Monica

Dear Baldur,

Standing in the middle of the hall or a nearby room crying loudly because you don't see me is Not Cute. Especially when you just left me and I haven't moved. I know you have object permanence; you never fail to find the food dish. So please remember, when you walk out of the office while I'm at the computer or especially when you jump off the bed at 3AM, that you know how to find me again without asking. Can you take care of that for me? Thanks.

* * *

He's been doing this for a year or so, so this is not just the effect of losing Erik and Embla. Google tells me that this behavior can mean:

1. Hyperthyroid. Yes, but it's being treated and his last blood test was at the end of October. So that's not it.

2. Going blind and/or deaf. I don't really know how to tell, given that I can't tell him to just read the eye chart for me. No visible clouding in his eyes and his pupils respond to light changes. He followed a laser pointer for me a couple days ago, but maybe light is different. He doesn't miss when jumping up on things or people and I haven't seen him stumbling or walking into walls. And he seems to notice activity in the kitchen. So I don't think it's this.

3. Depression. Don't know how to tell or what to do about it, though.

4. Dementia. Yes, apparently cats can get something like Alzheimer's. Whee. Rumor (ok, one web page) says there exists medicine for this; I've asked my vet for advice and she will get back to me.

Via tangerinpenguin: List thirteen things that are going well for you this Friday the 13th:

1. The customer who sounded like he wanted Big Complicated Things (In A Hurry) thought my first draft was about 80% while I was assuming 25%.

2. Two significant projects (and some lesser ones) at work want me and my manager will support whatever I want to do. Cool!

3. I read a letter on the eye chart this week that I don't usually get.

4. Some more e-books that I want to read are available as free downloads.

5. Good conversation with my rabbi last night.

6. Bought gas for $3.09/gallon (loyalty card) and it should hold me for a month.

7. Cirque du Soleil is coming to Pittsburgh and this time their web site allowed us to buy tickets. (Totem -- not interested in the Michael Jackson thingy.)

8. Waking up to a cat on my feet every morning still, even though the weather has gotten warm.

9. Baldur is eating better.

10. Mesura et Arte del Danzare -- lovely recording!

11. Neighbors taking care of things along the property line that they might have been able to get away with not doing.

12. The rain seems to have ended before I have to leave for Shabbat.

13. Dani makes me happy. (Why yes, that is redacted. :-) )

Baldur has been on Methimazole (for hyperthyroidism) for about a year. We started him on the pills (which were good enough for the other cats), but he reacted poorly to them -- not the drug itself, apparently, but something else in the pill. So my vet switched him to the topical form and that's been fine.

The way this works is that there's a dispenser with a cream in it; you turn the dial the correct amount to dispense a small blob of cream and then smear it in the cat's ear. (Using the applicator; you don't get any of it on your hands.) This actually works fine; I distract him with food. Initially he was getting 2.5mg at a time, so we got dispensers that dispense that amount. More recently my vet increased some of the doses to 5mg -- you can do that with a 2.5mg dispenser, of course, but it's a little more hassle (and expense) that way. I was due for a refill, so I asked if she could get me a mix of 2.5mg and 5mg dispensers.

She asked if there was risk that I'd get confused and use the wrong one. I said I would mark the dispensers and she said ok.

The package came today, and in addition to the dosage text printed on the dispensers, they have helpfully made them different colors. That was, in fact, how I was planning to mark them. :-) (Colored tape or a bit of paint.) The boxes are also different colors; I keep the active dispenser in its box for easier storage. So thank you, Veterinary Pharmacies of America, for getting the packaging right so I don't have to. I have two active dispensers, obviously different from each other, and all is fine.

Baldur is a cranky patient, so when he spent yesterday at the vet's for an ultrasound and chest X-ray (looking for cause of weight loss) it came as no surprise that they reported a lot of growling and hissing. The folks doing the ultrasound suggested a blood test that requires taking blood before and after eating, so they called to see if I'd authorize that. We also had roughly the following conversation:

Them: Do you think he would eat if --
Me: Yes.
Them: He seems awfully upset.
Me: Don't put any body parts you care about between him and the food.
Them: Does he have any food preferences?
Me: Already dead is best; he's not a mighty hunter.

When I picked him up they confirmed that they had slid a bowl of canned food into his kennel, covered the kennel (to try to calm him down; didn't know that wasn't just a bird thing), and immediately heard much slurping and chomping. That's my little vacuum cleaner!

( ultrasound report )

Tonight was check-up night for the cats.( Read more... )

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.