Average Jane

Average Jane's Household Pets

The neverending dramas of pet ownership continue to play out at our house.  In the last week:

• Our 17-year-old cat known as The Possum was back at the vet for digestive difficulties, the details of which I will spare you.  Almost $200 later (not including the liquid medicine that she absolutely loves...NOT!), she's back to her usual self.
• In an effort to keep the catbox-room funk from lunging up the basement stairs and assaulting everyone who enters the house, I installed a cat flap in the door that leads down to the basement.  When it came to manipulating the flap so they could go in and out, all four cats were, as they say, "ate up with the dumbass."  They could not grasp the concept of pushing the flap aside with their empty little heads, so I ended up removing the flap.  Now I have a closed basement door with a plastic-framed hole in it that allows the basement odor to waft upstairs more gradually.  Sigh.
• My bad luck with betta fish continues.  During a routine water change, my fish began to act distressed - for no reason that we could determine - and he died within a few hours.  I'm ready to throw in the towel as a fish owner but my husband was determined to soldier on.  He bought a new little betta on Monday afternoon and it has already taken up residence in the old tank with the faux jaguar skull.  Let's hope things go well with him.

Average Jane Flushes Her Triops (Already)

When I got on work on Monday, my desk lamp had been turned off and there was no discernable life in the triops tank. The water was scummy and disgusting and it developed a "bad day on the wharf" odor when the lamp began to warm it up again.

There was only one thing to do: pour the whole mess down the toilet and then decide whether or not to try again. I flushed the contents of the tank (except for the castle and the sand) and set it on my bottom bookcase shelf to dry out. There should still be plenty of eggs in the muck and I have half of the original packet of eggs in my drawer.

Now I just need to decide if I really want to go through with the experiment again. I could take it home and grow them in a place where I have control over the rampant light turner-offers. Perhaps I'll give that a shot and see what happens.

By the way, thank you to everyone who complimented me on the Sea Monkey Journals. They were what inspired me to start a blog in the first place, even though it took me several years to actually start blogging.

Average Jane Hisses and Snarls

I love my cats, and yet today and other days I hate them, too.

As I've mentioned before, my husband I have have four cats. We moved into this house with three, which was a blended cat family of the one he had and the two I had when we met. Since then, his cat had to be put to sleep, but we inherited one more after the deaths of each of our mothers. That leaves us with four filthy little beasts inhabiting and befouling our living space.

Because I grew up in a farm environment, I never really understood what an indoor cat could be like. Our cats were all barn cats and were only allowed in the house for short periods of time. As soon as I moved out on my own, I got an adorable black, male kitten. He was no trouble at all - so little at first that he could stand in the palm of my hand. After a while, he seemed lonely, though, so I got a little female, tabby kitten. Her mother had been an alley cat, so maybe that was the problem, but she had a difficult time grasping that it was not okay to pee on everything in my apartment. My cool, Jetsons-like midcentury sofa? She peed down each buttonhole on the cushion until the whole couch was irretrievably ruined.

I'll skip the damage they (come to think of it, probably she) wrought upon various other apartments and condos and move ahead to our current house. From the moment we moved in, we embarked on a de-carpeting plan that is nearly complete. We are lucky enough to have hardwood floors throughout most of the house, so every carpet and pad went out the door, mainly to discourage the cats from peeing in the corners.

Even though I knew how the cats were about carpeting, I still foolishly put an area rug in my dressing room. The room is a small bedroom space that I've made over into a walk-in closet, and I thought it would be nice to have a rug to stand on as I dressed. BIG mistake! I'd been noticing lately that the offwhite rug was getting more and more stained-looking. Today I figured I'd go ahead and throw it out since it's trash day anyway. Rolling up and removing the rug led me to formulate Jane's First Law of Cat Misbehavior: "If you've caught a cat doing something bad once, she's probably been doing it secretly her whole life."

So there we are. Four aging, deliberately-incontinent cats vs. two humans struggling desperately to keep their house from smelling like the big cat exhibit at the zoo. No wonder the cats are always so snuggly and purr-y. It's the only thing that balances out the funk they produce on a daily basis.

Average Jane Welcomes A New Pet

Last night my husband and I went to Petsmart (which always makes me think of the line from Army of Darkness, "Shop smart - shop S-Mart").  But aaaanyway, we were there so I could buy another in a long line of gigantic, expensive bags of Feline Science Diet for Ancient Cats.  (Have I mentioned we have four cats?  And yes, that is too many except when you consider them individually.)  This time Petsmart had a kind of cat food that promised fewer hairballs and less shedding (read: less puking), which sounded like an excellent benefit to me.  For the past few days, the cats had been subsisting on a box of Meow Mix from the local convenience store that I'd purchased so they wouldn't starve after their good food ran out on Monday.  Since that's pretty much the equivalent of feeding a human McDonald's at every meal, I thought it was high time to switch the cats back to something healthier.

So we walked into Petsmart (at this point, the order of events is all scrambled, so just work with me) and immediately came upon a big display of beta fish, the fish formerly known as Siamese Fighting Fish.  My stepmother has two of them, and I'd been considering getting one for quite some time.  I mentioned as much to my husband, who was suddenly seized with the desire for us to get one now!  I knew I had a fishbowl at home, so I told him to pick one out, get some food and gravel, and meet me at the checkout.

By the time I emerged from the cat section with the aforementioned cat food and 20 pounds of kitty litter, he'd selected a blue beta with a purplish-red head and some red details on his fins.  An employee had assured him that our filtered water at home would be safe for the fish right away, but my husband wasn't convinced.  In five minutes, he had already thoroughly bonded with this particular fish, and he wasn't about to take any chances.  Of course, I was thinking, "Well, if this one dies, we'll just keep getting new ones until we get it right."  I could see that it would be insensitive to say so out loud...more than once or twice anyway.

We took the fish in its little plastic cup and set it in the cupholder of the van while we ran our other errands.  As soon as we got home, I began searching for the fishbowl that I had last seen at Christmastime filled with pinecones.  It was nowhere to be found, so I moved on to Plan B, which was to take the cats' toys out of the big, recycled glass jar near the front door and clean it up for the fish to live in.  The added bonus of dumping out the cat toys was that the cats had a big old party, especially when they came across the catnip toys that had been out of their reach for some time.

Meanwhile, my husband hit the Internet for beta care information and worked himself up enough about our water quality to refuse to put the fish, by now dubbed "Angel," in the new container until more supplies could be purchased.  I thought the fish looked pretty miserable in 8 ounces of water, but the decision was clearly out of my hands.

It was really rather cute to see my husband start acting like a nine-year-old with a new animal buddy.  Sure, he loves the cats, but the fish deserves only the best!  By the time I got home this evening, Angel had been installed in his new bowl, along with a filter ("so we won't have to change the water so often"), a thermometer ("to make sure his water's warm enough") and some silk plants in which he can hide.  The fish looks much happier now, so I guess it was all worth it.  And the cats?  No yakking today as far as I can tell.  Everybody wins!