Kitten Almost Died

Okay, I may be exaggerating a bit, but last night I was pretty convinced Kitten was dying. 

Kitten has always ground his teeth from time to time, but last night, he went insane. At first I would catch him grinding his teeth here and there and I would yell at him to stop. But he just just kept doing it and it kept getting louder and louder. When I tried to get near him he would absolutely freak out, do one of his crazy mid-air flips and run away faster than I even knew Kitten could run. I tried giving him some treats to see if he would eat. He ate them up just like normal, but as soon as he was done, went right back to grinding. 

I did what I always do in situations where I am convinced Kitten, Boyfriend or I are dying -- I googled it. 

This did not help.

In case you are wondering, cats grind their teeth when they are having trouble swallowing, when they have tooth pain or an oral infection and pretty much any other time they are in some immense type of pain, including: abdominal pain, nausea, inflammatory bowel disease, pancreatic disease, cholangiohepatitis, gastritis, hypokalemia, rabies, bartonella, brain tumors and peripheral nerve neuropathies.

At this point I was going to go with nausea or brain tumors.

After a brief moment of panic, I called the only 24hr emergency animal clinic where I frantically explained to the receptionist that my cat would not stop grinding his teeth. He was very patient and polite, but essentially told me that it might be nothing or it might be something life threatening and that it was my choice to bring him in. Great.

In a last ditch attempt to save Kitten myself before packing him into his bag and lugging him over to the clinic at 11:00pm, I decided to rub his throat. I was pretty sure he was not having problems swallowing, but I figured it couldn't hurt.

While stroking his throat, I saw it. Kitten, the fabulously evolved creature that he is, had gotten a large segment of his neck hair stuck between his back teeth and lodged in his throat. I pulled it out and immediately the grinding stopped. After freeing the hair, a wave of relief came over me, my cat was not dying, he is only intellectually disabled.

This is a picture that I took quite a while ago of a much less life-threatening neck hair in mouth situation.

Boyfriend is Gone & School is Starting

Boyfriend has left me and Kitten.

That is, he has left us to go on a trip to Greece with two of his friends.

Boyfriend is the one making the awkward model-esque pose on the right. By the way, how jealous am I?

This may confuse you -- let me explain: while I have frequently alluded (or outright stated) to the fact that Boyfriend has no friends (mentioned here) I may have been exaggerating a bit. Boyfriend in fact has many friends in Ottawa (where he lived his entire life until I stole him away to Toronto). Anyway, some of these secret friends of his invited him to Greece for a party-boat tour of the islands. How could he say no?

Before Boyfriend left, I tried to take a few cute pictures of Kitten and myself to put in a card that I had gotten for him to open once he got to Greece. It really did not work. These were some of the best takes:

He won't be gone long, but while he is gone, I have been left with sole custody of Kitten. I am currently trying to deal with the gigantic mat that is Kitten's fur. Boyfriend, who is on brushing duty, has been slacking and I have been left to deal with it. Every now and then I will sneak attack Kitten and cut a few mats out or get a guerrilla brushing in, but he generally does not take well to it.

In addition to Boyfriend's absence, school is once again starting, which means Kitten feels the need to spend a lot more time walking in front of my laptop and lying on my things. The past few days I have been working quite hard on applications for 2012 summer jobs and Kitten has been doing a lot of this:

I do have an update on Kitten's toilet training for you, but I think I will dedicate an entire post to that later this week or next... so check back later if you are interested in hearing about the toilet training of my cat.

That last statement just made me question why anyone reads my blog at all.    

Kitten Hates Words

Sometimes, Boyfriend and I like to put on some music, have a glass of wine... and play Scrabble.

Boyfriend isn't the best to play Scrabble with -- he is all about the tiny words that fit in with other words,  getting lots of bang for their buck. This strategy completely closes off the board and makes it very difficult for other plays to put words down. Boyfriend will also get crabby if he starts to lose and will sit, sometimes for 20 minutes, trying to find the perfect word to play.

You know who else isn't the best to play Scrabble with? Kitten.

Kitten is illiterate and it really seems to irk him when the literate members of the house decided to play games that involve words.

The last time Boyfriend and I played Scrabble, Kitten decided to join us on the table. At first he sat beside the board, but slowly -- ever so slowly -- he inched his way over, and on to, to the board.

Until this happened.

Action Shot

Kitten had had enough of our book learnin' and wiped off the entire top of the board. Luckily I had taken so many pictures prior to this moment, that we were able to reconstruct everything. From then on, Kitten was scolded any time he got too close.

He wasn't too happy about it.

POTTY TRAINING UPDATE: Boyfriend and I took a trip to Ottawa last weekend, which meant that the potty training had to be put on hold. Since the training litter needs to be cleaned constantly, we had to put down an actual litter box for the time we were gone. It took me a few days to get the training one set back up after we returned, so basically there is nothing new to say about the potty training, except I am expecting some regression in the days to come.