T13 - Smudgers Fudgers ~ by Sadie

Believe me when I tell you that Mosaic Lady has the most well-developed sense of smell on the planet. (All the better for wine evaluation. Slurp.)
She can smell when a neighbor down the hill is smoking outside their house. She can smell freshly-oozed poo before it even hits the ground.
You can imagine that Smudge's amazing reversal of fortune this week in going from a constipated, hollaring, tight-butt, to a non-stop, poo puddle machine has taken its toll on her nose, and her sanity.

We have four litter boxes throughout the house for him, and yes, the litter in his kitty condo is Cat Attract. (He uses the litter boxes to pee all the time.)
In all fairness, we did hear Mosaic Lady say last Sunday as she walked through the living room with Nature's Miracle 3-in-1 spray in hand, staring accusingly at Smudge: "It smells like POO POO in here. What did you do? Of course... it could be my dinner."

We have somehow managed to live through two weeks with the prolific and odiferous Smudge, and god-willing, we will only have to endure one more. We were able to compile this list of 13 before his first two weeks were even up!

13 inappropriate and inconvenient places Smudge has pooped (so far):
1) On the floor of his kitty condo, inches from the litter box.
(We should count this one like 956 times, really.)
2) In our plastic play cube!
3) TWICE!
4) THRICE!
We are not making this up. While ML was writing this last Friday, she did not know he had done it again! Twice in one day! A new PR! It was such a big and GROSS poo puddle that she just gave up and took it outside to wash it down with the hose. Not only did she resent that she was fresh out of the shower when she discovered it, but I deeply resent that she hung it to dry over Walter's yard memorial. Things are going from worse to worser around here. Nothing is sacred. Everything is poo-vulnerable.

5) On the concrete floor of the mud/laundry room within feet of our litter boxes.
6) On the floor of the mud/laundry room right under the step down from the kitchen. That was a close one for always-barefoot-in-the-house ML.
7) On the rug in the mud room right after the step down in front of the washer and dryer.
8) On the concrete floor in the mud/litter/laundry room way back against the wall in between the freezer and a table so that to clean it ML had to get down on the dirty, hard floor and crawl under a table and pray that she would not get stuck in the tight squeeze and have to scream her lungs out for a neighbor to hear (They won't. They are all deaf.) She might have to inhale Smudge poo for days before someone brought the jaws of life to extract her.
9) On Mosaic Lady's bathroom rug, inches from Annie's litter box.
10) On Mosaic Lady's bathroom floor, inches from the rug.
11) In the foster kitty bedroom on the carpet in between plastic tubs full of mosaics.
12) Two piles in that place so we are counting it twice.
13) On the center circular scratch part of the roller ball toy WHERE THE CATNIP GOES!

Look out, little Lucy. It's only a matter of time until he poops on your head.

Wordless Wednesday - A Good Ground Crew is Priceless

MY Turn Tuesday ~ by Sadie!

Kitties, I have HAD IT with MY blog being constantly hijacked by foster intruders, including and especially those foster intruders who then get adopted into MY home!
And Victor is tired of it too!

I tried to convey my annoyance and objections to Mosaic Lady through the silent, ignoring her, you-are-dead-to-me, Beeyaaaatch!... treatment.

She did not notice.
So I swore at her.
That always gets her attention.

In a supreme power grab designed to regain my rightful place (errrr, that would be third in line of seniority after Willie and Bianca), I am making today's post All About Me.
Please go empty your bladders and then come back and enjoy some of my favorite photos of my gorgeous, flooffy, adorable self.

Was I not the cutest kitten on planet earth EVER?

I loved growing up with Walter as my big brother.
Here we are in Mosaic Lady's bedroom window of the Colorado farm house I went to the day she rescued me from an alley...

And here we are, 4 1/2 years later, in western North Carolina. This was taken last winter within days of moving into our new home. We have the coolest yards.

This must've been in the spring because I lost a lot of my fur, and my fat, over the summer!
(Victor, not only does the camera add 10lbs of floof, but my new Furminator removed 8lbs. So I must weigh about -5.)

I love to hang out on this back deck area right off the kitchen and dining room.
It provides heightened visibility when it comes to deciding if I will come inside or not, depending upon how many fosters and other intruders are occupying my floor and table space.

Here I am consulting on mosaic projects. I did not approve this one, however. It is a bone that says "DOGS RULE". Who believes that?

This is my favorite late afternoon corner on the front deck. I am very thoughtful, contemplative and deep.
Sadie-Badie Sartre.

I am feeling much better now that I got to suck up my FAIR share of attention and cat blog sphere oxygen again.
I might just have to proclaim one day a week SADIE BADIE BLOGS DAY if things are not more equitable around here.

Willie's Mancat Monday

Hello, I must be going, Smudge!
Even though I've just come in the back door, I must exit immediately out the front.

You really, really stink of poo!

(HINT: Smudge is the white, poo-challenged foster kitty ON the couch, NOT the dawg, who is Leah. For some reason, our post confused many readers. We are sure it is NOT the crappy photography. However, the dawg DID leave a huge, stinky poo puddle in the living room last night, so maybe the readers are not confused, but prescient?
Psychic Poo Detectives coming to Animal Planet next fall!)

Annie's First Fashion Friday

Bonjour, Chatties!
This is my first Fashion Friday ever, and maybe my last.
We are not so sure how we feel about cats in clothes in this house.
I mean, for us cats, in this house. On you cats, they are tres fabuloso!
Skeezix is always teaching us about the importance of proper accessorizing, so I will model my new scarf. It is quite fashionable!
It was a thank you gift from a big package of super dooper toys and treats from the nice Cat Blog Sphere Lady who collected money for Momma Kitty Hope and Rescuer Jody.

Like Skeezix and his very special girl friend, Daisy, pink is my color! (Actually, all color is my color. Update: All three of us are wearing pink today! I have arrived, Chatties!)
You can see how beautifully my scarf complements both my gorgeous green eyes and my new pink heart ID tag. (Please do not biggify this and drunk dial me collect from South Korea.)

This is my slightly-wistful, wholly indifferent, laissez-faire, snooty French model pose.
I think I've got that look nailed.

If we lived in Colorado like Mosaic Cats used to, hunting season would be starting soon.
I would for sure be wearing my camouflage scarf any time I went outside into the woods and forest.
Here in North Carolina, I plan to use it to conceal myself from annoying and poo-challenged foster kittens.
So far, it is more fashionable than functional.

What A Dummie, Wednesday

(We thought it was Wednesday until we posted this and saw our mistake on our blog. Therefore, the title is more fitting than ever and we are leaving it.)

Our fun fur friends, Kellie, Yao-Lin and Miss Peach, all tagged us for the screenshot of desktop meme.
At first we did not think we could do it since we are on a Mac, but this morning we googled it and found this:

Taking Screenshots with Screen Capture in Mac OS X Panther
Adapted From: Mac OS X Panther Timesaving Techniques For Dummies

So we followed the directions and got this:

That is our desktop image, but none of our folders would show up. (Update: This, too, is a generic Mac desktop image that comes loaded on the laptop. But thanks so much for thinking Mosaic Lady is talented enough to somehow be responsible for doing anything other than selecting it and clicking.)

But that's OK...they are almost all folders of photos of us in various stages of blog-readiness. And some mosaic photos, and lots more photos of us. We don't have a very interesting desktop. Mosaic Lady is very easily over-stimulated by sounds and sights and bright lights, chaos, strong odors (like POO puddles from Smudge, for instance), etc, etc. A very simple and almost mono-chromatic desktop works best for her sensitive nervous system. Green is her favorite color, and this is an especially peaceful and calming shade, so we use this one the most. (She's very annoying and bitchy when she's over-stimulated. "Brittle", comes to mind. Trust us.)

Here is Sepia Sadie. We used this on the desktop for a long time on our old iBook (RIP). We knew Victor would enjoy seeing his special friend when she was tiny and floofy and even more adorable just as adorable:


Right now our screen saver is Nature Patterns, a standard option on our Mac. We like that one a lot. Sometimes we do a slide show of all of our photos, but that gets on Mosaic Lady's nerves if we do it too much. Almost everything gets on her nerves if we do it too much.

It's sort of a stressful week around here for a few reasons so we are not feeling very chipper or creative today. In addition, we learned from Molly that our NOMSS Friend, the well-accessorized guinea pig, Gingerbread, was helped along to the bridge by her family earlier this week. If you feel so inclined, please stop by Molly's blog and express your sympathy.

Mancat in the Making, Monday ~ by Annie

Here is the other foster intruder kitten that I have been tolerating enduring, Kitties.
"Smudge".
Great name, huh? So mancatly. Especially when Mosaic Lady pronounces it: "Smudgers".

Yao-lin, where do I go to claim the medal you awarded me?
Not only does my rosy, post-adoption life require that I tolerate a mentally deranged dog and any number of foster cats, this foster cat smells like poo!!
Can you feel my pain disdain?

Not many people thought Smudge would live this long, or live at all. His mom dropped him and his brother on some lady's porch hours after birth. (His brother, Cheddar, is an orange guy! A classic striped Tabby.) A very nice rescue kitty named Cindy had a litter of five kittens she was nursing, so she took Cheddar and Smudge under her belly, too. All of these cats have wonderful new forever homes. We have Smudge. Lucky us.

Smudge has had some sort of disgusting issue with his poop tract since birth. He hollers and screams when he tries to go and used to get so full of poo he would vomit and stop eating. The vet can find nothing wrong with his insides, so he has enemas every few weeks to clean him out. He is much better now, although he is a total runt. He is about 5 months old, and you can see he is no bigger than Lucy, who is much younger.

There is NO shortage of Smudge poo in our house, I can promise you. And he goes wherever he feels like it. He is afraid that the litter box is biting his hiney. If you look up "dingleberry" in Webster's, you will see his face. And sometimes it sticks to him and he really stinks, which reminds us of a few of you kitties that shall remain nameless. You know who you are. Mosaic Lady had to cut a bunch of his tail furs off the other night. They call him Smudge for the faint black mark on his forehead, but I call him Smudge for dark streaks in other places.
So far, Mosaic Lady has not stepped in it, but we have 2.5 more weeks to go. It is disgusting and I apologize if you are eating your stinky goodness breakfast.

Here is a better picture of Smudge's partner in mayhem, Lucy. It's good they have each other, I suppose, because if there were only one kitten they would be torturing me all the time. Now they just torture me when they are awake. I do not recall signing on for any sort of fostering chores when I agreed to join this family.
Especially for the poo challenged.