The Digital Age
So I made my first attempt at digital art today. Behold: Pepper in neon!
(Yes, I know it sucks.)
Drawing in Procreate is very different than drawing by hand. I’m sure I could adjust the brush settings to be much more like drawing with a real pencil, but I didn’t want to mess around too much this first time.
Whatcha think?
Fish
Got a little fisheye lens for my phone. So of course I had to test it with Pepper.
She’s a cutie.
That is all.
Longest run + Pepper Adventures
You guys, I am SO CLOSE to marathon distance. SO CLOSE!
Also, look at this adorable girl:
We’re trying to get her used to the harness so that we can take her outside on the weekends. She seems to be enjoying the whole process.
Look at this destructive baby
She loves to murder rolls of paper towels.
(Don’t worry, we don’t let the towels go to waste; we save them and use them to clean up her pukes and other gross things.)
Pepp to Vet
We took Pepper to her first vet visit (well, first one she’s had with us) today, and the poor girl was SO scared. Like, Jazzy got scared too, but she would just kind of freeze up, turn into a brick, and let the vet do whatever they needed to her.
Pepper was mashed as small as she could get into the corner of her carrier and was just terrified. She kept emitting this very low growl and would occasionally his VERY softly. These growls and hisses were very different than the “play growls” and “play hisses” she uses with me when we’re fighting (big loud growls, big intimidating hisses).
Poor sweetie! Hopefully she’s just scared because this is the first time we’ve taken her anywhere; we’ll see how she does next year.
Pepper!
We’ve had our sweet Pepper cat for a year now!
She’s calmed down a little bit, haha, but she’s still a wild child most of the time. She’s so smart. She’s probably the smartest cat I’ve ever seen. I hope she is able to stay curious and playful and healthy for a long, long time!
A Year Without Jazzy
It’s been a year since we lost our sweetest little Jazz.
It’s been very hard.
I still have a lot of trouble going into our bedroom just because I always expect her to be on the bed. She LOVED bed.
She was such a wonderful little girl. I suspect all the health problems she had, including the cancer that eventually killed her, were due at least in part to living in that hoarding house. It’s not fair that she had to live like that and that those conditions probably shortened her life, but at least we were able to give her several years of happiness.
We miss you, Jazzy!
Pepper Play
As you’ve seen from many of my pictures and videos, Pepper is a very active, playful cat. One of her more recent favorite things to do is to take one of her favorite toys (either her new froggy or a particular mouse she loves), tuck it between her front paws, and then get wild when I try to take it from her.
I walk up behind her and start tip-toeing really loudly as I get closer and she starts flipping her tail and putting her ears back and getting that wild, playful look in her eyes. I reach down around her neck from the back to try and get the toy and she tries to shove it further beneath her as she growls (playfully) and hisses (also playfully…trust me, she could demolish me if she didn’t like what I was doing).
One of her favorite toys is a frog that ribbits. She destroys one of these per three/four weeks on average, so we’d just given her a new one. Here’s a video of her being super protective of it while we play. I love that dirty look she gives me at the end, haha.
So tough!
Catter Scatter
CHECK IT OUT THERE IS A CAT IN MY MOM’S BACKYARD:
My mom said she’s never seen her before but there she sits. She’s acting like she wants to come into the house.
I’ve named her Petal. I love her.
Edit: she chomped some mice my mom had in the backyard and we haven’t seen her since, haha. Must have just wanted the mice.
Pepper Pictures: March Edition!
Here’s another set of bi-monthly (-ish) pictures of Pepper, because she’s always posing and I’ve always got my phone ready to take her picture.
Big yawn!
She’s so beautiful.
Sink time!
Hahahaha.
HAHAHAHA.
Beauty queen.
She can basically flatten her hips completely down, haha.
Floor time!
Bi-Monthly Pepper Pictures
Because you know you want them.
Watching me opening packs in OOTP.
She is Pepper Towel.
Lounging.
More lounging.
Tub time (please ignore how gross our bathtub is).
YAY!
Puff Daddy
Pepper very readily puffs her tail if she’s startled, more so than any other cat I’ve seen. Sometimes she puffs at us when she’s in play mode and sometimes she puffs at us if we’re down the hall and she doesn’t know who we are.
Example: here she is after seeing Nate at the end of the hallway and not knowing who he was immediately.
Look at how fat that tail is! She’s such a sweetie.
Some Pepp
Have some more pictures of Pepper, because she’s always either a) in a gorgeous pose or b) in a weird pose and both are equally great.
That thing on the left is her tail, not her other leg.
Where’s Pepper??
Aww.
She’s so pretty.
She’s so weird.
Up on the fridge.
More posing.
Is it time for more Pepper pictures?
Yes.
Yes it is.
Enjoy.
Big yawn!
Snooze time.
Sneaking in my laundry pile, haha.
Hiding.
Pretty girl!
HEYOOOOOOOO
I miss Jazzy.
Just thought everyone should know.
More Pepper
So Pepper is an exceptionally pretty cat. Jazzy was gorgeous too, but I think because her coloring was so dark it didn’t show up very well in photos. Pepper, on the other hand, basically glows because she’s so white (and also sits still for pictures, unlike Jazzy), so her prettiness shows up very nicely. Observe!
She looks deflated in that last one, haha.
God I Miss Jazzy
That’s the blog.
Bright lights / big city / we have / a kitty
Sooooooooooo we didn’t get Waffle. The Humane Society doesn’t let people “reserve” animals (first come first serve), and when I checked their adoptions page right before we headed down there, Waffle’s picture was gone.
Meaning she had been adopted by someone who had an earlier appointment that morning.
I’d already bonded with her so much just by looking at her picture that it was almost like another loss. I ugly cried about it while Nate was in the shower.
But we decided to go anyway; perhaps another cat needed us.
And one did – we ended up with this pretty girl right here:
We don’t have a name for her yet, but she was very calm on the car ride home and seemed to not be afraid at all as she explored the house. It was hard to get a non-blurry picture of her.
It’s going to be interesting to see how different she is from Jazzy.
Edit: we named her Pepper!
Cat? I’m a kitty cat. And I dance, dance, dance, and I dance, dance, dance
The thought of getting a new cat is a conflicting one. On one hand, it would feel like a betrayal to Jazzy because she died exactly a month ago today, which isn’t that long ago at all, and it’s like even thinking of a new cat feels like we’re replacing her. On the other hand, there are so many cats in Calgary who need good homes, and we are in a position to provide that to one (or more) cats.
I was looking at the Calgary Humane Society adoptables today (because that’s what I do in my free time) and saw this sweet creature:
I felt an instant bond with her. Even just by seeing her pictures. Like…I need to meet this girl and see if we can help her. I’ve already renamed her Waffle.
So Nate and I have booked an appointment on Tuesday morning to go and check her out and possibly bring her home if we feel the same bond in person.
I’m excited. And sad. And guilty. And excited.
Long Boy!
It’s LONG BOY!
Long Boy (whose actual name is Tucker) is a cat I see relatively frequently on the path.
Well, I had been seeing him relatively frequently, but I think people kept reporting him as lost/missing so his owners kept him in Long Boy Prison to keep him from getting in trouble.
But he must have broken out, as I saw him trying to get into a car by the parking lot. I said “hi” to him and he ran up to me and wanted love and attention for like 10 minutes. Then he followed me for half a mile or so before he found some nice dirt to roll in and I was able to escape, haha.
More Sad, Sorry
I can’t sleep in our bed anymore. I miss Jazzy too much.
Bed was her favorite, favorite place. She loved to go to bed at night; she’d run in there after me and she had a hard time waiting until I got under the covers so that she could loaf on my chest and purr as loud as she could.
The whole house feels empty without her. I don’t even want to be at home.
Everything is so sad.
Jazzy’s Ashes
My mom and I went to pick up Jazzy’s ashes today. It was, of course, emotional, but not as bad as I was expecting. She’s back with us now, which is what matters.
Here is an imprint of her paw.
I miss her so, so, so much.
Gone.
We had to say goodbye to Jazzy today.
We knew it would happen sooner rather than later, but we didn’t think it would be this soon.
She threw up some blood this morning, which gave further evidence to our theory that she had some sort of lump or tumor somewhere in her upper digestive tract that has made it painful/impossible for her to eat. She then went and hid in the TV stand, which was another big indication that she knew it was almost her time to go.
The biggest indicator, though, was that she stopped purring.
We knew she was suffering. We didn’t want her to suffer anymore. We called the vet and they said they couldn’t get her in to get her put down for another few days, but they gave us the numbers of a few vets that would do in-home euthanasia. We were able to get an appointment in the late morning. Again, we didn’t want her to suffer anymore.
We spent a few hours just sitting with her in the living room before the vet came.
He was an excellent vet. He was very compassionate and understanding and careful. He explained what he was going to do and let me hold her as he administered the shots. She died peacefully in my lap with Nate next to us.
It was so hard to let her go. The vet put her little body in a cushioned box and carried her out after giving us time to just be with her.
Nate and I just sat on the bed crying after she was gone.
The house feels so empty. I can’t wrap my head around the fact that we’ll never see her weaving down the hallway again or doing her little wiggly tail dance in the kitchen or hear her beautiful purrs. I know she’ll be here in spirit, but it won’t be the same.
She was my child.
I will miss you, Jazzy. I will love you forever.
Jazz
Jazzy’s got some bumps on her.
There’s a small and somewhat soft one on her back near her spine and there’s another pointier one on the back of one of her legs.
This is obviously concerning because there’s like a 99% chance she has cancer, so who knows if these bumps are from cancer or from something else.
We’re hoping that they’re just a side effect from all the steroids she’s been having to take to try to suppress the cancer, but who knows.
I hate it all.
Future
I have a bad feeling about Jazzy. I think she’s not going to be with us much longer and I am NOT okay with that.
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