Zapato, Mouse, and Velvet
7/3/1

I guess I�ve really never talked about the cats. I may mention them, but I�ve not told the whole story. Or I may have. I don�t really keep up. If I have, it�s hard to find now, so here it is, I think, for the first time anyway.

Mouse

You really can�t talk about Zapato without talking about Mouse, and vice versa, but most of Zap�s stuff has to do with Mouse and Mouse has a few stories that don�t include Zap.

We got Zapato and Mouse from Old Francis Robert�s house sometime in June of 1994. This is the same Francis Roberts that the art/history building at UAH is named after. She had a hobby of feeding stray cats, but she didn�t take them to the vet or get them fixed, so there was always a population explosion. We saw an ad in the paper and Aisai and I had agreed to go and pick out the two healthiest kittens.

I had a dream about a week before that time. I dreamed that I was back in the house on Versailles and that I had a kitten that was all white except for a grey dot on the top of his head.

There was a cat there of that description, and it was definitely in the top three as far as health goes. The two cats to be picked were my dream cat and the cat now known as Zapato.

So, is Mouse a white cat with a grey spot on the top of her head? No.

Mouse was not the healthiest cat. She was defiantly the least healthy of the kittens. She only weighted 6 oz when she got to the vet for the first time.

We took our new cats, loaded with fleas, to Aisai�s mother and father�s house to show them off. Then they got a long bath as we picked the fleas off them.

Mouse had to be bottle-fed. She was much smaller than Zapato. One day, as I was doing schoolwork at my desk, Mouse just sat on the rabbit pelt that they liked to sleep on and looked sleepy. She never closed her eyes, but she looked so tired. When Aisai got home from work, I told her what the situation was.

Aisai immediately went and grabbed one of Mouse�s paws. It was burning up. It was also 6:30 at night and all the vets were closed. What to do?

I called Econopet and said, �I know you guys aren�t vets, but I have a young kitten here with a fever and��

�Call Jones Valley Animal Hospital. They close about now, but they�ll stay open for you.� was her response.

We did, and they did. Dr. Karen was the person who attended Mouse. First they put her in a water bath to cool her down. This wasn�t done in our presence. Then they applied rubbing alcohol to her footpads, to keep her cool. They told us to do this also. I don�t remember what they did besides this, but it was much after seven when we got out.

Mouse lived, but now has fairly severe brain damage. She can eat, play, and poop correctly (meaning in the litter box) but she is incapable of learning anything really. You adapt to her, not vice versa. She doesn�t know how to bury her poop, though she knows that she has the drive to do so. She�ll go in the litter box and then scratch on the wall nearby, trying to satisfy the burying instinct.

Mouse is also vicious and fierce, but in a nice, mindless way. Sometimes it is Time To Hunt, and she will hunt Zapato or Velvet.

Zapato

Zap is Mouse�s sister. The origin story is the same but Zapato is smart, lazy, and very emotional. She also has a good sense of humor. However, when we describe the cats, she is the Neurotic cat.

One of Zapato�s nicknames is Liberace, because she�s the peein�est. Not only is she prone to urinary tract infections since she eats poisonous philodendrons and drinks toilet water. We�ve even put little cat stickers, Chococat from Hello Kitty [Happy Meal Version] specifically, on the toilet seats to remind us to close them so El Disgusto can�t drink from the toilet.

Zap is good about the peeing in some ways. She always* pees only in the bathroom, usually on the bathmat, which is usually a towel.

*Except when she pees on my green jeans like she did about a month ago. Grrr.

Zap is always there for me. She waits for me, sleeps near me, sits on me. Meows if I don�t open the bathroom door quickly enough after my shower. She begs for food and is shameless in general. She�s an attention hog who doesn�t mind being the butt of a joke.

And to be honest, she got her toilet drinking habits from Velvet.

Velvet

At one point, we were having Zapato peeing problems and the vet, this time Dr. Mac from JVAH, tell us it was behavioral.

No sadder words have been spoken about cats urinating than �it�s behavioral.� At that time Mouse was being particularly fierce, for about a year, and Zapato�s nerves were constantly on edge. Zap couldn�t get a break. She was freaking out, losing it. And she was peeing on the bathroom floor a lot.

The solution recommended was to break up the polarity of the catness by getting, you guessed it, another cat.

It didn�t seem too bright to me at the time, but it did work. Velvet was adopted from the Humane Society here and rather than being raised by me, as Zap and Mouse were, she was raised by Zap and Mouse, who still don�t get along.

She is a Tuxedo Kitty, where Zapato and Mouse are Kremlin Tabby, with Zapato having Tuxedo partially imprinted over the tabby. Velvet has very strong kung fu, due to her violent upbringing, and has no fear. She has never fallen, to my knowledge.

She�s like a genetically designed supercat. A cat where they had to sacrifice humor, tolerance, and the begging instinct to get a finely honed, martial arts trained cat. She�s light, only six pounds at five years old. But not all of that is due to her active lifestyle.

Velvet, besides being gripey when you joke with her, has a significant flaw. She has a heart murmur. And the vet keeps reminding us by sending postcards saying we need to schedule an EKG. I asked Dr. Mac how the murmur would manifest itself if it ever got bad. He said, �You�d come home and she�d be dead.�

The only thing we can do for her is to give her a baby aspirin every week. So, no need for $400 EKGs.

We are also supposed to bring her in if she ever starts losing weight or shows a decrease in appetite. You couldn�t force Velvet to eat tuna from day one. She doesn�t want it or any food. She eats because she has to. And at six pounds, if she lost any weight, she�d float to the ceiling.

Velvet is called �The Cat Without Fear� and �Vampire Squirrel�. The second is because she is a combo of long and short hair with most of the long hair being on her tail, and an extended mane that goes down her sides. That�s the squirrel part. The vampire part is due to her coloration. She is black but has tuxedo marks, but also has two little pips of white right below her mouth. They look like fangs if you don�t know she�s colored that way. It�s cute.

Velvet also has another hang up. When she was born, her mother died. Now, Mouse will go and nurse on a blanket or something like that because she was taken away from her mother too soon [though it was really at the same age as Zapato, but Mouse never got any food as a stray]. But Velvet never had a mother besides the nice gal who took her to and from the Humane Society every day. She was always bottle fed by a human hand. Thus, Velvet must lick my hand every once in a while.

Oh, and it bugs me to death. But she�s a good girl, and I can tune it out. I�ve also developed tougher skin on the back of my hands. Oh, joy.

And Velvet will turn five tomorrow, July 4. More than likely that is not the actual birthday she had, but we just don�t know. Zapato and Mouse celebrate Cinco de Mayo as their birthday.

Our next pet will more than likely be a Greyhound. Aisai want to adopt one from Birmingham�s dog tracks. I�ve dealt with them when I worked at the vet, so I know they are good, healthy dogs. But I�ll miss having a puppy.

Cat Name Trivia:

Zapato�s name was supposed to be Langosta. Langosta means lobster in Spanish where zapato means shoe. She got the name Zapato since she has little white socks but I wasn�t going to name her Calcitines, the Spanish word for socks. Mouse�s name was supposed to be temporary until Aisai thought of a better one. Velvet was originally named Maddie, which we changed to Madison, then she was Batwings for a day, and then was named Velvet since Aisai commented that her face felt just like velvet, which it does.