Sunrise

just near the solstice and the sun comes up so early. I've been on night patrol with Prussia.

I should explain. I cancelled her appointment with the vet reaper way back when, and miraculously, she rebounded, put weight and spunk back on and has been enjoying life greatly. 

Until two days ago when she started to get weak in the legs, walk like a drunkard then finally lose the use of her legs at all. 

I have been blessed to be able to work from home so I can be near her. Nights I nap beside her, monitoring her. Bringing the food and water dishes to her face to take from. 

For now, I'm not taking her to the vet. She is resting and I pray that I can keep her comfortable until that final rest comes. That being said, I will of course bring her to the vet if she shows any sign of pain. 

For now, it's watching the sunrises together. 

prussia tv

recently someone said to emre and i, upon hearing that we don’t have cable or television, “you guys are the purist people i know! vegetarian? no car? no tv?” and by purist, she meant weirdest. i’m used to this.
yeah, and what’s worse, instead of watching tv, we watch the one-eyed calico. most of the time prussia is really boring, yet still we enjoy staring at her as she stares out the window, ears moving like antennae tracking bird calls and delivery trucks. but here we encounter her at her most show-stopping (and that in itself is a very relative statement)--high on catnip.


prussia-tv guide's episode highlights:
--this episode catches the actress in a rare moment of play
a year after i adopted prussia from north shore animal league, they sent me a survey asking a number of questions one assumes adds up to a healthy pet. when i came to “does your pet play?” i felt like a failed mother. in a year, she had never shown signs of friskiness. in fact, she was lucky to even be alive, after the getting-stuck-behind-the-sink-wall-suicide-attempt of ’99 which ended in taking a meat cleaver to the sheetrock and extracting said trouble making feline. you get the point—a playful moment like this? it’s kinda rare.

--the actress exhibits symptoms of a suspected case of A.D.D.
when prussia does get a wild hair (or a huge dose of catnip), she must be constantly reminded that she is indeed playing, in order to entertain us for any length of time. except it’s entertaining in itself to watch her get distracted from playing because she absolutely must bathe right this instant! How could she have missed that filthy patch of cat fur?!

--the actress furthers her reputation for being strange by preferring the lid of the catnip tub over any cute furry manufactured-to-be-a-toy entity.
this has been a lifelong preference.

--the actress demonstrates new ‘crotchety old cat’ voice
at the ripe age of 11 1/2 (what is that, 90 in cat years?) she sounds just like the wind up black cat sirens from ‘the nightmare before christmas’. prussia now sounds like she’s wounded and whining even when she’s purring and she has taken to yelling at us for food. this is old age for sure.

--the cat-actress demonstrates her human crossover tendencies, adopting modesty and shame.
it’s like she knows catnip is a drug and wants to hide the fact from her parents that she’s high, so she interrupts her play when she notices us looking at her. prussia also knows when she is being talked about, more specifically when she is being teased. she will flee the room in embarrassment.

--and lastly, the tail.
i've always known it’s a humorous 'weather vane' for her emotions, twitching like a rattlesnake when she's nervous. it seems to operate on its own. lately the tail has been drawing much notice from visitors. this reminds me of a certain cat named spike, whose possessed tail had a separate name: biardkirk (sp? sorry to bring it up tristan,--i know it freaked you out!)

ay, cats! but c’mon, what’d you expect when you came to a blog written by a girl named kitty? i considered editing down the video but ran out of time. got 2 minutes?


okay, so when i went on youtube to upload this video, i realized how pathetic we are to be entertained by so little because most cats on youtube? they're much more cute, weird and funny than prussia. oh well, we take what we can get, huh?