Petsmart Halloween

This has become an annual tradition for us, and if you think we're crazy - too bad :-).

A few years ago a local pet store in Corpus Christi asked us to enter their annual pet costume contest. We shopped there all the time and it sounded cute and fun, so we entered, and won 2nd place. We took home a bag of rabbit supplies (I had dressed our 4 rabbits up as the characters from the Wizard of Oz) worth at least $100. Once we realized we could win money we set out for 2 more contests in town - winning 1st place and a $50 gift certificate at one of them, and 3rd place a box of pet supplies worth about $50 from another one. In total we won about $200 worth of animal supplies and in a large animal household, any money or free stuff is always welcome and appreciated!

So for the past few years we have been taking the cats (and rabbits, though 3 of them have died, leaving me with only one character from the Wizard of Oz left). Each year we've won something. We've never won as much as that first year, but I've found that most people dress up their dogs and are shocked to see cats and rabbits in costumes. I think thats what helps us win - we're different from the rest.

This past weekend we took the cats to the Petsmart Halloween contest and walked out of there with 3 cute pictures, and 3rd place with a huge bag of Greenies treats. Greenies are pretty expensive and this bag is huge, so once again, we were happy with our prize :-).

We couldn't take all of the cats because some of them won't tolerate a costume for even 2 seconds, but we packed up the ones who were semi-well behaved and this is what we got. They all look so thrilled....

Meet Moe

Moe has appeared in a few other blog posts of mine - here and here - and now he needs any good vibes, prayers and thoughts that you can spare.

Moe started out as a foster kitten, and was then adopted by a friend of mine. When Moe decided to start violently attacking his former best friend (Larry, the cat), he came to live with me for a while. My friend and I tried to reintroduce him to Larry, in the hopes that they would eventually get along, but we were unsuccessful after several attempts and we failed. (side note: I am NOT a person who likes when people just give up pets, but this was a weird circumstance. I've never seen cats fight the way Larry and Moe were fighting, and with a 10 month old baby in the house who often ended up underneath their fights, this just wasn't working out.)

So Moe has come back to live in the V household permanently. I suppose I have the option of bringing him back to the vet that I first fostered him for, but that would require him living in a cage in the vet's waiting room, hoping that someone will adopt a full grown cat. Plus, he's been back and forth between my house and my friend's house several times, and he already seems confused about what's going on, so I wasn't about to relocate him again.

A few days ago, Moe had a horrible coughing fit. Since I've only heard one of my cats cough once before, and it was just one single cough, I started googling "feline cough". His fit was enough to have me worried because on top of the fact that he was coughing, he also seemed like he couldn't breathe. An hour or so of googling led me to the conclusion that a coughing cat is bad...really bad. Every single thing I read about it, said that the cat would need medical attention ASAP. So the next day we went off to the vet. I had started to suspect asthma, based on my readings and some videos I watched of cats having asthma attacks, and the vet confirmed my suspicions. However, asthma isn't the only cause of coughing in cats. There are several other things that could cause it...the worst one being heart disease.

If you remember back in May, I wrote a blog about my cat Meepers. Meepers had died from what we suspect was undiagnosed heart disease. When he died, I did a lot of research on heart disease in cats, and its a very, very scary thing. It often goes undiagnosed, and when its finally noticed, its often too late. So of course, since heart disease could be the cause of Moe's coughing, I was worried.

The vet listened to his heart and thankfully didn't hear anything wrong with it. A murmur or an irregular beat could be indicative of a heart problem. Unfortunately though, NOT hearing one of these things doesn't necessarily mean that his heart is ok. She also took some x-rays, and sent them off to a radiologist for analysis. Her suspicion was asthma, but the radiologist was the one who would really be able to read the x-rays.

Yesterday, I got some possible bad news, and I'm now a nervous wreck. The vet called me back and told me that the radiologist definitely confirmed asthma from the x-rays. This obviously isn't good, but its treatable. However, the vet also noticed that his heart was slightly enlarged. And having an enlarged heart is just not good obviously. Now Moe has to go back in for some more tests.

Its very possible that the asthma has caused the enlarged heart, but a more probable diagnosis is that he has some form of heart disease AND asthma. Apparently, the two often go hand in hand.

So now I'm playing the waiting game. When this holiday weekend is over, I have to schedule more tests for him and talk with the vet about getting him on an asthma regimen. And I'm hoping, praying and wishing that he doesn't have heart disease.

Heart disease is the #1 cause of sudden death in cats and that's what terrifies me the most. Meepers acted perfectly normal, and then an hour later he collapsed and died. I'm terrified that I'll have to experience that again with Moe. There's medicine to treat heart disease in cats, but its really something that seems to be hit or miss. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.

The absolute best case scenario here is that his enlarged heart has been caused by the asthma, and once the asthma is under control, then his heart will be fine. So if anyone can spare some thoughts, prayers, or good vibes, please send them my way. I don't think I can handle losing another cat to heart disease, this soon after losing Meepers to the same thing. :-(

How to Find a Lost Dog

My friend and I had quite the adventure this weekend, and because of the way it ended, I felt the need to share it. Basically, Facebook found my friend's lost dog, and for some reason, the randomness of that fact is really amusing to me.

So...On Saturday, my friend Mrs. B over at Musings of a Mama, and I joined forces to have a garage sale. We started the sale on Friday, and ended it on Saturday. She had to leave to be somewhere at 11:30 on Saturday, so I stayed behind at her house to get in a few more garage sale hours. She had left her dog outside in their backyard, and I wasn't sure if she wanted the dog in or out when I left. I don't have a dog, and I know that a lot of my friends leave their dogs outside or crated when they aren't home, so I sent her a text message to ask her what she wanted me to do with Roxy (the dog) when I left. Unfortunately, she got the text message too late, because I had already left and opted to leave Roxy outside.

Once she finally got back to me, she told me that Roxy can jump her fence, and they do usually leave her inside. OK, no problem. I offered to go back, make sure Roxy was still in her yard, and put her in the house if their back door was unlocked. I went back, Roxy was still there, but of course, her back door was locked and Mrs. B wasn't going to be home for 6 more hours or so.

So I took Roxy back to my house, thinking that this would be the ideal solution. She can't come in our house because of the cats (the cats WILL attack her as proven by the one other dog that I ever let into my house), but my fence is about 6 feet high, almost twice as high as Mrs. B's fence, so both of us figured that the likelihood of Roxy jumping over my fence was pretty unlikely.

Mr. V and I went to a movie that night. I had told Mrs. B that we would probably go out for a couple hours, and we both thought that Roxy would be ok. Of course, bad luck seems to follow me around.

Mr. V and I went to see Inception, and when we came back, we checked on Roxy, only to find her missing. Gone. She wasn't in our backyard anymore. Regardless of the fact that she wasn't there, we still spent a few minutes looking around the fence line wondering "Did she dig out? There's no possible way that she jumped this fence!" (Roxy is a boxer, and several people that I talked to yesterday insisted that there was no possible way for a boxer to jump a 6 foot fence - clearly they were wrong.) There were no holes dug underneath the fence, and the gate was closed and locked, so even if she had managed to unlock the gate, it wouldn't have relocked behind her after she went out of it. So jumping was the only logical answer as to what happened.

At the exact same time that we were racing to get into the car to search the neighborhood for her, Mrs. B texted us telling us that they were on their way home and were coming to pick up Roxy. So now Mr. V and I were slightly panicked and we had to call Mrs. B to tell her the bad news that her dog wasn't in our yard anymore and we had no idea where she was. We had already talked to the neighbors that share a fence line with us, and none of them had seen her. So we started searching. I don't even know how long we drove around for, but at some point, Mr. and Mrs. B arrived back in town and also went out searching. Once it got too dark (and this is Washington, so that didn't really happen until after 10:00), my eyes were pretty much useless so Mr. V dropped me back off at home, so I could print up some "Missing Dog" fliers, and he continued driving around. When we all realized that driving around looking for her, was getting us nowhere, and it was way to late to start knocking on people's doors to ask about her, we went around taping the fliers to the neighborhood mailboxes (Our neighborhood has large mailboxes that have 10 or so mailboxes in them so they are all centrally located amongst the houses), and shoving one under the door of the closed animal shelter, in case someone brought her in the next day.

Then we went to sleep. I felt horrible. I had taken Roxy to my house thinking that she would be safer in my backyard than in Mrs. B's backyard, and she still managed to get out. Not only did I feel awful because I lost my friend's dog, but I have also been through the process of losing an animal, when my cat Moses ran out the door and into the swamps of Jacksonville 2 years ago. He was missing for 3 months, and I had given up all hope of finding him, when a man called me to tell me that he had found him! So I know how upset someone feels when the lose their beloved pet like that. Losing Moses devastated me, but it also taught me to never give up looking!

The next morning I woke up still full of guilt, but motivated and driven to find this dog! I printed up smaller fliers and started going door to door asking people if they had seen her. I worked my way in a circle around my house to cover every direction, and ended up getting fliers out to 100 houses, talking to about 50 people in the process. No one had seen her.

My friend was home, and upset. She hadn't slept well the night before, so I told her to sleep, and that I'd keep searching the neighborhood. At some point in the afternoon she got a phone call from a guy who had read one of the mailbox fliers. He thought he had seen Roxy near his house. I had also run into a kid, about 6 years old, that morning who swore that he saw a boxer in the same area that this man said he saw her. I have to admit that I didn't really believe the kid because he parents even told me that he had no idea what a boxer looked like. I figured that he had just seen a dog, and since there are a lot of dogs in this neighborhood, I didn't think much of it.

So at some point in the afternoon, my friend and her husband joined me in going door to door. I had stopped after 100 houses because I thought that I had made a pretty large circle, and at that point, Roxy could have been anywhere, so other than calling shelters and posting fliers in central locations, I didn't know what else to do. However, the man that had called Mrs. B lived on the street directly behind where I stopped my circle of 100 houses. We had fliers on the mailboxes in that area, but not on every house. So we started canvassing that area with door to door fliers, talking to everyone we could.

By this point, I don't even know how many hours had gone by, but I did know that I was getting a pretty good workout! I had walked all over my neighborhood for hours, and had talked to anyone that I could. I have to admit that I was still confident that Roxy would be found, but I wasn't confident that we were going to find her in my neighborhood. After talking to so many people, I was thinking that if none of them had seen her, then she might be long gone at this point.

Then enter the lady in the green house on the street that intersects with mine. Again, I had stopped my circle at the very end of my street, and hadn't worked my way onto the next street (the streets in this neighborhood wind and twist all kinds of ways) because I was trying to make my circle pretty even in all directions.

Mr. and Mrs. B were going door to door on the opposite side of the street from me, when I knocked on the door to the green house. A friendly lady answered the door. I asked her if she had happened to have seen a dog roaming around the neighborhood. I was so used to people saying "no" at this point, so I was about to hand her a flier and ask her to keep an eye out, when she got all excited and said "A boxer? Are you looking for a boxer?" Since I hadn't told her what type of dog I was looking for yet, I got excited! I thought for sure she had Roxy in her backyard or that she had at least seen her!

Here's the odd/amusing/amazing part. She proceeded to tell me that her son's friend had found a boxer the night before. And how did she know this? She was playing Farmville on Facebook. She needed some kind of gift from someone, but none of her friends were online for her to ask for it. So she logged into her son's Facebook account so that he could send her what she needed. When she logged in, one of the status updates that popped up in her son's news feed was a guy who had posted "Has anyone lost a boxer?" followed by a whole conversation about this boxer he had found and that they had her at his house, were wondering if she belonged to someone, and if she didn't, they'd hold onto her. I was excited, but still doubtful. So this woman got incredibly excited, started looking up this guy's phone number (which she couldn't find), and then her son came home. He called the guy, described what Roxy looked like, and it appeared that the dog this guy had was a match! At this point I literally ran down the street to find Mrs. B, and we all ended up back at this woman's house. She armed them with a phone number, address, and map and sent them off to get their dog! It looked like this guy had found Roxy in our neighborhood the night before, didn't know where she came from, so he took her home with him to a neighborhood a few miles down the road. The next day he posted his "Anyone lose a boxer?" Facebook status.

The good news is that the dog he had was definitely Roxy and she is now home safe and sound with her family!

The day was crazy in itself because I was so determined to find this dog, and was so upset about losing her in the first place (and so thankful that my friend didn't hate me for this)! I guess I just never expected Facebook to be what found her dog. When you really stop to think about it, the whole story is so random. This woman said that she hardly ever logs into her son's account, but she did, and the first thing she read was that this guy had a lost boxer at his house! About an hour after she read the status, I knocked on her door asking if she had seen a missing dog.

I almost didn't go to this woman's house! She was outside of the original circle, so I guess first, our mailbox fliers helped, and then Facebook and Farmville saved the day in the end. The flier led to some guy reading it, calling Mrs. B, and directing her to his area of the neighborhood. From there going door to door led us to this woman's house, and amazingly she had just read a random Facebook status from her son's friend, and that's how Roxy was found! I honestly think the whole story was just incredible, and I don't know if we would have found her so easily if it hadn't been for Facebook in the end. I'm hopeful that eventually this guy would have called the animal shelter or put out fliers of his own, but we'll never know.

So Roxy is fine! She spent the night at a barbeque and slept in this guy's garage! I don't know if this story even sounds exciting to anyone else, but if you've ever lost a pet, then you know what that feels like. Anf if you've ever found a lost pet, you know how amazing that feels too! The way everything worked out in the end was just so random, yet perfect! Mrs. B's husband apparently mocks Facebook and doesn't really like it. She told him that he can't talk down about social networking sites anymore now!

I'm happy to say that the B family and Roxy got a very happy ending! :-)

Halloween in November

I realize its already November 20th, but I finally got around to putting my Halloween pictures onto the computer. For the past 3 years I have been dressing up my zoo in cute, adorable pet Halloween costumes. It started when a local pet store in Corpus Christi told us about their pet costume contest. To register, you had to donate something to the local animal shelter that was sponsoring the event. Donations could be anything from $1 to a bag of food - just as long as you donated something. I had 4 rabbits at the time, including a brown lionhead rabbit that looked like a lion. I am not sure how I suddenly got the idea to dress them up as the Wizard of Oz characters, but we went on to win 2nd place from the local pet store, 3rd place from the local Petsmart and 1st place at our vet's costume contest - taking home about $200 of prizes in the form of gift certificates, toys and rabbit food. You can't really beat that! Here's a picture of my rabbits from that year:

Its very hard to get 4 rabbits to sit still for a few seconds, so I realize the picture is hard to see. There is Lilly as Dorothy, Boomer as the Scarecrow, Ginger as the Tinman and my Lionhead Nala as the Lion.


This year we took the cats and my rabbit to Petsmart and Petco for their Halloween contests. At Petsmart we won 3rd place for all of the cats. Apparently, the judges were shocked and surprised that we managed to get cats into Halloween costumes. At Petco, my rabbit won 3rd place. So here are my 3rd place winners: (note: the footprints on the floor were glow in the dark Halloween decorations)


Wendy is a princess because she thinks she is a princess. We bought this costume to play along.








Patches is a pirate because it fits her personality perfectly.














Meepers is supposed to be a lion. Husband made his costume, and I think he looks more like a monk. However, my costume making skills are not that great, so I still give Husband a lot of credit for making this!





Oreo is simply dressed in a tuxedo sweater. I'm not completely sure what he is supposed to be. I only know that he looked cute in a tuxedo costume so we called him a Gentleman :-).



















Marmalade is a pumpkin. This was a last minute costume, but we decided that orange cat = orange pumpkin.





























Moses is a "Hairy Davidson" biker cat. He's so big and muscular so we decided that a biker cat fit him well. Husband also made this costume and painted the logo on the back. Its very hard to see in this picture, but the back is painted to look identical to the Harley Davidson logo. I was quite impressed by Husband's skills with costume.












Sheena is our "hunter" therefore we made her into what she hunts :-). She was very unhappy. Out of all of the cats, I think Sheena was the most miserable. I took all of their pictures in the same place, except her. Unable to get her to stay in one place, I followed her around and managed to snap this picture of her under the table before she frantically pulled the mouse head off.



And finally, this is Peter, the rabbit. Sadly, I only have one rabbit now, but I still have all of my Wizard of Oz costumes. I dressed Peter as a scarecrow because I found it appropriate for a rabbit. He loves to eat hay, so I stuffed his costume full of hay so he could snack on it and stay relatively calm while in costume :-). (He's a Lionhead rabbit for those of you wondering why he looks funny.)


And that was my Halloween this year. I am well aware of the fact that I am turning into a crazy cat lady more and more every day, but how can you not find these costumes adorable? :-)