A Naughty Boy Again!

I was awakened at about 5:30 am this morning by a naughty boy. Long-time readers of this blog will recall my complaints that a certain orange devil in cat-skin often wakes us in the early hours of the morning by dashing up and down the aisle of the trailer, jumping on counters and opening all the cupboard doors. Anyone who knows cats knows that they laugh, and our naughty boy hoots like a chimp as he ricochets from pillar to post.

He hadn't done this in the last couple of months. He'll soon be nine years old and I thought he was just "maturing", but as it turns out he probably just didn't have all that much energy. With his diagnosis of diabetes, a big change in diet and injections of insulin he is a naughty boy once again. (HOORAY!)

He's doing very very well indeed. He has required very little insulin in the last five or six days, only two .25 unit doses when his blood glucose was 6.5 - 6.7. Otherwise his BG has been well within normal range.

He seems to have figured out that the ear pokes and blood testing have something to do with feeling better, so he tolerates it, though does not enjoy it! What he does enjoy is eating four cans a day of low-carb "Fancy Feast" cat food at $1.05 a can! (Yikes!) Yesterday I found it on sale at two cans for $1.13 and I grabbed about 20 cans.

Four cans a day! I guess he doesn't believe weight loss is a necessary part of the program. But it's hard to ignore his pleas when he's hanging onto the fridge door, screaming for food. He pulls all the fridge magnets and notes off onto the floor, grabs the top edge of the fridge door and swings. At least it's exercise! The low-carb food is supposed to lead to weight gain - but he doesn't look any skinnier to me.

Looking outside on a grey chilly day. The yard is full of three or four dozen quail and several dozen sparrows and finches, feeding on the bird seed I provide twice a day. The small birds are bathing in what must be an ice-cold puddle that's melted out of a snowbank. Hardy little souls!

I've had my eye on a little hen quail these past few days. She has managed to break one of her legs. It's sticking out at a 90-degree angle to one side. But she hasn't let it slow her down. She hops to feed, and flies when the other quails run. Gotta admire spirit like that.

There was something else in the yard yesterday morning. I looked out the window to see a coyote standing beside our truck, just a few feet away. She looked a bit like I must look when I lose the car in a mall parking lot, anxious, confused, a bit panicky. I think she got into the fenced park and couldn't figure how to get out. Our neighbour Dave got a couple of pictures of her, one as she stood outside the gate to the dog run, the other as she escaped the dog run and fled into the apple orchard across the street.

We often hear coyotes at night. We've heard them running past the trailer in the dark of the night, close enough to hear the panting between the yip-yip conversation they have going. One left a calling card the first summer we were here. Let's just say I have tasted the coyote and lived to tell about it. There's a thing called "blood brothers", is there such a thing as "bladder brothers"? No, I didn't think so, even when you like animals as much as I do.