Stop beating the cats!

Poor Johnny has had an acute onset of conjunctivitis in one eye (and a dendritic ulcer, as I learned today when I brought him to school). Looks like somebody sucker-punched him.

Wait -- black eyes are badass, right? Then that makes 2 of us in the family!

Is four blogs too many?

I have, after careful consideration, decided to take the plunge and start a fourth blog.

A fourth blog, you ask? Am I crazy?

I don't think so.

Am I addicted to blogging?

Erm.... perhaps.

Seriously, though, Paul & Becky's Recipes (http://www.pbrecipes.blogspot.com/) and Vet Med Word of the Day (http://vetword.blogspot.com/) don't take much upkeep.

Yes, I will admit to writing my fair share of posts for this, my illustrious, informative, and endlessly entertaining main blog.

But as I spend day after day watching our two hilarious cats, I can't help but feel that they deserve a space to post their own anecdotes.

Therefore, I introduce to you: Monkey Business! ("A chronicle of the antics and mischief of two feline brothers living the good life in Colorado.")

Since the URL http://monkeybusiness.blogspot.com/ was already taken (albeit not by anything good), you'll find MY Monkey Business blog at:

http://johnnyandsimon.blogspot.com/

Look for periodic updates on the hilarity that ensues when two young and crazy cats are forced to live in a mere 1200 square feet of condo space.

Want a pair of cats?

Dear, darling Johnny and Simon were up on top of the refrigerator today, and evidently knocked the freezer door open on their way down. It was wide open when I got home just now, and by the look of things inside, had been that way for most of the 10 hours I was gone.

Anybody looking to adopt two adorable but undeniably and unapologetically mischievous felines??

Simon still loves to save lives!

Simon went in yesterday for his second blood donation. He had been scheduled to donate in early August, while we were still in Massachusetts, but his petsitter ended up being out of town so she cancelled.

We were going to just wait for his next scheduled appt, in mid-October, but the teaching hospital's blood bank has been in high demand recently so they emailed me on Wednesday and asked if I could bring Simon in on Thursday or Friday.

He was a trooper, again. Not thrilled about missing out on breakfast yesterday, and not thrilled to go in his carrier, but settled in once we got in the car and was very patient when we had to just sit around the VTH for an extra 20 minutes waiting for them to get my new ID badge to work.

I guess they ended up drawing his blood later in the morning than usual, so when I picked him up at 3, he was definitely a little loopy still from the ketamine. It was pretty funny - he was squinting in the bright light and had this face like a little old man.

Once we got in the car, though, he gave himself a nice bath and had a quick nap before we got home.

Johnny, of course, was once again quite intrigued by Simon's weird new smells from being at the hospital, and pestered him incessantly until Simon got mad. So, all is back to normal. :-)

Happy Birthday!

Dear Trevor and Taylor,

Happy 6th Birthday today! We are all so impressed that Dad has not killed you yet!

Sincerely,

Cousins Johnny and Simon

Simon loves to save lives

Mr. Simon-Monkey had his first blood donor appointment on Tuesday. I drove him to FoCo and set him up in a kennel in the teaching hospital at 7:45 am.

Once the nurses and doctors got there, they checked him out, made sure he looked good physically, then sedated him and stole away a whole bunch of his blood.

I made the nurse promise to call me when Simon was done, since he'd never had this sedative before, or donated blood before, and even vet students can be worried mommies! I got a call just before 2 pm saying Simon was all done and that he was "perfect." That's my good little cooperative cat!

I was working in Northglenn till 7:30 pm so didn't get to the hospital to pick up Simon until after 8. He was the only cat left in the ward when I got there, and yawned and blinked his sleepy eyes with an expression that said, "Okay, I thought you were never coming back!"

After that, he did totally fine. I thought he might be a little sleepy or tired for awhile, or hungrier than usual, but he had dinner when he came home then immediately jumped back into the routine of tearing around the house with his miscreant brother. Simon has a small patch of hair shaved on his neck and had some mild bruising on his neck for a couple of days, but other than that he is totally back to normal and ready to donate blood again in a couple of months!

P.S. I think I have found a petsitter to watch J&S for the ~7-8 weeks we are in Massachusetts. Keeping my fingers crossed that this one works out!

Happy Birthday, Monkeys!

Johnny & Simon turn 2 today, so happy birthday to them! They have thus far spent their day dropping random objects in their water dish, eating some lovely dry food, and napping in the sunshine. Sounds like a pretty good life to me.

We've had them for almost a year and a half (since right after our wedding) and they continue to bring us joy, cuteness, amusement, and unrelenting mischief. Here's hoping with a few more years, they'll finally learn to settle down and be good cats!

(Yeah right!)

Doing our part for the kitty community

Lucky Mr. Simon has an appointment tomorrow afternoon to be screened as a potential blood donor kitty for sick and ailing kitties in need of transfusions at the teaching hospital! It would be awfully sweet if he could "give back" to the other kitties in the community --- and help build up some positive karma to counteract his garbage-eating karma so he doesn't end up reincarnated as a cockroach.

(Johnny might be off the list of potential candidates for now, due to his occasional gastrointestinal issues and his uncooperativeness [i.e. extreme squirminess] for blood draws.)

Just as an FYI, the feline blood donor program is pretty neat. The hospital used to have a colony of blood-donor cats that lived on site. Each cat donated every other month for a year or two then found a home. However, the cats eventually got too fat and it cost too much to feed and house them, so the hospital found homes for all but two cats - one cat of each major blood type - to have around in case of an emergency. The rest of the donated blood comes from cats in the community, almost all of which are owned by vet students. The cats have to be adults, at least 10 pounds, healthy, relatively cooperative, indoor-only with no contact with outdoor pets, and they go through some extensive blood screening for metabolic abnormalities as well as a bunch of yucky blood-borne diseases like feline leukemia, FIV, and blood parasites. They get dropped off for a day at the hospital once every 8 weeks, where they are sedated for their blood donation, then go home that afternoon. In return, the kitties get free physicals and all the bloodwork every year, and they get free food and heartworm/tick/parasite preventive medicine year-round. Pretty good deal for both the donor cats and the sick cats at the hospital that might die without a transfusion.

The garbage bandits have been foiled! (for now)

After several consecutive days of the naughty little kittens (a.k.a. the garbage bandits) getting into the kitchen trash can, we have devised a creative solution to solve the problem. It involves two half-empty gallons of paint, plus an enormous kettle full of water, and it's neither pretty nor especially convenient, but thus far it's getting the job done. (And thank goodness, because it severely pains me to contemplate spending $60-90 on a decent quality, heavy, stainless steel garbage can with a foot pedal. I have better uses for that $$, thank you very much, Johnny & Simon.)

Bad monkeys!

Johnny & Simon (often semi-affectionately referred to as "the monkeys" at our house) are in big trouble.

They have always had this thoroughly annoying obsession with food: hunting for food, smelling food, finding food, stealing food, licking food, eating food... (and you can replace the word "food" in the previous sentence with "anything that remotely looks, sounds, smells, or tastes like food, or meets none of the above criteria but nonetheless fits in their mouths").

Having lived with J&S for about 16 months now, we've learned to make some accomodations and special arrangements to help keep this food addiction under control. Carefully measured meal portions, with supervised feedings to ensure everyone only eats his own food. People food is never left anywhere accessible, ever. Dishes must be washed or put in the dishwasher immediately. For months and months, the cats were put in their carriers whenever we were eating.

But now I fear the monkeys have at last learned how to knock over the garbage can in the kitchen. We had a problem with the garbage in our apartment. They knew it contained food of some sort and I suppose they thought it smelled really delicious. So the garbage lived in the cupboard under the sink. Eventually, they figured out how to open the cupboards, so we got some of those child-proof latches. That pretty much solved things.

Fast-forward to our condo. The cupboards in our kitchen are smaller, and no reasonable size of garbage can will fit. So we got a big plastic garbage can with a pop-top that sits in the kitchen. Since we moved here in August, the kitties have occasionally managed to knock over the garbage can and send the contents flying, but this has been mostly an unintentional action. (Picture 2 hyper adolescent cats wrestling and chasing each other all over the condo, and accidentally running smack into the garbage can with remarkable force.)

The last few days, however, the garbage has been knocked over regularly. I fear the monkeys have at last learned how to knock it over whenever they want. Which is really annoying, gross to clean up, and not safe for J&S (because really, none of us should be eating rotting food). Plus, it's just a plain old bad habit. Not sure how we're going to remedy this situation, but something will have to be done, or a little monkey cat might just end up strangled soon! (Probably Johnny. I'm pretty sure he's the instigator.)

Coveralls make an awesome fort

We're having our first Food Animal Production & Food Safety field trip on Friday, where we'll be visiting a food animal production operation and thus need to arrive dressed in coveralls and boots. For the large and mixed animal students, this is no big deal. For us small animal folks, we are all feeling pretty silly right about now as we prepare to meet with the rest of the class on Friday dressed in our brand-spanking-new coveralls and shiny new boots.

I'm not especially eager to spend much money on garments that I won't be using much at all until the minimum required large animal rotations in my junior and senior years, so I was glad that a friend gave me a pair of coveralls that had shrunk in the dryer and no longer fit her. I brought them home today and dropped them on the floor (intending their location to be temporary).

Much to my surprise, Johnny & Simon have decided that coveralls lying in a heap on the carpet make an awesome hiding place. They took turns crawling inside the bib part and down toward the legs, then turning around and poking their faces out. I swear Simon was lying in there for what was apparently too much time, because Johnny came over and meowed at him, like "Get out of there, it's time for me to have a turn!" They are too funny sometimes.

Johnny felt weird

Most nights, the cats get shut out of the bedroom so that we humans can actually try to get some sleep. And most nights, I end up waking up sometime in the early morning to go to the bathroom. The usual routine is that by the time I get out of bed and into the hallway, Simon is waiting there for me, and he follows me into the bathroom. If I leave the bedroom door open, Simon will run ahead of me and into the bedroom when I try to go back in, so I usually push the door mostly shut when I get up. That way, if Simon sneaks in, I'll know because the door will be open.

Note that, usually, Johnny plays no role in this whole nighttime interaction.

So this morning I woke up at 4:30 a.m., met Simon in the hallway, went to the bathroom, went back to the bedroom, making sure to keep Simon outside, shut the door, and got back in bed. Much to my surprise, there was something furry and warm under the covers where my feet are supposed to go.

Yes, it was Johnny who evidently snuck into the bedroom while I was in the bathroom. He made himself quite comfortable in his favorite spot, at the foot of the bed under multiple layers of blankets. It is so weird, because he is usually too lazy to even get out of bed (he sleeps on the guest room bed) when I get up in the night. He must have been feeling really lonely and wanted to snuggle. Normally I'd kick him out, but he seemed so desperate that I took pity and let him stay till CLH got up at 5 a.m. :-)

I admit it, I was wrong

So, earlier this month I was feeling all kindly and pleased with our cats' good behavior. See:

http://thevetschooljourney.blogspot.com/2009/02/my-babies-are-growing-up-sniff.html

Due to a recent series of events, I can only conclude that while CLH and I are at work and school, Johnny & Simon get on the Internet and read my blog.

Here are some of the things they have done in the last couple weeks:

• Kept us awake all night. Eight nights out of ten, the cats get shut out of the bedroom so we (okay, I --- they never wake CLH up) can get some actual sleep. So that's about 6 nights a month that they get to sleep with us. Normally, about 4-5 of those 6 nights are spent sleeping, with only minor annoyances to the humans in the room. Lately, every opportunity for them to get near us while we try to get some shut-eye has ended in meowing, pouncing, wrestling, etc.
• Shredded the toilet paper. This is something they had never done until sometime around last October. All of a sudden, they decided that shredding the toilet paper was a highly entertaining activity. After weeks of keeping the bathroom door shut at all times or hiding the TP under the sink, we tried giving them access again and they were fine. Now, the TP habit has returned with a vengeance.
• Shredded the paper towels. Unlike shredding the toilet paper, shredding the paper towels is something that J&S will do every chance they get. It usually results from one of us (generally me) mistakenly leaving the paper towels in an accessible place.
• Dragged stuff around. They do this with some regularity, especially if we are both gone all day and they don't get their 4:30 pm meal on time. Items displaced in recent weeks have included socks, slippers, shirts, bathmats, dish towels, oven mitts, and several stuffed animals that they are not supposed to play with but I've pretty much given up on.
• Gone up on the counters on a near-daily basis. This has been a constant struggle ever since we've had them, regularly refueled by the fact that occasionally they manage to get up on the counters and we don't catch them before they get food, which only reinforces the bad habit. Lately, Simon has decided that it's a great idea to get up on the backside of the TV table, behind our 2-month-old flat screen TV. If he knocks it off, he's going up for adoption.

Today was the crowning glory of their misbehavior. CLH wasn't home last night, and I left at 7:10 this morning. Neither of us returned until 7:30 tonight. Evidently, three hours past normal dinner time was the straw that broke the kittens' back. We arrived home to discover that J&S had gotten the pop-top of the very full trashcan open and delighted in the disgusting contents. Fortunately, unlike some previous incidents, they only got the top open, rather than tipping the whole thing over --- thus, their access to the garbage was somewhat limited.

Nonetheless, I feel it's time for an apology.

Johnny, Simon, I now realize that you read my blog. I'd like to admit publicly that I was wrong in writing anything about you having grown up in even the slightest bit. You have made your point, and made it forcefully. I fully accept that you are still naughty little teenager cats. Feel free to cease your determined attempts to destroy our house, and return to your average amount of chaos. Thank you.

Kitty pictures!

When I posted about Johnny & Simon yesterday, I meant to throw in some cute pictures... so here they are!

Here are a couple of shots of them sleeping in weird places. This was back in our apartment in Arizona, we were getting the carpets cleaned one day so everything small got piled onto the couch, and the cats thought that was just a fantastic place to play and sleep.



































And here is a cute shot of them snuggling together, really, really close, which they still love to do.

My babies are growing up... sniff

Johnny & Simon will be a year old in May. Wow! They still seem like naughty little kittens sometimes - but I guess they are pretty much still teenagers.

They are slowly maturing, though. Finally, after over a year of living with us, Johnny is almost to the point where he can eat next to Simon unsupervised.

(Note: If Johnny had his way, he would be a grotesquely obese cat and he'd be perfectly happy about it. It is only through strict monitoring of his food intake that he remains just mildly overweight.)

So Johnny has a food bowl, and Simon has a food bowl. They've both eaten all kinds of food since we've had them, but now Johnny is on a prescription hypoallergenic diet (= costs $$) and Simon is eating whatever I can get for free. The deal with Johnny's diet is that we're testing him for a food allergy, so if he eats anything besides his special food, that can mess up the results.

Previously, Johnny would gobble his food (think about the "Hungry Hungry Hippo" game), and promptly head over to Simon's bowl for dessert. When they first came to live with us, one of them would always get locked in his carrier while they both ate.

Eventually we got to the point where, if you were standing right next to them, brushing your teeth or something, Johnny would just sort of mope around pathetically after he finished eating, but not dive into Simon's food unless you turned your back.

NOW, you can actually leave the room while the cats are eating, and Johnny will finish his food and go off by himself after about 80% of his meals. (The other 20% of the time, he really wants Simon's food. But if he goes toward the other bowl, and you catch him, he'll cut it out if you say "no.")

The only issue is that Johnny has apparently decided that any food that falls out of Simon's bowl is fair game for him if he can reach it with his paw and pull it closer to him. It's pretty cute to watch. If you're standing there, he will simultaneously look up at you (with an "Am I going to get in trouble?" look) and reach his paw out to grab the food. And yes, he always gets in trouble...

I don't have a maid, but...

...I do have two cats who really like to help with chores. Here are some things they excel at:

* Making sure I sweep the floors really thoroughly by messing up the dirt pile over and over
* Cleaning up crumbs from the kitchen floor, the table, the chairs, the carpet, the couch....
* Folding laundry (some would call it lounging about on the freshly cleaned clothes)
* Washing dishes by hand (okay, by tongue)
* Bringing cloth items upstairs to put in the laundry hamper (dish towels, oven mitts, cloth napkins, etc.)
* Putting clean sheets on the bed

Helping me make up the bed with clean sheets is by far their favorite task, and they assist me on a nearly weekly basis. Here's how it goes: First, I take off the old sheets. Then Simon jumps onto the bed, on top of the mattress pad. He proceeds to lie there while I put on the fitted sheet over him. Second, Johnny jumps up on top of the fitted sheet. He pounces on Simon while I put the flat sheet over Johnny. Third, both cats scramble around and wrestle under different layers while I continue to add the blanket and comforter. This is one of those games that your mom always said ends in tears. By the time I've got the pillowcases on the pillows, somebody is usually meowling pathetically and both cats squiggle out from under the sheets and try to get their dignity back. Good luck with that!

Metronidazole update

Johnny still thinks it is super-yummy. He comes running when I get it out. Weirdo.

Simon still thinks it is utterly unfair that he doesn't get any.

Can't tell if it's making Johnny better - maybe a little? Or maybe that's my wishful thinking?

3 1/2 days down, 10 1/2 days to go...

Fraternal jealousy, or Metronidazole is yummy

Johnny has been dealing with some sort of chronic GI problem (you don't want to know more) for a few months now and he's been to the VTH repeatedly as we try to figure out what's causing it. His last round of trial meds did nothing so now he's on a 14-day course of Metronidazole.

Metronidazole is not a tasty drug. Often, when dogs or cats taste it, they end up frothing and drooling like rabid beasts from the unpleasant taste. So the goal is to either pill them expertly so they never taste it, or to mix it up in something really yummy. I'm not thrilled by the idea of shoving a pill down Johnny's throat twice a day for two weeks (plus cats can get pills stuck in their esophagus which can cause a whole new set of problems), so I got Johnny's meds compounded into a flavored liquid form.

He was due for his first dose this morning, so as it got close to time for me to leave for class, I pulled up the little syringe with his meds, grabbed him in the kitchen, and assumed my favorite cat-medicating pose. (That is, me squatting/kneeling on the floor with his back end trapped firmly under me between my knees, and the biting end face away from me.) Pried open his mouth and squirted in the meds.... lo and behold, I think he liked it! The last time I administered flavored compounded liquid Metronidazole was with our long-term foster cat, and she despised it and did the whole frothy drooly thing every time.

The funniest part was that once I grabbed Johnny to medicate him, Simon of course was super-interested in what was going on. He got right up in Johnny's face as I was squirting in the meds, and as soon as I was done Simon looked up at me with this great face that so clearly said, "Johnny got some sort of food! Where is mine?!" (After all, anything that goes in the mouth must be food and so both cats must have it, or life just is not fair.)

Here's hoping Simon eventually figures out that he is NOT going to get any of Johnny's Metronidazole, ever, and he can leave poor Johnny alone while I shoot a bunch of liquid medication down his throat....