Hairbrushes and Hairballs

We all know that Pepper is a weird cat and likes weird smells like the seasoning salt that is better than catnip as far as she is concerned. When Keith uses the salt at dinner I usually have to put a little bit of it on one of my cleaning rag washcloths and let her roll around in it in total bliss.

She also likes my hairbrush when I have just brushed my hair after my shower and it smells of lovely shampoo smells. Is it gross to throw the brush on the floor and let her sniff and rub against it? Probably, but I don't care and it makes her feel special. She waits patiently by the bathroom sink each night when I brush my hair and if I forget that she is waiting patiently there and put it back in the drawer before letting her sniff and rub, well...

First she looks around to make sure that nobody else will get her hairbrushy goodness.



Then, hairbrush heaven.


I was trying to get a picture of her snaggletooth. It makes her look like she has a constant sneer on her face. Which she usually does, snaggletooth or not.


I woke up this morning and found a coughed up hairball on the blanket. Fortunately it was on Keith's side of the bed and what he doesn't know won't hurt him. Although I really didn't feel like having to wash the blanket today.

A package of books from BNSF came by UPS for Keith yesterday so I stacked them in his mail pile on the counter and of course they looked really comfortable, so...

Snaggletooth

We noticed that Pepper's lip looked a little funny on Friday night so Keith looks at her teeth, Pepper squirming and growling, and one of her front bottom teeth is sticking out all funny like it's been knocked loose from where it belongs. We have no money to take her to the kitty dentist so I'm hoping that the tooth will just fall out on its own and she'll just be missing a tooth and fit right in here in hillbillyland. You walk around town here and most of the residents of this city have missing teeth, so why not the cats, too?

The last time Bear went to the vet we found out that she has a missing tooth so apparently since cats can't brush their teeth or floss, occasionally their teeth fall out. Hopefully we won't have to start buying them dentures.

Speaking of Bear, Lucy is still defending her living room territory against her (and only her) but she walked into the bedroom and looked around the other day, walking right past Bear who was sitting by the food bowl, and didn't growl or even pay any attention to her. I don't know, I just feel bad for poor Bear being afraid to leave the bedroom. She did sneak across the hall to the front bedroom this morning so she could sit and look out the window.

Almost as Good as Catnip!

Pepper is such an odd cat. She's cranky and mean but also loving and sweet. Almost every time I come in the door she comes to greet me. The only time the other cats come to greet me is if I have bags of cat food in my arms.

Last night we were putting our dinner on the table and Keith got his seasoned salt that he likes to liberally pour on all his food. Pepper could smell that salt coming and jumped up on the table totally excited by that smell. Now, our table is very small and I really don't like to have to share it with a fat cranky kitty, so Keith put the salt container on the floor.

Oh, heavenly smell of season-all!!

Dirty Socks-My Favorite!

Pepper is an odd cat. Her favorite smells, other than catnip of course, are green peppers, celery, black pepper ( you have to hide the pepper shaker or she'll lick the top of it) and the smell of the cream that I put on my heels after my shower. I use bag balm and heel cream, and the bag balm is especially enticing to her. She'll nip my heels and lick my hands in her quest to get to that wonderful smelling bag balm! So, last night I put socks on over my bag balmed feet and then tossed them on the floor when I went to bed. Yes, they do belong in the laundry basket, but it's all the way across the room in the closet, and I was tired.

So, this morning Pepper found my socks still faintly smelling of bag balm and decided that they would make a great pillow for her head. Mmmm, smelly bag balmed socks!!!

Wake up!

Hey, what are you doing? Are you sleeping? Hey, hey, wake up!

Buddy was playing with a mouse the other day, having a great time tossing it around and chasing after it, but then it landed next to Pepper. Buddy must have some smarts because he patiently waited for Pepper to move before he went after his mouse. He knows that Pepper is a very cranky kitty!


With six kitties in the house, I shovel a lot of poop every day, twice a day, from the cat boxes. Not only do I shovel poop, but I have to wash Pepper's butt every day, too. She is fat and the vet thinks she has arthritis in her hip so she has a very hard time cleaning herself 'down there' so I have to do it for her. She must be getting used to it because even though she protests loudly she lets me do it. It probably feels a lot better not having a nasty butt.

More About Pepper-Or, Back When We Only Had One Feline

Pepper's shooting me the 'I wish you were dead except then who would feed me' look right now since I had to remove her from my chair so I could sit down at the computer.

It's kind of hard to remember back in the days when Pepper was a cute little kitten-I know she wasn't cuddly, she hates to be picked up and is most definitely not a lap cat. She has always been feisty and her favorite thing as a kitten was to hide and then run out and bite your ankles when you least expected it. My hands were always scratched up because she liked to play rough.

We kept her inside for her first few months, deciding to get one of those cat harnesses so that we could take her outside but keep her from getting into trouble or hit by a car or something. We put the little harness on her and took her out front, attaching the end of the harness around a pole so that she wouldn't stray. I went back inside for just a minute and came back out to an empty harness and Pepper sitting a few feet away with the first of many many of the 'I wish you were dead except then who would feed me' looks she has given me over the years.

So, Pepper became an indoor/outdoor cat without a harness-this changed a year or so ago when we started keeping all the cats inside after Pepper left me a huge pile of poo that was filled with still squirming worms, we spent hundreds of dollars on Advantage for fleas, and all the cats were diagnosed with an intestinal parasite called giardia-sp?-that can cause internal bleeding and very loose stools. The medicine they give cats for giardia causes cats to foam at the mouth and run around the house like lunatics, and then hide under the bed for the next four hours, coming out only to give you more of the 'I wish you were dead' looks.

Since we keep all of our cats inside now, no big Advantage bills, no squirming poo, and no foaming at the mouth.

So, Pepper was the Queen of the house until we adopted a little stray black kitten about a year later, and she has never ever forgiven us for that one. She only puts up with us because we can open cat food cans.

How it All Began

I was never a big cat person and neither was my (2nd and current-if he behaves himself) husband. He'd had a cat growing up and we also had a cat growing up, but I could kind of take them or leave them. When my kids were teenagers they convinced me to let them bring home a kitten from one of the never ending litters of kittens born at their Grandma's house. She loved animals but neglected to spay all of her cats so there were always litters of kittens at her house. So, they brought home a little grey tabby kitten, promising to feed it and keep its litter box clean, which of course happened rarely if ever. The cat box was in their bathroom and apparently it didn't bother them that a cloud of noxious fumes greeted them each time they opened the door. So, little grey tabby grew up, shredded my nice new sofas, and spent a lot of time sleeping at the foot of my bed. We never really named him, he was just known as Kitty, and then when he started spraying and we knew for sure that he was a boy (and got him fixed) we started calling him Mr. Kitty, which sounded a little more dignified. We are not good at determining cat sexes.
Of course, both of my teenagers grew up too and moved away, leaving Mr. Kitty with me, so when I got married and moved away, I gave Mr. Kitty back to my daughter, where he currently resides, very pissed off sometimes because in addition to Mr. Kitty, she and her husband have a dog and a new kitty. Grrrrrr...
We moved into a little house 100 miles away and thought our days of scooping cat shit and opening cans of cat food were done.
Nope.
A few months after we moved in, son calls and asks if we could take his kitten in-also a little grey tabby-because his crazy wife wouldn't let him keep it and was being abusive to it. So, soft hearted people that we are we said sure, bring the little kitty over. We didn't know if it was a girl or a boy but son assured us that it was a boy. Not-when we finally took HER to the vet, they assured us it was indeed a girl. A very rambunctious scratchy bitey little girl. After a few months we decided on the name Pepper, which suits her well, since pepper is kind of a bitey scratchy spice, not something you want to use too much of, and she's kind of peppery colored. She is now 4 years old and very fat and cranky. We had to put her on a kitty diet and she's not too happy about that, not that I blame her.
We have no baby kitty pictures of her since we had no camera back then, so here is a picture of her current fat cranky sassy self.
She goes nuts over the smell of celery and attacks the grocery bags if we bring celery home. And oddly enough, she likes pepper and will lick the top of the pepper shaker so now we have cat slime flavored pepper.
She's praying to the fancy feast goddess for opposable thumbs.