I keep forgetting that they cut the grass every single Monday now. It’s one of the dubious perks of having a deployed spouse and living on-post. I don’t have to worry about managing the yard, because the housing people take care of it automatically. Why dubious? Well, because being that my allergies have been in overdrive, having pollen and grass flying every single Monday morning is not boding well for me.

Yesterday was particularly bad … as was today. It was quite windy for the last 4 or 5 days with no rain and a small amount of sun to go with. This means that pollen is flying unimpeded all over the place. Add to this picture the fact that I open the back door and front window for the kittehs each morning so that can watch kitten-TV, and you have the perfect recipe.

I woke up this morning and every word on every piece of paper or on my computer screen was blurry – like the letters had fur. My doctor said to me today I should get my eyes tested … except that I can’t imagine that my eyes could deteriorate literally overnight. Plus, with the itching, dryness … I had to believe it was allergies. Add to THAT my irritated nose, post nasal drip, little tiny hives that keep popping up all over my skin (in crevices like my elbow pits and arm pits) and I just said that it’s gotta be my allergies.

Doc said “but we’ve pretty much exhausted all the meds I could possibly give you now” and I am like “I know Doc – I don’t know what to doooooo” – she smiled and said she’s just give me a steroid shot and see how that works. So I am watching that. Maybe I’ll have a little relief now? Keep your fingers crossed fro me.

So Oklahoma is being pounded by tornadoes. Yay. That’s the state above this one; nevermind that it’s a good 5 hours drive (or more) North, tornadoes travel under completely different rules. Just what I need while I am here alone without hubby to hug me tight and tell me it’ll be alright. I think I’ve made up my mind – tornados are running a VERY close second to earthquakes on my list of most-hated weather phenomenon. Frankly – they’re probably the only 2 on that list. Hurricanes have been off it since my first tornado watch a couple of years ago. I’d give ANYTHING to swap hurricanes with tornados.

In any case, my thoughts are with the Oklahomans (is that what they call themselves?)

Binky, the newest addition to the family, has started to drive me stir crazy – getting into everything, chewing on everything, pulling my towels off the rack in the bathroom, rearranging my furniture and rugs, terrorizing Nala at feeding time … hubby was right – I probably didn’t want to have to go through the new-young-kitty experience again. /sigh

It’s ok tho – he’s cute enough to make me forgive him each and every time. He looks considerably like Nala did when she was his age. I suspect they will look almost identical once he grows a little except for maybe having a little more definition in his tabby stripes. He’s a lover … I can barely hear him when he cries … IF he cries. More often than not, he’s silent and deadly. And he isn’t shy – pizza delivery man came yesterday to the door, Nala did her usual vanishing act, Binky tried to go outside between my feet to see who it was.

He is a sweetheart… when he isn’t being the devil’s own.

And the little Amazon.com box that sits under my desk with bubble wrap is his little hideaway … he loves crawling in there when I am working and snuggling in amongst the wrap.

Ah … kittehs. /sigh

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His orders are sitting on the table. It’s a reality then. I guess I was thinking and hoping that something would come up and the whole thing gets cancelled or postponed … stupidly. It was a go the minute we got orders to report to this duty station way back in June of last year. The reality of seeing it in print … is staggeringly sobering. It’s an instant smile-wiper.

He is definitely going.

Frankly, aside from all-of-a-sudden sober, I am not entirely sure how I feel. A little bereft, for sure. Apprehensive, ya. Anxious, most definitely. Aside from that … nothing else. Not yet. Part of it is the retreat this weekend, part of it is … I think that our “courtship” was a key preparatory phase for us … well me. While those separations were never more than 3-4 months at a time with full and complete telephonic contact of some sort the entire time, it helped. We already know what it is like to be apart for months at a time. A year – well that will be the challenge, but having gone months, I am confident that we will make it through the year.

Of course, there is the added very basic fact of WHERE he will be that changes the landscape a whole shitload more … but you know what? I am NOT going to worry. It’s what he’s been training for his entire military life. It’s sort of in his bones now.

As for me stateside, I’ve got my toys, I’ve got my friends, I’ve got my plans … I will be fine. And oh yea – I’ve got WoW.

It’s not time to bid him farewell yet. I just wanted to get that off my chest – seeing the orders. Right now, it’s time to continue the prep for block leave.

And as luck would have it (Man! My guardian angel is working overtime!) I found me a pet sitter – affordable, efficient, professional, likeable – Easy Case Pet Sitters right here in Killeen, TX. She’s been doing it professionally for 4 years and did it for a year or 2 before non-professionally. She hand picks her staff and she has paperwork up the yin-yang to protect both herself and her clients. A member of the local chamber of commerce and insured. And her personality is winsome. This time around, Nala will be in her own home, cared for and I won’t be worried sick for the entire time.

What’s better is that when it comes time to hit the Caribbean for a long overdue visit, Nala will be in good hands. Hell, she’ll even on a moment’s notice come check in on her if I wanna go drive to Dallas for a day or 2. I gotta remember to thank Maddy (FRG leader) profusely on giving me the link. She saved my sanity.

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Earlier this week, I did something I know I had to do and had been putting off for weeks because it was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do – I surrendered a pet to the post animal shelter.

Since then, I have asked myself over and over whether it was necessary and whether I was a mean person for doing it. Each and every time, I have ended up feeling like the scum of the earth despite the answer being “Yes, it was the right thing to do.”

Bear has been with us since February 2008. I have blogged and talked about Bear incessantly. He came to us at just under a year (about 9 months old) and as wild as the day is long. At first he would run and hide when he heard strange external noises (the doorbell, the lawn mower) and that was fine because he had learned that we (my husband and I) were his family and we would never hurt him.

Last August, when my parents came to stay with us for our wedding, we were all surprised at how quickly he made friends with them as well. Even after the upheaval of Nala arriving and herself adjusting to us and him and the house. But he grew to like my parents, to come out and say hi and get an ear rub from Dad. It was a beautiful thing.

Then after we were married, we had to move. And that was stressful for him, I think. He hid for a whole day. But that was expected – all the new smells, new sense of space, new everything except us. And that helped a little I think … that we were still there with him, still loving him.

He was fine for months until he started stealing food. I had to rig the kitchen counters to be an automatic remote alarm so that when he jumped onto the counter the falling soda cans would startle him and he would learn not to jump on the counter. After we heard the cans fall a couple of times, I figured he had learnt and moved them.

Well, he hadn’t learnt and would still jump onto the counter to steal food – and this is with food in his bowl, by the way. In case you were thinking “poor kitteh is actually hungry – why don’t you feed him?” Frankly, it only hit me while writing this post that his behaviour had started to get a little off the minute we left the first house we lived in. He would chew on stuff … especially cardboard boxes. Again, with food in his bowl. We put up the Christmas tree in December of 2008 and he chewed on the branches (they are plastic).

Hubby and I thought maybe he just didn’t like that brand of food – we changed it 3 times. We knew he liked wet food, we got him more. I even tried feeding him more often, put out more food at a feeding – that only made him put on weight, it did nothing to alleviate the chewing and the stealing. We tried everything we could think of – it made no difference.

Bear developed a wailing kind of cry during these days – a caterwauling like you hear wild cats doing. Hearing it would make anyone think he was in pain and distress. It drove me nuts because I knew that I was doing just about everything I could for him. I fed him, I cleaned up after him, I made sure he had water, was warm and safe.

It was during this period also that we realized that if we missed feeding them by a few hours, Bear would puke his food up and run scared for the rest of the day until hunger drove him out later for more caterwauling.

I think the final straw for Bear was the 3 day drive from Kentucky to Texas. Once he got here, he was as neurotic as I’d ever seen him to be. Where before curiosity drove his need to get into every door and cupboard, now it seemed almost pathological.

He developed his first UTI evidenced by his frequent trips to the litter box and eventually his peeing on everything but in the litter box – including the furniture. It if hadn’t been so tragic, it would have been funny – furniture covered in paper, doors closed, cupboards reinforced with things to block his access … the vet told us that they do that because they associate the litter box with pain.

Ever after being treated, he was erratic and the caterwauling became his standard cry. The stealing became worse, he would leave the food in his bowl and take food off the stove, out of the sink … even out of the garbage. He would run away from me and from hubby with no known trigger. He would hide all day and seek to get through every single closed door he could find – even the exterior doors.

There were days when he seemed fine, however. Days when he would sit either at the open back door of the house or on a chest in the spare room staring outside, or just sleeping in the recliner. When he would be affectionate and friendly, playful. These days we would think “it must just have been a phase, he’s ok now”. But it would never last long.

And this is at the root of our reasoning – with this kind of erratic behaviour – stealing, sneaking, running scared today and affectionate and playful tomorrow … well, he wasn’t happy and he was making us unhappy. There weren’t a lot of choices for us. We couldn’t afford to care for him anymore – both financially and emotionally, he was getting to be unmanageable. And a friend suggested that as well as he was right now, this was the best time to get him a new home rather than waiting for him to get sick again.

We discussed it – over and over and over. We wavered from one position to the other. It was especially obvious to us when we had to board them both while we went North to say goodbye to hubby’s Grandfather. When we got back, his UTI had returned, he had lost about 3 pounds and he was caterwauling like you wouldn’t believe. Once home, he seemed to get better, but the caterwauling, the stealing and running scared continued.

It was driving me nuts – as a light sleeper, having a cat sit on your legs in bed and caterwaul at 3am is not happy days. Even locking them out of the room did nothing to help, he would sit in the small closed hallway and caterwaul outside the closed door anyway.

I guess when I think about all these things and put them down in writing, I realize that there really wasn’t much we could have done. Without the means and money to care for him, we were actually going to be doing us all harm – Hubby, Nala and myself – by fooling ourselves into thinking “he’ll be ok”.

The last straw was him puking his breakfast up onto Scott’s favourite chair. For weeks, I had been setting alarms to wake me to feed them on time, and one morning I was off by an hour and even that was too late. Hubby was gone all day and half the nights too sometimes, I was alone and at my wits end. With the upcoming deployment, this was just not something either of us wanted to have on our plates on top of everything else.

So, off to the shelter I went. I know there were other options: we could have found him a new home ourselves. We could have tried harder with him, I know. And this is probably where my guilt and depression now stem from – knowing there were other options, and I chose the easy way out. Except, that I personally could not in all conscience knowingly inflict that kind of erratic behaviour on anyone else.

Maybe I was wrong and I will rot in hell forever. Maybe. I know I can’t get out from under the dark, evil cloud of the whole thing. I know it was the right thing to do, but that isn’t making me feel any better.

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I had made the mental note to blog at least once a day … I had even started to. Then the trip to Michigan threw my schedule out of whack again. And frankly, everything has been out of whack since I moved here.

Let’s do a recap: We got back from Michigan to hear that Bear was peeing blood in his urine again and the vet wanted to do an x-ray for some god-awful amount of money. We brought him home because I looked at him and saw that he was in distress and aside from not being able to afford the god-awful expensive x-ray, I just had a feeling that Bear would be fine once we brought him home. And frankly, he HAS been better. It seems he managed to pass whatever was causing him the bloody urine and our Bear is back to normal.

Although, the concept of not being able to afford to care for them if they get sick was made very clear to us and we have to come up with a plan to deal with that. And THAT … is breaking my heart. /sigh

In other news, it’s gotten cool here in Texas. I can’t believe my luck! It’s been a week now of steady 60-70 degree weather. I am in awe. Of course, with that comes the rain and overcast skies and fogginess, but I don’t care. I am just SO happy (like a pig in shit) to have it be cool again.  We put the blanket on the bed … which might be a little premature since it wasn’t as cool last night, but it’s just nice to not be sweating every minute.

I’ve rediscovered WoW. I know, I know … I hear you asking if I ever stopped playing. Well, I hadn’t; but I had got to the point where I was really only mechanically playing because of the sentimentality of it. It had become a chore, something to avoid if I could … and avoid it I did when I could. I would watch TV instead, or just read. But now … /sigh

The MP ball is in a week or 2. I have to find a dress. I’m not looking forward to it the way I think I should be. Probably because it’s still all so new to me here and I really have not found anything to like here or anyone to like … heh.

I find myself torn … I want to say I hate this place, but how can I say that without forfeiting the support for hubby? We are here for him, with him … I am here for him and with him. If it wasn’t for that, I’d be gone like a bat out of hell from this place. How did I ever survive the tropics all my life? How does THAT sound? Like a “sellout”?  I’m not sure I care. If I only suspected before, now I know for sure – I despise cities, heat and insects. They are the bane of my existence.

There, I’ve said it out loud at last. And I won’t say it again …ever. Now it’s time to suck it up and deal. And THAT’s going to be a chore … so pardon me while I go work on my coping skills.

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Soon after I got better, we noticed that Bear was acting stranger and stranger. He would wail for no reason, wander around sniffing at strange places, wailing. And I know it was crying and not plain meowing now, after the fact. At first we were just annoyed because we thought he was begging for food. We’d feed him, he’d eat and he’d start wailing again. It was pretty distressing.

But I knew something was up when he started peeing everywhere else but the litter box. The first clue was him peeing in his bed – right out in the open in front of us. Then he started sniffing around the couch and recliners too. By this time I had already looked up the symptoms on Google; they had been ringing a bell in my head because the person who gave us Bear had mentioned them to me at one point. The web confirmed what I had already suspected – Bear had a UTI. So I told hubby we had to get him to a vet ASAP.

I was grateful that he was still on vacation, because if it weren’t for him, I think I’d have got myself in a load of trouble the next day when at the vet on post, we were told that they can’t see him “until late next week”. WTF?!!! Who tells the owner of a cat with a UTI that? Are they sick? Luckily for THEM, they handed us a list of off-post vets that we could go see instead.

The one nearest to us seemed the best bet and I was on the phone with them immediately. I liked their attitude: they were concerned and nothing stopped them from seeing him. Even though we didn’t have his records on us to prove their inoculations were up-to-date, they believed us when we said he was covered. Come to think of it, if we said we’d just moved, they were more than likely to believe us since we couldn’t have travelled with them without them being covered …

Anyway, poor Bear was so uncomfortable in the carrier that he actually peed onto his towel. When we took him out of it, there was a corner of the towel that was red and smelled of urine. That seemed to convince everybody what Bear was going through – the vet actually said he didn’t really need a sample to confirm but he had to take it for the records. And then he did something with Bear’s bladder and got him to pee a little into a cup… and out came bloody urine.

Long story short, Bear got sent home with antibiotics, can food (ooh yummmmmm!) and some new food we were to wean them onto which should help with healthy organ function. Vet cautioned us that we mightn’t be able to get it at Walmart or on-post but that he was sure Petsmart would have it. Then he went on to explain that the water here in Texas is SO hard that it sometimes creates stones in the bladders of kittehs which in turn cause urinary tract infections. Poor kittehs find it SO painful to pee, that they associate the litter box with the pain and attempt to pee everywhere else just to ease the pain. (Not too smart, kittehs, eh?) He said UTI’s can also be caused by stress, and considering we had just moved halfway across the country under trying circumstances, it wasn’t unusual for Bear to get one of these things.

Course, he said we’d also have to start buying purified water for them too … but I don’t know that this wasn’t just stress. I am going to bet that it’s not so much the water as the stress of the move. And I am hoping that I don’t lose on this one.

The worst part of the whole ordeal was having to confine Bear. Aside from not really wanting to have kittehs in the spare room, I just really hated to separate them. It was painful to see Nala laying down in front of the door, sticking her paws under it, crying and pawing at what I assumed to be Bear on the other side doing the same thing. How far they’ve come: when Nala first came to us, Bear spent the better part of the first week hissing at Nala. Whilst we were moving, Nala spent the better part of the entire journey hissing at Bear.

Well, Bear is clearly feeling MUCH better these days, even though he still has some pills left to finish. He’s happier and he just seems himself again…. thankfully.

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