Exciting time in the ol’ Write Up The Road office tonight – the cats were all getting ready to go to bed, when Pete ambled over to get a drink of water. And stopped in his tracks.
And I’m very glad he did – there was a gigantic red wasp, floating and struggling in the water! If Pete had lowered his head – or worse yet, his tongue – he may have been stung by a wasp trying to save itself from drowning. Whew!
I shooed Ta’Male away from the water bucket and tried to think how to get rid of the wasp without any of us getting stung. I didn’t want to fish it out and try to step on an enraged wasp – not wearing shorts, I wouldn’t.
Luckily a good angel whispered in my ear to catch the wasp in a small plastic cup that I use for mixing paint colors, and quickly slap a piece of cardboard over the top to keep the wasp in the cup. Then I should be able to get him to the door of the office on the floor below.
Worked like a charm. I zipped down the stairs, raced across the floor and opened the door all in one motion (I’d bet it was, anyway) and threw the plastic cup and wasp out away from the door as far as I could.
Fred looked disappointed when I came back up the stairs.
“Didn’t you get a picture of the water bucket with the wasp swimming in it?“
Um, no, Fred, I didn’t. I didn’t even think of it, actually.
“Oh, rats! That would’ve made a great picture entry in our Dishunary under ‘wasp.’ “
Fred, the nearest emergency vet is an hour’s drive away. And if someone had gotten stung, it would’ve really, really hurt, all the way there. I got a picture of the water bucket to show our readers, is that any good?
“Yeah, well, I gotcha. But I bet that photo would’ve gotten a Pawlitzer Prize for Best Photo.”
Senor Ta’Male has been having stomach problems for the last week or so. The lists of symptoms on the net detailing his stomach problems point to food allergies.
Poor guy. He’s one of the farm cats who would happily live on nothing but kibble and a bucket of water; canned food is fine, but for a real meal, give him that crunchy stuff.
The first culprit I suspected was the little sausage-shaped green pellets in a very popular dry cat food. I’d noticed an awful lot of these seemed to be present in the cats’ kibble lately, a lot more than I remembered. Checking the ingredients indicated those pellets were made of soybean husks or hulls, and soybeans are among the top offenders for cats with sensitive stomachs.
Ta’Male has always had a ‘sensitive stomach’ but mostly when there’s a lot of inter-cat bickering going on or I’m off on a tangent because of one of the Gang of Seven in the office being absolutely horrid. (What? One of my angelic cats chewing up things or ripping something to shreds after it’d been taken away and hidden or deliberately starting a fight with a sibling? Nah.)
But when his stomach was Not Happy with the kibble and kept rejecting it, I searched for a reason.
Now, this posting isn’t EVER to be taken as medical advice, or instead of taking your cat to the nearest vet. Veterinarians are heroes every day, in my book. They’re the experts, and the ones with the education, expertise and access to tests etc. that benefit thousands of fur critters every day.
However, I literally live with these reincarnated humans in fur suits, and I notice patterns/changes/glitches in their habits. I figured it’d be a good idea to try out my theory of food allergies before making a vet appointment, simply because ours are so busy, it might take a week or two to get in anyway. (BTW, food allergies, like those in humans are among the hardest things to diagnose.)
Picking over cat-sized portions of their regular kibble quickly proved to be Not A Solution. But just keeping most of the suspected soybeans out of Ta’Male’s food led to very gratifying results – he went a happy week without any vomiting at all. When I allowed him the regular kibble with the soybean hulls, he got sick within minutes.
Bingo!
Now, how to sort out the good kibble from the offending kibble without spending hours I don’t have picking it over by hand?
Remember reading about the gold miners panning for gold in California? Here’s how you pan for green and remove it from your cat’s dish.
The tools you’ll need are a hammer, a Phillips’ screwdriver and a slightly larger blade screwdriver. Next you’ll need an aluminum cake pan and an aluminum pie pan (used from the bakery are great). The pie pan needs to fit into the cake pan.
Punch a series of holes on the inside of the pie pan, resulting in this new version of the back of the pan:
Don’t run your fingers over these holes! Aluminum or not, they are SHARP. Now fit the pie pan into the top of the cake pan. Pour in a handful of kibble that you want to sort. Holding the pans together tightly, shake them gently and see if the smaller green pellets fall through the holes into the cake pan.
See where more of the green kibble fell into the cake pan? This isn’t a perfect method – you’ll still have to fish out some of the regular kibble that fell through too, but it IS a lot faster than picking out each. tiny. pellet. with your fingers.
I hope this post helps some other cat whose stomach just can’t take certain foods any more. You may be able to adapt this for other kibble, like salmon pellets (mine can’t stand them) or other detested bits.
But please excuse me for now – it’s dinner time, and I have to go pan for green.
He was always – shall we say – inquisitive, curious, willing to explore and actively engaged in his small world!
Ira never looked his age until he got quite old. This photo was taken when he had to be six years old, but he doesn’t show it.
Things that irked both Abishag and I; he stayed skinny (she didn’t), he looked years younger for most of his life (Abishag and I didn’t), he leaped up onto any surface and ran/walked the open beams in the office until his arthritis got the best of him. (No comment.)
Abishag generally greeted his latest escapade with her distinctive “Humph.”
That one syllable was supposed to put her brother in his pace and make him behave. It didn’t.
I can see Ira leaping from cloud to cloud, shouting, “Hey, sis! You finally got here! Lookit me! I can really jump high now! Wanna see me slide down the Rainbow Bridge?”
And Abishag stands there, watching him show off, and merely says, “Humph.”
When Pete detects a flea daring to walk across his fur, or – egads! – daring to chomp on him, it means All. Out. War. And a distress call to the nearest human who can wield a flea comb immediately.
If that flea comb doesn’t come to the rescue – here you view the results.
A concentrated attack of teeth and claws usually ends the problem. Of course, it renders Pete a bit motley-looking, but killing that flea is of paramount importance.
What’s that saying about ‘not suffering fools lightly’? Pete quotes it as, “Not suffering fleas lightly.”
And any entity armed with that many sharp teeth and claws can quote or misquote anything they wish, as far as I’m concerned.
Do any of you remember when the internet was younger, and people were still having fun with their computers by making silly little things to amuse themselves and others?
Here’s a classic from that era: https://share.google/vY3FmYmahLYPsHdgQ (Click twice on the box that says ‘share Google’.) Thank you, Shanee Pigate, who dreamed that one up in 2005!
Readers, have a little nostalgia with your coffee today … and be sure to hug your cat. (We won’t mention how much that Dancing Cat looks like Seis.)
One of my favorite photos of Seis and Ocho, as Ocho put her cold paws on her nice warm brother! The startled look on Seis’ face is priceless.
Sad to relate, however, Ocho passed away today, March 31, 2026 at eleven years old; probably of congestive heart failure. She’d been having more trouble than usual breathing this spring, with asthma and allergies plaguing her daily, but kept on purring in spite of it all.
We’re reassuring Seis that he will indeed see her at the Rainbow Bridge – she’ll meet him there, along with her only litter of kittens, their sister and their good friend Uno Tomas.
But somehow the house feels a little more empty, and Seis of course is watching for Ocho on this side of the divide. Thank you, dear readers, for sending him good thoughts as he works through the grieving process.
Frankly, he’ll also have to brace himself for their reunion. Ocho is going to really chew him out for not having stayed behind her and come along as she told him to and not lag behind.
Ochita, you were one in a million, and we’re glad you were part of the family for those years. Find a nice sunny spot on the other side where you can see who’s coming up the Bridge, and enjoy the warmth, the soft green grass – and no horrid fleas. We’ll look after your brother until he crosses too.
Herman remains convinced that his toy dinosaur is real enough to need feeding every day, at least once, and of course from Herman’s own dish of kibble and/or canned food.
The tabby cat started putting the tiny felt (and much-cherished) toy in his food dishes back in the fall of 2024. And obviously now it’s a habit.
But to carefully position the stuffed toy between two dishes of food, balancing it exactly on the rim of both? Was this so the dinosaur could choose from which dish to eat first?
Sometimes owning a cat becomes a balancing act too. Just how smart is your average house cat? And when does the owner lose the upper paw – er, hand?
You can tell it’s gotten really cold outside, with 6 inches of snow, wind chill factors and no sunshine. Plus the fact that Gabby and Fred are sharing a dog biscuit box doesn’t bother either one of them.
Definitely a chilly day at Write Up The Road Publishing.
Abishag always had ambitions to be a published author – after all, she ‘ran away’ from home (the house next door) when she was very young, to come and live in a small publishing company. While she had more cats to play with in her new home, it was when she and her brother Ira moved upstairs into the company office that she bloomed. Abishag absorbed vocabulary like tuna. She enjoyed the noise and bustle of the office and all of the different things that went on. With the single exception of not liking to have someone read to her, she was in her element, a miniature editor and certainly a vocal critic.
She had several ‘books’ brought out under her name with Write Up The Road as the publisher of record. These haven’t yet been released to the public, except as blogs – because who’s going to believe a cat actually wrote anything? (Don’t tell Fred. Most people don’t accept his literary talents either.)
She did snort her disdain at a famous beagle and his struggles to be signed to a publisher’s contract for his tales about the ‘Bunnie Wunnies’, commenting that of course a “stupid dog” would never be a popular writer.
Well, an editor of any species is going to have a few prejudices, so I guess we can allow Abishag hers. And it is true that Snoopy referred to the feline next door as “that stupid cat.”
Tit for tat, stupid dog, stupid cat. If only people could solve their animosities with such mild name-calling.
