Average Jane

Average Jane's February Photo Challenge Day 17: Time

For Toby, time is marked by two vitally important events: Doggie Breakfast Time and Doggie Supper Time.

Doggie Breakfast Time is immediately after he wakes up, whenever that might be. Doggie Supper Time is around 6:00 p.m. or so.

For each mealtime he gets a half cup of Nulo Chicken and Brown Rice, which is a woefully inadequate portion as far as he's concerned. The veterinarians who developed the serving recommendations beg to disagree, chubby.

Average Jane Volunteers

I wrote a post at BlogPaws about some of my volunteer work. You can find it here: 

Volunteering With An Animal Rescue Organization

Average Jane's Halloween

First of all, it's NaBloPoMo or National Blog Posting Month. That means I'll be posting every day in November. I've been doing this every year since it started, so I figured I might as well continue.

We had an extremely low-key Halloween this year. Against my better judgment, I bought a bag of candy. We got exactly two trick-or-treaters. So we'll have plenty of individually-wrapped Twizzlers to enjoy at the movies this holiday season.

I didn't exactly decorate, but I put out a number of decorative open flames.

Toby lay in the Día de los Muertos-themed bed he stole from the cats and helped me watch for trick-or-treaters. Not really. He just slept.

Xena and Velvet decided to demonstrate how beautiful black cats look against my new comforter.

My husband got us a pizza and watched the Chiefs game while I surfed the net and kept an eye out for the non-existent trick-or-treaters. Finally, my lack of sleep from the previous night combined with the pizza carbs to send me to bed by 9:00 p.m.

And that was our Halloween. How was yours?

Average Jane Gets Crowded Out

When my sister posted this photo of my niece asleep with her favorite cat, Hutch, wrapped around her head, it made me realize I had a post in the making about the various pets that are always competing with me with for bed space.

In general, I have no objection to sharing my bed with any of the other beings in the household. Well, my husband does snore more than I'd like...

Anyway, that can mean as many as three cats and a dog jockeying for space on a queen-sized bed with me and sometimes my husband as well, depending on his sleep schedule. Fortunately there's never a fourth cat in that equation. Xena and Trillian take turns because they can't stand the sight of one another.

Toby is always the first to join me. He curls into a compact ball and presses himself against me. If I'm lucky, he keeps his back to me. Otherwise, I get his feet poking me at random intervals when he stretches in his sleep. Either way, he tends to cause me to move closer to the edge of the bed than I'd prefer.

Xena likes to cuddle. She especially loves to settle her great bulk into my husband's armpit and drape herself onto his shoulder, but she'll accept me as a substitute if he's not available. It's kind of nice to be able to hug her while I'm sleeping, but she's awfully warm. She also likes to get under the covers near our feet, which is where she was when I woke up today.

Velvet usually lingers around my head - all the better for licking my hair when she gets the urge. I wish she wouldn't.

Dr. Jones spends all day sacked out on the bed by himself, so he doesn't seem to feel as compelled to lie there when we're there. Still, he'll occasionally come up and settle himself on my chest.

Trillian is an even rarer visitor, but she'll go right for your chest as well. She really prefers to interact with people who are sitting up, though, because she likes to be held and snuggled.

So that's why I have dark circles under my eyes every day. Just kidding! That's genetic.

No, the pets are really fine most of the time. I'm sure I'd sleep somewhat more restfully without them, but I'd miss them. Every time I stay in a hotel room, I wish I had at least one cat to keep me company.

How about you? Do you allow pets on the bed at your house or keep them somewhere else while you sleep?

Something to Think About from Average Jane

By now you've probably seen the story about the dog that survived an attempt to euthanize him. This kind of thing is not completely unheard of -- a similar story made the rounds in 2006.

In both instances, people came out of the woodwork wanting to adopt the "miracle dog."

Well I have some news for those people: you can accomplish the very same "miracle" any day of the week just by visiting an animal shelter and taking your pick.

Sure, it's amazing when an animal defies the odds and manages to escape certain death. But what about the other 3,999,999 dogs and cats that are euthanized every year in the United States? Is an uncanny resistance to poison your only criterion for choosing a pet? It shouldn't be.

If you want a dog or cat and can provide it a good home, don't wait around for something extraordinary to happen. Go to your local shelter and meet the animals. If you feel strongly about adopting from a no-kill organization, that's great: you'll be freeing up space for them to pull animals from local kill shelters.

It would be wonderful if we lived in a world where every homeless pet got the kind of news coverage that would prompt hundreds of people to want to take them home. In the real world, we have no choice but to go looking for each special pet on our own.

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!