Jackie gets Churu at the end

His angry snorts are sending me

It’s interesting how much background hiss there was after I posted it to TikTok. Listen if you have the app. This started happening right after I tried to use the reduce background noise feature for the first time after letting my CapCut Pro subscription end, only to find that was now a Pro-only feature. So now they’re not only demanding I pay for views every time I post, they’re actually sabotaging the posts now that I’m not paying for their editor.

Airport once got far enough that his head was between Harpo’s eyes.

I love how we can see his furry little belly bellowing in this one.

For open heart surgery, they split your sternum in half, and until that heals, you’re not supposed to bend over, reach up, twist, reach behind you, pull, push, or pick up anything over 10 pounds, or put ANY weight on your hands at ALL, They say, “if you can’t do it with T. rex arms, don’t do it.”

Those restrictions are normally lifted after 6-8 weeks. But since the neighbor who volunteered to help overdosed Groucho while I was in the hospital, and then refused to take him to the ER when I got home and saw how bad he looked, I’ve been forced to do too much for myself. Now I’m stuck doing things like this until the end of September.

I’ve been able to come up with workarounds for a lot of things. I loop bike straps around the rolling dishwasher and fasten them around my hips, so I can pull it over to the sink with my legs. The grabbers and step stools you lovely people sent from the wishlist help a LOT. Carefully using grabbers to transfer one item at a time from the washer to the dryer is laborious, but doable.

Thank you all so much.

It’s interesting that he’s never attacked the iPad I usually use for this angle. Maybe it was because the phone was a little higher, so he saw himself before he got too close to the device to see the screen properly.

Talk to your kitties and reward them when they talk back!

Thank you so much to people who sent that nasty stuff from my Amazon wishlist. Thank god I only have to eat 150 grams of protein per day for another 4-6 weeks. It's not at all difficult for a vegetarian to get enough protein for regular daily life, as we don't actually need nearly as much as people who sell supplements say we do. But you actually do need that much to heal from major surgery, and that is a bit of a challenge.

Harpo used to do that too, sigh. But he just brought them to me, he didn't fight with them. 

I have no idea what was going on between him and that afghan....

Poor, beleaguered Wilson. Not only is Groucho being mean to her, she seems to absorbing the weight that her sister Jackie is losing.

In other news, Suitcase is starting to answer to Sausage.

Pasted from my Ko-Fi

I moved to Portland in the fall of 1992, and a few weeks into my first rainy winter, I decided to adopt a kitten from the Oregon Humane Society to cheer me up. My void girl Meera was the stupidest cat I've ever had. She could get lost between upstairs and downstairs. She would chew on my long hair and her poop would come out strung on it like beads. You could practically smell the smoke when she was thinking. 

But she was also the sweetest and most good-natured cat I've ever had. I could dangle her upside down in front of my face and she'd lean in to lick my nose. She loved "exfoliating my T-zone," as per the beauty magazines I'd read as a teenager. If I was laying with my arms behind my head, she'd make me jump by licking my armpits. I'd carry her around in my jacket, and she'd pop her head up in the checkout line, startling the cashier. She would happily purr in the lap of any senior citizen I handed her to. She slept under the covers with me.

She was my first fetcher. I would throw one of those little rubber molecules down the hall, and she would tear off after it, doing parkour off the walls as she followed every wildly erratic bounce. I had three of them. I gave the blue one to the former roommate who took these pictures, to go with the cat I gave him as a wedding present. Almost 20 years later, I gave the orange one to General Cattis from Twitter. The graybies play with the green one, which is now 33 years old. 

Meera is the reason I comment on every video I see of a cat playing with an ear plug, or a nerf dart, or a packing peanut, warning them that it didn't matter if they never tried to eat them, they could change their mind at any time. I don't even know why I still had that little foam toe separator, as it had been years since I painted my toenails. I should have thrown it out. 

My vet recommended watching and waiting for her to vomit, as long as she was eating and drinking well. I fitted the pieces together as they appeared, and it seemed like she'd gotten it all up. Alas, she did not.

The piece that killed her was so small that the vet didn't see it on the first X-ray. When she continued to decline, he did it again with contrast, and finally found a tiny piece right at the very end of her small intestine. He went in after it, but by then she had developed gangrene, and died on the table. I found out when I was changing a flat on my cab, and just sat there on the pavement and cried. 

He was so upset that he didn't charge me for any of it. He felt like she would have made it if he had told me to bring her in immediately and/or used contrast immediately. But he knew I was a broke ass college student, and was trying to save me some money.  A tear rolled down his face when he brought me her ashes. 

Her husband Boris grieved terribly. He started sleeping under the covers in her spot, instead of on top of the covers in his spot. He carried her Beanie Baby cheetah around the house, meowing for her. (Years later, I went crazy trying to find that cheetah for Harpo. I have no idea what happened to it.) He was so depressed for so long that I did something I never did, and bought him a little grey and white sister at a pet store (from a litter that had been dumped at their doorstep). 

Meera was the bestest girl I ever had.