emmy, originally uploaded by clevermynnie.

Recently, it was a weekday morning and I had just gotten back from running. Ben came downstairs to talk to me while I was stretching and the first thing he said was, "Did you see what our cats did?" I shook my head, and he went on, "What they brought us? Outside our bedroom door?" While I was out on my run, they had thoughtfully deposited a dead mouse there. For us, their big friends who pet and feed them! This is gross but kind of nice, since before we had cats we had an on and off mouse problem, finding mouse droppings around and occasionally a mouse dead from natural causes. We never left anything edible out on the kitchen counters, even in a box or under plastic wrap, because we would find gnaw-marks on it later. So now our mouse problem is more or less solved. Yesterday I came home and walked into the bathroom to find the front two-thirds of a dead mouse, partially cached under the bathmat. I would prefer that they just ate it and I never had to see it, but still, that is a mouse that will not be licking our silverware or pooping on our counters.

I like the aesthetics of cats; they are fast, sleek, playful, and very cute. I grew up with them, so their actions and movements are also reassuring in a way. But what is a little weird to think about is that cats are deadly predators, and most of their 'cute' actions are deadly and brutal, but look cute to us because a housecat is much too small to take down a person, or even a child. They bat at things to see if they are alive, make sounds at birds while imagining crushing the birds' throats in their jaws, savage toy mice. The only exception, for our cats at least, is that they are very cuddly with us, and will snuggle up with us or on our laps and lick us to clean us if we let them, and this is a pack behavior rather than a killing behavior. I'm not saying this is a bad thing either, just one that you can forget the basic meaning of after having cats for a long time.

We got a bird feeder to put outside our kitchen window for the purpose of entertaining our cats. They love watching birds, but there is also a lactating squirrel that keeps coming to steal the seeds. This would be bad if we cared about feeding the birds over the squirrel, but the cats also like watching the squirrel hang down from the roof and pick at the seeds, so I suppose our goal of cat entertainment is being met.

cat tv, originally uploaded by clevermynnie.

On Saturday a stray cat came to our backyard and sat below the window meowing to our cats, who meowed back. She was very small, probably not older than 6 months, white with a gray tail and face. I assume she was a stray, at least, since she was really hungry and didn't have a collar. I felt really sorry for her and put out some food, with the result that she came back Sunday, and yesterday night, and I saw her this morning on our street. I didn't feed her again but now we are seeing her a lot, and it tears at me to imagine something happening to this poor cat. Ben is opposed to getting another cat, and I suppose I am too. He thinks we should call PACCA, the group that takes in strays and sends them to PAWS, their adoption branch. I am sort of worried because PACCA was outed for having something like an 80% kill rate three years ago, though they replaced their management and two years ago I think it was more like 40%. The PSPCA, where we got our cats, doesn't pick up strays or take them. I am really worried that if we turned in this cat she would be euthanized, but on the other hand she is still very young and very cute so I think in a shelter her chances of being adopted would be great, assuming she doesn't have feline immunodeficiency virus or feline leukemia (both of which are apparently somewhat common in strays around here). Plus I suppose if we turned her in she would be fixed and not be a source of more strays in the future. But I feel some hesitation about this; have any of you ever turned in a stray? Or worked in an animal shelter and can give advice on the best thing to do?

cleaning, originally uploaded by clevermynnie.

Recently Ben and I came home from the grocery store to find that the cats had caught a mouse! A live mouse, that is. They have ample training to recognize and pursue mice from their days as strays and all the tiny mouse toys we get them, but unfortunately they fell into that age-old housecat trap... they would put the mouse in their mouths, then when he stopped moving they put him on the floor to see if he's alive. When he runs away, one of them picks him up again. They did this several times, the final time by the refrigerator where the mouse vanished. Whoops.

Sometimes when Ben is petting Blinn, Blinn bites him on the chin while looking really happy. Ben always looks a little put out but also a little amused, and I really ought to be keeping the camera on my desk ready to go for just such a moment.

Yes, I have turned in to someone who posts about their cats, but I think you should know that ours are getting along really well now. I was worried about this, but we emptied out a spray bottle and started leaving them together but spraying them with water when things got too rough. They spent a day very wet and now play a lot but get hissy and growly a lot less. And we'll find them curled up together asleep on the couch, or on the cat bed Ben put under his monitor to steal them from me. At some point he apparently found them sitting together, licking each other's faces, which is very cute.

The first paragraph was a ruse; this entry isn't entirely about cats. I finally finished the last fellowship application I was working on, in a flurry of signatures, paperwork, and express mail. Which means I applied for three, all national and all really competitive. I have to admit that I don't expect to get any; it's just too reminiscent of the first time I applied to graduate school. Some of them, this is the last year I am eligible, and there are some especially for women that I will still be eligible for next year. But applying to them is so very unpleasant, and sort of expensive with all the transcripts and things that you need. It seems like a waste of time that you could be spending on research, but then I wouldn't sneeze at the extra money. There is a Penn fellowship I would be eligible for except that only one person in each research group can have one, and someone else in my lab already has one. But maybe in a few years I can steal it from her.

I like reading pop neurology books, like Phantoms in the Brain, and I just finished Oliver Sacks' classic The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. It is a series of case studies, and one of his comments really took me aback. He mentioned that Shostakovich was examined by a Chinese neurologist who found a metal splinter in his brain, embedded there no doubt sometime during his military career (from which a lot of his best work comes). He apparently refused to have it removed, and claimed that when he tilted his head to the side, he heard melodies which he made prolific use of in his composing. I was unable to find much confirmation of this on the internet, though, which seems weird for such a cool factoid. The same fact is referred to in a 1998 New Scientist article, though. Apparently Sacks has a new book about the neurology of music, which I should really get from the library.

And also, we received our wedding invitations in the mail and they are beautiful; I'm very happy with them. We also got some quasi-engagement photos in the mail, which were a present from my dad, and I want to see if I can scan them in before giving them to people. I wish I could still ninja Chih's scanner.

I have had cats for a week now!

blinn ears, originally uploaded by clevermynnie.

emmy, originally uploaded by clevermynnie.

I love how they are both perfectly happy to fall asleep in your lap while you watch a movie or play WoW. They are getting along ok now, but still play-fighting a lot and both trying to establish some kind of dominance. They seem very comfortable with both Ben and me, and pretty happy.

What didn't quite occur to me about pound cats, though, is that they are not necessarily in good health initially. The pound screens them for illness and such, and treats what it finds, but not that effectively. So Emmy came home with a cat cold, which then passed to Blinn. We took them to the vet near here on Friday, who gave us some antibiotics to prevent any secondary infections. But since then, Blinn is a lot worse. His nose is really stuffy and you can hear him having a hard time breathing out of it, and he makes these little loogie-hawking noises a lot. And he hasn't eaten or drank very much for the last 36 hours or so, which is more worrying. I am trying to get in to talk to the vet right now, but they didn't answer for the hour or so before they opened, and now the line is busy.

On top of that, the vet confirmed last week that they both have some fleas (even though the pound told me they gave them both flea baths!). Before this we had been letting them sleep in bed with us, but I really don't want our nice new mattress to get infested with fleas. We ordered some Frontline stuff that the vet said worked really well, and it sounds like once the cats are uninhabitable to fleas, any that have come to reside elsewhere in the house will die off, because they need to feed off the cat to survive.

Hopefully these are both short initial bumps, and since our cats will be indoor cats, long-term they shouldn't have this sort of problem much.

We brought our kitties home on Monday and Tuesday. Their names are Emmy and Blinn. There are pictures!

( Read more... )

I spent the last three hours at the PSPCA shelter in north Philly, not including the half-hour drive each way, getting cats.

This doesn't mean that I actually have cats. The two cats Ben and I picked out hadn't been neutered/spayed yet, so we have to wait a few days before we can pick them up. They are both totally sweet and adorable, though, and very playful. We got everything we will need for them, at least to start out with, and we are both super excited.

What was frustrating was how disorganized and understaffed the PSPCA was... it was hard to figure out what you were supposed to do--when to fill out forms, which forms, that you had to sign in at the desk, where to put the tags they gave you--and on top of that, it was pretty inefficient, so you would wait for 20 minutes and they would call you up, have you fill out a single piece of paper, and then have you wait for another 20 minutes. Ben had to drive back to our house to get a copy of our lease, so we could prove that we're allowed to have cats. And while we were doing the final paperwork at the end, everyone behind the counter rushed away when someone started yelling "this dog is biting!" from another room (the dog bit an employee, but not badly). A few people were really snippy about the slowness and the staff tried to do their paperwork really quickly so that they didn't just leave without adopting anything, but since I felt bad for them and didn't complain, it was very slow.

The cats we picked out are young, 7 months and a year old. I feel awful for animals in shelters, caged up and just waiting, and I feel especially awful for older cats. On the other hand, my experience has been that it can be really tough to train bad habits out of older cats, and they can have personality problems that are understandable but hard to deal with if they've been seriously abused. So we got young cats, but I feel bad about it. And I spent a lot of the day fighting back tears, because of the sizes of the enclosures they're kept in and their sweet eyes. It was nice, though, while I was waiting in the entrance, I watched a family with a little kid take away this young German shepherd who was just jumping all over the place and so happy to be out, with people. The dog was great with the kid, too, and it was wonderful to see how happy the dog was (and how delighted the little kid was!). I hope our cats are as happy when we bring them home.

I have a couple photos of the fused glass plate my mom helped me make. Here it is, still in the kiln fusing. The colors are a little off because of the heat. We opened the kiln to flash vent it, which cools it without giving it time to vitrify, i.e. form a crystal lattice.

plate in kiln, originally uploaded by clevermynnie.

After that we slumped it, which is to say reheated it in a curved mold so that it's a sort of dish. You can see the shape here:

dish, originally uploaded by clevermynnie.

And if you want to see pictures of my cats, you can ( click here )