Kelsey's Imp

Now we are twelve and have perks.

We brought Fonzie home from his cage at a cat show in 1999. We were there just to gawk, not intending to bring anyone home with us, since we had just moved into our new place (soon to be named "Ft. Harrington"), already had three cats and had just gotten our first dog a couple of months before, and didn't really need something new to deal with.

But then we saw this imp in a cage. He had been brought there by people from a cattery in Southern California, but only to keep his Abyssinian littermates company because he wasn't at all show quality. When we first saw him in his cage, his area was deserted because his companions and owners were off being judged in various other venues. We waited until his one of his owners came back, and we asked how much she would ask for him.

We went home shortly thereafter, our checking account $50 emptier and our hearts, as it would turn out, immeasurably fuller. His name was "Fawn-do" after his coat color, but that wouldn't do, so we modified it a little -- not too much, since he was old enough to associate the "Fawn" sound with himself -- to "Fonzie."

When we got back to his new house and opened his cardboard box, he scuttled under the big bed, as was to be expected. The other cats, Boo, Max, and the imperial Oolie, showed mild interest that something might have scuttled under there, but didn't follow. Our new dog, though, put his nose right under the bed, curled tail wagging rapidly.

We feared that he might get his schnozz shredded, or that the new cat would be freaked out by the first dog part he had ever seen, but neither happened. What did happen was that Fonzie came right out from under the bed and greeted Kelsey with a cat-bow: a stretch with the front legs extended. Kelsey was taken aback, but not offended, just curious.

Fonzie was smitten, and remains so to this day, a dozen years later.

Fonzie and Kelsey as youngsters in May, 2000.

It was pretty much a one-way love affair for the next decade, with Fonzie clearly having a fondness for the yellow dog that he never showed (or shows) for any of the other four-footed creatures. He used to follow Oolie around, and would actually actively learn behaviors from The Black Freighter*, but respect and fondness are not the same thing, even for a cat.

Kelsey, though, is an aloof dog, probably predisposed to that by the Akita genes in his mix. While he would tolerate Fonzie's down-the-hall dance ahead of him in greeting, he never actively sought the cat out for anything. But that is starting to change.

Fonzie is now our oldest cat, and he has begun to enjoy a perquisite that other elders of our pride have had: he can go outside with us from time to time. Like Boo before him, in his elder years we are confident that he won't wander outside the Fort's perimeter. (Oolie had us believing that was also true for him for a while in his later years until he found out that he could get to the road via the sluiceway under the barn. I found out about that when I arrived home one day to find him sitting calmly at the end of the driveway, watching cars and trucks speed past.)

Oolie at the potting shed, 2007.

Kelsey and the spaniels, of course, are always with us outside. The spaniels generally are comfy on the deck furniture cushions, or in the shade. Kelsey, bless his heart, can never stop being the guard dog, and is almost always on vigilant patrol. When Jax isn't asleep outside, he plays Lieutenant Jax to Captain Kelsey, following him by a respectful dog-length.

Captain Kelsey and Lieutenant Jax on patrol.

But now Fonzie has joined the outside group for the summer. Last weekend, he became the Lieutenant on patrol with his big yellow pal. It was hilarious and heartwarming at the same time, as these photos (best viewed at a larger size by clicking on them) hint:

Checking scents from the North.

Here, I'll mark this rock for you...

... and I'll mark this for you, too...

... and I'll mark this for me.

Two of a kind.

Of that last photo, an internet acquaintance from the Ukraine via the "Flickr" photo service says, "They look like brothers." Yes, they do.

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* The instance of Fonzie learning something from Oolie that Diane and I still shake our heads over was this: Oolie was a very, very clever cat. One of the doors to our main bathroom is a sliding pocket door. One day, soon after we had moved here, I watched Oolie try to figure out how to open it -- and eventually, after about ten minutes of pulling and pushing on various parts of the door, he found that if he put a paw under the door, palm up, and gained purchase on the bottom with his claws, he could pull the door open. Fonzie eventually figured out the same trick, but only after watching Oolie do it several times. None of the other cats has ever figured it out.

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Two Years On, and Still Flickering in the Corners of Our Sight

Keeping warm by hiding the white parts.

Today, as tears fall from my eyes, I sit and remember all our great times.
The years have gone by so fast, it's hard to believe that already this much time has passed.
You seem to have missed the last two years.
But now I know that you have seen more of time itself than I have.

... from "Two Years" by Amy Renee Banker, adapted only slightly.

Pinup for Mojo

She is older now. Her black fur has faded in places, revealing its underlying red. She has a few notches in her ears that she didn't have four years ago. Her trust is not so simple as it was, and not so surrounding as before.

But trust of a kind is still there, if changed, and her sweetness remains unbittered, and her inclination to show her secret places in the hedges to people she trusts has not changed.

She is White Socks. She is Bothy Cat.

(I'll let Mojo himself explain the "Mojo" in the title of this post... if he wishes.)

While We Wait for Sherwood to Have a Thought Worth Communicating...

... a Diversion:

Fonzie on May 7th, 2010


Doggerel for a Cat

Who knows where his mind is,
Who knows where he goes?
Who knows what he’s thinking,
Who knows what he knows?

Deep thoughts about the future,
Or contemplating, if he can,
The foibles of his keepers,
And the final days of Man?

Perhaps he’s astrophysics’
Or mathematics’ sage,
Viewing in this corner
Hadrons' impact in the voiding gauge.

Or maybe he can see into
The chaos of our past,
Mistakes that litter pathways
That our curiosity outlasts.

Or maybe he’s just looking at a wall.

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Lift a Spoon of Vanilla Ice Cream with Me Today

The Black Freighter and his midlife bear, 2002.

Sometimes, April isn't the cruelest month. February can be.

It's been a year today, and still I will often reach for vanilla ice cream at the store before I remember with a sting that he's not here for it. We still, and probably always will, see him in a shadowed corner at the edge of vision, or on the other side of a window.


Oolie, shantih, shantih, shantih.

(With apologies to T. S. Eliot who, at least as Old Possum, would probably understand.)

Fonzie Dreams

Old Fonzie on a chill Fall evening in Ft. Harrington, 2009. He may be dreaming; he may be dreaming of his old friends, long gone; he may be dreaming of the orange no-tail, or of his protector and mentor, Oolie.

Or he may be dreaming of dinner. Hard to tell.

He is solitary among a houseful of animals; he is gregarious in a home that has many visitors; he is slippery among the dimensions.

He is simple. He is not simple. He is who he is.

200 Days On

I had some vanilla ice cream last night. I actually got to eat it all, but didn't get to hear the purr.
Not a trade I would make voluntarily, all things considered.

100 Days On

Oolie, graphic effects by Photoshop.

Thursday marked 100 days since this remarkable cat wandered away into a place where I can't communicate with him. What's remarkable about that is that I noticed the occasion. I've lived with more than a dozen mammals who have pre-deceased me, and the only ones whose anniversaries of departure stick with me like this are of the two-footed variety.

Except for Oolie, the Black Freighter, evidently.

And his absence continues to have odd repercussions among the remaining cats, well beyond what we'd expect. Oolie was, unquestionably, the top cat, the ace, the big deal, the boss. Never mind that it had been years since he was physically capable of beating up anybody... his aura and attitude was all that he needed to intimidate. When he vanished, three of our five remaining cats were in a pickle: who's the boss? They still haven't figured that out! The clear favorite is big Alnitak, the tall Maine Coon with a sometimes nasty attitude -- but the other two ace-programmed males, Finn and Al's nephew, Cooper, don't seem to be willing to let that happen by fiat. There isn't constant bickering, but there isn't the common deference that there was toward Oolie.

And his absence continues to have unsettling repercussions among the remaining two-footed critters around here, too. We see him all the time, striding around the periphery of our vision.

It's Been a Rough Month for Tuxedo Kitties

The Clinton White House cat, Socks, was euthanized this morning in Maryland. He was probably about 20 years old, and had been suffering from cancer of the mouth and jaw for quite a while.

Given what happened to another tuxedo kitty earlier this month, ronniecat, I suggest that you enclose Veronica and Mojo in bubble-wrap until February is over.

Home Port

Voyage complete.

Oolie, 1995 - 2009

Raul, aka Oolie the Black Freighter

The smartest, most dominant cat I have shared a home with in the past 50 years died yesterday. How he went was the last, greatest demonstration of his strength and will.

Even at the relatively advanced age of 14, he was still sleek, strong, and massive -- and, at least in his mind, the dominant member of the pride. Diane and I can't remember him ever being sick, even with a sniffle.

But, two days ago, he just seemed to stop. He didn't eat all day, and, more ominous, didn't groom himself. When the lethargy continued into yesterday morning, we called the vet, and she wanted to see him as soon as possible in the afternoon.

When we arrived, she was noticeably concerned immediately with the tautness of his abdomen -- and by the fact that he hadn't fouled his carrier on the half-hour drive to her place. He always did that. She took him directly to x-ray.

You wouldn't have to be an expert to read the film. His lungs and abdomen were crowded with tumors. His lungs, particularly, were so full of them that I am astonished that he could still breathe. He was miserable, there clearly was no path to amelioration, so the vet gently ended it for him then. Like his friend Max before him, he exhaled his last breath against my wrist.

While his last general checkup in October showed nothing awry, the cancer must have been developing for quite a while. Toward the end, it must have been severely weakening and painful -- and yet he never showed any outward manifestation. Until it overwhelmed him two days ago, that is, and he just stopped. There was never any shortage of strength and will in that cat.

His portrait above (taken in 2005) makes him look fearsome and menacing, and I'm sure that's how he thought of himself most of the time. But his favorite pastime of all, for his entire life, was to rest on his back against a human chest, purring:

Diane and Oolie on a peaceful winter day. (Max is there, too, on a pillow at the top.)

Oolie disdained almost all of the other animals in Ft. Harrington, far preferring his own company most of the time, but he made exceptions. The most noteworthy exception was Max, the quirky gray Burmese, who was his lifelong buddy until Max died two years ago. Max was three years older than Oolie, and took to him right away on the summer day that we brought Oolie into our house in Sunnyvale. After Max disappeared from his life, Oolie seemed to become even further withdrawn from the four-footed society.

The temptation to say something treacly at this point is nearly overwhelming, so I'll just say that this is probably how I will remember Oolie most frequently, and leave it at that:

Oolie (left) and Max in Summer, 2003

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Why I Couldn't Make the Bed This Morning

Forty-six Seconds You'll Never Get Back

Alnitak's Having Fun in Containers Day

(With apologies to Mojo el Jefe for appropriating his posts' title format.)

This is a big part of the reason we put up with them. Within just a few minutes this afternoon:

UPS delivers new nesting materials to Al. It looks like his nephew, Cooper, is about to push him off the bed once he gets all nice and comfy, though.

HALP! QUICKPAPER!!

Al's mobility is temporarily hampered.

Fonzie

Fonzie has his own manifold of reality's dimensional geometry. This napkin box, for example, is perfectly adequate for him in most nodes.

Another interpretation, of course, is that Fonzie is nuts.

I Didn't Plan on This Post

This blog is supposedly written by an astronomer, and is supposedly in part about astronomy, but you wouldn’t know it recently without the verbiage around its Blogger frame.

A historically significant Galaxie.

I really am working on a couple of big posts about science and community colleges’ ways of wrenching it into relevance for our students. Multi-spectral views of the “grand design” spiral galaxy M74 are in the offing here in SherWords, for example, and in the works are guest blogs from electrifying explainers of modern Meteorology and Geology. Let’s hope that the latter guest appearances happen before global warming and/or earthquakes kill us all. (The astronomer is holding a major asteroid impact back as a trump card.)

But, meanwhile, Fort Harrington just insists on continuing to happen. And, particularly, its short, supposedly “dumb” denizens insist on being cute in ways that can’t be ignored, unless you can ignore a baseball bat applied to your nose.

You think being cute is a once-in-a-while thing? HAH. These critters work on it full time, and sometimes perversely. For example, the last post in this blog was a presumably unusually-cute picture of Emma. Yesterday, she just had to trump that with the prettiest picture ever taken of her, seriously:

Emma, January 2nd, 2008

And, the day before that (New Year’s Day), Guinness and the still-acclimating Finn McCool just had to practice their Hallmark audition:

Finn McCool and Guinness celebrate New Year's Day, 2008.

And, yesterday, even the chickens had to get into the “You just TRY to leave this out of your precious blog, pinky!” game, notably the remarkable Specks…

Speckles surveys the deck rail after the solstice.

… and Bratty, the Black Giant.

Bratty perseveres, kicking dirt to uncover worms, a month after the loss of her sister.

Bratty’s picture is both warm and heartbreaking to Diane and me. Pepper was her nearly identical sister, and (if you can believe it), Pepper’s eyes were even more startling in their warmth.

Detritus

Eye of Guinness.

Digital photography has its own extravagance, a profligacy, an excess of images born of exuberance that spins its own dust bunnies. While I’m working on a few more significant entries in this blog, I thought I’d grope around under my virtual couch and splash a few images up here that have languished at the tail-end of my Nikon’s memory chip for the last month or so. Nikon-bunnies, as it were or was or is.

Murk!

The above is a really, really bad picture of me. At the right side of the frame, you can trace out the arc of my left arm, in the left-center, you can see the black circle of my camera’s lens, in the upper-left you can sort of see my gray-headed, um, head.

… but, if you zoom out a little …

… you can see that it’s actually a pretty good picture of the Little Prince, the Magic One, the Guinness!

This is the season for…

… the holly…

… and the (English) ivy!

(Holly and Ivy are long-time and exuberant dominant ladies of Ft. Harrington’s front yard.)

And it’s the season for something that I wish everybody all the time anyway: peace on your earth, and good will to all your men and women and children, and thank you for visiting here, God bless you.

HAPPY- HAPPY to you all! (And joy-joy, too!)

The main man of the Fort, the Kelsey, the ferocious and the virtuous, naps. A lot.

And he wishes you the best for the holidays and the new year.

Guinness-the-Kitten

Oh... "hai," as they say.
Click on any image to see a larger, higher-resolution one.

More than ten years ago, I was active in campus "governance" (read: political) activity at DeAnza. In 1994 - 95 I was President of the faculty Senate (Diane has threatened -- no, promised -- to divorce me if I ever go back to that sort of thing, but that's another story.) During my time in the Senate, I grew to appreciate and enjoy the company of a Senator from the History Department who is a Burmese cat breeder by avocation.

At that time, our beloved, tiny Max (who was a non-show-quality tossoff from a breeder in Southern California) was little more than a kitten, and this History prof was one of the very few faculty members I could freely and happily talk to about this incredibly cute thing that my little cat did yesterday! The three of you who are cat people know what I mean by that; the other four may want to skip this blog entry entirely.

Yes, SherWords readership appears to be up to seven.

Anyway.

Whatcha got?

Fast forward a decade and more:

When Max died after his long battle with renal failure earlier this year, I told my colleague about it, just because she knew Max vicariously. Soon thereafter, a little miracle appeared in one of her litters: a sable (very dark-brown) tiny guy afflicted with pectus excavatum, or "flat-chested kitten defect." While severe at first (my friend said they weren't sure for several weeks whether he would survive or not), he grew out of it well, and the only continuing setback seems to have been that he was about a month behind his litter-mates in development -- but stayed just that far behind, as though he had just gotten a late start and then charged along at a normal pace. (Subsequent meticulous examination by the Ft. Harrington vet shows nothing of concern -- his heart and lungs have developed normally, and the only slight remaining manifestation is that his chest is a little flatter than a normal kitten's... which serves to make his little round Buddha-belly even more comical.)

I like this big ape's chair. A lot.

When she was sure that the little guy was going to survive -- and pretty sure that he would be a normal, healthy cat -- she gave Ft. Harrington a call. Clearly, she couldn't breed, show, or sell the kitten, but she wanted to place him someplace she felt comfortable with. She asked us to take him.

We had to think about it for a long time. Thirteen, maybe even fifteen seconds later, we said "yes." His name is "Guinness," because of his color and to continue the Irish theme of his orange mate-in-newness here at the Fort, Finn McCool.

Unlike Finn, Guinness had absolutely zero trouble melding in with the menagerie. His obvious baby-ness probably helped him a lot, even with the dogs, but the rapidity with which he became comfortable with everyone was just astounding. We did the same preps we did for Finn -- isolation, introducing the other animals one at a time after he felt comfortable in his room, etc. etc. -- but trashed that routine after about two days. There was no point; he was just confident and accepted by everyone within 48 hours.

Two days after Guinness arrived (left to right: Cooper, Guinness, Alnitak).

He took a quick, special affinity to the Maine Coons, Al and Cooper. Comical at first because of the crazy difference in size, it sort of makes sense in hindsight: he's a kitten, and those two huge, gentle, fluffy cats may have had (and continue to have) a mom-like attraction for him.

Al, Guinness, and Cooper.

He even tries to nurse them sometimes. When that happens, they just gently push him away, but not very far.

My, what big... oh, to hell with the teeth. Your mouth is bigger than my head!

Breakfast with the bookends (Alnitak, Guinness, Copernicus.)

Even Oolie, the Black Freighter, grudgingly thinks he's ok, maybe.


But his special friend is turning out to be Finn McCool. Finn is still young enough (at about 15 months, but nobody's really sure about that) that having somebody to play with in a kitten way is a fun thing -- and it's helping Finn's long adjustment.

Buddies in a cat tree.

Not that Finn is having a bad time -- he's not; it's just taken him a while. Finally figuring out that the 'Coons are too tough to be messed with probably helped a lot:

On my command... unleash heck!

... but we're still not particularly happy that he likes to ambush poor Jax:

Why doesn't that orange cat like me? Everybody likes me!

But, for now, Guinness and Finn are the best of buddies, and that's going to be good for...

... everybody.

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