Category: Pets

Lorena went with me to my annual lab test appointment. There was a lady there who had a Dobermann Pinscher service dog. He was nothing short of spectacular. His owner gave him her business card to carry to Lorena, then gave him one to carry to me. The picture is of him delivering it to me. He was a joy to watch. The magnitude of these kinds of dogs was impressed on my like never before. It is one thing to see them in a demonstration, but is a whole other thing to see it all up close and personal. It was also impressed on me that these are not pets but working dogs and they love their jobs.

We are not sure exactly how old Kiwi is, but we know it is in the range of 15-16 years old. She cannot really do a lot of jumping up on things anymore, but she is very healthy. She has a good appetite, is very social, and keeps a precise, clockwork-like schedule. I feed here when I get up in the morning at five or so, then she eats again at noon and six pm. The one thing she does a lot more than she did in the past is sleep. I think that is probably just an artifact of her age. We are pretty sure she is getting toward the end so we are enjoying her as much as possible while she is still here. She sat on our laps in our church meeting (online because of COVID19) this morning.

Lorena took Kiwi down to PetSmart to get her shots and to get groomed. We have been very worried about her. Her fur was getting matted, did not groom herself, and was very lethargic. We thought she was at the end. After getting her shots, she is a new “person.” She cleans herself, has more energy, and has been playing and purring a lot more. She never quit purring but she did it with a lot let less energy. We think the shots she got defeated some kind of condition or bug she might have had. We are truly glad she is feeling better. We don’t like to think about not having her.

Kiwi is getting older and her grooming skills are not what they used to be so Lorena ran her down to the local PetCo to bring her shots up to date. While she was there, she scheduled a bath, grooming, and toenail clipping. Kiwi hates that kind of thing, but she is easier to manage this time than when she was younger. She was given a clean bill of health and even though she is a little out of sorts, she now longer has matted hair, her toenails do not scratch up everything in their path and she smells very nice. Here she is waiting for her ride home. It would have been impossible to let her free in the car when she was younger, but not she sits there nicely. I think the motion of the car puts her to sleep. We plan to do this again every 2-3 months now.

We are not the only ones in our area suffering the effects of cat entitlement! We laughed hard when Gena sent this picture along. Now that Christian is here Kiwi is acting even MORE entitled and we wonder that that is even possible. Maybe we ought to invite the eagles in to have a chat with her. In the end, the only workable solution I could find to actually be able to use the computer is to raise up my monitor a little and make some space between the monitor and the keyboard so she had a place to recline. That does not work so well when one uses their laptop only.

Kiwi was a little suspicious at first. She really never liked to go downstairs, because we never really went there. It took several hours, but when she saw my office had officially moved, she made her way down and installed herself at her usual location on my desk below the monitor.

And of course, whenever we get new boxes, we cannot throw them away for several days because it gets immediately inhabited. Lorena said Kiwi sat slept in the box all day, only coming out for food.

The first gazillion times the neighbor’s tomcat came by for a visit, Kiwi threw a hissy-fit (literally). It has been tapering off for awhile and now is to the point where the neighbor cat, Jack, sits outside the screen door while Kiwi lounges somewhere within view and they stare at each other (or not) for hours on end.

Kiwi gets up at 4:00 AM every morning to do the hard work of being irritating enough to wake us up and keep us awake long enough so that we can lock her into the laundry room to get just a little more sleep. At about 6:00 AM, one of us gets up and feeds her and lets her out of the laundry room. We get a brief reprieve until about about 10:00 AM when the process starts over again. We give her lunch at about 11:30 after which she harasses us to give her part of our lunch until we lock her into the laundry room again so we can have enough peace and quiet to enjoy our lunch. That peace and quiet really does not happen because she makes such a racket through the hollow core laundry room door. After lunch, she takes a nap for another couple hours because she knows she will have to start in again at 4:00 PM so we will feed her on schedule at 6:00. This is our life.

Warren K. took some very cool pictures of the bald eagle that sits on the tree behind our house sometimes to fish down in the Chehalis River below us. He took the picture with his Samsung S8 phone looking through the spotting scope Bob so kindly lent us. We thought the pictures were amazing. The bird certainly was.

I think I have a very good excuse for not getting much done this weekend. Every time I wanted to sit down to the computer to get something done, Kiwi was already in place. The thing I realized when I first took this picture that with respect to the Internet, I am part of the problem. I cannot deny that I love to post cat pictures. Actually, it was a very nice hiatus from technology for a weekend. All I did was eat, read and do a pretty serious workout on Saturday. I am not at Lorena’s level nor do I ever expect to get there, but she is definitely shaming me into pushing a little harder. She did it again today and is well on her way to the next level.

In the meantime, I have new side projects stacking up everywhere. Now that I have my code running and a plan to get it pushed over to a BeagleBone Black and up on the Internet, I need to not let my other side projects get in the way so I can mark at least one more thing as done.  I hope Kiwi does not steal my chair again next weekend.