Category: Cats

caturday — bo visits the vet

whbeebe2 Comments

Every animal sooner or later needs to make a visit a vet, and mine or no different. Earlier this week Bo needed to go get his three-year rabies shot as mandated by Florida law. Getting Bo into the carrier was uneventful, as was the trip to the vet’s office. Once we got there Bo went into his fearful shock mode, where he hunkered down and refused to move. A little bit of drool also started to form at the corners of his mouth, and he kept giving me a wide-eyed unblinking stare. After he was weighed (13.3 lbs), the staff set up a hiding place for him to stay in. That’s that pink blanket over a simple wire frame you see above. When the vet came in to administer his shots, the vet moved the towel away, but Bo just continued to hunker down and didn’t make a peep when he got his shot. Then the vet put the cover back over Bo, and he stayed there until the vet tech put Bo back into his carrier, I paid the bill, and then drove Bo home.

Once Bo got back in the house I opened the door to the carrier and Bo took off like he’d been shot out of a cannon. For the next 30 minutes he wasn’t anywhere to be found, then all of a sudden he was back in my chair looking up at me like nothing had transpired.

Bo and his brother Luke will be nine years old in October. Even though vet trips are infrequent, you’d think after all these years Bo would understand and not be fearful, but I suppose Bo will always be fearful of trips away from home. I wish I could communicate with Bo he has nothing to be afraid of, but I can’t. So the next best thing is to be quiet and supportive during these infrequent trips.

caturday — napping on my tv sound bar

whbeebe3 Comments

Luke is the clowder’s alpha. Being the alpha means he takes every opportunity to exploit every special spot in the house, special being defined by how much they each covet a particular spot. Recently the space between the base of my TV and the sound bar has become one of the most coveted spots in the house, primarily as a napping aid. Here we see Sir Luke napping to the left of me on the sound bar.

Here, he’s switched positions and is now napping to the right of me on the sound bar.

And to prove how popular a napping spot the space between the TV and the sound bar has become, we see Nicholas the Youngest napping to the right. Others in the clowder (it has six cats) may also nap there, I just haven’t caught them at it yet.

There are at least three problems with the cats napping on my sound bar:

  1. They all shed like crazy, so I’m regularly pulling out my special vacuum and wand and constantly going over everything to pick up the hair. I have to really work on the sound bar because it’s covered in cloth. Looks stylish, but it’s a royal pain to keep clean with this crew.
  2. Cats are not windows. Their fat little bodies cover the IR window at the base of the TV, meaning that when the humans want to watch TV with the remote control I have to get up and chase them off.
  3. One morning I came out into the TV room and found the sound bar pushed off the normal position you see it now, and down onto the floor. Thankfully I still had an Orvis thick dog pad on the floor so that the dog pad cushioned the fall. The fall still disconnected the HDMI cabling as well as the power, so I had to reconnect everything and turn it all back on again. So how did the sound bar wind up on the floor? I suspect a brief but powerful wrestling contest between Luke and more than likely Nicholas, resulting in the sound bar being pushed off by all that thrashing cat mass.

*sigh*