missmaryr

My cat Sugar is a diabetic. Ironic, considering the name.

She's bee peeing all over the house- Charlie's bed, the loveseat, the bathroom rugs. So I take her to the vet. The assistant told me it was a Urinary tract infection or diabetes. She rubbed Sugar's belly until she peed and got a sample. When she came back, she needed a blood sample, which she got by sipping a claw. In February when she was spayed, her blood sugar was normal (about 150) but this time it was 718.

Two choices. Start insulin and feed a special diet, or let her go.

I came home with a bag of diabetic cat food, a box of syringes, and a bottle of insulin.

So by this time it was a bit late to start supper so my son Philip and I go to the local Mexican place. It was cloudy when we went in, and pouring rain when we left. I came home wet.

It was smaller than my hand and lay on the porch right off the back door.

But I still don't know which of the cats left the mouse for me.

I totally do not get cats. 

Now, you can say I'm a cat person. I have four of them, all of them rescues. My definition of rescue being that if I didn't take them in, they were going to the pound. 

One of my cats, Chester, is solid black and an old fart at 22. He is blind and had a stroke about six months ago, so he can't really groom himself. I brush him every day and he lives in my bathroom. When he was young, he was the kind of cat that backs dogs out of the yard, and if they didn't back, they regretted it. I saw many a German shepard and similar sized dog running from my duplex yard yelping their tiny brains out, bloodied in some way. Squirrels and birds learned to avoid my yard. A mouse  into the house once. Chester didn't want to deal with it because it was raining (excuse the pun) cats and dogs and the mouse looked like a drowned rat. I had to chase it out the hole it came in from with a broom. (You didn't expect me to kill it, did you?). Then I covered the hole in the cupboard and never saw another mouse. I'm not sure if it was due to Chester or the board I used. 

One is a half-grown kitten, and as Stitches is like any other half-grown kitten you ever met, I won't say more. 

The last two are sisters, Sugar and Spice. (I did NOT name them). Suger is a quiet cat whose mission in life is getting attention from my younger son, who spends most of his time in his room and doesn't let her in because she's peed on some of his stuff. Somehow I think he's got a point. Anyway, she sometimes begs attention from me, my older son, and her sister, smacks the crap out of Stitches if he bothers her (but he has to bother her, otherwise she ignores him) and sucks up to Chester when she's in heat. It doesn't do her any good, as Chester is fixed, but she tries anyway. Suger, to the best of my knowledge, has only seen the outside world from a cat carrier, and if you left the damned thing in the middle of the yard and opened the door, she wouldn't move. I've tried it. 

The oddball one is Spice. 

Spice goes everywhere. On top of the cabinettes, under my bed, in my closet (at least once she's managed to knock down the rods holding my clothes, don't ask me how), in all of my cupboards at one time or another, in my drawers. More than once, I've heard her fussing and opened a shut drawer to find her inside it. Or she'll crawl into the open drawer and get behind it, only to be whacked when I tried to close the door. She's not real bright, because she does it over and over again. 

She tried to get outside when we open the door. Why, I have no idea, because the great outdoors scares her to death. Sometimes she'll stop and eat grass. Other times, she heads straight for the little open spot in my underpinning and goes under the house. 

Once my skinny younger son and I crawled around under the house for about an hour the first time she got under there, and tried to get her out. No luck. One time we caught her in the bushes (I hope she was peeing there instead of under the house) and blocked the opening (which is there so we can turn off the water to the house in the case of a pip breaking). The boys chased her around the house four times. That was one hell of a sight, two teenagers chasing a cat in circles. I didn't bother- my knees object heavily if I run. Eventually I opened the back door and she ran inside. From then on, we just waited until she got hungry enough to come home. 

Well, one evening when she got out, I hear her in the vents. I opened one up and hauled her little self into the house that way. Then we had to go under the house and tape up the ducts with industrial strength duct tape, for once using the stuff for the purpose it was created for. When the expert came to fix it, he told us he couldn't have done better himself and just did a routine check so we didn't waste the money he'd charge for a house visit. 

Today, she pulled off another Houdini stunt. I didn't even know she was outside, but we kept hearing her in my bathroom. We hunted through all the cupboards and such. No Spice, only a lot of dust. Now, my bathtub is a garden bath, meaning simply that it's a damned big tub. On cold days I wantonly waste water filling the thing, sitting in nice hot water and reading until it gets cold. Anyway, I opened the plumber's door that leads to the pipes, and sure enough, there's Spice. I still don't know how the hell she got there, and I am not inclined to crawl under the house and find out. I suspect she managed to find an opening in the underpinning somehow. As I said, the tub is inclosed, so I doubt cold or heat is going to be an issue. The house-which is a doublewide modular home, not a 'stick built' house- has a brick underpinning. So I'm not really troubled. 

But I have to admit, I wish the idiot of a cat would just stay inside!