A couple of great cat-related links have come my way recently. One is to a story about a lady who bought a boat to lodge all of the strays cats she was taking car of. In her case she lived on the waterfront so the cats were kept close by. Check out the Cat Boat. Me, I don’t live on the waterfront, so my cats have to settle for lying around on top of my car all day.

And here’s a link to Fatboy Slim’s kitten video. I feel sort of sorry for all the kittens, they don’t all look happy about their costumes, but hopefully they got paid well! Anyway, it’s quite cute, enjoy it!

They are always hungry. My daughter will feed them and then 10 minutes later they are able to convince my husband that they haven’t been fed in YEARS!

Now Lilah, my calico love cat, who I found STARVING and skinny as a rail in the Parque Kabah, figured out long ago that she could tear a corner off a newly-bought bag of cat food and have herself a little snack. So we are very careful to immediately pour all new bags of cat food into a large plastic bin with a lid on it.

Well the other night I heard a loud crash downstairs and when I went to see about it I found Lilah had knocked over the plastic cat food bin, knocking the lid off in the process. She was halfway inside the sideways bin with her butt and tail sticking out and she was snacking away. The other cats were all lined up patiently waiting for her to give them a chance to pig out. Damn cats!

Ok, so I took the wrong cat to the vet. I didn’t take the fat old lady cat who’s peeing all over. I took the young cute one who needed shots. But at least I took one of them. I’ll take the other one in a day or two. Around here someone always needs to go to the vet.

Our vet is actually two vets, two married born-again Christian vets. And their office is filled with born-again employees and little born-again signs in Spanish which say things about “being one with him” and “walking in his light”. I won’t say anything.

Regardless of when they were born these vets are very serious about helping the street animals in Cancun. Their policy is that they will neuter any cat we find on the street for free (or for a tip). We’ve brought them a lot of street cats so far, including one which we later learned wasn’t a street cat (oops). But there are always more cats around ready to make more unwanted kittens, so it will never end.

The cat I took today is one we found with a broken leg. She was about 4 months old when we found her and her femur had been snapped right in half. The poor thing ended up with a pin in her hip for a month. And as soon as she recovered from that ordeal (and she has recovered very well) she went into heat, so we had to do an emergency spay on her just to get her to quit all that horny yowling!

Today I took her to the vet because she had a string from one of her internal stitches sticking out through the spay incision scar. It was very weird. We noticed yesterday that the string was sticking out so today we decided to ask the vet to deal with it, which she did by just cutting it off (well now I coulda done that, I think). But while I had the vet’s attention I got her to give this kitty her vaccinations. So now that kitty is all set, finally, maybe, until something else goes wrong.

Meanwhile my husband has piled a whole bunch of stuff on our bed to make it an unpleasant place for the fat old lady cat with the leaky bladder to hang out. He’s got the lid from a plastic bin on there and a bunch of towels and some screwdrivers and junk like that; and he’s got it all cockamaymeed so there’s nowhere comfortable to lie down and lose control of your bladder.

But now I want to take a nap and my bed is a big complex lumpy mess. Looks like I took the wrong cat to the vet.

…actually she’s been sick for a while. She’s super-fat (she’s almost 20 lbs) and is 15 years old. For years the vets told me to get down her weight before she begins to develop kidney failure and diabetes. Well, we tried the diet thing but this cat would have nothing of it. She hardly lost any weight at all but trying to keep her on her diet made the rest of us crazy.

The poor thing has been peeing way too much for years. And she drinks more water than our other 8 cats combined. But now she’s started peeing on our bed. Sometimes twice in one day. And it’s not just the bed but the pillows too. I’m afraid she’s losing control of her bladder now. And I’m getting very tired of cleaning up cat pee (though I’m good at it now). We’ll be taking her to the vet tomorrow…

…all nine (9) of them. When we came to Cancun two and a half years ago we had two old-lady cats. After we got familiar with Cancun we began to see the extent of the street cat problem here. We decided to start catching and neutering street cats. In the process of doing that we ended up adopting a whole bunch of them…