What Happened?

I have not posted in a while, I know, but I did not realize it has been over 6 months! Things got away from me, I guess. Thank you for not hounding me about this.

Last couple of months have had a few changes. I was laid off from my job, which is pretty big. I still work, now as a personal assistant, but still, a change.

My husband has a new job, one I think he really likes and likes him. He has had a few of those - jobs he liked - but circumstances beyond his control take away the opportunity. The best was the newspaper for which he was selling advertising space folded - end of job! He was doing well - they were not.

On our kitty front, many changes. After all, our cats are a part of our Pocono Life, so when these things happen, we are deeply affected.

We lost Star - a little girl cat who woke one day unable to stand up and when she did, could only walk in circles. Very scary to watch. We rushed her to the vet, who diagnosed her as having a form of inner-ear abnormality and showed us the office cat with the same affliction. He said she would get used to it and live many years, but she was so terrified of what was happening to her - you could see it in her eyes. Two hours after we got back from the vet, she died in my husband's arms. I think the changes were too much for her little heart and she could not take it.

Next came Scottie, who was older and had not been happy since Ike passed. He died quietly in his sleep.

Then, Sunshine, who was being treated for hyper-thyroidism for the past year. She was so skinny at the end, but had the heart of a lion, never giving up. Sunny came to us as a 2 week old kitten, abandoned by her mommy cat in our backyard, on the first day of summer, laying in a sunbeam. We bottle-fed her and made up a box for her, but her motto was "You cannot hold Sunshine." We eventually had to progress to a refrigerator box; when she escaped that, we knew she was ready to be a part of the group.

Sunshine would allow you to pet her and hug her as long as you did not pick her up. She was a princess and had to be in control. I knew it was time to give her peace when she lost control and allowed us to hold her and carry her around on her last day. The vet was amazed that she lived as long as she did when he gave her her release. It was the first day of summer, 12 years after we found her.

The hardest one for us has been Little Bear. He actually died a week before we had Sunshine put down. We think he had a massive coronary. We love all of our babies, but Little Bear had a special place, particularly on our bed, next to the headboard above our heads, where his thunderous purr would soothe us to sleep every night. This was important to my husband as he went through a year of chemotherapy. After his weekly shot, my husband would feel very cold, but would be sweating profusely (cold sweats). Little Bear made a point of sitting on my husband's head to keep him warm until he would fall asleep - summer, fall, winter and spring. He showed he cared, I believe. The night Little Bear died, he was particularly affectionate, holding my head between his paws, which he had not done since we first adopted him. I did not know why. I found him the next morning on the floor.

So we have adopted some new kittens - Sweetie, Fancy and Guy. I think we needed some energy in the house, and now we have it. We still miss our passed babies, and we are not replacing them, but these little creatures needed a home and we needed the love.

Brophy - the Building and the Cat

My first job for 'The State' was to train employees how to work with the Mentally Retarded clients at a state institution. Three weeks after I started, I was training new employees how to work with the Developmentally Disabled(DD) clients. Better term for sure, but that should have been a clue of how things would go working for the state - same job, different name.

Not that I was really qualified to train anyone, let alone discuss the challenges new employees would face working with a DD population. I took a Civil Service test and came out #3 - so I was hired. Fortunately for me, we did not have any on-going staff development for the first 6 months after I started due to a disagreement between my supervisor and the institution administration. So I read manuals and books and talked to everyone about what I should know.

The first class offered was new employee orientation - some of these 'new' employees had been there for 2 years! - but I was to sit in our the training to fulfill requirements and learn how training was done. Two hours in, one of the instructors was unavailable and I was told I had to train the class. That class was "Life/Sex Education" - a class to acquaint new employees with how the clients at the institution dealt with sexual issues. The crux of the class was the clients were adults and should be treated as such, especially when they used all the different slang for body parts and functions. Yep, trial by fire!

Settling in, I discovered I enjoyed the job. It was very trying and a little intimidating, but the time I had when I first started helped. Truly learning as I went along, I had my own office and developed friendships and was treated with respect - mostly. Some people thought I was silly and not serious, but I found that my trainees remembered what I was showing them if I could wrap it up in a funny bow.

This all leads to Brophy. Brophy was the name of the building I worked in. The building was over 100 years old and had all the charm an institution could muster, which was very little. Still, I came in one weekend, painted my office, brought in some old chairs and wallpapered one wall with the brightest wall paper I could find. It was very comfortable and a refuge from the rest of the world. I got in a little trouble with our union painters, but they reasoned that they did not want to paint our offices anyway and let it go.

After one of my classes, some of the employees came in and told me of a little kitten caught in a bush outside. I was amazed they came to me and did not handle it, but they knew I loved cats and would be the one to save the kitten. So I went outside the front of Brophy building and extracted a little black kitten from the rose bush - now I knew the real reason why they came for me. Scratched from the bush, I brought the little kitten inside. I knew I did not need another cat at home, and we already had an office cat, but my boss (a new boss, not the one who did not get along with the administration) said for me to keep him in my office.

My new assistant would play with anything that moved, answered my phone (hard to explain the 'mew') and followed me when he was allowed out of the room in between classes and cried when I was not there with him and he could hear my voice. I tried many different names for him, but he always paid attention when the name of the building was mentioned. So, he became Brophy.

Fairly soon after Brophy took up residence, I was transferred. What was supposed to be a 'temporary' reassignment became a permanent move to another department within the state. Brophy now had to come home with me and get acquainted with the cats in my house. The minute he was put down, he jumped on everyone and basically told them he was in charge. That went well, except for one little girl kitty in the house who told him otherwise. He avoided her for all the time they were together.

Brophy had a personality and was very smart and opinionated. He was accepting of anything I did to him, but he told me about it anyway. He rode well in the car, he loved going to our cabin, and he hated leaving that cabin, showing his displeasure by defecating in his box - every time!

Last week he lost his year-long battle with kidney disease. For this past year, he let me inject him with fluids, he let me give him the medicine and he made sure to sit on my lap every night. But last week I came home and he was unable to control his bowels and bladder and I knew it was time for him to go. He looked at me with those big yellow-green eyes, the same way he looked at me the day I saved him from the bush as the vet gave him his release.

A fine cat.

Checkers

Things get busy around here during the holidays. Our friends know why and I will not go into details here. But on top of our usual hub-bub, we have had an issue with our cats all getting sick at once. Very confusing to us, and life has become miserable for them. Humans understand when they are sick with a cold to ride it out; animals just want to hide from it.

Checkers

About 12 years ago we have a nasty storm around Christmas time (sound familiar?), with winds and blowing snow. More wind that snow, and bitter cold. We had decorated our house for Christmas with a large plastic light-up Santa that I had purchased with one of my first paychecks as a teenager (that is another story). We tied it up on top of our porch roof, but it could not stand up to the winds that day and blew off the roof with a tremendous crashing noise - at 5 am, of course. My husband ran outside as the sound was so loud, we thought a car had crashed into the house. The news of the 'death' of my Santa did not go well, but even worse was our front door did not shut all the way against the horrible wind when he came back in. When the door blew open, one of our cats, Scottie, ran out. We spent two weeks searching for Scottie, going door-to-door, posting fliers - the usual. We purchased a humane trap, set it in our back yard and put in his favorite food to temp him. That is how we got Checkers. (We caught Scottie the day after.)

We could have let Checkers go, since she was feral, but she seemed so calm in the trap that we brought her in and confined her to a bathroom until she could acclimate to her surroundings, and until we could get her to a vet to be sure that she did not have anything that would hurt our other cats. I would go in to visit her, and she would come up to me very shyly, full of trepidation, but willing to be pet and held. These little visits were very precious to me.

We took her to our vet and Checkers was in perfect health, about 6 months old, and, of course, ready to be spayed. She came home and took up residence in the bathroom until she was healed. Having sniffed each other through the bathroom door, there was very little excitement when she joined the rest of the group. Then she met Ike, our pure white deaf cat. It was love at first sight on her part and our little cuddle sessions were now over. She bonded to Ike and I guess she figured she only needed him and the female human was now unnecessary. I was disappointed, but she became Ike's hearing buddy, so I did not push the issue. The only times I got to hold her again were when I was able to trim her claws, or when we moved. These escapades consisted of corralling the poor cat into a small space, donning oven mitts, and wrapping her in a towel or shoving her in a carrier.

The minute she arrived here in the Poconos house, she laid down her boundaries: feed her, let her buddy up to Ike, and let her hide when we come near. We tolerated all this because she was the world's best mouser. No fooling around with the prey, like the rest of the cats; she would just whack it! We started calling her Ms. Soprano.

I believe, and our new veterinarian agrees, that one of those mice that dared come into our house brought this bug that they are all suffering from now. Checkers, being the real assassin, got it the worst. We were able to catch her to take her to the vet only because she had grown so weak. She had pneumonia.

The vet told us we would have to medicate her everyday and really subject her to some intensive care. We knew that once she got her strength back, if she did, she would fight us. It would all be torture to her. She was so sick and she had no fight left in her. I know she told me it was time to go. I know, silly, talking to a cat, but I swear when I told her what we thought about doing and that Ike would be joining her soon (he is 18), she relaxed and gave me a final gift. She let me hold, cuddle and caress her beautiful fur one last time. No more fight.

We buried her under the magnolia tree where we have the others who have passed since we moved here. We have a spot next to her for Ike when he chooses to go. I think he misses her, I know I do.

I know this is a self-indulgent posting. Thank you for reading.

Stray Cat Syndrome

As I have said before, we have cats. By many people's estimation, far too many, but they are all loved and they are all spayed or neutered. The majority of them are also older and have started developing the usual problems of age. In a sense, we are all older in this house and everybody is incapable of kittens.
All of our cats came to us in one form or another. For a while we seemed to have kittens growing in our yard in NJ and we found homes for most and adopted some of them. We only 'paid' for one kitten and that was the first thing my future husband and I bought together. We had just moved in together and we wanted to bring home something. We had only $2 between us, but the pet stand at the Collingswood Auction had stray kittens for only $2. So we agreed on a beautiful calico kitten who that night sat under the middle of the bed and cried her lungs out all night. The cat that I already had when my husband to moved in, Vanilla, was deaf, so he didn't care. Vanilla lived to be 21 years old. The crying kitten, Ms. Kitty, stayed with us for 18 years. They remain in our hearts.


More cats came and stayed and passed on since then and we never paid to adopt another kitten until Gracie, who was a rescue and the organization insisted that making people pay shows that they will be invested in the animal and will not harm them. (Just come to our house!) But two of our boys were strays and they have a different mentality - that mentality is reflected in their feelings about food. The bowls must be full, the food bin must be visible, and if these things are missing, the boys are absolutely sure that they will once again feel like they are starving to death. These 'little' boys are very rotund and there is nothing much we can do to prevent them from eating short of locking them in a room and listening to them cry bloody murder (can you tell we tried?). We let our crew eat dry food at will, and the majority are in good shape, but these two stray boys. They do not eat ALL the time, but the food has to be there ALL the time.

This Stray Cat Syndrome applies to many things, and not only to cats. In our current economic situation, I guess you could say that this mentality applies to money - it should always be there. In my case, I always want water around - I may not drink it, but if a bottle or glass of water is not nearby, I get really thirsty. This feeling applies to cars as well - I do not go anywhere for days on end, but when we only had one car and no car was available to me waiting outside my door, it just felt wrong. I feel this way about my family as well. I may not get to see them very often, but they should always be there. And they are not there anymore and that is wrong.


Thank heaven for my husband and my cats. And our friends whom we do not get to see often enough, but we know are there. And that is comforting.

Adaptations

I have noticed a phenomenon of 'hardening off' for people, animals, and plants during the cold winter months. I know many of our plants were severely damaged by our early, heavy, wet snow storm at the end of October - the plants had not had the opportunity to harden off yet to prepare for the snow. We have many broken limbs and bushes smashed by the weight of the snow caught in the leaves that had not fallen off yet - they just were not ready.

People get used to the cold as well and 'harden off' - we had a warm spell and most people were in shirt sleeves, no coats and shorts in temperatures that would have required a warm jacket on people who are not used to our often-bitter cold. Even now, I find we walk outside without a coat to tend to things that do not require a long time outside, but during the bitter temps we always put a coat on. By way of explanation, current air temperatures are now in the 30's during the day - much easier to handle than the 'teens and below that we have just lived through. We are hardened off. No guarantee the temperatures will not drop again, as snow is again predicted later this week. After all, the stupid groundhog did not see his shadow!

Birds get used to the cold somewhat, but when we have a break in the weather, they go crazy! Nice to walk outside and hear all that type of noise though. Some of the birds we have here have made adaptations that are very puzzling. We have a woodpecker who every year for the past two has tried to build a nest on our old, unused TV antennae. The antennae is, of course, a heavy aluminum type and has probably been attached to our chimney for 50 years. We have not taken it down because it is 'up there' and not hurting anything, and it is so well tethered in place with wires attached to adjacent buildings and other poles that we are afraid of starting a house-of-cards effect. So the woodpecker still tries to build a nest for a potential mate each spring and clangs his head on the metal trying to bore a hole in that thing. Annoying noise, but we admire his tenacity.

Another bird we had last year, and I hope comes back this year, provides moments of amusement for our cats (if you know about cats, moments of anything is an accomplishment - they get bored easily!) This bird is a bit of a clown, trying to sit on one of the guide wires for the power pole in our yard. The wire is attached to the ground at a 45 degree angle, but he still tries to perch on it, sliding down, getting back up, over and over again. On top of that, he is insisting that it is his right and this is his territory and swoops at anything that comes close to him. I am not afraid of him, but I do tend to wait until he flies away before I go outside. I just have these visions of the bird pecking me - I think it is Alfred Hitchcock damage. So I have adapted to him.

Wildlife

Let me start by saying that while we have had close encounters with wildlife, we have not had direct encounters. I am afraid that if some of our friends read about the wildlife here in the Poconos, they will never come to visit. I want to reassure them, but also to state that we are in the mountains! I am pleased that humankind has not destroyed all the natural wildness in the world.

It is still a little unnerving when you have encounters with wildlife, especially if you were raised in the city, like my husband, or in the tourist area of the Jersey Shore, as I was. Wildlife to us very often consisted of an occasional bunny, squirrel, bird, or drunken person. But now, living surrounded by forest areas with trees over 200 years old, we see flora and fauna that we used to see on TV documentaries. We have a nesting pair of eagles in one of our trees! How cool is that!

Deer are a way of life around here. They prance about our property and set off our motion sensored lights regularly. The previous owner 'caged' his prize bushes and flowers to prevent deer from eating them; we took the fencing down and while the deer eat some of our rhododendron bushes and hedges, the plants seem to be okay. My husband hit deer with the car one foggy night last year - the deer was fine, our front end was a mess! Part of living up here, I guess.

Our real first encounter was with a bear. We had come up to our cabin (before we bought the house) on New Year's Eve and we saw evidence that bear had been in the area. Since we did not see him/her/it, we figured get inside and just keep an eye out if we go outside. Later that night, around 8 PM we heard a scratching on our sliding glass door. I asked my husband to look and he said "What if it is the bear?" Well, I speculated that it would not expect to find anyone 'home,' so we would scare it more than it would scare us (Yeah, right!) So he got the flashlight and a broom (I guess so he could sweep it to death) and looked out the patio door where the scratching was coming from. "I don't see anything." But there was a little white paw near the bottom of the door. "Look down." There, outside the door, in 20 degree below zero wind chill, was a gold cat! As my husband opened the door to look closer, the cat walked right in, went into the guest bedroom, onto the bed and made himself at home - happy, purring and treading! The cat we had brought up with us for the weekend gave this intruder the usual greeting - growl, hiss,fitt, all the cat-anger noises!

Now what? This little cat was obviously well fed, used to people - he had to belong to somebody. So we boxed him up and my husband rode around the area to see if anyone had lost a cat. After 2 hours and subjecting this poor cat to inspection by numerous people, he brought the feline home. We named him Little Bear. And we did see the real bear a couple of weeks later - glad we didn't let him in!

We do get mice in the winter in the house - brave little souls with all the cats around. We discovered that our girl cats are much better mousers - the boys just like to watch. There is a comment there, but I will not make it.

Just this week we had another wildlife encounter. We were keeping our extra catfood in a locker outside and it was broken into. Okay, we should have known better, 20/20 hindsight and all, but we usually only do that in the summer. In the winter, we keep the locked container in our garage, and all bagged groceries in canisters or the refrigerator because of the mice. But whatever broke into this locker this week took about 9 pounds of catfood, bag and all. Maybe it was another bear?

Moving In

We decided that we should move up here as soon as possible after closing so my husband could start a job that he had managed to find in-between looking for houses. Have I mentioned that we have cats? I will not tell you how many, but enough that moving takes the planning and coordination of starting a new company. Certain members of the feline family are okay with the moving process, (the 'zen' cats), while others feel that any movement away from their usual spot is an affront to their whole well being and must be punished by any means possible. So we loaded them into their carriers (That was fun! When one sounded the alarm, they all hid!), buckled them into our cars and headed off for three hours of the most ear piercing cries and moans that humans were ever meant to hear. And crying is not the only means of expressing displeasure, and it goes without saying (but I will) that much cleaning had to be done to the interiors of the cars!

So why move them out of the old house first? Because the realtor selling the NJ house said that the only way to get the house sold was to de-cat the house. Now, I kept a very clean house, but we did have litter boxes that some people found objectionable and I understood that. So, welcome to your new home kids!

The Mechanicals and Fix-ups

The house was really move in ready, but everybody who moves into a different house has to put their imprint on it. That means paint, clean, and fix the flaws as you see them. The house when we first moved in had one very small bathroom, so we knew that we would have to add a bath and remodel the original bath to make it a little more 'roomy.' The heater worked, but needed oil. And the previous owner left a washer and dryer in the garage, which worked but had to be dragged back into the house and hooked up.

Quite frankly, there was no real rush to get anything accomplished at the new house - the one our realtor said needed a lot of work - so we concentrated on getting the house in NJ sold. We had to paint that, do some minor repairs, stage the house to sell - and then wait a year to get someone to buy it. What housing downturn? I week after we had listed it on the market, we had an offer from a business man from Guatemala - who promptly disappeared! So our lives for the first year here consisted of shuttling between NJ and the Poconos.