Tonight I took the gang in for scheduled maintenance. ( Read more... )

My vet thought that Baldur looks much younger than he is, so when one of the techs came in to help with vaccines and blood draws, the vet asked her to estimate his age. The tech used to work at an animal shelter, so she said she's done this a lot. She then said "6 or 7", and was boggled when we said 15. These are my first cats so I don't really have expectations about what an old cat looks like; Erik does look older than Baldur to me, but I think that's due to being underweight and moving a little slowly.

Baldur and Embla had their checkups tonight. Ok, all of my cats have lost weight this year. How weird! They eat as much as they want. Yeah, older cats tend to lose weight, but still... (My vet had no specific advice on diet changes.)

Baldur: 13 pounds 3 ounces (15+ last year, 17+ the year before)
Embla: 6 pounds 13 ounces (missed last year, 9+ the year before)

Baldur has recently (last couple weeks) been throwing up (small amounts), and Embla's heart rate tonight was 240 (normal is 180-200), so both are getting blood tests. In both cases, the vet suspects hyper-thyroid. I asked if I can get a bulk discount on treatment. :-) I also asked if it's really plausible that all three of my cats are suffering from that ailment, and he said he didn't know but it is common in older cats.

(So, lorimelton, you were right the other night -- Baldur actually has lost weight. Granted, it's hard to really tell by looking.)

Tonight's was not one of the better trips to the vet, despite the best efforts of my vet and her assistant to make things go smoothly. (My vet and the assistant rock, and when I go back in a few weeks I should take them cookies or something.) I'm not sure what got into Erik and Baldur tonight.

( in which we talk about biology and behavior )

I couldn't get three adjacent appointments, so I'll have to go back another time with Embla. I made this appointment as "Erik plus one" and that was ok with them. (The vet specifically wanted to see Erik tonight.) I'm not surprised that I was unable to capture Embla tonight.

But in interesting news, it seems the Atkins craze has cat-food analogues. I had commented that I expected Erik to have gained some weight (he didn't) because he's been getting canned cat food (to bury medicine in); the vet told me that actually, anecdotal evidence suggests that cats are more likely to lose weight on canned food. The dry stuff, by contrast, is full of carbs. Mind, this isn't scientifically-validated research; it's just what some vets have started to talk casually with each other about. Curious.

(For those who've asked, "random bits" are longer than "short takes".)

Last night I adapted a piece of music for (folk) harp for the first time. Mind, I don't play harp -- but I've been around those who have enough to have some basic clues, so when a friend asked me if I could render a four-part a-capella piece for harp and singer for her wedding, I agreed to give it a shot. It was an interesting exercise; harp is kind of like piano in terms of how you think about the hands, but has the twist of also having to plan for when to flip the sharping levers for accidentals. (Doing so requires that you take one hand off the strings, so right after a long note is a good time to do this.)

After I completed my first draft I talked with the harpist. She says she doesn't have sharping levers. Oops; how did I miss that? So I'll see if I can arrange around them. At which point we move from "music that is a subset of the original" to "music that is slightly different from the original". Fortunately, it's rennaissance music and I know how not to do anything egregious there. Still, it's a fun challenge.

One of my cats (Baldur) has taken to meowing persistently in the early mornings (around 6am), almost every day, for minutes at a time. He's 11 years old and this is a recent change (last couple months). I have been unable to correlate it with anything else going on in the house. His last physical was in January and he was fine, and he doesn't do this at other times. Do the kitty psychologists in my reading audience have any theories?

Today my shell-account provider had a scheduled OS upgrade. When they came back online, SSH was behaving oddly for me. It told me the host key had changed (not surprising), and I chose the "accept for this session only" option. (Hey, I'm paranoid -- even though I know that should be ok, I want to see the right things happen before making the permanent change.) At that point SSH bounced me on a permission error (I never got to the password) -- repeatedly. On a whim, I said to just accept the key -- and everything was fine. What the heck? Now that I think about it, though, I'm pretty sure the same thing happened to me a few years ago -- so maybe if I write it down this time I'll actually remember next time.

Asian restaurants tend toward the "spiciness on a scale of 1 to 10" meme. Of course, one restaurant's "7" might not resemble another one's "7" -- or even its own on a different day. But there's a bigger issue: is this supposed to depend on the dish you order? What does it mean to order Moo Goo Gai Pan to a spiciness of 9, or Kung Pao Chicken to a spiciness of 1? If you do that, does the cook just shrug and make the dish normally, or what? (Mind, I have little personal experience with numbers in the bottom two-thirds of the scale...) This thought brought to you by the data-collection effort going on at my place of employment to attempt to determine the pattern, if any, of spice levels at the nearby Thai restaurant.

I enjoyed this entry on the dynamics of ladies' nights at bars.

Why can't people who use auto-reply systems when they're on vacation learn to configure them to not send such messages to posters on mailing lists? Sheesh. For mail that was sent directly to you, go wild -- but if I post to a mailing list with several hundred subscribers, I really don't need to be told about the ten specific subscribers who are on vacation this week.

I got mail from another school class looking to build a yurt. Did some education journal just run an article on yurts or something? These are ninth-graders in Albuqueque, so it's probably just a coincidence. (I'm out of the loop on tent supplies. Where do people buy canvas these days? I mean raw materials, not prepared tent parts.)

I dropped Baldur off at the vet around 7:30 this morning. Around 9:30 I got a call saying everything had gone fine. That was much faster than I expected. And the good vet of years past called; I'm glad he was the one to take care of him. (This was the vet I saw regularly until his hours completely shifted to weekdays and the more-distant location.) I can pick him up between 4 and 7; given weather forecasts and traffic, I think I will aim for earlier rather than later.

Ironically, Erik is finishing a round of antibiotics and Baldur is about to start a round (for the gingivitis that led to the dental treatment). So the pill-in-canned-food exercise is just going to shift one cat over, it seems. Baldur has been jealous of Erik getting special treatment, so now it's his turn. I wonder if I can head off any sickness in Embla that might be looming by just giving her the good stuff too?

The form I had to fill out when I dropped him off asked me to rate (good/fair/poor) several factors, including "appetite". I decided against writing in "enthusiastic". I do have hopes that simply hiding a pill in his food will work, though; with Erik I've had to crush them and mix them in. Baldur resembles a vacuum cleaner when eating, so I might get lucky.

Fun hack (but stay out of my house, you hear?): Man's apartment (and all its contents) covered in foil (link courtesy of siderea).

Today's winning entry in the "sad/true but at least funny" sweepstakes comes from grifyn.

"I so hope the people who run that site don't read their referer logs, or I am so going to hell" (q_skud_, owner of a domain the religious site owner probably wouldn't approve of).

It's discouraging to see the word "above" in a temperature forecast -- it reminds me that there was another possibility. This might be the best argument for Farenheit over Celsius. :-) (We haven't seen sub-zero temperatures yet this winter, but there's still time. Mind, I'd be happy to leave it as a theoretical construct.)

When the vet told me Baldur needs some dental work, she said they'd send me an estimate. The vet's office has never before sent me a written estimate for anything. They always just say "it'll cost $($amount)", and that's that. So this made me wonder just how hefty the price tag was going to be on this, if they were suddenly getting all formal on me. It came yesterday and is less than I plunked down for two cats' exams, vacines, and blood tests. That's a relief, but I'm still mystified by the process.

I had a cunning plan for capturing Embla, but it didn't work. She and Erik both escaped to the crawl space in the attic, leaving me holding Baldur. So I stuffed him into a carrier and tried to get the other two until it was past time to leave for the vet. Disappointed, I headed off with one cat instead of three.

My vet rocks. While she was starting Baldur's exam, she asked how far away I live and I told her. (Not far -- 10 minutes if the traffic lights cooperate.) So she said if I wanted to try fetching another cat while she did Baldur's exam, that would be fine with her. I had created a "cat lock" before leaving, with Erik and Embla behind the far door, so I called Dani and asked him to open the far door and see if anyone came into the lock. This got Erik but not Embla, but if I was only going to get one this time that's the one I wanted so that's ok. I raced home, stuffed Erik into a carrier (with Dani's help), and raced back, arriving just as she completed Baldur's exam. (He didn't yet have his vaccines, so I even had a few minutes to spare.)

I have another appointment in two weeks for Embla; I have got to figure out an appropriate token of my appreciation to take along. This vet is really accommodating.

Erik weighs 8lb 11oz and Baldur weighs 18 even; no surprises. Baldur has some gingivitis and will probably be seeing the kitty dentist; they drew blood tonight to make sure everything's ok and anesthesia-compatable. After we discussed this an assistant checked something and informed me that there's a discount scheduled for dental work in January -- bonus. :-) (I didn't know that vets did specials like that.)

Both cats are otherwise healthy. She also drew blood from Erik to check on the calcium levels; I'll hear back in several days. (Maybe not until next week because of the holiday.) She believes that Erik's high calcium is idiopathic, but even so if it gets too high he'll need drugs to prevent bad effects, so we have to check. (We did a bunch of diagnostics last year with less-than-informative results.)

Two down; one to go.

Baldur: 18.0 lb (a slight drop from last year)
Embla: 10.1 lb
Erik: 8.125 lb (lost a pound)

I think this is the first time in his life that Baldur has lost weight from one checkup to the next. This is cause for celebration, though the drop was only about three-quarters of a pound. I'll take what I can get. The vet was unwilling to estimate what his weight should be, however.

Unfortunately, this is not the first time Erik has lost weight; last year he lost most of a pound from the previous year, and this year he lost a pound from last year. He's not a large cat to begin with. I had actually thought he was gaining a little weight this past year, but I was wrong. (I actually asked that they weigh a 10-pound bag of food, to make sure the scale wasn't off. It wasn't.)

The vet took a blood sample from Erik and they're going to run the standard suite of tests. I should hear back in several days (maybe by the end of the week). His only other blood test was two years ago, when he showed elevated levels of calcium -- enough to call for a dietary change, but not enough to worry about cancer, they said at the time. (Tonight's vet concurred with that.) So we'll see what the level is this time. The physical exam was just fine -- nothing suspicious there, the vet said. (Apparently the other thing that sometimes causes high calcium is a thyroid problem, but she said his thyroid felt normal.)

He's only ten years old; he's not supposed to be wasting away yet. I hope the test results suggest a useful course of action.

The vet was a little puzzled by the choice of special diet; it's something for renal failure, rather than a low-calcium food. She's not the one who prescribed it, and when I asked her if she recommended changing it she thought about it for a minute and said no. One effect of high calcium would be kidney problems, and even if he's not showing those problems now, the food could help hold them off. And she didn't have any better suggestions for what to feed him.

Once again I have had an ambiguous experience with VCA. I was prepared to ask for a copy of our medical records on the way out, so I could take them to a different vet in the future. I might still do that before next year. This particular vet was very good -- it was the most thorough exam I can remember them having, and she seemed perfectly willing to take all the time we needed to do everything right. She handled them gently but firmly, and she showed genuine concern. She carefully read each cat's medical history before doing the exam and asked me relevant questions. That's the first time that's happened. And, like my own doctor, she didn't talk down to me but assumed I had a brain. (This was probably aided by some of the questions I asked her.)

However, she's been there for four weeks; VCA will probably beat it all out of her in time. And judging by past experience, she'll probably be there next year and not the year after. My big complaint against VCA is the revolving-door vets; I want a regular vet. They have some good people, but they don't keep them for long.

Maybe the thing to do is for me to tell her that, rather than talking to VCA. If she's going to leave VCA for some other place in the city, for example, I'd have no problems with following her. (She might have a contractual problem with that, but I don't know if I don't ask.)