Cutie and Lydia, Ella Too

I am about to go to bed so I'll probably say something about Ella on another post tomorrow. At this time, I just wanted to mention that I have two twin sisters, both black cats, who have been with me, and one another, their entire lives. This is substantial because they turned twenty-four last month.

At that advanced age of twenty-four, I just had to break up a fight a few moments ago. They were in beds on a table near my desk, next to one another, when they began slapping at one another. I don't know what the squabble was about but it was quite a slap fight.

I broke it up, moved the beds a foot apart, and turned them around so that they didn't have to look at one another. Then I spent a few moments petting each of them. When they both put their heads back on the side of the bed, as if to sleep, I went back to my computer. I hadn't typed more than a couple of lines before they were slapping at one another again.

 

For the most part, cats are adorable little psychopaths, concerned first and foremost with themselves, pretty much like very young children in that respect. There are moments, and particular cats, who seem to challenge that, however. While I was sick with the flu, and with whatever it was that had me down for another week later, our one year-old, Ella, hardly left me alone long enough to eat or use the litter box. Nearly every time I woke up, she was there. The couple of times when she wasn't, she was just over by the window, where she watches out for birds and squirrels. As soon as she noticed I was awake, she came back over to me. Yeah, it could well be that she simply enjoyed the excuse to lounge around all day, but it looked like empathy to me, so I'll give her the points. My other cats, who have been with me for twenty-four years, barely came up to visit.

 

Here's a nice photo of Ella (1 y/o), Cutie (24 y/o), and a squirrel of unknown age. I keep bird/squirrel food on my fire escape so that the cats have something to look at, and it seems that the squirrel is enjoying the view too. We have three squirrels that come around and they have learned that the window provides safety for them, so they sometimes come right up to the window to look in at the cats, which drives Ella mad. She's funny, because she gets so excited she starts scratching on the window and slapping it, to get their attention, especially when she thinks they are going to leave. It's as if she's saying, "Come back here!"

 

This morning, we had a baby squirrel at the feeder. I didn't have a camera, but I have never seen a squirrel that small before and she was by herself.

 

I think this one was old enough to be out of the nest because was getting around okay, and had managed to find the feeder, which is on a second floor fire escape. He have have come up with one of the older ones another time, or followed them up. When he left, he jumped from the railing of the fire escape to the branch of one of our trees. I'm not sure where they nest, but I think they nest in the eaves of our neighbor's house because there are always tracks in the snow on his roof.

 

Lydia has not been doing well lately. Keeping in mind that she is 24 years old, some problems can be anticipated, but she has had trouble keeping food down lately, and has been getting very thin. Whenever she is able to avoid vomiting for a couple of days, she starts to fill out again, but she isn't often able to do that. When I buy the blander, grain-free foods that she should have an easier time with, she won't eat them. Otherwise, she is always hungry but not very successful with whatever she eats. She is thin and also seems to be having trouble curling up naturally in her bed, and sits there in a position that doesn't look comfortable.

We have an appointment with the vet this afternoon. At twenty-four, of course, my expectations are lessened but I am praying that I'll be able to bring her home again, and that there might be something that can be done to make her more comfortable for whatever amount of time she has left. She has been with me her whole life, and her mother and grandmother before her, and I took her great-grandmother in when she was just a kitten, so I have had cats from that family with me for more than half my life, and I'm sixty-three. Lydia and Cutie are the last of them. We do have Ella, but she's from another family.

 

How did the vet visit with Lydia go, Ken ? I noticed that you didn't post any good news, so I hope that it didn't turn out that she had to be put to sleep. Even when an animal has lived a good long life, and we know that they are not doing well, it is still such a hard decision to make .
Sometimes, it is the last way that we are able to show our love for them, and we have to give them up ; but it is always heartbreaking.

 

She will still be with us for a while yet, I believe. She has hyperthyroidism and there's medication for that, so long as I can get to to take it. It's harder to mix it in with her food, since I have two other cats, and they often trade bowls at the last minute. Hyperthyroidism sometimes masks signs of kidney disorder so there is a chance that, once treated, the signs of kidney disease will appear, but the vet doesn't think so. So yes, for a 24 year-old cat, it's very good news.

 

I am glad to hear that, Ken. Good luck with giving her the medication. If she won't eat it in her food, I have had reasonably good luck using one of those plastic eye-dropper things that they make for babies. Giving any kind of medicine to a cat (or dog) is often a struggle, and having two people to do it will help. I usually wrap them up in a large towel, say a prayer, and hope for the best as I try to squirt it down their throat.

 

Cutie just amazes me. She's twenty-five years old and still pretty healthy, and able to learn new ways to manipulate me.

I won't go into the whole story but I took in a feral cat that I had been feeding since she was a kitten. The feral cat was named Bird, and Cutie hated her. Bird was only a few months younger than Cutie, but about six years old before she graduated to house cat. Although she was with us, in the house, for more than fifteen years, Cutie and Lydia both treated her as if she didn't belong there. Yet, while Bird was still an outside cat, when she wanted to play, she would yell, usually while holding a toy in her mouth. The toy could be any piece of trash that she found and thought she might want to play with, and I sometimes brought her toys. Anyhow, a couple of other cats in the neighborhood would come running and they'd play.

When Bird tried that in the house, both Cutie and Lydia ignored her. I would feel bad for her, so I would come and play with her. Cutie apparently noted, and filed away that this was a way of getting attention, but she never used it while Bird was with us.

We lost Bird a year and a half ago (probably to a fox). Sometime after that, Cutie began carrying toys in to me, holding them in her mouth and yelling, as Bird once did. She didn't want to play, though. While she does sometimes play, that's not high on her list of demands. At first, what she would want would be for me to pick her up in her box. She has a cardboard box (that I change from time to time) that she likes to be dragged around the house in, or flown through the air in, or just held and petted while she is in her box. I have come to refer to that as box time. For over a year, I would know that when she carried a toy to me and yelled, she was wanting box time, and there were days when, five minutes after I had finished a box time, she was back with another toy. If I limited the number of toys available for her to "spend," she bring a pair of socks out of the laundry bag, a pen, or pretty much anything she could carry in her mouth.

While she still likes her box time, she has carried this a few steps further. Once she could see that she had my attention (she stares directly into my eyes while meowing), she would ordinarily go into her box and sit down to wait. However, one day, instead of doing that, she trotted into the other room. Thinking she had changed her mind, I went back to the computer, soon she was back in my office, staring at me. I followed her, and she went to her food bowl, which was empty. She had learned that she could buy lunch with a toy. Now she uses that to let me know when she wants to go out or when anything else is amiss.

In her twenties, she has learned to communicate. Get my attention with the toy, which she uses purely as a prop, then lead me to whatever it is that she wants. There are times when I can't figure out what it is that she wants, and I can see the frustration in her face. She's doing her part to communicate, but I'm too damned stupid to understand plain feline. She also gets frustrated when I don't let her out, because I don't let them out unsupervised anymore, and sometimes it's raining. When that happens, she doesn't seem to realize that the answer was no -- instead, she assumes that I am too stupid to figure out what she wants. I have been carrying her outside, hoping she will realize that I do understand her.

When I go to bed, she tries to get me to get back up and come back downstairs by bringing me toys. At first, thinking she needed something, I would get up and follow her but she would just lead me back into my office, which is where she usually hangs out with me. When I stay in bed, she eventually settles into bed next to me, but when I get up, there will often be a trail of toys leading to the stairs, and sometimes all the way into the office, so that if I were inclined to follow the trail, it would lead me to where she wanted me to be.

I sure am going to miss her. She is pretty healthy right now but, at twenty-five, I know that she can't go on forever. Her sister, Lydia, is very feeble and thin now. She doesn't eat as much as she should, and throws up a lot, and they are the same age.

 

Ella likes ten-cent toys. Literally. Ella is the baby of the family, being about a year and a half old. For some reason, she is always batting dimes around the floor. If we leave change on our desks or on the table, she will pick out the dimes. I have never seen he with a penny, a nickel, or a quarter, but I find dimes on the floor all the time. She doesn't just slide them across the floor, but she bounces them down the steps too, and then carries them back up so that she can do it all over again. When she comes up against an obstruction, she will carry the dime in her mouth. When my wife makes the bed in the morning, she often finds dimes that Ella has brought up with her. When I was cleaning the cat tree, I found a dime on the top platform, which is near the ceiling. I don't know what it is about dimes, but she loves them.