Every day Hopper gets her mouse.

Every day Hopper gets bored with her mouse.

Hard to believe it, but Hopper turns 15 this month. (Pictures taken this morning, while she sunned herself under my light box.) Hopper is my first cat, my first companion animal. And to think I didn’t even used to like cats! She was only 6 months old when I adopted her and I wish I knew where her baby pictures are. Those were taken in the age of non-digital cameras and if some of my pics are blurry now, well, all of my pics were blurry then.

We’ve successfully managed Hopper’s heart disease since she was diagnosed about 2 years ago. They found it early, still in a mild condition and hasn’t progressed, thankfully. Her arthritis is another story and she refuses to take her pain killers. She has a slight limp that you can’t really see unless you know what to look for and she needs to jump on a few extra surfaces to reach her destinations, but she can still haul ass when Angelo or Hee Seop terrorize her. She’s thinner then we’d like, but I think it’s a part of her aging. Still, I forget how much more fragile she is because I still think of her as 5 years old. Her sassy attitude hasn’t changed, that’s for sure!

Picture taken just now.

As I write this, Angelo is still lying in my inbox, looking like he’s hungover from partying on New Year’s Eve. He actually turned 9 in December, but I didn’t have a chance to post. At least he’s behaving at the moment.

Hopper’s First Christmas, 1995

I’m guilty, that is. Of taking my fur child to the store to sit on Santa’s lap, which she clearly did not want to do. This is a scanned Polaroid, and when I tried to fix her glowing eyes, I think the red eye feature made her look even more frightened.

At the time, I wasn’t just a first-time pet parent but a first time kitty parent, too. My family had dogs when I was growing up, so I knew absolutely nothing about cats. On this day, oh, I learned some lessons. Brian, the kitties, and I wish you all a wonderful holiday!!!

Since Hee Seop had the kitty stomach flu, he’s become finicky, which is so unlike him. I mean, the guy eats trash. Trash. So the vet said to try other foods. He eats better than we do, what with his organic, all-natural, human-grade meat, etc., food, so we went to our local pet supply shop and bought different brands (he usually eats Wellness). One of the foods we tried was Weruva’s Green Eggs and Chicken (that’s free range chicken ), so called because of “those bits of dried egg” and “green peas and spinach [that Hee Seop] will enjoy with every bite!” As you can see, Hee Seop did not enjoy the peas.

I realize that “Unintentional Grounding” is not a criminal charge. In fact, it isn’t even a penalty in football, which is actually intentional grounding: “when a passer, facing an imminent loss of yardage due to pressure from the defense, throws a forward pass without a realistic chance of completion” [via]. But I’m running out of charges so I have to be creative with the episode titles.

Anyway, in this week’s episode of CSI: Cat Scene Investigation, which actually occurred on the morning we left for Iowa, Hee Seop jumped onto the bed to join me. I went to welcome him, then immediately recoiled when I saw that crap on his cheek you see in the picture above — evidence that poor Angelo unwittingly began to dispose of (click on pic for larger image). Brian and I thought our little culprit turned into one of those cats who likes to eat litter — they exist — Google it if you don’t believe me. But based on his previous offenses, we ran into the kitchen and found this:

Oh, relax. They’re just coffee grounds. Apparently, Hee Seop had to get past the coffee filter in order to get to the real treasure: scraped out, leftover cat food, which we know he never got to because paper towels and other debris weren’t strewn all over the floor. And no, this did not cause his stomach flu. That happened over a week later. *sigh* Will he ever stop?