Last Tuesday Whit had his staples removed and I’m pleased to report that he did very well. In fact, his behavior was fantastic. For him, that is. As you recall, being anywhere outside his home turf appeals to Whit about as much as being put on a rack and tortured. When a diabolical poltergeist knocked his crate off the end of the exam table on which I was holding him and it hit with a crash that caused anyone of any species within earshot to jump, all he did was shoot out of my arms like a cannonball and
Read more →Originally I was going to post this after a related podcast, but some phone and other challenges really messed up my schedule so the two are out of order. It doesn’t matter contentwise, except that I make a reference in the podcast to posting more details about Whit at some later date. Yeah, I know: more evidence of how anal I am! Having once again proven that, let me begin by saying that Whit had his surgery last week and did extremely well. Even though neither picture is that great, the pre-opt Whit on the left and the post-op
Read more →Wednesday I saw a client at the clinic and while I was there I decided to make an appointment to take Whit in. My thinking was that I wanted the first appointment in the morning when we’d be less likely to have to wait and the waiting and exam rooms fresh and clean and about as free of possibly threatening other animal scents as a veterinary clinic possibly could be. Because the practice is a busy one, I also thought it could be several weeks before such an opening would be available. Wrong. As it turned out, a quirk
Read more →Whit and I are more or less in a holding pattern. I continue to leave Ollie’s crate out and open for him–Whit–to use in hopes of getting him more accustomed to it. He’s been using it more as the evenings get cooler so I plan to get him to the clinic with minimum trauma for some bloodwork soon. His appetite blows hot and cold, but when he’s not interested in eating his canned food, he wants to go out. And when he goes out, he hunts and eats most of the rodent he catches. I think I could make
Read more →The stars in my technological house have never been particularly spectacular, but lately they’ve apparently either been on strike or on vacation. It began a while back when my camera bit the dust and was followed with an upgrade on the blog software than messed up the player for the podcast, followed by another upgrade in the blog software. I’ve started recording the first mystery for free download and then my son, Dan, gave me his old camera which is hardly old. Toss in multiple storm-related power outages, and the result has been METO, i.e. Matron Electronic Technological Overload.
Read more →This week, changes in BeeBee’s physiology and behavior and pondering the answer to the question, “Would she hurt one of the other dogs or the cat?”
Read more →By the time I went downstairs after I’d written and posted my last message, Whit had eaten all the food in his dish. But then the next morning when I went down to the basement to clean his litterbox, I discovered that he’d vomited what looked like all he’d eaten. Because the food he’d vomited was the first I’d offered him that contained actual chunks of fish or meat (which I thought was a step up), I then made an emergency run to the store to pick up some more of the less expensive, store brand pudding stuff. I
Read more →This has been a week of ups and downs. Until noon today, I could have reported that Whit was doing well, showing sufficient enthusiasm for life that I felt encouraged. But then today he showed no interest in his lunch. It’s a miserable hot and humid day here and, had he skipped a meal when he was younger–or if any of the dogs skipped one now–it wouldn’t bother me. But now he’s OLD, and that changes everything. Part of me wants to race down to the basement and dig out the empty cat food cans from the recycling bucket
Read more →Yesterday I picked up an assortment of canned cat foods for Whit when I went grocery shopping. He’s always eaten dried food and was such an excellent rodent-hunter that I tended to think of what I offered him more as supplemental feeding. Even so, I always provided him with what I considered the best, although I admit that I’ve made adjustments several times over the years when new data about feline physiology made it clear a particular era’s best wasn’t as great as we thought it was. But when I went shopping yesterday, the cardinal rule of nutrition was
Read more →This post inaugurates a new blog category, the Whittington Journal. Ironically, in March of this year, I wrote In Praise of Whittington, a commentary that described my feline companion of almost 14 years. At the time, I did this because he was doing very well for his age and I didn’t want to wait until he was gone to write about him. I say “ironically” because two weeks after that commentary was posted, I had to euthanize my old dog, Watson, a loss I’ve yet to put into words. Wats and Whit were so much like an old married
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