#Tag
Randy posted this lovely photo of Obie and wrote: “Obie has come a long way — from neighborhood stray two years ago to writing assistant.”
He also told me that Obie got on his desk, talked and talked to him, then marked Randy’s beard by rubbing his ear glands on his beard over and over again.
OBIE: This is my human. Mine.
Randy posted this lovely photo of Obie and wrote: “Obie has come a long way — from neighborhood stray two years ago to writing assistant.”
He also told me that Obie got on his desk, talked and talked to him, then marked Randy’s beard by rubbing his ear glands on his beard over and over again.
OBIE: This is my human. Mine.
Kelly remains extremely sick. He won’t touch food and we haven’t seen him drink water all day. He kept throwing up until I think he simply ran out of anything to throw up, even phlegm. I gave him more Lactulose this morning, but a while later he threw up again and what I cleaned up looked a lot like the medicine. I think he urgently needs fluids, but we don’t have any. We used to give fluids frequently and had ringer sets around, then all of our old cats died, so we didn’t keep any on hand.
I contacted the emergency vet clinic in Redding. The tech said there’s a shortage of veterinarians and there wouldn’t be one available by the time I got there. Plus we have a winter storm coming in. There’s a high pass I have to get over to even get to Redding, and making that drive with possible snow and ice is risky.
My local vet hospital isn’t technically open on Mondays, but there’s always a tech there and they all know me. I plan to get Kelly there as early as possible tomorrow morning. Even if there’s no vet available, they can get him on fluids and maybe an IV until a vet can look at him.
Tilly has acquired a nickname: Miss Hot Pants.
Because her dark markings just barely cover her butt.
Tilly has acquired a nickname: Miss Hot Pants.
Because her dark markings just barely cover her butt.
The big surprise in our lives has been the transformation of Obie. It was February of 2024 when a hungry orange tabby showed up with a scarred face and ragged ear. When we began feeding him, he behaved like a feral and was untouchable.
Now that we’ve won his trust, he turned out to be a wonderful, affectionate, sweet cat. I’ve never seen a cat that likes to spend so much time with his belly up. He lets us scratch him under the chin, and rub his chest and belly.
When he comes inside wet from rain, he lets us towel him off. Once a week, he patiently allows me to rub him all over with the anti-allergen liquid.
Obie’s fur is beautifully soft now. Last winter he developed some bad dreadlocks that we had to cut off, so we’re being careful to comb him. He likes being combed. He will even lie on one side to be combed, then roll belly-up and let us comb his chest and belly (!!!), and then roll to the other side for more combing.
He’s filled out, of course. We may have made him a bit TOO chunky, so we’re watching how we feed him. He routinely comes inside, eats inside, plays inside, and has come to enjoy the cat furniture, but will only hang out for so long before he asks to go outside again.
To our further delight, he’s something of a lap cat. He often gets onto the sofa to snuggle up next to Randy, then crossing over Randy’s lap to share the snuggling with me, and one memorable night he got into Randy’s lap in the armchair.
He’s friendly and gentle with all of the inside cats, and never strikes back on the rare occasion when a cat whacks him. Obie has actually integrated with the other cats far better than Kelly did, and Obie is happy to hang out with Kelly outside the house. Kelly tolerates Obie better than the indoor cats.
He’s gradually spending more time indoors, but still insists of being outside most of the time, especially at night. When we had a night near freezing last week, we kept him inside overnight to see how it would go. He cried on and off all night, but in the morning he was fine. Not upset with us and willing to come in and out the same as before. We haven’t repeated the experiment because we haven’t gotten down into the freezing temps again, but once we do, we plan to keep him in at night.
When we decided to start letting Kelly go outside and ordered a collar for him, we decided to get a collar for Obie as well. At this stage, we want to be sure he isn’t mistaken for a stray because he does still wander a bit. This necessitated that we finally settle on a definitive name for him. We tossed out Obi-Wan and Oberon, and have simply gone for Obie. We looked up Obie as a name. It’s a Nigerian Igbo name variously defined as “heart”, “a father’s heart”, or “a father’s will”.
He’s certainly won our hearts.
