originally thought were just one cat until we started trapping them. We THINK we've seen No a couple times since getting him fixed, but it's dubious and we're not wholly sure where his territory is. Dude was just wrong place wrong time that day.
• Cat Under the Stairs — a medium-sized cat with a blobby white and grey pattern, who, as soon as he sees you, will run inside a hole in the concrete stairs up to this one house's porch. He has to squish to fit through, and then he'll turn and glare balefully out at you.
  • Update (July 2020): I met cat-under-the-stairs’ caretaker!!! This cat is a she, her name is Shorty Ro-Ro (which is short for Shorty Royana Whitehead), and she is Bruce’s littermate!! Her tail might have been truncated by a bird!
• Short-Tail Cat — A medium-sized cat with a blobby white and grey pattern who has a clipped tail. He will act like he doesn't see you, but will just happen to cross the street to avoid you.
  • Ruth says this is the same cat as Cat Under the Stairs! She is right.
• Colette — small tabby. Feral girlfriend of Pierre, a small black cat who is actually someone's pet and has a collar and everything. Their love is so pure 😭
• The Skunk — NOT TECHNICALLY A CAT.

Uh, Ruth and I are going to Japan tomorrow for a two-week vacation, during which we get to hang out with my old friends Laura and Emmalee on their home turf for the first time. What the fuck!! I've been somewhat anxious about it for reasons that don't really withstand any scrutiny (thanks, brain), which is why I haven't talked about it, but at this point I am ULTRA EXCITED and it is gonna be a great time. I'm gonna try and post photos to my Mastodon several times a week (crossposted to Twitter, but you can also just add it to your RSS reader if you wanna).

Halla-cat got her teeth pulled, like I mentioned she was gonna, but unlike with Annabel her stomatitis didn't really improve much. What the fuck!! So she got another steroid shot and antibiotic shot, and now we're dosing her with an immunomodulator (cyclosporine) every day, woof. That one extra sucks because it's an oily liquid with an unwanted taste that has to be given on an empty stomach. Like, COME ON.

Actually though, we've been having a better time of it than I thought.

For one thing, we've learned that while Halla really hates being stalked and cornered for something (getting her in the carrier to hit the vet is so crummy), she... actually doesn't seem to mind being ambushed. Or at least, she gets over it basically immediately. So you just leave the syringe with the gunk behind your ear, wait ten or fifteen for your moment, scruff her and squirt the stuff in her mouth, and then everyone's fine!!

For another thing... the medicine seems to be visibly helping. Well above and beyond what the steroid shot does for her. We think.

Anyway: promising. We'll probably be trying to mess with her food at some point, too, and there might be some other things we can do as well. But she's got more of her old self back on-line than she's had in months, and it's kind of amazing.

It's been over a year, and I still really miss Instagram. UGH. It was such a good way to keep up with friends and share what I was up to! I'm still so mad that they're so committed to ruining it!

I've heard from people that they dialed back the hateful scrambled timeline a bit from its peak aggression level when I left, but one of my problems (in general, I mean) is that I kind of tend to live in the future a little, and Facebook have been SO CLEAR that their business model really requires Instagram to collapse into a pile of corrosive garbage, and that they will drive it to that point at the maximum speed they can get away with. So even though they've conceded to corrupting it more slowly than they were in early 2018, opening it still just depresses me because I can't stop thinking about the final destination.

That was a downer, maybe I can add a fourth thing to round out the post.

It's feast day on the anti-jet-lag diet today, and we just had Ethiopian food for dinner, and that is definitely a circumstance to improve one's outlook on life in general, I tell you what.

As I might have mentioned before, Annabel is a shouty crybaby who enjoys yelling. Here are some of her favorite reasons for Meowing Really a Whole Lot:

• I am sad because I don't see Halla, and I don't feel like going to look for her. (Halla will usually wake up after about a minute of this and come blearily downstairs looking for the ruckus, at which point Annabel will pretend to forget what was going on and start licking herself.)
• A human went into the kitchen and is about to feed me.
• A human went into the kitchen and isn't about to feed me.
• I need to poop, just letting you all know, I'm gonna go poop now.
• A human is in the downstairs bathroom with the door closed. What are they doing in there???
• No reason.

Our old cat Frankie (RIP) was a Media Snob.

• Once, Ruth was telling me about this kind of absurd "Music for Cats" kickstarter — the composer was trying to focus on frequencies where cats' hearing is most acute and nuanced, and also mimic natural sounds that cats are known to like. Frankie was sitting with me as Ruth was telling me all this, so I played one of the sample tracks. She immediately got up and left the room. Maybe they accidentally recorded Kidz Bop For Cats, or some feline equivalent of Komar and Melamid's "Most Wanted Song."
• Another time, our housemate was at the kitchen table with Frankie on his lap, watching some bird-related video. She was like "bird?!," and hopped up to look behind the laptop screen... then saw there was nothing there and stalked out of the room, visibly outraged. She never again paid ANY attention to a video screen, because I guess television ONLY SHOWS LIES.